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Map of the Sounds of Tokyo

Map of the Sounds of Tokyo (2009)

December. 02,2009
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6
| Drama Thriller Romance

A Japanese assassin falls in love with the Spanish wine seller she was hired to kill.

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NekoHomey
2009/12/02

Purely Joyful Movie!

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HeadlinesExotic
2009/12/03

Boring

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FirstWitch
2009/12/04

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

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Rosie Searle
2009/12/05

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

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basscadet75
2009/12/06

Ryu is a contract killer who makes her living shooting people in Tokyo, and whose only friend is a guy she meets at the ramen museum in Yokohama. Meanwhile, David is a Spanish guy running a wine shop in Tokyo whose girlfriend kills herself. When his dead girlfriend's family then hires Ryu to kill him, the two instead begin a torrid love affair.None of these things are spoilers - all this happens in the first act of the film.If this already makes no sense, congrats - you've got this movie pegged. It's been a while since I've seen a serious film with characters who make such nonsensical decisions and whose actions seem to have all the consequences of a superhero movie. For example, the police don't even seem to investigate Ryu's many murders, despite the fact that she seems to be responsible for nearly all of Japan's gun homicides (they get about 10 total per year - that's not a typo - and she's responsible for at least three within the span of a few months).The film is just not believable on any level. Tokyo itself is miscast - I never take film titles literally, but this one borders on false advertising. There are plenty of gratuitous cityscape shots to remind us where we are, and occasionally people speaking Japanese (not often enough considering it's, you know, Tokyo), but otherwise there is nothing uniquely of that city in the film and plenty that is completely out of character for it. There is no "map" here, and the only sound I found recognizable from Tokyo (a city that's a cacophony of unique sounds) was the slurping of ramen.In fact, at times I felt much the same way about this film as I did about "Lost in Translation" - it often feels like a travelogue from somebody who has missed the point. Tokyo is depicted as a slow, dead city, filled with English speakers, western tourists eating sushi off of naked women, gun crime, and depressed residents who eat ramen all the time and go to love hotels and karaoke bars not to have fun, but to wallow in their misery. I understand contrarian filmmaking and it can be interesting to see a film that illuminates the dark side of a place, but western filmmakers *always* seem to try to show this side of Tokyo - it's no longer contrarian (if it ever really was), it's a common theme that's just plain wrong. At this point, it would be contrarian to show Tokyo as it is for most people - a loud, energetic and fast-paced city. Heck, "Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift" gets it better than this film does.The main characters are both unsympathetic. At best, Ryu is a cold- blooded murderer, and no backstory is ever given to try to soften that. A narrator (her ramen friend) literally pleads with us throughout the film to feel sympathy for her, but he also tells us right from the start that he can't offer an explanation for who she is or what she does. David, meanwhile, is just a jerk - the night after his girlfriend commits suicide, he attempts to pick up Ryu in his wine shop, and almost never says a kind word to her after that (he doesn't know who she really is, so he thinks she's just some random pickup). She inexplicably seems drawn to him.It would help if David wasn't miscast as well. Now, I don't mean any personal offense to Sergi Lopez and I am not too familiar with his other work, but given his character's jerk-ish personality it just strains credulity that a much younger woman (much less two of them) would be so sexually drawn to this doughy middle aged man, and in fact the sex scenes are borderline embarrassing to watch. David's character really needed to be a Johnny Depp type in order to work - a westerner you could really see women falling for no matter what, who could get away with saying hurtful things and still sound suave doing it.About the only redeeming quality in the film is Rinko Kikuchi, who does her best with what she's given. She makes it clear that Ryu's a tortured soul despite not having many spoken lines and a script that inexplicably goes out of its way not to tell us why. The script works against her, but she almost manages to make Ryu sympathetic completely on her own. That's no small accomplishment.I won't give away the second and third acts but suffice to say they are in keeping with the rest of the film. It never makes sense.

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imbicta
2009/12/07

I don't particularly like Isabel Coixet's movies, but I can accept that her pulse fits well when screen playing dramatic, intimate novels. However, if you let her free to compose her own script, it's a disaster. This movie is a disaster. It takes borrowed scenes from Wim Wenders, Taylor Hackford (only An Officer and a Gentleman's final scene can compete with this movie's final scene) and Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation is haunting this movie every second). The dialogs make no sense, the characters make no sense and what's even worse - her apparent goal of paying an homage to Tokyo is completely frustrated: this movie could be set in any other city, you don't even notice the influence of Tokyo.Don't waste your time, as I wasted mine.

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snaki3
2009/12/08

Well, I went to see this movie yesterday and it was not what I was expecting. Does that means it was worse than I imagined? At all, it just means it was different.Coixet portrays a different perspective of Tokyo where the city becomes just an excuse to show the loneliness of its two protagonists, who are literally lost in a decaying world and don't know how to get out of it. Ryu, the Japanese girl, is an assassin who gets paid for its job, and David is an Spanish living in Tokyo, who has lost his wife recently and feels his life has nothing but emptiness. Both found themselves alone and feel they need each other, but things are not easy and there are some scars that will never be healed.This is NOT "Lost in Translation" and this is NOT about Tokyo but about human feelings. If you want to see a more realistic movie about Japanese culture and you think you might like this movie because you're a fan of everything related to it, you might be very disappointed. If you go there with no expectations and you just want to get immersed by its story, I'm sure you'll enjoy it.That being said, it contains very explicit sex scenes, so be careful little children. I don't think it's a movie any kid would like to see or appreciate, anyways.

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efewebber
2009/12/09

Having enjoyed greatly many of Isabel Coixet's movies (notably "Things I never told you" and "The secret life of words") I must say I was quite disappointed by this last movie.It is difficult to point out what fails in this movie, but I certainly did not connect at all with its characters and situations. The movie is set in Tokyo, but contrary to "Lost in translation" here the movie tries to build half on Japanese characters and half on western ones, which really demands a deeper knowledge about japan. It is difficult for me to believe the Japanese part of the movie, first of all they all seem to speak very good English, which is, at least, difficult to believe, e.g. why would the Japanese girl, played by Kinko Rikuchi, speak good English at all?, why is the other guy working with the Spanish seller almost American? Must say maybe I am biased by my own experience with the Japanese people I met in japan, but certainly communication is in general much tougher than what Isabel portraits here.Of course all the visual and sound stuff is really good, beautiful takes, nice sounds etc, but the story really does not make any sense to me from the beginning to the end. As the movie develops I got mostly bored, the sex scenes seem empty, repetitive and with no special purpose.We do not get enough info to actually feel anything for any character, starting from the friendship between the guy recording sounds and the girl and ending by the business-man and his daughter. Everything seems fake to some extend and the whole story really appears to be built to serve as an excuse to go to Tokyo and enjoy the visual landscapes of the city (maybe just a documentary about the fish market would suffice).Sadly, I must say I got nothing of what I was expecting: neither a nice insight into Japan, nor a situation I could connect with. I certainly would prefer to watch "Lost in Translation", read Amelie Nothomb or watch a good documentary about japan to see beautiful takes of the country, instead of spending two precious hours at the cinema.In any case, I hope I ll enjoy better the next one from Coixet! (and I ll certainly keep enjoying Japanese food meanwhile)

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