Word: takeshi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...this case, the Westerners' ignorance can be a gift. Local viewers have to juggle jagged images of a personality who is the Japanese equivalent of Groucho Marx on the small screen and Humphrey Bogart on the big one. Westerners have no vision of Takeshi the TV clown to erase before they can accept him as an existential...
...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...
...cool-for-the-room persona, more than his variegated talents, that make Beat Japan's man of the moment. Beat Takeshi has become the coolest kid in the gigantic gako (high school) that is Japan, and everyone wants to be just like him. He's sitting there, unflappable and detached and looking sharp in a Yohji Yamamoto suit amid the third-rate chaos swirling around him. That's how most Japanese want to see themselves. Their nation has become an economic and political farce. Feckless, forgettable Prime Ministers come and go. The moribund economy has come to resemble more...
This is Beat Takeshi country, this TV Asahi soundstage that looks like one part Vegas lounge and one part Starship Enterprise. In front of a long desk where Beat holds court is a large half dome with flashing neon lights. Behind him in cylindrical pods are a contorted mannequin's torso, several fake strands of DNA and blinking white Christmas tree lights. Flanked by lesser television personalities and second-tier celebrities, Beat Takeshi presides on TV Tackle as the highest of Japanese pop culture royalty, an imperious entertainer whose every twitch and tick and grunt and sniffle elicit commentary...
That's why Beat Takeshi, 54, has become the icon for Japan's troubled times. Think of David Letterman, Clint Eastwood, Dave Barry and Quentin Tarantino all rolled into one person?and then give that one person bumper-to-bumper, gavel-to-gavel, cover-to-cover, morning-till-evening omnipresence on any and all forms of media. He is a one-man entertainment conglomerate, and has been a dominant pop culture figure for more than 20 years. In addition to his seven TV shows, he has penned 71 volumes of satirical commentary, written poetry and reams of magazine columns...