dbborroughs This film that opened the Sabu retrospective at New York's Japan Society and was a real blast.Sabu's fourth film is a kick in the pants. It's a film that starts off with a salary man waking up in a hotel room, unsure of how he got there. He then begins to remember back... it started at the funeral...moved on the bar....then continued on past the Yakuza...I've already told you too much because as with all of Sabu's films, the plot isn't the point, its the connections to the things we don't realize that are important. I don't want to say anything about what happens but the funeral becomes one of the funniest ever put on screen and the dancing puts to shame the much heralded Tavolta/Thurmond pairing in Pulp Fiction.I really like this movie a great deal. I suspect that it's going to hang with me for a few days before I can really find out how I feel about it. Its a film that has lots of stuff going on behind it's eyes as it were.If you can find a copy or see it at some screening I suggest you do so. Its further proof that Sabu is one the best filmmakers working today.

yojimboakimbo1 I've seen this movie several times. But My favorite scenes are the ones at the .Funeral(Exploding corpse), and two bar scenes (Fortune teller, woman in white, no hands peeing, twist/ seductive slow dancing, and a bunch of yakuza).And although Takagi's(Shuichi Tsutumi) life goes a little South in the later part of the movie , I kind of wished for a better fate for him in spite of the four murders he committed(face it ,the first two were accidents). He could have ran off with either the Yakuza girl or something. Anyhow,if this were a normal movie, it probably would not been produced by Sabu(Hiroyuki Tanaka)Also of note in the music. No where does a funky song feel so out of place as in the scenes at the first bar where Takagi meets the Yakuza sexpot (I feel like I wanna get down!!!).But is it really out of place ? Can a straight laced Japanese character be able to get down with his bad self? For the uninitiated, check out the movie and see!!!

seldom- Without these "enlightening" fifteen minutes (at the very end) this movie may seem quite hopeless, though. It may seem too simple, too odd, too surreal... phony even. But make no mistake: MONDAY is plotted out much more clever than it appears.It is about a guy waking up in a hotel room with bit of a cloudy memory. Things start to come back to him as he bumps into all kinds of leads he find in his pockets. I imagine that the main thought behind it was, what the human mind capable is of doing with the means it has, and how it could be shown in a film. I can say that the creators have come a long way in showing the answer to this.As said, it will takes time to see there is more to it than it seems. Fortunate enough, the retrospective march of events that made the guy end up where is now, makes it perfectly clear that the unrolling celluloid is to be sure of revealing a well-thought-out plot. Second, the whole story raises enough questions about the sanity of the characters as well as the people who wrote the story, that one will sit it out no matter what, if only excited with hope for a plausible explaination for it all.It is unlikely that MONDAY (by Hiroyuki Tanaka) will be a boring experience to anyone. To many, especially those unfamiliar with Japanese cinema, it will be something different than usual, perhaps less exciting, a bit clownish, here and there the surrealistic texture will be a bit hard to swallow, but it surely will keep one curious. And that is the only thing this film needs.This is a movie, and, I think, Japanese directors, Tanaka in particular, have well understood what this means. It isn't real life and it doesn't have to appear this way. Even though some characters and their actions seem to be right from out of a comic book, this movie is as real as (a movie) can be.I heard someone comparing aspects in this film with Tarantino. I'm not entirely sure about that. Frankly, I believe the approach Tarantino uses in his work isn't that unique to begin with. I think it was to be expected that directors would make films the way he does some day. As for Japanese movies like that of Tanaka, I think it has little to do with Tarantino. I actually think we should speak of it as the 'Japanese approach' than the 'Tarantino approach', anyway. Was "Reservoir Dogs" not a remake of an underrated Japanese gangster film??? I think is was.Well. Tanaka is nowhere near Kurosawa yet. But surely no less than Miike, Kitano or Nakano. I therefore rate it 7.5!Watch it and be patient, enjoy it and be astound ;)

marchrijo "Falling down" in Japanese: a young salaryman, utterly drunk, had murdered four people - gangsters all of them, but that's no excuse. Days later, as he wakes up in a hotel room, he has no remembrance of what happened. With his brain restarting, he begins to call up the pictures of the dreadful night. This ist the strongest part of the film, almost two third of it. The scenes in the night club, the dance with the beautiful white Yazuka bride, and his first steps becoming a mass murder, are full of magnificent ideas and pictures. The action and the atmosphere comes from Tarantino school while the minimalistic silver-blue photography resembles Kitano a lot. The problem of the film is, that he doesn't know, how to bring the story to a neat end. Shall we believe, that this harmless man kills some guys of the special police forces, which advance to his hotel room? Can we understand his behaviour after he took the chief inspector as hostage? Are these phantasies of almightiness not too much of Tarantino? Some scenes seem as if the director wants to gain minutes in order to fill the hundred minutes. The film should had come to an end, when the "tragic analysis" finished, that is when the hero noticed that the police had surrounded the building. Because of this incoherence it is not even a good movie, despite of the strengths especially in the scenery and the photography.