Review of Map of the Sounds of Tokyo (2009) by Jesse O — 19 Mar 2012

What a pretentious and dull movie. The movie is beautifully directed but thematically the movie is an absolute mess. There's no story to speak of, other than characters moping around worse than the people in Twilight.

There's a narrator that never really serves any purpose in the story, other than to add to the pretentious feel. It take its talented leads and doesn't do anything interesting with them, other than sex scenes.

Now see some of these sex scenes serve a purpose for David's character, in that he's using sex as a way to forget about his dead wife (or girlfriend). So I was fine with the sex scenes past a certain point.

But other than that, with the exception of the cinematography, this movie is an unmitigated disaster that only the likes of Gus Van Sant (and Isabel Coixet) can pull off.