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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: MONDAY (2000)

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Mandei

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DIRECTED BY: Sabu (Hiroyuki Tanaka)

FEATURING: Shin’ichi Tsutsumi, Yasuko Matsuyuki, Ren Ohsugi, , Akira Yamamoto,

PLOT: A businessman awakens in a strange hotel room with no recollection as to how he got there; as reassembles his memories, he discovers that a number of shocking acts lead directly back to him.

COMMENTS: “Get a little booze in you and you’re a tough guy,” the mugger’s moll says. And right she is. Koichi Takagi, a meek middle manager (in Japanese parlance, a salaryman) can’t even stand up to his mouse-voiced girlfriend. But get a few drinks in him, he becomes an entirely different person. Confident, even cocky, and – provided with the proper tools – a spree killer. Kanpai!

Like Garfield but so much worse, Koichi is having a truly terrible Monday. He wakes up in an unfamiliar hotel room with multiple religious tomes open on his bedside table and no clear memory of his weekend. When the neurons finally begin to fire, they first recall an incredibly uncomfortable funeral where, through farcical hijinks, he is called upon to snip the wires on the corpse’s pacemaker with disastrous results. From there, his girlfriend dumps him after he fails to explain why he missed her birthday party. An attempt to drink away his woes lands him in the orbit of a yakuza boss, and soon he’s engaging in a highly charged dance number with the gangster’s girlfriend. Alcohol definitely seems to have loosened him up, but maybe too much, as will become apparent once he gets a hold of the mobster’s shotgun. Whoops.

A surprising number of reviewers seem to think that “’Monday’ is a movie for those who believe that fate has once again dealt them an especially bad day.” The thing is, I don’t think this is really a case of bad luck. There are three very clear causes at the root of Takagi’s rampage: a gurgling rage from overwork and underappreciation, a distinct inability to keep a clear head with all the liquor that’s thrust upon him, and the sudden and unfortunate availability of a Philadelphia-made shotgun. (One of his selected poisons, Henry McKenna Kentucky bourbon, also throws some shade at all-American vices.) Maybe one can argue that none of these things are intentional on Koichi’s part, but this isn’t just a rotten roll of the dice. Rather, he has reached the point where he is unable to hold himself back from bad choices. In a funny/tragic moment, Koichi begins to compose a maudlin suicide note, expressing regrets to his family and offering explicit instructions for taking care of his plants. But while he writes, he idly takes a swig (and then several more) from a nearby bottle of booze, and his tone becomes less conciliatory and more aggressive. That proves unfortunate, but that’s not dumb happenstance.

The revelation of Koichi’s lost weekend plays out like a darker version of The Hangover, but when he discovers that every channel on the television is talking about him, as well as the regrettable ease of perpetrating gun violence, Monday takes on a different tenor as he tries to find a way out of this mess. It soon becomes clear that he’s the only guest left in the hotel, and the place is surrounded by authorities waiting to apprehend him as a brutal murderer. Here is where the film makes its true bid for weirdness, deploying a series of massive tonal shifts and elaborate setpieces in quick succession. When the drunk and armed Koichi emerges from his hotel room, we’re treated to a violent action scene to compete with the likes of John Woo or Gareth Evans. When Koichi enters an elevator to make his way down to the street, he is accompanied by a gaggle of giddy white-painted demons urging him on as he indulges his worst impulses. And when he reaches the street and takes the lead detective hostage, he indulges in an amusingly self-serving inspirational speech that culminates in a public celebration akin to the boys coming home from war. It’s a dizzying display, but even if you thought you could draw any meaning from it, Sabu yanks the rug out by returning Koichi back to the hotel room to contemplate his predicament. And there we end, certain that it all means something, but sure of little else.

Monday relies heavily on the goodwill engendered by Tsutsumi’s affable performance. He seems like a decent man in a world where decency gets eaten for lunch, and even when his actions are at their most appalling, you hold out hope that he’ll come to his senses and pull himself out of the muck. But despite his charm, you can pity Koichi but you can’t really forgive him. His excuses have merit, but his actions are indisputable. Friday may be pay day, but Monday is when the bills come due.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The flashbacks become increasingly edgy as Sabu turns up the danger, as well as the weird… It’s the sort of thing that sends conventional moviegoers and I suppose overseas distributors running for the hills, but Sabu has too much on mind to be concerned about that. One thing Sabu is not is subtle, and serious issues, such as unchecked authority, glorified perceptions of violence, and the questionable right to take justice into one’s own hands, come to the forefront, even debated openly by the main character and those he confronts.” – Steve Kopian, Unseen Films (2022 screening)

(This movie was nominated for review by Tamori. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules

CAPSULE: MISS MEADOWS (2014)

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DIRECTED BY: Karen Leigh Hopkins

FEATURING: Katie Holmes, James Badge Dale, Callan Mulvey, Jean Smart, Ava Kolker

PLOT: A prim and proper substitute school teacher moonlights as a vigilante.

Still from Miss Meadows (2014)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Miss Meadows has cult ambitions and tone issues, but it’s too restrained, not messy enough, and too afraid to wade into weirdness.

COMMENTS: In-movie, Miss Meadows is described, rather too ambitiously, as a “Pulp Fiction Mary Poppins.” Oh, Katie Holmes nails the “Mary Poppins” angle, alright. Dressed in flowery frocks with white gloves and ankle socks, reading books of light verse, correcting others’ grammar, and signing off with her signature phrase—“toodle-oo”—she is an anachronism that never existed, so whitebread and out-of-place in modernity that she’s uncanny. Holmes’ casting was inspired, and at times she almost steers the movie into legitimate character study mode. But, unlike Pulp Fiction, the script she’s trapped in offers no surprises, clever dialogue, or grit.

The opening, where Miss Meadows taps her way down a tree-lined boulevard greeted by CGI-wildlife of varying believability, only to find herself hit on by a scumbag whom she must blow away with her ladylike peashooter, pretty much encapsulates the entire film. The movie does venture down a few seedy alleyways, with little success. Since Miss Meadows is a sexless construct, Holmes’ flirtations with the local sheriff require her to break character and briefly act like a real human being (which she does by dancing to imaginary accordion music), but heat never develops between the two. Conversations (on a yellow rotary phone) with her equally deranged mother serve as an attempt to add another dimension, but one which only ends in obvious revelations. But it’s Meadows’ tea party with antagonist Callan Mulvey, an accused child abuser furloughed from prison in a recent budget crunch, that offers the biggest missed opportunity for the film to develop some depth. Mulvey is the only character who can stand up to Meadows and challenge her sincerity, questionable social agenda, and sanity, but the script abandons its feint towards developing this character into a true foil. That failure leaves the movie with little to rely on: it’s a toothless non-satire, an underdeveloped romance, and a black comedy with no real darkness. Miss Meadows founds itself on a coarse irony, then fails to do much with the premise you couldn’t find in a one-sentence logline.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Holmes’ performance helps Miss Meadows considerably: It’s so relentlessly upbeat and deliberately artificial that it admits no cynicism or judgment, and it makes the film daringly weird, like a less-bloody but no less savage version of Lucky McKee’s May, with less mutilation and more tea parties.”–Tasha Robinson, The Dissolve (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: DEATH NOTE [Desu nôto] (2006)

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DIRECTED BY: Shusuke Kaneko

FEATURING: Tatsuya Fujiwara, Ken’ichi Matsuyama

PLOT:  A law student finds a notebook (deliberately dropped by the God of Death) that

Still from Death Note (2006)

allows him to kill anyone whose name he writes in it; soon, criminals across the world start dropping dead, while, with the aid of super-detective “L,” the police race to stop the mysterious vigilante.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Death Note has a unique premise and execution, particularly in the way it mixes the fantasy and detective genres, and has potential as a cult film even beyond its existing magna/anime fanbase.  The presence of apple-munching Ryuuk, a lurking angel of death whose motives for making Light his emissary are never explained, gives this film a small tinge of weirdness, but other than that it abides by its own internal rules with such rigid consistency that it registers no more than an “offbeat” on the Weirdometer.

COMMENTS:  Death Note begins with a potentially interesting premise, but spends most of its first reel setting up that premise in such a routine way that I feared it was going to be just another uninspiring Ringu variation.  Studying the law with the intention of becoming a district attorney, young Light magically gets the power to dispense capital punishment.  He targets only the vilest unrepentant criminals who have escaped justice.  The anonymous vigilante who slays with a stroke of the pen is anointed “Kira” and is applauded by legions of Internet groupies.  For a while it looks like we’re headed towards a depressingly obvious morality tale, with Light destined to fall from grace, abuse his power and accidentally execute an innocent man.  The first twist comes when we meet Ryuuk, a god of death and the source of Light’s new-found power; his motives are unknown and he proclaims himself neutral as to whether Light uses the Death Note or not.  Ryuuk constantly hangs around Light, apparently because he’s fallen hard for the earthly pleasure of the humble apple and Light has become his produce pusher.  The angel of death is an interesting character, but his idiosyncrasies take a while to unfold, and he’s a disappointment on other terms: he looks like an artist’s black and white rendering of Heath Ledger’s joker with bat wings attached, badly animated for a cheap video game.  He even moves like a game character, hovering slightly in the air with a stock expression until the game cursor hovers over him, at which point he jerks back his head and delivers his dialogue with a cartoonish cackle.  It’s to the script’s credit that despite the cheap animation, Ryuuk’s role is interesting enough that we eventually get used to him and forget about his distracting appearance.

The second wrinkle comes with the arrival of another oddball character, the anonymous sleuth “L,” who first appears as nothing more than a voice on a laptop.  Faced with a worldwide pandemic of accused murderers dropping dead from heart attacks after juries acquit them, the baffled police turn to the techno-detective, who cleverly narrows down the list of suspects from the entire population of the world to a small pool of Japanese students using pure deduction.  But the story doesn’t really take off until the halfway point, when Light turns his attentions from criminals to those tracking him down and new rules are introduced for the Death Note allowing him to write out elaborate scenarios to cause his victim’s demise, rather than unceremoniously dropping dead of a heart attack as they had previously.  Light needs his victim’s name in order to off him, and the anonymous L, driven by his own amoral sense of sport, seeks to discover Light’s identity as well.  The cat-and-mouse games between the two masterminds turn complicated, clever and thrilling, with L playing the part of a high-tech Sherlock while Light becomes a mystical Moriarty.  The story is spread over two feature films; this picture wraps up one story arc, but ends with Light and L at a stalemate to be broken in Death Note: The Last Name (2006).

Death Note has become a small franchise: based on a popular magna, it had previously been adapted as an anime series, it has spawned not only the of-a-piece sequel but a spin-off movie featuring L.  It’s also destined for a horribly uninteresting Hollywood remake.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

Light’s goaded into his kill spree by the God of Death; a lolloping CGI ghoul in rock star clothes, who appears out of nowhere and offers advice while munching on apples. Weird, huh?”–Jamie Russell, BBC (contemporaneous)