ChanFamous
I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.
InformationRap
This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.
Hadrina
The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful
FilmCriticLalitRao
Actors making films is a new trend in Japanese cinema.It is a known fact that many of them are no so successful.The only exception in the history of Japanese cinema is Takeshi Kitano who is good as an actor as well as a film maker.Monday is directed by Hiroyuki Tanaka who is one of the most important actors of Japanese cinema.In this film he has given viewers unfettered access into the minds of various sections of Japanese society.What we see in the film is the way people like a family,a salary man,some yakuzas and some of the police behave in the course of their normal lives.The idea of the film is not to criticize a section to praise a different one.In this film,Sabu wants to show us his protagonists with their real intentions,moods and motives for leading lives which they feel are suitable for them.Monday is also a plea for peace as Japanese people have suffered enormous losses in the past especially during the World War 2.This is the reason why violence has been shunned in this film.PS:kindly watch with close attention the performance of Terajima Susumu who also stars in Sabu's wonderful film "The Blessing Bell".
Armand
A strange puzzle. Mixture of kafkaesque atmosphere, pieces of black humor, slices of Japanese mythology, pacifist thesis. Ambiguous thriller about fall of a waste world, about normal existence like masks collection, about innocence like result of inactivity. A surrealistic funeral and explosion of corpse. The life broken decent limits and every gesture is a trap. Madness, Oriental Erinyes,an quaint fortune teller, a fascinating woman and Yakuza. Stupid murder and beginning of nightmare.A salary man in a hotel room.Monday morning. Reconstruction of last hours step by step. The sin like oil stain. Fascination, stupefaction, fear, negation of facts. Cobweb of memories. Slow suffocation.Palsy. The resignation.Traces of Sydney Lumet's "Dog Day Afternoon", Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" and "Kill Bill", Stone's "Natural Born Killers",David Cronenberg's "Spider", Ingmar Bergman's " Tystnaden". But important is only the Japanese recipes.In fact, subtle exploration of Dostoievskyan sin, exploration of unavoidable failure, impossibility of escape. New page of Old Greek moral lesson.
Andreas Moss
Monday is an existentialist movie. For those who are comparing it to Tarantino, please stop reviewing movies. This is more like an anti-Tarantino movie, if it is anything. It questions the use of law. It questions the use of weapons. It questions alcohol. It questions justice versus moral. It questions things that went over my head as well. Does that sound like a Tarantino movie? No, not at all. Please give Sabu the right to call this his own movie, and let this compare-everything-with-Tarantino-nonsense slip away. Its about a person waking up in a hotel room, not remembering who he is or how he got there. Gradually he remembers more and more, and it kind of goes way over-the-top, but in a way that is both funny and thought provoking. It also has quite a surreal laugh-at-life quality in some scenes that should be mentioned. Its kind of an intelligent action movie. Let there be more of these!
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.
