Word: gangsters
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...first film as actor-director, Kitano played a policeman too violent for his department; in his next, the 1990 Boiling Point, he's Uehara, a gangster too violent for the yakuza. The movie is mainly about two baseball-crazy kids who run afoul of the mob; Kitano shows up for about a half hour before some unfriendly types splatter him across his car upholstery. But this wild man had it coming. In an interlude between gunplay, he watches a couple have sex. "My turn," he chirps. He pushes the woman aside?and jumps...
...demons, channeling anger against, say, his uncaring parents, or giving an unjust society the dynamite stick up the butt that it deserves. Freud and Lenin are not on his bookshelves. Kitano Man is just doing what he's supposed to?what he, the killing machine, is designed for. A gangster's life, like a cop's, is not romantic in these films. It's a job, a routine, like ditch-digging but with less action and a higher body count. Mostly, you wait, in a bad mood, to shoot or be shot. You hang around for the inevitable comeuppance, payback...
...Sonatine he's Murakawa, a big-timer, the ceo of evil?and he's "worn out," ready to retire. A yakuza gathering is like afternoon at a retirement club, each man alone in regret and anxiety. Sonatine, which secured Kitano's reputation in the West, plays like a gangster King Lear as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. The soliloquies are bloody battles, illuminated by the sheet-lightning pyrotechnics of automatic gunfire; but the rest is Kitano walking, sitting, staring. Till he blows his brains...
...shoulders. His trademark silences suggest a man who knows the ways of the world and doesn't much like them. He smolders, stone-faced, then without warning erupts into spasms of violence. One second he is motionless, a vortex of stillness. The next, he is beating a rival gangster bloody. "That's what is so exciting about him," says Takashi Yamamoto, the 38-year-old producer of TV Tackle. "We never know what he is going...
...rebel, the outlaw, the yakuza?while also playing the subversive clown prince version of all those cherished tough guys. Those phoned-in TV appearances are just the flip side of the stylized cinematic tough guy. Beat plays off the public's awareness of who he is. That farcical gangster on the set of low-budget TV shows is all the more lovable because he's the deadly gangster of big budget glossy feature films. In Japan, where no one wants to lose face, to have the aplomb to make fun of yourself is almost transcendentally bitchin'. "I suppose my film...