Robots and Vamps

Reviewed by Scott

This movie was all sorts of crazy, and pretty good at the same time. Tokyo follows three different stories about people living in this hyper populated Japan megalopolis. To tell anything about any of these stories is to give them away, so this review will tread lightly.

The first story follows a young couple as they attempt to find their way in the city. One of the humorous parts of the story is the lead male’s movie that he has been working on. It is the ultimate in cliché shock art films, mixing shots from the inside of a woman’s womb, to the rabbit she bears, to a Nazi symbol shadow on the wall. A nod at eugenics gone horribly awry? Who knows, it is only briefly shown in the movie, but hilarious none the less. The story really follows his girlfriend and her struggles to find a place to fit in.

The second story is insane. It follows a crazy red bearded, one eyed, French terrorist that lives in the sewers. Now I know what you are thinking….”A what now?” Exactly! This story is nutty for sure. Again, there is a funny part when he is captured and the news media attempts to guess at his origins, including their telling that the US government swears they have seen him in an Al Qaeda training video. Really? Al Qaeda? Is there anyone they won’t let climb on their monkey bars? Regardless, the story degrades as it continues, the beginning was promising with the shear craziness of his travels across the street and his odd interactions with the populace before returning to the sewers, but after he is captured the story turns into a court room drama that John Grisham would be proud of.

The last story was perhaps the best. It follows a loner, a guy that has withdrawn from society. In fact, he orders delivery food so that he does not have to go out in public. Moreover, he abhorrently refuses to look anyone in the eye, in fact he espouses that he has not done so in well over eleven years. His apartment is full of carefully stacked pizza boxes, pyramids of empty toilet paper rolls that look more like art than an episode of A&E’s show about Hoarders, and towers of he assures us, read novels. Secure and safe in his seclusion, he orders pizza as he always does and is shocked when he looks at the delivery person’s lower half to see the silk outcropping of a garter belt. Suddenly unable to control his notoriously stubborn eyes, he for the first time in eleven years looks into someone’s face and it is a beautiful young delivery girl whom he instantly falls in love with. The remainder of the story follows his endeavors to face his fears of public, sunlight, and other things to find this delivery girl once again. Once again mixing in subtle humor that was perhaps accidental, the Japanese delivery girl’s skin is home to English text tattoos, seemingly answering the age long joke do Asian people have English script tattoos like we have Kanji tattoos?

So Tokyo! Was pretty cool I thought. It was very original and deserved the 4 stars I give it.

NOTE: This entire movie is in Japanese and is subtitled in English.