A visual feast, but is it too much?

Michel Gondry's Mood Indigo amuses and then over-amuses.

Not many filmmakers seem to care about visual comedy these days. You'll find abundant sight gags (generally of a gross nature) in American movies, but true visual wit remains a rarity. Gore Verbinski displayed plenty of intricate visual humor in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, but he's an exception to the rule.

The French filmmaker Michel Gondry (The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Human Nature) doesn't always score bulls eyes, but left to his own devices, as he apparently was in 2006's The Science of Sleep, Gondry unleashes his capacity for amusing visual invention.

Gondry's Mood Indigo is based on a 1947 novel -- L'Ecume des Jours -- by Boris Vian. I'm not familiar with Vian's novel, but after seeing Gondry's movie, I have to believe that the director was inspired by a story that allowed him to pull out every visual stop -- with substantial help from Stephane Rosenbaum, his talented production designer.

The story: Colin (Romain Duris) has money and a quirky Paris apartment. Colin's a bit frivolous, having invented a machine that he calls the "pianocktail." This grandly silly instrument mixes cocktails when Duke Ellington's Mood Indigo is played on it.

Colin's chef and chief advisor (Omar Sy of The Intouchables) whips up fantastical dishes for Colin and his best friend Chick (Gad Elmaleh). Turn on the faucets in Colin's apartment and out come eels, an amusing, if less than appetizing, sight.

Love looms. Chick meets Alise (Aissa Maiga) and falls for her. An envious Colin insists on falling in love, as well.

At a party, Colin meets Chloe (Audrey Tautou). They dance together in a scene in which Gondry uses animation to enhance their limbs in rubbery, cartoonish fashion.

Colin and Chloe also date, flying over Paris on a white cloud that looks like a swan and seems to have been borrowed from an old-fashioned amusement park.

Gondry's mix of live action and effects can be amusing and strange: The doorbell that turns into a mechanized insect that crawls the walls of Colin's apartment, for example.

Colin is such a good pal that he offers money to Chick so that he can marry his soul mate. As it turns out, Chick spends most of his time and a lot of Colin's money acquiring valuable editions of the work of Jean-Sol Patre, a goof on ... well ... you know who.

Gondry's upbeat tone prevails right up to the time when Chloe contracts a Camille-like cough, a malady that stems from the fact that there's a water lily growing in one of he lungs.

Faced with losing the love of his life and his fortune, Colin drifts toward despair.

Mood Indigo takes place over a fleet 92 minutes, but the non-stop invention inevitably loses some its charm, and the movie's visual bric-a-brac proves so plentiful that it can feel as if it exists purely for its own sake.

I liked parts of Mood Indigo very much, and I respect Gondry's desire to ravish and entertain the eye. But like heavy rain on hot pavement, Mood Indigo tends to evaporate quickly, a victim perhaps of its own immoderation.

Noam Chomsky, the animated version

A creative look inside the mind of a famous linguist.

Earlier this week, I was reading a piece by Stanley Fish on the New York Times Web site. Fish -- an academic and a regular contributor to the Times's on-line efforts -- commented on the 2013 John Dewey lectures that were given by Noam Chomsky at Columbia University.

Fish pointed out that "the academic views of a professor are independent of his or her real-world political views ... You can't reason from an academic's disciplinary views to the positions he or she would take in the public sphere; they are independent variables."

I had been thinking about that very subject after watching Michel Gondry's documentary, Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?: An Animated Conversation with Noam Chomsky

In his hyper-creative film, Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) interviews Chomsky, who is probably best known to most of us as a political thinker operating from the left side of the spectrum. Gondry mostly focus on Chomsky, the linguist.

As a filmmaker, Gondry remains unbound by convention. His mostly animated documentary is supplemented by filmed interviews with Gondry. It's as if Gondry's using his drawing skills to keep pace with leaps in Chomsky's thinking.

The mixture of animation and talk can be as overwhelming as it is intoxicating, but I was grateful to Gondry for spending time on Grondry's linguistic theories, which -- to the extent that I understood them -- seemed quite interesting.

Gondry, whose English is thickly accented by his native French, can be heard in some interviews, and he's not always confident about being a worthy conversational match for Chomsky.

If you're looking for a summary of Chomsky's thought, you'll find a reasonably cogent one in Fish's report on Chomsky's first John Dewey lecture, which addressed the question, "What is Language?"

Says Fish: The creativity of "language performance" finds its source "not in the empirical world, but in an innate ability that is more powerful than the stimuli it utilizes and plays with."
I could rattle on, but let me simply say that Gondry's documentary, which also deals with Chomsky as a kid, as a father and as a husband to his late wife, can be equally stimulating and confusing as it breezes by in its steadfastly original way.

Teen-agers, sometimes at their worst

For the longest time, I found myself wondering why I was watching Michel Gondry's The We and the I, a boisterous look at a group of rude and rowdy Bronx teen-agers riding a bus home from school. In one sense, Gondry has gone an amazing job; his movie makes you feel as if you're actually on a bus with kids who were busy bullying one another, trading insults and disrespecting any adult who has the misfortune of wandering into their midst. That's the issue: You'll have to endure a fair amount of abuse before these youngsters begin to drop their guards and expose some humanity. Gondry, whose movies (The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) usually include more playful helpings of artifice, plays things mostly straight in what sometimes looks like a sociological exercise about the way teens behave when the only authority figure in sight is a bus driver. The title suggests what Gondry is after, a lively examination of the tensions between individual and group imperatives, a particularly strong subject with teen-agers who often experience intense peer pressure. Gondry's actors -- recruited from The Point, a community center in the Bronx -- do a good job of acting naturally in an extended bus ride through the South Bronx. As the unnaturally long ride evolves, Gondry defines the various individuals and cliques that create laughs, tensions and a bit of empathy, particularly for those who are picked on. By the movie's end, Gondry brings his themes into sharp (even poignant) focus, but The We and the I can be difficult to take, mostly because Gondry refuses to shy away from the meanness that kids use to shield their vulnerability.

This 'Hornet' has no sting

Seth Rogen doesn't cut it as a superhero, and the movie scores only fitfully as a comedy.

January may be the oddest of all movie months. In much of the country, several of the more interesting movies of the previous year are just beginning to reach theaters. When it comes to new releases, however, the picture is grimmer. Many movies that open in January arrive with a question trailing in their wake: Why didn't we see this during the summer or at some other peak movie-going period?

That's certainly the case with The Green Hornet, a superhero movie that would seem better suited to the sweltering days of summer than to the frozen hours of mid-winter matinees.

The Green Hornet has a lengthy history. It began as a radio serial in 1936, found life as a comic book and also enjoyed a brief run on television during the '60s with the legendary Bruce Lee portraying Kato, the Hornet's sidekick. This new big-screen version reportedly went through a variety of incarnations before it fell into the laps of actor Seth Rogen and director Michel Gondry.

Rogen, a veteran of such Judd Apatow comedies as Knocked Up and co-writer of hits such as Superbad and Pineapple Express, is certainly an unlikely candidate to play a superhero, and Gondry, known for visual creativity (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep) isn't exactly a renowned master of the blockbuster form.

But back to January. After spending two hours watching this re-tooled and needlessly 3-D version of The Green Hornet, I began to conjecture about why it has arrived in January.

Although Rogen wrote the script with his partner Evan Goldberg, it works only fitfully as comedy.

But wait, as they say on those late-night TV commercials: There's more.

When it comes to action, particularly as the movie limps toward its finale, Gondry sacrifices wit for the usual collection of fender-bending and explosive noise, none of it handled with special aplomb. And Gondry's trademark creativity seems more hinted at than expressed as bodies fall like overly ripe fruit from burdened trees.

At heart, The Green Hornet is an origins story. Rogen's Brit Reid suffers at the hands of his abusive newspaper publisher father (Tom Wilkinson). Having reached his 20s, Reid is skilled only at spending daddy's money on women and parties. When his father passes away, Brit finds himself in control of Los Angeles' Daily Sentinel, an influential paper. He also develops a relationship with Kato (Jay Chou), a creative mechanic and inventor with martial arts skills. Together they carry out a prank, and The Green Hornet is born. Kato signs on as sidekick and principal butt-kicker.

No superhero movie can survive purely as a bromance - even a testy one that makes Kato more assertive than the usual sidekick. Enter an underutilized Cameron Diaz, as the woman Britt hires to be his secretary.

Rogen, who does his usual shtick albeit with annoyingly manic bursts of energy, flops as a superhero, even one who's designed to play against the usual cliches. The Green Hornet's claim to fame involves the way the public perceives him. The Hornet cultivates the image of a bad guy in order to do good.

This brings us to the subject of villainy, an essential ingredient in any comic-book movie. Christoph Waltz, who won an Oscar for playing a soft-spoken, sadistic Nazi in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, portrays Chudnofsky, the evil Russian crime czar who rules Los Angeles. Too bad Waltz's best scene arrives at the very beginning of the movie when he squares off with an aspiring gangster (James Franco in cameo). That scene - full of self-conscious bluster and exaggerated menace -- suggests what the movie might have been.

This being a slow movie month, The Green Hornet probably will enjoy a decent opening weekend before fading, but, based on what I saw, I put myself in the side of those that wouldn't mind seeing The Green Hornet vanish into the mists of pop cultural history with the speed at which his car of choice -- the fabled Black Beauty -- tears up the road.

This Hornet's got no buzz.