Executive Koala (2006)

Bizarre hardly begins to describe this peculiar offering. Tamura is a divorced company employee about to embark on a new venture with his company. Suddenly is sweetheart is found murdered and he's the prime suspect. Did I mention that Tamura is a koala? No? Oh! The fact that he is a koala doesn't seem to have any bearing on the plot at all. It's more of a strange distraction from the films inability to focus. By the time it gets to amnesia, implanted memories, and a shady past, it is all a bit too much. Certainly enjoyable at times, but when switching from dreamlike martial art sequences and axe murder, you can't really fathom what it's aiming to do.

The front of the DVD advertises Executive Koala as being apart of the "Minoru Kawasaki Collection", which made me chuckle twice as, first, I had never heard of him and the DVD assumed he was a director of stature enough to already have a 'collection', and secondly that his collection of films is of the kind of work that makes Japanese entertainment seem as wild and crazy and cute as it is. A sampling of his titles include The Calamari Wrestler, The Rug Cop, and Best Hit! Parade!, and he doesn't seem to be stopping yet, mostly through direct-to-video stuff that Takashi Miike would probably turn down. And with this film he has what is a kind of psycho-Kafka parable with a giant Koala-man fighting for his sanity and justice in a murder case. ... Yeah.Why a giant Koala? Hey, why the hell not? I love that the director doesn't really explain that there is a giant Koala-Man, nor that his boss is a giant rabbit, nor that there is a small role for a giant Frog who works at a convenience store. Everyone else in the film is human, and with the exception that the Koala is suspected of murdering a girl, and then possibly his ex-wife, or maybe more than that stemming from a childhood of evil, no one takes him being a Koala as not normal. It's just one of those 'things' in Japan, as if the mentality of the Muppets is so straightforward for them, albeit in this case in a dark-comedy-thriller context where the Koala goes insane with red-eyes and KILLS KILLS like a robot.The film grows to be a big entertainment mostly near the end with a big climactic fight that had me and my friends howling with laughter and cheering. Up until then, it has a curious disposition: it is funny, yes, but it also 'tries' to be funny in some ways that don't work, except maybe in some inside-joke way that Japansese would get and Western audiences would feel out of the loop. But the film has a great charm to it, and knows what it is enough to poke fun at itself (i.e. those flashback scenes the Koala has with his 'romance' stuff), and actually gets oddly dark when the Koala is sent to prison(!) in a fake Alcatraz scenario where he's bullied by everybody else.Executive Koala is recommendable to certain movie buffs. It's not a movie you tell your mother to watch unless she happens to have an affinity for weird anthropomorphic stories of corporate and psychological horror. But if you're hanging out with friends and want that next rush of crazy-Japanese filmmaking (or for Japan is, um, just another Thursday), it's fun and different. And the Koala-man is actually a good actor! I would credit him but IMDb doesn't provide any names for anyone (perhaps due to it being an anonymity thing, or just because of laziness).

This movie is so very special. One minute I was thinking it was the worst movie I'd seen and a minute later think it was one of the funniest. Its a strange one, that is for sure.I've not seen much, if any, Japanese movies so how much of the bad acting is just bad acting or cultural or deliberate, I can't say. Either way, it amused me. As did the pure absurdity of the whole story and where it went. I wouldn't call it a thriller cause I wasn't on the edge of my seat but I definitely wondered where we were going. And when we got there it wasn't what I expected, but isn't that what you want in a movie? I'd like to give a better description of this thing but it is so absurd and so random that I don't know where to begin. If you are wondering if you should watch it, let me put it this way. If you are a fairly mainstream movie going type person the answer is no. If you are a fan of the weird, the funny, the absurd, the surreal, or the slightly off kilter then i say go for it. Was it a good story? eh. Was I entertained? Absolutely.

Writer/Director Kawasaki Minoru shot to cult fame with the infamous "Calamari Wrestler" about a wrestling squid, and he's back in anthropomorphic territory with "Executive Koala".Keiichi Tamura is a hardworking executive in a pickle company, who is making a big merger at work and struggling with memory loss and the mysterious disappearance of his wife three years prior. He's also a koala, which doesn't seem to bother people too much, but then the president of the company is a large white rabbit. Tamura enters the sights of the police when his current girlfriend is found stabbed to death and his murky past seem to imply that he is not the well-mannered Koala he appear to be.On the surface "Executive Koala" takes the shape of a thriller, but delve into weird psychological territory and spices it all up with quite a few surprising twists and turns. Indeed, you never quite know what to expect next as one bizarre scene follows the next, ranging from romance to creepy horror and a musical trial. It doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense and becomes weirder and weirder, but then you were never really gonna get a normal movie when the main character is a suit wearing Koala.A cross between magical realism and surrealist expressionism, "Executive Koala" might be weird for the sake of weird, but unlike David Lynch and his sort, who take that thing very serious under the guise of art, "Executive Koala" is inherently silly and never tries to hide or excuse that."Calamari Wrestler" had a more straight forward and accessible plot and made sense within it's narrative universe. "Executive Koala" doesn't, but then it isn't supposed to. It just comes at you with a wealth of ideas and odd quirky silliness, but you can't help but feel that it's a joke on people who would take this sort of surrealism too serious and engage in deep analysis. "Executive Koala" strength is it's truly quirky reality and one-of-a-kind expression, all the while sending you in one direction wondering where it's going until you realize, "Hey, it's a giant talking koala" and you cannot help but laugh at even the darkest subject matter.You will probably come away wondering what it was all about, but still having been thoroughly entertained and laughed heartily at the goofy silliness of the whole thing. But that's a good and very charming thing.Highly recommended.