Word: kitano
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...gangsters in Shanghai, was reshot, recut and withheld for five years. Jia Zhangke shot Xiao Wu (Pickpocket, 1997) despite the censors' rejection of his script; he was banned from directing, but went ahead anyway. Jia got funds for his next film, Platform (2000), in part from Japanese star Takeshi Kitano...
...That's the worldview of Kitano's crime films, where life is to die for and death is a punch line. Could any view be bleaker?or, in the hands of a master showman, more rudely entertaining? For TV's Beat Takeshi and the movies' Takeshi Kitano are halves of the same protean artist. One does anything for a laugh; the other dares the audience not to laugh at the spectacle of man annihilating himself and his species for the sake of a rusty old word like honor...
...still finds time to shill for Toyota and Johnny Walker. He played the villain in last year's ultra-violent hit Battle Royale, and Brother, his most recent movie, opened in Japan in January and will debut soon in Asia and the U.S. Internationally better known as Takeshi Kitano (his real name), he has garnered critical acclaim as an inventive filmmaker (his 1997 movie Hana-Bi won the grand prize at Venice in 1997) and a striking minimalist actor...
...older brother, Masaru Kitano, a chemistry professor, says that Beat actually takes after their father. "Our father was shy and frustrated with his life. He didn't have a place in our home, so he turned to alcohol. He used to hit our mother, sure, but that was very common then...
...mother, Saki Kitano, pushed her children hard. She wanted them all to study engineering in college, and Beat did, enrolling at the prestigious Meiji University before growing restless and dropping out. He drove taxicabs, worked in a strip joint and then decided to try his hand at comedy. "Takeshi, you are the son of a house painter," his brother admonished him. "You will never make it in entertainment." Beat just nodded when he heard this warning. He didn't say a word...