Anrakkî monkî

we are all just unlucky monkeys, bouncing from one strange situation into another. and that´s just what happens in the movie, sabu (monday) takes us on an bizarre tour de force, starting with a bank-robbery... go watch this movie, if possible. i think you won´t be disappointed.

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.

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

I saw this movie a few days ago, but the memories have already kind of faded. Therefore I guess that it wasn't such a memorable experience as it seemed to be during the time of watching it.

The opening sequence, where a bag of money changes hands several times in an elegantly choreographed series of accidents is probably the best scene of the movie in my eyes.

After that, it wasn't really clear to me whether I was watching a comedy, a yakuza crime flick or a splatter film.

The movie in itself has several parallel storylines that crisscross from time to time, nothing unusual, mixed with the Japanese way of hinting at emotions very blatantly, in itself nothing unusual either, but the constant shifting between comedy, crime, philosophy and gore was a bit too inconsistent for my taste.

However, if you like Japanese movies based around the topics Yakuza, Identity-Loss, Action and Slapstick, you might wanna give it a try.

6/10

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...