orionfalls My best friend spent the first months of 2017 insisting me to read "Norwegian Wood" by Haruki Murakami. I finally accepted after finishing my mandatory reads for college and he lent me his copy. But when I read the summary on its back cover I proceeded to bury it in a shelf as I thought it wasn't the best read possible for the bad times I was going through in life. Destiny has made me read the book while on my summer job here in Paris, making it even more beautiful than it's been per se."Norwegian Wood" is the first book that has ever rendered me unable to keep going on with my to-read list. Its beauty captured me so hard it was truly impossible to concentrate on "To kill a mockingbird" at all for entire days. As I searched for a way to satisfy my thirst for the delicate, soft and marvelously precious atmosphere of the book and finally be able to overcome it, feel at peace with it and move on, I remembered the fact that it was adapted into cinema not long ago. Oh, what a discovery. And not precisely a good one.The bad quality of this movie resides in the fact that it seems like it was made just to be able to say that yes, Haruki Murakami's best known novel has been taken to the big screen. In other words, it's been made just to cover the record. The astounding impatience with which the first 7 minutes of the movie are carried out (during which Toru has already lost Kizuki, moved to college, shown his inaction during student riots, sold some vinyls and said goodbye to his roommate) is just the beginning of the butchering show this film is. The angst that Toru feels at the beginning due to the forcefulness of life's events should've been well exposed and is nothing but an occasional shadow in the way he glances at things and the short statement "All that mattered to me was the books I read". But again, nothing's said about "The Great Gatsby" or any of the other works that marked his pass from adolescence to youth. Never is it well explained that he had no other motivation in life but the inertia of waking up for no reason at all.The movie misses each and every single one of the points it should have made, it spends more time trying to create impact through sad passages than actually building the characters, and finally offers a lame image of a book that could've been turned into a cult film if treated with care, pause and love for Murakami's work. This version of "Norwegian Wood" could definitely pass among the typical evening movies offered during weekends so people have adequate white noise to take their naps.I could write an entire essay about why this movie is a perfect example of what not to do when you want to adapt a book whose entire force lies in the power of emotions, self introspection and an anguish for loneliness and voidness. But all I'm going to say is that it was enormously wrath-producing to witness how Reiko's story is completely ignored, Midori is nothing like what she is in the book and some aspects of Toru and Naoko's relationship are badly and wrongly manipulated just to be able to fit the entire book in 2 hours and 4 minutes like you'd fit meat into casing to make sausage. Seriously, NOTHING is told about Reiko's past (which is profoundly important for the story's relevance in the book) but for some unknown reason Toru still asks her about her husband and daughter during a penultimate scene whose vagueness had my mouth drop open for a good 10 minutes. Same thing happens when Midori's background is totally skipped yet irrelevantly mentioned when Toru discovers that her dad is actually prostrate in a hospital bed.Basically, someone who happens to not have read Murakami's book will think that there was a love triangle between Toru, Naoko and Reiko and won't understand the importance of timing, interlude and process in "Norwegian Wood". Worst of all, they won't understand how Toru finally manages to feel like he has grown up.Ask me what I think about the appalling last scene in which the director proves that he has not understood the book by not making Toru call Midori while watching people walk the streets of Tokyo, and I will probably snap for good.Avoid this waste of time and go read the book. I hope it makes you feel as flabbergasted as it has made me.4/10 and 3 of those points are thanks to Toru's good incarnation and Reiko's honest try to make the movie worth the while.

paul2001sw-1 Haruki Murukami's novel, 'Norwegian Wood', a tale of a young man painfully out of his emotional depth as remembered from middle age through a faint haze of wistful nostalgia, touches almost everyone who reads it. And Trang Ang Hung 's film is a mostly faithful rendering for the screen, with a delicate touch (although I was expecting the character of Midori to be just a little more wild, and unlike the demure stereotype of a Japanese woman). But for some reason, having previously read (and been duly entranced by) the book, I found the film mostly dull, and I don't think this can be entirely put down to having prior knowledge of the plot. Rather, the book is not just exquisitely sensitive in its writing, but also, surgically precise; and the movie captures only the first half of these qualities. Too often, we see an accurate sample of a relationship that, as described in the original, simply had more complexity than what we get to see in the film. Perhaps also, a film must make corporeal figures who in the book are the ghosts of memory. Read the novel, which is Murukami's best; but I don't think this work adds anything to it.

Chris_Pandolfi "Norwegian Wood" is dreary, unfocused, and unreasonably slow-paced. It involves characters so dour and unlikeable that investing in them takes nothing less than sheer will power. They each find themselves in relationships so emotionally complicated that never once do we see a process of connection at work; we can only marvel at the fact that these people have somehow found their way into each other's lives. Not only do we not understand their reasons for being together, but on the basis of what unfolds, no one is the better for it. Here is a coming of age drama so confused and needlessly drawn out that we're anxious for the moment when the hero finally grows up – which, in this case, has nothing to do with witnessing a beautiful act of transition and everything to do with ending two miserable hours sitting in a theater.Adapted from the novel by Haruki Murakamki, the film has been structured by writer/director Tran Anh Hung in the most curious of ways, namely to make every single scene play like the finale. When you have a movie filled with ends, you will inevitably invite speculation as to how it all began, and it's incredibly unfair to deprive audiences of answers. Some scenes are just plain awkward in their length, pacing, and exploration of characters that have no bearing on the central plot. It's almost as if clips from an entirely different movie had been randomly spliced in by editor Mario Battistel, perhaps because he was feeling a bit mischievous and wanted to get audiences off of what narrow a trail there was to follow. If that was his intention, he succeeded. This story leads us nowhere in particular, except in circles.It takes place in Japan during the late 1960s, the era of the Vietnam War and a time of great social unrest. You'd think that, given this rich history, the filmmakers would actually make it a part of the plot. But no – history is reduced to a handful of brief shots, all of disorganized student protests that immediately fade into the background. Because it's barely a backdrop for a soapy story of love and loss, this movie could have taken place anywhere at any time. It's told from the point of view of nineteen-year-old Toru Watanabe (Ken'ichi Matsuyama), who moves to Tokyo and enters college following the inexplicable suicide of his best friend since childhood, Kizuki (Kengo Kora). Why this is left unexplained, I have no idea. I, for one, would have appreciated knowing what made Kizuki so unhappy that he felt the need to poison himself with exhaust from his own car.Toru forms a relationship of sorts with Kizuki's girlfriend, Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi), who also knew him since childhood. Ever since his death, she has not only fallen into a deep depression, she has also lost all traces of her sexuality. She will make repeated attempts to find it throughout the movie, at first by submitting herself to Toru on the night of her twentieth birthday, the rest of the time through sexual advances she initiates. Alas, it's to no avail; she's incapable of feeling anything physically, while emotionally she retreats further into herself. Her mental state has landed her in a sanitarium buried in the forested mountains of Kyoto. I use the word "sanitarium" loosely, as it isn't made to seem like one. If anything, it comes off as a spiritual retreat for the musically inclined.Toru occasionally visits Naoko, and will even exchange letters with her. He might even have feelings for her, although you'd never know it by looking at him; as Toru, Matsuyama gives a performance so statuesque and soft-spoken that never once does an emotion leap off the screen. Regardless, Toru finds himself torn between Naoko and one of his classmates, a young woman named Midori (Kiko Mizuhara), equally as soft spoken but far more outgoing. At times, she's developed to the point of oddness, and if you watch the scene where she calls Toru after the death of her father, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. The worst thing about this character is that her interest in Toru stems from nothing made clear to the audience; she, like everyone else in this movie, has no clear purpose apart from being doing and saying miserable things.In spite of the characters, the plot, the structure, and the performances, a connection still might have been possible had it not been for the horrendous soundtrack. On the one hand, we have samples of sleep-inducing folk rock hits of the era, including the Beatles song the film derives its title from. On the other hand, we have Jonny Greenwood's score, which is comprised of depressing and emotionally manipulative violin dirges. Most of it plays during the latter half of the movie, at which point the story goes from solemn to outright devastating. Listening to both the score and the songs, one wonders if anyone involved in the film has ever laughed, or even knows what laughing is. For films like "Norwegian Wood," joy and happiness are treated as foreign concepts that get lost in translation.-- Chris Pandolfi (www.atatheaternearyou.net)

tha-13 This pretentious movie is beyond art-house-cinema at its worst, because it isn't art. Because it has no touch what so ever with human emotions it is unbearable to watch, and you cannot help feeling, that it must all of sudden turn into a comedy - but unfortunately it does not. It wants to be a movie about sexuality and loss, but since it is made by the mind of a materialist it looks and feels like a series of scenes with abused young actors in a bad commercial for a dress-label and a Russian vodka. It wants to show off and take an existential view on the important and always vivid subject of coming-of-age, but the level of wisdom and spiritual depth is perhaps the most shallow, I have seen since "plan 9 from outer space". Watch Bille August "Zappa" or Jacob Aron Estes' "Mean creek" instead.