Non-Stop

Virtually every film released this autumn, whether it was pretty damn good or soul-crushingly bad, has been predictable. Really predictable. Predictable enough that you know how the movie is going to turn out from watching the commercials five weeks before the movie opens. Here to stem this awful trend is Shooting Gallery Films. This benevolent organization has masterminded the re-release of "Non-Stop" (originally titled "D.A.N.G.A.N. Runner"), the 1996 writing and directing debut of a Man with One Name called Sabu. Sabu, one guesses, felt unfulfilled from acting stardom after his widely remembered turn in "World Apartment Horror" in 1991, yet he had not refined his technique to the heights it attained with "Unlucky Monkey" in 1998. As you might expect from a man involved with films sporting titles like those, "Non-Stop" is quite a bizarre film. Whether you want to see it or not depends on exactly how sick of predictable filmmaking you are.

Here's the plot: Yasuda is a pathetic loser obsessed with the not-particularly-beautiful Midori, who taunts his spinelessness and general lack of masculinity. Yasuda plans a bank robbery to win her heart, but gets caught shoplifting immediately beforehand and wings the shopkeeper with his illegally purchased gun. Yasuda runs. The shopkeeper, named Aizawa, runs after him. Eventually, we learn that Aizawa used to be a cool rock star with a hit called "Shame," but now he's a heroin addict who owes money to the yakuza. While Aizawa chases Yasuda, a yakuza hitman named Takeda sees them both, and, since Aizawa owes him money and Yasuda bought the illegal gun from him, Takeda decides to chase the pair. The three men run for approximately twelve hours.

Apart from the fact that most heroin addicts are not up for twelve hours of breakneck running, this plot presents a cinematic problem, in that if Sabu just showed the running the only people who would watch would be Olympic athletes. So each of the principals has numerous flashbacks. Then some of the people in the flashbacks have flashbacks. Then some of the people in the flashbacks start existing in real time (it's not entirely clear when this happens) and start a whole separate plot line which is distinguished mostly by its complete incomprehensibility and one quiet loner Americana-obsessed gun nut. Just so he's not relying entirely on flashbacks, Sabu also shows the three principals' exhaustion-induced hallucinations. In one particularly memorable scene, a comely young female bends over to pick something up just as the principals are passing, giving Sabu a chance to show how the three characters differ by depicting each of their separate softcore porn fantasies about the woman.

Despite the undeniable fact that this movie makes no damn sense, there is still much to enjoy. The exhaustion-induced hallucinations, which show various significant scenes from each character's life and are supported by some beefy Romantic string quartet music, are kind of touching. Tomoro Taguchi, who plays Yasuda, actually acts pretty well, giving what happens to his character some coherence by showing how his various character traits infect everything he does. Sabu certainly has a commendable gun fetish, and when he cares, his chase scenes are pretty visceral. An undercurrent of hyper-cynical comedy also runs through this film, as evidenced by the fact that all three main characters are complete losers and behave like it too (rob a bank to impress your beloved?). Occasionally this film is pretty funny in a supergrim way.

But "Non-Stop"'s chief merit (and chief defect) is its willingness to do absolutely anything for any reason at any time. Sabu has such a fertile imagination and feels limited by so few conventions that some of what he does is bound to come out pretty well. His relentlessly postmodern displacement of time at least presumes that there is an intelligent audience watching, as opposed to virtually everything else out now. And, eventually, most of the narrative locks can be picked, if you disregard a few scenes here and there and watch with an active imagination. Certainly the apocalyptic finale fixes up a few of the narrative deficiencies, even if the motivations of the characters are inexplicable.

If you want to watch something with a normal story, keep running. But if you're sick of cookie-cutter filmmaking, and you're willing to sit around and think of near-incoherence as unpredictability, or unfettered experimentation as freshness, "Non-Stop" may well be the film for you. Just one suggestion: try to see this film at your most alert. You'll need every bit of mental acuity you can spare to appreciate its successes and skim over its failings.

I really want to see the film "World Apartment Horror" now Lindemann

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