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If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

hyped garbage

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

After making 'Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind', a film that had heart, creativity, was emotionally engaging as well as occasionally funny, Michel Gondry has been getting steadily worse over the years. 'The Green Hornet' was further proof in my opinion that Gondry is a one film wonder and is better suited to music videos. I would like to think this film would prove me wrong, but it didn't. It just irritated me with it's quirky and overly random ideas and a playfully twee tone which I have grown to hate.Romain Duris stars as the wealthy bachelor Colin who lives in a converted train where pretty much anything turns into an animation. He has a live in lawyer who is also a chef named Nicolas (Omar Sy). He also has a friend named Chick (Gad Elmaleh) who has an unhealthy obsession with an existential philosopher Jean Sol Partre (obviously a play on the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre). In his house, he has a door bell that comes to life when someone rings and it crawls around the room until someone steps on it. Also, people's legs go all noodley when they dance, Colin's shoes run away from him, there is a piano that makes cocktails and many more. There is not a single scene that goes by without multiple visual quirks or whacky, random events which just happen for no reason. It is as if Gondry made an endless list of any daft idea he can think of and decided to cram every single one of them into this film to annoy his audience into boredom. It is very tiresome after the first 20 minutes, and most of them are not funny. Why some members of the audience were laughing at every little thing that happens really escapes me. All these ideas did not add much to the characters or the story much which for me starved the film of any emotion when Colin meets Chloe (Audrey Tautau), falls in love and then goes on a date in what looks like a space ship attached to a crane. I found all the falling in love parts just mainly annoying and airy fairy. Too much twee makes John want to smash the screen into silence, just like Colin wants to smash a radio into silence when he hears a cheesy power ballad.Later in the film, it does take a progressively darker tone as Chloe accidentally inhales a water lily which starts to grow in her lung. When things go all sad and Colin has to work extremely random jobs to fund Chloe's recovery, I did not feel much in the way of emotion, I just felt mainly annoyance that these daft ideas were still happening in rapid fire pace. When the film ends, I just felt exhausted. That was enough quirkiness for me for one day (Although because of my occupation, I had to sit through this 3 times). Also I was surprised by the downer ending. As the relationship gets more difficult between Colin and Chloe as well as everyone else in the film, the hues become gradually more pallid until the final scenes where they are black and white. Some of the scenes looked very good and colourful, but for me, more suited to a music video.I feel the film was trying to say something more deeper and meaningful. Was it some kind of dream like allegorical tale of life. It may be vague, but it was all I can come up with as I was so distracted by all the stupid stuff. Sure a lot of hard work has gone into making all the animation and effects happen on screen, but it doesn't mean I have to like it! It does not give me great pleasure to say that this is in my opinion yet another mis-step from Gondry. I don't think he will make another great film on par with Eternal Sunshine. I'm sure he will still attract a devoted legion of fans who are into the quirky and the twee, but I shall not make much of an effort in future.

The basic story seems simple enough. Boy lives a charmed magical life with his outlandish inventions. Boy meets the girl of his dreams and marries her right away. Girl falls ill with a mysterious ailment, and boy does everything in order to save her.In the hands of noted French director Michel Gondry however, this tale is taken to surreal directions, fantastic and absurd. It was obviously going to be an art film from the get-go with the out-of-this-world imagery that gets weirder and weirder as the mood of the film turns from happy to somber. There were disturbing images of blood and gore, which felt misplaced in this film whose general mood was romance.Audrey Tautou is of course a familiar name, playing the ill-fated Chloe. This role is somewhat reminiscent of her past roles. Romain Duris plays Colin rather unevenly, as you cannot really read his true personality of his character. Omar Sy, who was recently seen in "X-Men: Days of Future Past" plays Colin's faithful friend with the flair for preparing fancy food, and dancing with his rubbery legs to jazz music.This will not be an easy watch for mainstream movie audiences. This is strictly for the art-house crowd. I read that this was based on a beloved French book and fans of the book liked how this film brought their favorite story to life. However, for those unfamiliar with the book, the two hours plus running time will be unbearably slow.

It's been a long time since I've been acquainted with Michel Gondry. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep are two of my all-time favourite films. Be Kind Rewind was an unfortunate misfire but I already warmly welcome his style. However, I've never seen him quite so unrestrained like this. Mood Indigo is a truly fantasy world. No dream, no drugs, and nothing is how you'd expect. Not even dancing, not even a handshake. To say the world of Mood Indigo is surreal and absurd is an understatement and no words can quite grasp the chaos on screen. It's like an R-rated Dr. Seuss. Like Gilliam's Brazil. But, it's an absolute delight. Things may not make sense at any point, but it's not about symbolism, it's about expressionism. The characters are deeply human, and that's what counts. All these inventions, twists, obscurities all about emotion. And Mood Indigo constantly had me bellying with laughter or sinking an anchor in my stomach when tragedy strikes even when I wasn't sure what was happening.That's the spirit of filmmaking really, to feel how the characters are feeling, and this film achieves it admirably. But at times it is so dense that its hard to keep up. The special effects and production design are wonderful, but the way it's shot in HD does sometimes nullify its effects and brings us back to reality in a way it doesn't want (I would've preferred Gondry to not have his cameo). Sometimes the cast can't even keep up with it. I really wasn't sure about the cast at first. They're familiar faces, but they didn't seem to suit the tone, plus they felt too old. However, with the film's dark twist in the second half, so dark the film turns black and white, it did become apparent that these cast members fit this melancholic side of the world. I wish it wasn't so bloated in characters and was more restrained like The Science of Sleep. The great soundtrack definitely adds to its rich atmosphere too. I do hope this film will stick with me like his two best films. It may be manic, but it's thoroughly charming. Not Gondry's best but his best in a long while.8/10

Anyone familiar with Michel Gondry's recent Hollywood films would be gobsmacked by Mood Indigo, a lovely but utterly surrealist twist on an old tale. It's hard to imagine the director of The Green Hornet and Be Kind Rewind putting together something quite as odd and delicate as this - although those who remember the heady swirl and triumph of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind will be better able to adjust to Gondry's blithely strange take on Boris Vian's 1947 novel L'Écume Des Jours (Froth On The Daydream).Colin (Romain Duris) is happy, healthy and wealthy enough not to have to work. He spends his days chatting with his best friend Chick (Gad Elmaleh) and lawyer/mentor/buddy Nicolas (Omar Sy), and inventing cheerful little contraptions like his 'pianocktail' - a piano wired to brew a cocktail out of the music it plays. At a party, he meets Chloé (Audrey Tautou), and they dance and romance their way into marriage. All is wonderful until Chloé falls ill: a water lily is growing in her lungs, and the only way she can be treated - to be surrounded with fresh flowers everyday - is prohibitively expensive for Colin and his dwindling coffers.Mood Indigo is, in a word, delightful. If it had been filmed in a completely straightforward way, with Chloé suffering from a far less exotic ailment, the movie would be boring - its plot thin and predictable. But, because the romance between Colin and Chloé unfolds in a universe in which doorbells clatter noisily to life and sunbeams turn into solid threads of white light, it feels bright, fresh and endlessly charming. The surrealist bent of this cinematic universe - one that hums to the jazz of Duke Ellington (whose songs provide both the English title of the film and Chloé's name) - adds a touch of very welcome magic to the love story. It's the kind of glorious flight of fancy that one hardly ever encounters in romantic comedies these days, except in painfully manufactured chunks.The film showcases an enchanting array of offbeat ideas: from the constantly rotating typing pool that tells the story even as we watch it on screen, through to the pet mouse (played by actor Sacha Bourdo in a mouse costume) that has free run of Colin's house. As Nicolas' elaborate meals waltz across the table and everyone's legs bend and elongate for the most fashionable dance of the moment, it's incredible to think that the film - impressive, breathtaking production design and all - was made on a meagre budget (by Hollywood standards) of approximately US$26 million.It's true that the characters feel somewhat underwritten: the supporting characters, in particular, exist only to fill their appointed roles, such as Chick's expensive and all-consuming obsession with celebrity intellectual Jean-Sol Partre (a sly reference, of course, to Vian's own philosopher friend, Jean-Paul Sartre). But the cast is good enough to make up for it. Sy and Elmaleh are wonderfully droll, especially when Chick and Nicolas meet their own respective love interests in the form of Alise (Aïssa Maïga) and Isis (Charlotte Le Bon).More importantly, Duris and Tautou are a gift: they look great on screen, of course, but they also share a sweet, believable chemistry that helps gloss over the deficiencies of the script. Tautou is so effervescent that her charm remains intact even when her character is forced into the role of a sickly invalid in the second half of the film. Duris treads the fine line between comedy and tragedy with ease, exuding joy and also misery as Colin's life takes an unexpected turn for the better - and then, invariably, the worse.Many viewers might be turned off by the endless inventiveness showcased in Mood Indigo, yearning instead for a more grounded story and characters who are less flighty and feather-light than the ones we meet. But it's hard to argue with the many and various delights of Gondry's film, many of which are purely cinematic. What other film would dare to take a race to the altar very literally indeed, or bleed quietly into monochrome when a character's heart breaks?