Unlucky Monkey - Des Wahnsinns fette Beute

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.

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

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 already knew that I loved the works of Hiroyuki Tanaka before seeing this movie, but could still rate it unbiased because I didn't know that it was by him until the credits were showed.

It is mainly a film telling you much about life, and how it can turn on you. Its messages are very close to reality although most viewers won't experience them the way the protagonist does. But I found it very touching, especially the interesting dream monologue. I like that kind of movies, with their underground shabby feel to them, not trying to always show the greatest action scenes and effects, but letting you really get into the character(s), feel with him, pity him, then hate him, then wanting to help him again, and even think about him and his story for weeks after watching the film.

I think Shinichi Tsutsumi did a great job in portraying the character of Yamazaki, the emotions felt very real to me, and he knows how to play that helpless guy. The quiet, uneventful scenes are an important part of the movie to give you time to think, and are well realized, but still a bit too long sometimes, when you can see him walking through the city for over a minute and nothing happens, he just walks. But Sabu did great on the confusing part, never really telling you what's real or going to happen next. But although the moldy look is a part of the movie too, I think the picture quality could have been less miserable at times.

Unlucky Monkey is one of the movies you can watch and immediately know that what you see in front of you is a great piece of art, even though you can't really describe why or because of what elements, which is why I won't further try to. You will just have to watch and rate it for yourself. I suggest you look for a DVD of it somewhere. The movie has not been synchronized, only subtitled, but you'll see that this was the only smart thing to do with it.

One of the Top Asian Movies there are, if not one of the Top Worldwide.

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.