Word: kitano
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Just before the final shootout in Brother, the yakuza played by Takeshi Kitano walks into a diner out in the California desert. The old man behind the counter takes a long look at him and says, "You Japanese are very inscrutable...
There are a few jokes in this little scene in Kitano's first American film as actor-auteur. One is that the old man is himself Japanese-American, baffled by the demeanor of a compatriot from the far side of the Pacific. Another is that the line echoes the title of a Beat Takeshi TV show, You Japanese Are Strange. But the third is on Kitano's loyal worldwide audience. Because his pictures?passion action movies, lurid and pensive?are pretty darned scrutable...
...Tough Loner, whom Kitano embodies in most of his films, is bound to no nation and needs no subtitles to translate his brute magnetism. It doesn't even matter which side of the law he is nominally on: as an officer in Violent Cop and Fireworks (Hana-bi) or a yakuza in Boiling Point, Sonatine and Brother, he carries a gun and a grudge. Like the uninflected killer played by Alain Delon in Jean-Pierre Melville's classic 1967 crime film, aptly titled Le Samourai, Kitano walks slowly, stares blankly; he might be a patient whose life the surgeons have...
...years, working steadily since his 1992 debut as a Harlem teen in Juice made casting directors notice his quiet forcefulness, strong build and deep, soulful eyes. (Danes has called him "one of the most beautiful men I've ever seen.") He's wrapped shooting on acclaimed Japanese auteur Takeshi Kitano's first American crime film, Brother, and this week stars in the new Love & Basketball, a $15 million hoop-dreams romance produced by Spike Lee's company. For Epps, Love & Basketball is his shot at big-time stardom. "I look at Denzel and Wesley, Cuba and Will, and figure...
...business and keep our noses to the grindstone," says David Lam, head of Expert Edge Technology in Palo Alto, Calif. "Doing a good job has turned into a bad thing." Now that Asians see themselves as players, they want to be part of the corporate game. Says Harry Kitano, professor of social welfare at the University of California, Los Angeles: "Twenty or 30 years ago, we didn't expect to be promoted. A lot of people suffered in silence...