Post by Jean Luc de Lemur on Apr 14, 2023 16:02:06 GMT -5
Missed by a dollar
or, $1 money wars
Missed by a dollar is one of the least-regarded specials, by which I mean it is one of the least thought of. It slots in with the other nineties specials, living in the shadow of…almost everything else. I don’t think it deserves to be there. Like most of the specials it does suffer from an uneveness, but it stands on its own merits better than most. While Lupin has increasingly leaned on nostalgia for the franchise, this one prompts nostalgia for the time it was made.
2000 was a good time to be Lupin. He’s always been, to use a term that became popular in the nineties, a nonstate actor. From the beginning he’s been associated with criminal, clandestine, dissident, illegitimate, or exiled political movements, and like any big nonstate actor has had his share of run-ins with governments.
He’s sitting at the end of the nineties’ End of History. Lupin even has a couple of Fukuyama-ish lines. “The century of war is over now […] Dictators are long out of fashion”
Despite Lupin’s confident geopolitical attitude, instability is constantly lurking behind the wealthy facade (the 1997 Asian financial crisis even gets namechecked). The main antagonist, banker Cynthia Craymov, is a product of the post-communist collapse turn into liberalism, utilzing the ensuing collapse to great material gain through both. Fujiko goes straight (the cut from Lupin’s New York to Fujiko’s Los Angeles is one of the formal highlights of the special) only to find herself falling victim to Craymov’s bond market manipulation. Craymov herself is haunted by the revolution that took down her party chairman father. The maguffin—a broach that belonged to the likes of Napoleon and Hitler—is a good luck charm that supposedly lets one ride out the game of chance.
Cynthia and her (Soviet) Afghan War vet henchman, Nabikov, echo another passage from The End of History:
Or is the danger that we will be happy on one level, but still dis-satisfied with ourselves on another, and hence ready to drag the world back into history with all its wars, injustice, and revolution?
Cynthia’s goal is to recapture and surpass the power of her father, echoing Fukuyama’s warning that liberal democracy could be subverted by megalothymia, an excess of regard for the self and material accomplishment. Craymov desires to become a “financial dictator,” one exercising power outside the state apparatus much as her father ruled a un unnamed Communist state. Her means—global post-ideological terrorism disrupting oil markets—anticipates the upcoming decade’s narratives. Nabikov’s desires are simpler—impressing Craymov.
It’s Cynthia and Lupin who have chemistry, though. One of the main strengths of Missed by a Dollar is how it provides Lupin with plausible love interests. Lupin is after Sundy, an aspiring jazz singer, while Craymov is after Lupin. It’s unclear the degree to which Craymov and Lupin’s attraction is mutual—Lupin steals a kiss but it doubles as a means of blocking Nabikov’s gunsight. While Craymov’s similarly self-interested her attraction is clear, and she knows it’s clouding her sense of self-interest. All Craymov’s instincts are pulling her in different directions In researching the special I saw this used as an example of a plot hole, but this is wrong. It’s some surprising complexity, and from a guest character no less, the sort we don’t see often enough in Lupin.
Lupin’s characterization’s particularly well done here. He’s still a bit girl-crazy, but it comes across as more innocent than lecherous or desperate, grounded by his honest admiration of Sundy and more double-edged relationship with Craymov. The most effective humor in the special comes across as the natural result of Lupin’s character, not degradation or slapstick. Even after his biggest fall—a false death in at the end of act I—the joke isn’t the fall itself how Lupin gets out of it.
That doesn’t mean things don’t get ridiculous at times. This is done well with the two car chases, one up a transported-to-New York Marina City and the other in Central Park (the animators apparently didn’t know where you can drive through). It’s done competently with the false Lupin death: the audience know it’s fake and the special doesn’t milk it for needless emotion. It doesn what’s necessary: sets up a couple of emotional shocks for Cynthia and an opportunity for some good Lupin humor in its resolution. The same goes for the decoding of the broach’s location—nothing groundbreaking, but done competently at a good clip. The oil plot, though, is ridiculous (yours truly, who studied carbonate geology at what’s basically a feeder school for Shell, tried not to be insulted). I’m not sure the writers understand how auctions work. The talismanic maguffin was a very hoary Lupin trope even in 2000, but it works well enough to motivate the action and ends up bringing some real thematic resonance by the end.
Much as the broach goes from a silly plot device to a serious thematic one, Lupin demonstrates grows into some real darkness in Missed by a dollar. Like the more humorous bits they seem like a real extension of who he is. As the special goes on it’s clear his superficial desires are linked with deeper feelings. Like with Craymov there’s an added punch, though—while with Cynthia we see her self-interest interfering with his feelings, with Lupin we can’t be sure where the feelings end and his calculations begin. Lupin manages to span the full range of his character in a naturally, preserving an anti-heroic stratum that’s been mostly buried in recent Lupin media.
Lupin’s character design is an iteration of previous models than a revival of one of the seventies character designs. Sometimes it looks more natural, though it can hard to tell when Lupin’s face is meant to be extra expressive and when it’s just off model. By this point guest characters are more generic and longer have an independent Monkey Punch-ish character—Craymov and Nabikov could have stepped out from any anime, though Craymov’s blank expression ends up working well for the character.
These specials’ budget restraints always required economizing, and the emphasis on mood and psychology allows Missed by a dollar to do this better than most. Apart from the opening car chases the actual heists are fairly simple, almost smash-and-grab level affairs. The Lupin-versus-technology aspect, so prominent over the past decade, appears here in a slightly different form. Lupin brute forces his thefts since a sophisticated approach would be thwarted; the puzzle side of detecting the broach is mostly handled by Lupin’s laptop. Lupin’s role is to provide some very lean muscle and, apart from a couple of devices, the only engineering he takes care of is social engineering.
The pace slows in the second half, when the story moves from New York to a Caribbean island (unfortunately named Cari) and we mostly shift from action to character work. We don’t get a lot of sun—much of the action happens at night, in quiet rooms or hotel bars. For the first time since the mid eighties Yuji Ohno is clearly interested in his own music, setting the moodier tone of the special with smaller-scale jazz arrangements that focus more on song and leitmotif. We even get a surprisingly vulnerable, Great American Songbook-style English rendition of Fujiko’s theme (used for the first time since 1980, I think).
Unfortunately it’s not a great outting for Fujiko herself. In some scenes she a smart woman with an intimate— in a refreshing change of pace Platonic—relationship with Lupin. In others it seems like her age has been shaved in half (the shorts and spaghetti string—it’s 2000!—top don’t help) bvy misguided attempts at comic relief. Jigen’s just there, used instrumentally, and while they gave Goemon more lines than him it’s just evidence that they strained to include the character. Goemon’s given a strange, superfluous subplot where he’s a devotee of a new-agey LA wellness cult. It might be a way to change up his one-liners, but it’s seemingly out nowhere and just odd given Japan’s then-recent history. Zenigata’s role is relatively small, but manages to square the circle between competence and clownishness.
They’re all truly just supporting characters, though—it’s Lupin and Craymov who are the center of the film. Their final scene together is poignant, playing a little game where they drop coins into a glass of water until surface tension breaks. The emotional and thematic tension between the two breaks here, too—I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say Lupin’s the one with luck on his side.
Or is it luck? By this point Lupin has the broach and it can be interpreted as evidence of its power, but over Missed by a dollar we’ve seen Lupin go from comically hungry to calculatingly confident. Whether it’s by peeling back layers of his persona or by actual growth doesn’t entirely matter. Lupin works past his impediments and through his frutstrations. Craymov feels that some kind of temporal power’s her birthright. To the extent Lupin has a birthright it’s not to any object or to power, it’s to his profession. Lupin complains about money while wearing a $30K Breguet—it’s not that Lupin’s poor, necessarily, but that the loot is a means of sponsoring his thefts, not the other way around.
Lupin’s skill operates outside society, Craymov’s at its margins, but Sundy’s aims are fully within it. Although megalothymia can break society, one of liberalism’s strengths is that it can redirect this drive. Sundy doesn’t want power per se, but stardom. By the end she’s ascended to the top of the music business (there’s no way a torch singer’s becoming so popular in 2000, but I’d rather have Ohno’s heartfelt jazz than some generic pop tune). In a chivalrous gesture Lupin’s given her the broach, hers by inheritance, but unlike Craymov Sundy places little importance on history. Plus in a blink-and-you-miss it moment we see an A&R guy at one of Sundy’s performances. Sundy’s background. As with Lupin, Sundy’s success is all her own. The broach is just another piece of compensation.
Recommended?
Recommended—a surprisingly strong and nuanced end to the Lupin’s uneven nineties. While looking through the first version of this review I decided I needed to give the special another look. It held up on a second viewing within a month, which is no small praise for anything Lupin. I even caught details I missed the first time around.
That noted it was a case where the special grew on me. Some of the shifts in tone and pacing work against it, as do a number of other small flaws, but those are easily outweighed by Missed by a Dollar’s merits and I would have still recommended it after first viewing, though not as effusively.
Stray observations
• The dollar coins Lupin and Craymov drop into the glass of water are silver bullion.
• The voice acting in this is quite good, including some surprisingly real moments from Makio Inoue (Goemon) and Eiko Masuyama (Fujiko).
• Fujiko loses her bra in a fight scene but her vocal response exhibits surprisingly real distress. Oddly the fact that we don’t see anything makes it come across even worse, like the payoff was the humiliation. It really didn’t sit well with me.
• Although we’re teased with Lupin’s Mercedes, he insteads gets in (roughly) sixties vintage Subaru 360, even more dinky than Mazda R360 of Lupin Zero (and both of them make the Fiat look positively robust). Lupin might have been in a tiny Subaru before, the little van in “The Arrest Lupin Highway Operation”, though there are a lot of tiny Japanese vans.
• It’s an unusually good special for watches. I couldn’t identify Nabikov’s watch, which is some generic nineties tactical-style analog-digital. Zenigata wears an everyman’s Seiko 5. I mentioned Lupin’s Breguet above—it’s probably the most conservative watch in the entire franchise, based on a pocket watch from the late eighteenth century. The reserve de marche hand—showing how much time is left before it needs to be wound again—is repurposed here as a countdown seconds hand, ticking down to an explosion: power stored to power released.
• It’s a shame there’s no proper soundtrack album for this special—the music track is available but there isn’t a more regular album with song-length renditions of the themes, as the TV series and first two movies got. The theme, however, is a mix by Readymade from one of the Punch the Monkey remix albums, the only instance of one of those tracks making it into televised Lupin.
or, $1 money wars
Missed by a dollar is one of the least-regarded specials, by which I mean it is one of the least thought of. It slots in with the other nineties specials, living in the shadow of…almost everything else. I don’t think it deserves to be there. Like most of the specials it does suffer from an uneveness, but it stands on its own merits better than most. While Lupin has increasingly leaned on nostalgia for the franchise, this one prompts nostalgia for the time it was made.
2000 was a good time to be Lupin. He’s always been, to use a term that became popular in the nineties, a nonstate actor. From the beginning he’s been associated with criminal, clandestine, dissident, illegitimate, or exiled political movements, and like any big nonstate actor has had his share of run-ins with governments.
He’s sitting at the end of the nineties’ End of History. Lupin even has a couple of Fukuyama-ish lines. “The century of war is over now […] Dictators are long out of fashion”
Despite Lupin’s confident geopolitical attitude, instability is constantly lurking behind the wealthy facade (the 1997 Asian financial crisis even gets namechecked). The main antagonist, banker Cynthia Craymov, is a product of the post-communist collapse turn into liberalism, utilzing the ensuing collapse to great material gain through both. Fujiko goes straight (the cut from Lupin’s New York to Fujiko’s Los Angeles is one of the formal highlights of the special) only to find herself falling victim to Craymov’s bond market manipulation. Craymov herself is haunted by the revolution that took down her party chairman father. The maguffin—a broach that belonged to the likes of Napoleon and Hitler—is a good luck charm that supposedly lets one ride out the game of chance.
Cynthia and her (Soviet) Afghan War vet henchman, Nabikov, echo another passage from The End of History:
Or is the danger that we will be happy on one level, but still dis-satisfied with ourselves on another, and hence ready to drag the world back into history with all its wars, injustice, and revolution?
Cynthia’s goal is to recapture and surpass the power of her father, echoing Fukuyama’s warning that liberal democracy could be subverted by megalothymia, an excess of regard for the self and material accomplishment. Craymov desires to become a “financial dictator,” one exercising power outside the state apparatus much as her father ruled a un unnamed Communist state. Her means—global post-ideological terrorism disrupting oil markets—anticipates the upcoming decade’s narratives. Nabikov’s desires are simpler—impressing Craymov.
It’s Cynthia and Lupin who have chemistry, though. One of the main strengths of Missed by a Dollar is how it provides Lupin with plausible love interests. Lupin is after Sundy, an aspiring jazz singer, while Craymov is after Lupin. It’s unclear the degree to which Craymov and Lupin’s attraction is mutual—Lupin steals a kiss but it doubles as a means of blocking Nabikov’s gunsight. While Craymov’s similarly self-interested her attraction is clear, and she knows it’s clouding her sense of self-interest. All Craymov’s instincts are pulling her in different directions In researching the special I saw this used as an example of a plot hole, but this is wrong. It’s some surprising complexity, and from a guest character no less, the sort we don’t see often enough in Lupin.
Lupin’s characterization’s particularly well done here. He’s still a bit girl-crazy, but it comes across as more innocent than lecherous or desperate, grounded by his honest admiration of Sundy and more double-edged relationship with Craymov. The most effective humor in the special comes across as the natural result of Lupin’s character, not degradation or slapstick. Even after his biggest fall—a false death in at the end of act I—the joke isn’t the fall itself how Lupin gets out of it.
That doesn’t mean things don’t get ridiculous at times. This is done well with the two car chases, one up a transported-to-New York Marina City and the other in Central Park (the animators apparently didn’t know where you can drive through). It’s done competently with the false Lupin death: the audience know it’s fake and the special doesn’t milk it for needless emotion. It doesn what’s necessary: sets up a couple of emotional shocks for Cynthia and an opportunity for some good Lupin humor in its resolution. The same goes for the decoding of the broach’s location—nothing groundbreaking, but done competently at a good clip. The oil plot, though, is ridiculous (yours truly, who studied carbonate geology at what’s basically a feeder school for Shell, tried not to be insulted). I’m not sure the writers understand how auctions work. The talismanic maguffin was a very hoary Lupin trope even in 2000, but it works well enough to motivate the action and ends up bringing some real thematic resonance by the end.
Much as the broach goes from a silly plot device to a serious thematic one, Lupin demonstrates grows into some real darkness in Missed by a dollar. Like the more humorous bits they seem like a real extension of who he is. As the special goes on it’s clear his superficial desires are linked with deeper feelings. Like with Craymov there’s an added punch, though—while with Cynthia we see her self-interest interfering with his feelings, with Lupin we can’t be sure where the feelings end and his calculations begin. Lupin manages to span the full range of his character in a naturally, preserving an anti-heroic stratum that’s been mostly buried in recent Lupin media.
Lupin’s character design is an iteration of previous models than a revival of one of the seventies character designs. Sometimes it looks more natural, though it can hard to tell when Lupin’s face is meant to be extra expressive and when it’s just off model. By this point guest characters are more generic and longer have an independent Monkey Punch-ish character—Craymov and Nabikov could have stepped out from any anime, though Craymov’s blank expression ends up working well for the character.
These specials’ budget restraints always required economizing, and the emphasis on mood and psychology allows Missed by a dollar to do this better than most. Apart from the opening car chases the actual heists are fairly simple, almost smash-and-grab level affairs. The Lupin-versus-technology aspect, so prominent over the past decade, appears here in a slightly different form. Lupin brute forces his thefts since a sophisticated approach would be thwarted; the puzzle side of detecting the broach is mostly handled by Lupin’s laptop. Lupin’s role is to provide some very lean muscle and, apart from a couple of devices, the only engineering he takes care of is social engineering.
The pace slows in the second half, when the story moves from New York to a Caribbean island (unfortunately named Cari) and we mostly shift from action to character work. We don’t get a lot of sun—much of the action happens at night, in quiet rooms or hotel bars. For the first time since the mid eighties Yuji Ohno is clearly interested in his own music, setting the moodier tone of the special with smaller-scale jazz arrangements that focus more on song and leitmotif. We even get a surprisingly vulnerable, Great American Songbook-style English rendition of Fujiko’s theme (used for the first time since 1980, I think).
Unfortunately it’s not a great outting for Fujiko herself. In some scenes she a smart woman with an intimate— in a refreshing change of pace Platonic—relationship with Lupin. In others it seems like her age has been shaved in half (the shorts and spaghetti string—it’s 2000!—top don’t help) bvy misguided attempts at comic relief. Jigen’s just there, used instrumentally, and while they gave Goemon more lines than him it’s just evidence that they strained to include the character. Goemon’s given a strange, superfluous subplot where he’s a devotee of a new-agey LA wellness cult. It might be a way to change up his one-liners, but it’s seemingly out nowhere and just odd given Japan’s then-recent history. Zenigata’s role is relatively small, but manages to square the circle between competence and clownishness.
They’re all truly just supporting characters, though—it’s Lupin and Craymov who are the center of the film. Their final scene together is poignant, playing a little game where they drop coins into a glass of water until surface tension breaks. The emotional and thematic tension between the two breaks here, too—I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say Lupin’s the one with luck on his side.
Or is it luck? By this point Lupin has the broach and it can be interpreted as evidence of its power, but over Missed by a dollar we’ve seen Lupin go from comically hungry to calculatingly confident. Whether it’s by peeling back layers of his persona or by actual growth doesn’t entirely matter. Lupin works past his impediments and through his frutstrations. Craymov feels that some kind of temporal power’s her birthright. To the extent Lupin has a birthright it’s not to any object or to power, it’s to his profession. Lupin complains about money while wearing a $30K Breguet—it’s not that Lupin’s poor, necessarily, but that the loot is a means of sponsoring his thefts, not the other way around.
Lupin’s skill operates outside society, Craymov’s at its margins, but Sundy’s aims are fully within it. Although megalothymia can break society, one of liberalism’s strengths is that it can redirect this drive. Sundy doesn’t want power per se, but stardom. By the end she’s ascended to the top of the music business (there’s no way a torch singer’s becoming so popular in 2000, but I’d rather have Ohno’s heartfelt jazz than some generic pop tune). In a chivalrous gesture Lupin’s given her the broach, hers by inheritance, but unlike Craymov Sundy places little importance on history. Plus in a blink-and-you-miss it moment we see an A&R guy at one of Sundy’s performances. Sundy’s background. As with Lupin, Sundy’s success is all her own. The broach is just another piece of compensation.
Recommended?
Recommended—a surprisingly strong and nuanced end to the Lupin’s uneven nineties. While looking through the first version of this review I decided I needed to give the special another look. It held up on a second viewing within a month, which is no small praise for anything Lupin. I even caught details I missed the first time around.
That noted it was a case where the special grew on me. Some of the shifts in tone and pacing work against it, as do a number of other small flaws, but those are easily outweighed by Missed by a Dollar’s merits and I would have still recommended it after first viewing, though not as effusively.
Stray observations
• The dollar coins Lupin and Craymov drop into the glass of water are silver bullion.
• The voice acting in this is quite good, including some surprisingly real moments from Makio Inoue (Goemon) and Eiko Masuyama (Fujiko).
• Fujiko loses her bra in a fight scene but her vocal response exhibits surprisingly real distress. Oddly the fact that we don’t see anything makes it come across even worse, like the payoff was the humiliation. It really didn’t sit well with me.
• Although we’re teased with Lupin’s Mercedes, he insteads gets in (roughly) sixties vintage Subaru 360, even more dinky than Mazda R360 of Lupin Zero (and both of them make the Fiat look positively robust). Lupin might have been in a tiny Subaru before, the little van in “The Arrest Lupin Highway Operation”, though there are a lot of tiny Japanese vans.
• It’s an unusually good special for watches. I couldn’t identify Nabikov’s watch, which is some generic nineties tactical-style analog-digital. Zenigata wears an everyman’s Seiko 5. I mentioned Lupin’s Breguet above—it’s probably the most conservative watch in the entire franchise, based on a pocket watch from the late eighteenth century. The reserve de marche hand—showing how much time is left before it needs to be wound again—is repurposed here as a countdown seconds hand, ticking down to an explosion: power stored to power released.
• It’s a shame there’s no proper soundtrack album for this special—the music track is available but there isn’t a more regular album with song-length renditions of the themes, as the TV series and first two movies got. The theme, however, is a mix by Readymade from one of the Punch the Monkey remix albums, the only instance of one of those tracks making it into televised Lupin.