Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Japanese films can be among the strangest films in the world. This is not a complaint...just a fact. Sometimes the films are delightfully strange (such as "Happiness of the Katakuris") and others, like "Tokyo!" are weird....and NOT pleasantly weird. It's a shame, as I really wanted to like this one but can see no reason to see this film."Tokyo!" consists of three short films. All are set in Tokyo and feature Japanese or mostly Japanese casts. However, two of the films are directed by French directors and another by a Korean one. Perhaps this might explain why I liked it so much less than other weird Japanese films."INTERIOR DESIGN" is the best of the three films. It's a story about a couple that move to Tokyo and have a hard time fitting in and adjusting. All this is pretty enjoyable and the couple is cute. BUT, out of the middle of nowhere, the film becomes weird--super, amazingly weird. I think the theme is something about depersonalization but frankly the payoff just isn't there. Trippy and worth, perhaps, a 3."MERDE" is different because it starts off VERY weirdly and is about a weird creature that lives in the sewer and runs about doing stupid (and rather funny) things. I liked the film a lot. And then, for no apparent reason, he began murdering people and the film because bloody and unfun. Of the three films, this one was the worst--tedious beyond belief and yechy--with a bit of VERY unsexy full-frontal nudity to boot. Unpleasant, that's for sure and worthy of a 1."SHAKING TOKYO" is a strange but somewhat enjoyable film about the 'hikikomori'. A hikikomori is a strange sort of person who simply gives up on life and becomes a recluse--and it usually begins in the teen years and may last many years. According to one article I read, this mental illness affects a whopping 700000--though no disorder like this is seen in western society. It is NOT the same as agoraphobia (caused by fear of life outside the home) but is more like a voluntary sort of hermetic life. The story is about one man content to live this sort of withdrawn life until he meets a very odd pizza delivery lady. Not pleasant but not awful and I'd give it a 3.Overall, none of the stories are particularly good and all are odd just for the sake of being odd. I just couldn't stand that there NEVER was any payoff for any of these stories and cannot recommend the film.

When you watch a 3 in 1 movie like this, you run the risk of liking one story and not liking the other but TOKYO! overall is a trippy ride into three movie watching experience unlike you've ever seen before. You may not enjoy every one of them but... it will impress you. A great collaboration but ends up with the big question of 'what's the purpose of all this?' You're going to try to connect the theme for one with theme for the other because each movie does a good job of making you feel like they're separate entity when they're actually one big metaphorical imaginative trinity.If I had to choose, I'd say the first two segments are my favorite. Michel Gondry's INTERIOR DESIGN is sad but in a really creative way. Gondry has been known to possess the ability to surprise us with weird visuals that compliment the characters and the story itself and INTERIOR DESIGN isn't far from that either. The two leads are looking for apartment and you get to see some of the most interesting spaces, and just like some of those spaces, the female character feels useless like she has no purpose at all, the boyfriend's accusation of her not having an ambition just makes things worse.I like how the story implies that even the most supposedly useless thing around like a chair could be so useful.There's a part where the woman slowly turns into a chair and it is absolutely downright amazing for a movie like this to have such great visual effects. Whatever Gondry was smoking, it sure as hell worked.The second movie, MERDE, by director Leos Carax, is quite possibly the funniest of all the the three. The story of the sewage monster man with his own language will shock you and crack you up at the same time. I don't recommend eating while watching this cause some of you might throw up at the sight of his filthy look. It's got enough humor and weirdness that will keep you curious as to what this is all about. Very entertaining especially the odd twist at the execution scene.But it's also a lesson in tolerance and understanding one another.The third movie, SHAKING TOKYO, directed by Bong Joon-Ho, is probably my least favorite one but it doesn't mean it couldn't hold his own ground. It's still a very original take on OCD, loneliness and the desperate attempt to connect. The actor who plays the man who isolates himself gives an outstanding performance without having to do much at all because it all works on his inner monologue. Will fear of uncertainties keep people locked up inside or is the only way to fight is to simply live without worry? I like how the movie plays with excessive light to illustrate discomfort that comes with taking chances in great lengths just to live again.TOKYO! is a masterpiece that doesn't beg for any reward, it simply wants to prove that film-making can be a simple as this and still be artful, profound, and entertaining all at once. And no matter how much we try to deny it, the fact remains.. people matter.--Rama's SCREEN--

At the outset I have to say that Leos Carax made 2 of my 10 favorite films (LES AMANTS DU PONT-NEUF and POLA X) so he's the primary reason I went to see TOKYO! I always try to avoid reading reviews before I see any film, but somewhere along the line (it has taken forever for TOKYO! to get an American release) I somehow managed to learn the bare bones plot line of Carax's MERDE contribution to TOKYO! beforehand. I wish I hadn't, as it definitely detracted from my overall enjoyment of the piece, but Carax's film sense -- which to me is one of the purest, most thrilling and most soaring in all of cinema -- still kept me enthralled. I found myself smiling throughout most of MERDE -- not just because of its humorous aspects, but with sheer joy at Carax's (as usual) often breathtaking visuals and the satisfaction felt in letting myself go along with a real artist's vision no matter where it takes me. On first viewing I'd say that MERDE could benefit from some slight pruning, and I wish the budget had been higher to enable Carax to go all out in MERDE's principal set piece (anyone who has seen MERDE will know the part I'm talking about). Lest you think, as some reviewers here have said, that MERDE is slight and one-note, rest assured there is plenty to chew on in the way of interpreting what MERDE has to say about the world today. And, needless to say, it is my favorite segment of TOKYO!Michel Gondry's INTERIOR DESIGN comes in second. I have never seen any of Gondry's other films, and I'm glad that I didn't know anything about INTERIOR DESIGN before I saw it. The film veers sharply into a strange and melancholy place at one point and the less you know about it the better off you will be. And I pray you will be spared the presence of a "hip" audience member like we had to endure tonight at the film's NYC premiere at the Alliance Francaise who laughed uproariously at the segment's sharp left turn and nearly succeeded in ruining it for us.Joon-ho-Bong's SHAKING TOKYO ends the film and is the weakest segment by far. This supposedly tender tale is overblown and overstated in just about every way and I couldn't wait for it to end. When the hero (quite literally) pushes the heroine's buttons, I wanted to gag at the heavy-handed symbolism which all but destroys whatever legitimate point about alienation that the segment seems to be trying to make.

Three 40 min shorts by three directors: Gondry, Carax and Bong Joon-Ho. I went for the first and enjoyed all three very much.Gondry's Interior Design is a slightly uneven but characteristically surprising, hilarious and deceptively light coming-of age yarn. Two naive Japanese artists find their relationship - and more besides - mutating under the pressure of moving to the city.Leos Carax's Merde follows a possessed, green felt suit-clad Denis Lavant above and below ground. A surreal modern re-working of the Gojira (Godzilla) story, Lavant's 'Merde' terrorises the people of the city with his distracted, antisocial consumption of cash and flowers - and worse when he discovers a cache of pre-war explosives. With his slapstick language that only a preening French lawyer (Jean-Francois Balmer) can understand he cuts an equivocal figure in the film, at once entertaining and dangerously, opaquely misanthropic. It's the best performance of all three.Finally, Shaking Tokyo sees Bong Joon-Ho create a Murakami-esqe lovestory. Teruyuki Kagawa is a recluse (or hikikomori) living in an OCD's paradise of take out food and literature. His regimen is terminally interrupted by the coincidence of a pretty delivery girl and an earthquake (yes, the latter may be said in magic realist terms to follow causally from the former, although I'm not sure this was intended). I was a little disappointed that this promising, ascetic but good-humoured film had such a facile ending but it's the most lovingly filmed of the three.As a tribute, satire or simply guide to modern Tokyo, Tokyo! is very effective. I'm off to watch Lost In Translation again to really savour the aroma. 7.5/10