I walked out of this film. I haven't walked out of a film in a long time, but this managed to completely turn me off. I disagree with the reviewer who said this movie requires someone who is appreciative of Murakami to truly understand and love it. I love Murakami (and Norwegian Wood is one of my favourites) and I hated this film without reservation. This adaptation is unbelievably uninteresting. The characters have no emotional appeal whatsoever. They are emotionally distant and unrewarding. The movie takes random episodes from the book and strings them together, with no sense of a cohesive theme - no understanding of why the episodes are meaningful, or how they relate to each other: why we are on this journey. The episodic nature of the film kills any interest in the story. And for a writer who relies so much on music to create a sense of mood, time and place, this movie is strangely devoid of music for much of the time. I was literally begging for some music to play, if only to distract me from the mess unfolding on the screen. I guess I have technically disqualified myself from the right to review this film by walking out, but I really could not take any more. I regard this as a travesty against the book. Adapting a book is not simply an exercise in selecting scenes from the book and stringing them together. It's an exercise in understanding the soul of the book and rendering that in a meaningful, cinematic way. This fails on all levels.
Review of Norwegian Wood
