Anrakkî monkî

Honestly...I don't know what the hell this film was about. It took me three sittings to get through it, and although it started off strong, it went in so many different directions, I couldn't really make heads or tails of it...

Some dude robs a bank (against his better judgement...) and ends up accidentally stabbing a chick in the process. From here on out, we follow this guy around, intertwining with other parallel tales of some Yakuza members, environmental actionists, and some other stuff...

I was really feelin' this one in the beginning as an off-beat, dark-comedy, but then it got slow and too serious, and then weird again - and reminds me of what I don't like about Japanese films - they're oftentimes too quirky to get anything from. At times, UNLUCKY MONKEY is down-right funny, at other times stone-cold-sober. At about the half-way point, I just lost interest. Not a bad film per se...but I've gotten to the point that I'm getting pretty burned out from pretty much everything currently coming out of Japan at this point...6.5/10

This Japanese movie starts as a modern b-action, when two men are about to rob a bank. During the robbery, which probably doesn´t go as they´ve planned, only one man - Yamazaki - gets away alive, and while he rushes from the scene of the crime, he accidently stabs a young woman. From this point, the story turns more into a psychological drama, in which he tries to make up with his guilty conscience in different ways. The peak of the film is a long monologue with an off screen voice, where Yamazaki tries to convince himself that it wasn´t his fault, which results in the illogical conclusion that HE is the victim in this mess.

From this point, the film again turns into b-action, not that clever or exciting.

The ending, or should i say the four endings, is really bad. He makes not one closing scene, but a total of four long scenes with fading or an object disappearing in the distance, and yet not does the movie end. Frustrating and annoying.

Japan has produced much better films than this one, but it´s not the worst either...

I find this film fascinating for several reasons.Its the only Sabu film with social conscience,for one.Then,its the film where the human is shown from the darkest point of view,without the unnecessary violence.There is some violence,but its not graphic nor without reason. The dream scene is one of the deepest and best I have seen and it stuck inside me as well as the ending(and I hope it did with others too).

The ending is a bit hard to understand for some.Why does the dead man rise?Why does Tsutsumi's character so desperately try to end his life?Maybe because he has seen more than others and knows that this society is going towards the end.Its disturbing I know and thats why this film is so precious to me.Sabu cared,thats why he made it.This is not just another of his mad stories with weird plots and a sad ending.

The ending I don't find really sad and thats another reason why I love it.He found relief.What I found sad and heavy to watch is the scene where he wanders through the filthy streets and knows that he is truly lost.The beginning gives you an insight to why he really is lost.He tried to commit that robbery because it was a chance for him to get a better life.Maybe he wanted to move away from all that.And then found himself stuck right in the middle of it all.Its the last tale of human hell and the desperate road to redemption.Sabu,you really are a master. Shinichi Tsutsumi became my favorite actor after this film.He really is a special talent and a gift to Japan's film industry.I hope he will have a long and fruitful career.Without him,this film wouldn't be what it is,a Dante-ish tour de force.

This is basically imitation Tarantino. So, if you like that kind of thing, you might want to sit through this. There are, in fact, a couple of laugh-out-loud moments that arise from very dark situations. But, otherwise, very slow moving - lots of filler because he doesn't have enough story to fill two hours - and no strong links to reality. This is allegory all the way, although I'm not sure what the point of it might be. One difference from Tarantino: the main character does feel an acute sense of remorse and that becomes a major thread near the end. Recommended only if you're intensely interested in modern cinema from Japan.

I'm far from an expert on Japanese films, so my ideas here are probably sophomoric, but here's my view. The film interweaves two main story lines, each fate-driven to collide with a host of peripheral dramas or mini-universes: an environmentalist meeting, a bum in an alleyway, a cocktail waitress on her way home, a professional hit-man hallucinating in a park, a family on its way to cemetery, etc. And each intersection of the main story lines with themselves, or with the peripheral story lines correlates to some specific dramatic style or phase: tragedy, melodrama, Chaplin-esque slapstick, crime thriller, philosophic, and, in the end, Twilight Zonish (or "Return of the Mummy"-ish). Afterall, the "unlucky monkey" is all humanity.

Each flip from one style or phase to the next is transitioned - unfortunately so, to my taste - not by a fade or short black-screen, but by a very excessive stop- or slow-motion study of some ultimate moment. These transitions so wore on my patience that I pressed fast-forward to escape. But even in fast-forward, I found them annoyingly long and static.

In imposing those transitions on us poor viewers, as though infatuated with what he thought some original and arty technique, the director was frankly destructively self-indulgent and probably deaf to whatever free-minded advisers he had during editing. I can't imagine another monkey on this planet with patience enough to sit through them - unless intended as mini-intermissions for making a few phone calls, mixing some lemonade and making some popcorn before returning.

With very little editing, this could have been a really good flick. Acting, scenery and artistic direction are good, and the environmentalist meeting sequence is among the most hilarious I've ever seen.