Word: kitano
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...Sonatine (1991), Kitano Man had matured, or wizened, into its now-familiar form: the gang-war veteran who can be impressed or surprised by nothing. He doesn't act out of an awesome rage, like a Pacino or DeNiro hero. He isn't exorcising personal 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...
...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...
Cynics would say that Kitano knows an audience will endure long minutes of artistic entropy as long as he delivers a few shootouts or explosions. The artillery scenes are like production numbers in old musicals. But he doesn't cue the killings or glamorize them. Things just erupt, blow up, like in real life. Like, his admirers would say, in real...
...jurors of the 1997 Venice Film Festival thought Fireworks was art; they gave it the top prize. The movie has "art" of a sort: Kitano's own paintings, executed in a faux-naif (or maybe really naive) style, are seen throughout the movie. Fireworks also flirts with humanism. He's Nishi, a cop, and his wife has terminal cancer. (Women in Kitano films, when they appear at all, exist mainly as objects or metaphors: the hooker, the angel, the noble victim.) Nishi becomes a caregiver with a vengeance: he steals money to support his wife...
After Kikujiru, a wan comedy in which the Kitano gruff guy serves as a young boy's nanny, he has returned to the crime genre with Brother. Shot in Tokyo and Los Angeles, this is a hyper-violent action movie with the standard fish-out-of-water plot?only this fish is a tiger shark. A yakuza lieutenant comes to L.A. to help his half-brother, a low-level thug. Aniki, as everyone calls Kitano (Japanese for brother), has nerve, entrepreneurial skills and a lot of spare bullets. Before long, half of the L.A. underworld has eaten his lead...