After a screening of this picture at the AFI Fest, a man from the audience stood up and implored the rest of us to post reviews here on the IMDb. I'm not sure that my comments are what he was hoping for, but here they are:
In the opening scene, a Japanese man walks away from his former place of employment, a just-closed factory, and without speaking a word for two days, witnesses at least two suicides, rescues a baby from a burning building, is charged with and then cleared of murder, wins the lottery, loses the money, sees a ghost, and has at least two or three other amazing and improbable encounters. And I don't really know what to say about it.
I'm usually not stumped like this, but I really don't know if I kind of liked it, or if I absolutely hated it. I can't tell if it was silly and pretentious, or ironic and vaguely amusing. It was going for a minimalist absurdism. That's clear, but I rarely managed more than a kind of snort for a laugh. Visually, the movie was elegant, but not exactly imaginative. There was a lot of Jarmusch and Beckett going on, but I'm not sure I can tell what Sabu himself brought to the party.
The ending, oddly, feels like the movie's saving grace, but even that, when all is said and done -- and please excuse the spoilers -- is basically an inversion of that old junior-high Super-8 filmmaker's scenario: "it was all a dream." In 8th grade, the standard premise was, a bunch of weird s**t happens to the hero and then the hero wakes up. In Sabuland, a bunch of weird s**t happens, and the hero goes home and tells his wife all about it. I should have been p****d off that the whole movie had been setting me up for this kind of one-off joke, but it was actually such a relief after the insufferably mannered ninety minutes which preceded it, that I upgraded my audience ballot rating from "fair" to "good."
In the opening scene, a Japanese man walks away from his former place of employment, a just-closed factory, and without speaking a word for two days, witnesses at least two suicides, rescues a baby from a burning building, is charged with and then cleared of murder, wins the lottery, loses the money, sees a ghost, and has at least two or three other amazing and improbable encounters. And I don't really know what to say about it.
I'm usually not stumped like this, but I really don't know if I kind of liked it, or if I absolutely hated it. I can't tell if it was silly and pretentious, or ironic and vaguely amusing. It was going for a minimalist absurdism. That's clear, but I rarely managed more than a kind of snort for a laugh. Visually, the movie was elegant, but not exactly imaginative. There was a lot of Jarmusch and Beckett going on, but I'm not sure I can tell what Sabu himself brought to the party.
The ending, oddly, feels like the movie's saving grace, but even that, when all is said and done -- and please excuse the spoilers -- is basically an inversion of that old junior-high Super-8 filmmaker's scenario: "it was all a dream." In 8th grade, the standard premise was, a bunch of weird s**t happens to the hero and then the hero wakes up. In Sabuland, a bunch of weird s**t happens, and the hero goes home and tells his wife all about it. I should have been p****d off that the whole movie had been setting me up for this kind of one-off joke, but it was actually such a relief after the insufferably mannered ninety minutes which preceded it, that I upgraded my audience ballot rating from "fair" to "good."