Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

One of the worst movies I've ever seen

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Even when they are full of ideas, some filmmakers can be sometimes a bit 'stingy' when they try to film great thinkers. What happens when an image inventor confronts a creator of concepts? There can be many misunderstandings (maybe due to the language barrier?) and theaters can remain painfully empty. Not long ago, in 'Film Socialism', Jean-Luc Godard filmed Alain Badiou talking in front of an empty theater.It seems that Michel Gondry accepts with great pleasure the emptiness that can sometimes separate images and philosophy on the screen. His film plays with the principle of 'illustration': this funny documentary is made of (often) naive drawings, coming from the discussion between the two men.The viewer will not leave the theater with a manual on 'generative grammar' of the American linguist, MIT star. Instead he will be struck, blown away by the creative explosion of a free filmmaker, an inventor renewing at a rate of a thousand digressions and associations of ideas, with its memorial vein and dream, like in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep (his most romantic period). No wonder that the film is secretly haunted by Chomsky's absolute love for his late wife, Carol. Nonetheless, I found this 'little film' immensely refreshing.

"What makes you happy?" "I don't really think about it much." What do you get when two you combine the innovative brainwaves of French director Michael Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Science of Sleep) with that of esteemed American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, logician, political commentator and activist Noam Chomsky? You get an animated documentary film in which challenges the mind and provokes thoughts to arise within the deepest spectrums of our psyches we never knew were there, with a unique choice of aesthetic. So, is the man who is tall "happy"? Let's take a look.Released in February 2013 and directed, written and animated by Gondry, he uses his own drawings to allow complex ideas into more accessible and tangible ones to expand the forum of the documentary to its fullest extent. Painstakingly taking two years of his life to doodle each and every sketch to match the soundtrack of the learned wisdom of Chomsky, Gondry indeed pulled off yet another feat with his original, audacious and colorful animation. So, is the man who is tall happy? It was twice in 2010 that Gondry met with Chomsky for a series of conversations about his deep knowledge in philosophy, linguistics and also for a glimpse through the window into the author's childhood in Philadelphia. Gondry was inspired by picking up the work of Chomsky in a New York bookshop. Deciding to first record talks with the professor at MIT, where Chomsky teaches, Gondry then used those discussions as a springboard for animated explorations of their content. Chomsky says at one point in the film, "If you're willing to be puzzled, you're able to learn," a concept he stands by as he grows. Even an intelligent man like Chomsky can be confused, it seems, and through this, we as the audience learn quite a lot indeed. Even though no one specifically asked or confronted Gondry to create a 16mm animated documentary about one of the most prominent thinkers in society, he explains that he was looking for a project to occupy his free time while editing 'The Green Hornet' and producing 'Mood Indigo'.As we the audience are seeing the ideas and theories of Chomsky come to life on the screen through the animation of Gondry, what we are actually viewing is the interpretation of those ideas and theories as Gondry depicts them. The drawings show themselves to be vivid and playful, but also a tad crude. But one cannot blame a director he intrepidly keeps us intrigued with his dancing and lively animation at 24 frames per second.Not all of the movie is theory and concept. We actually meet Chomsky halfway into the picture. H speaks of growing up with an academic "Zionist" father in Philadelphia, his experience in a grade school, the terror of race riots during WWII—filling the rounded portrait of an intensely guarded but affable man. Near the end of the film, in the sole musical portion (scored to Mia Doi Todd's "I Gave You My Home"), Gondry pays a poignant homage to Chomsky's wife of 59 years, Carol, who passed away in 2008. It appears that the man, Chomsky, is tall but not so happy, due to the death of his wife. At the end of the movie, it seems that, perhaps for the first time, the two men with very different minds might finally be on the same page.At 89 minutes, one might argue that that is too much time to be listening to a great thinker discuss theorems and ideologies of scientific concepts. In its nicest and truest form, the film plays out as a cool after school meeting with that certain professor you've always admired. Chomsky and Gondry, although mismatched on paper, share an odd but genuine chemistry when it switches back to real life.Bill Stamets from the Chicago Sun-Times puts it well: "The film's title dates from the '50s, when it served linguists as a specimen of a polar interrogative to demonstrate a structure-dependent syntactic rule. Or, in ordinary language: how a child knows which 'is' to move when changing a sentence like 'The man who is tall is happy' into a question. Chomsky explains generative grammar with ease, even as he calls language "an infinite array of structured expressions which have a meaning and a sound." The animation was truly a labor of love, dedicated solely to his "professor" that Gondry, the "pupil," looked upon with admiration and respect. Stylistically capturing beautifully abstract and yet sophisticated drawings to clarify Chomsky's occasional drivel, 'Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy?' is indeed a creative and colorful sojourn into the kaleidoscopic minds of a modern linguist and a director's whimsical and whirring animation. Again, is the man who is tall happy? Yes...yes I believe he is.

As deep as a saucer, Gondry take on the nature of human language is just a giant waste of time, both Chomsky's and ours. Gondry interviews one of the leading authorities on human language and he cannot think of better questions to ask him than "what makes you happy?" or "do you miss your dead wife?".If you're interested in Chomsky works, look somewhere else. If you happen to like Gondry - and want to maintain any respect for him - do yourself a favor and skip this movie.I understand some people appreciate Gondry lavish visual creativity (I usually do, too), but in this movie they cannot compensate for the fact the Gondry has no idea what his own movie is about (since he has no clue what Chomsky is talking about most of the time).

I would have LOVED to hear a good film with some narration concerning Naom. Instead I got a constant annoying projector and misc sounds interrupting what was otherwise a potentially great film. The graphics were amateurish and often pointless. I felt it discounted from his responses more than enhancing them. I didn't see the point in the perpetual noise or randomly agitating the viewer with unnecessary sound. I'm not so schizophrenic I need perpetual noise in order to appreciate an otherwise potentially dry point. Not that I even think of Naom as dry! He's interesting and all that crud did was detract from his speaking or the ability to focus on it. You'd think you'd want to enhance what he is saying but this film does everything but. It just wasn't enjoyable . . . . . . . . . .