Word: takeshi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...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...
...known in nearly as many countries as the rubberized Hollywood star. Takeshi pages pock the Worldwide Web, in Spanish, French, English, Dutch, German, Italian, Polish. His international admirers, seeing him churn out nine films in 11 years as actor-auteur?and perhaps catching him as an actor in art films (Nagisa Oshima's Gohatto), nihilist teen epics (Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale) and a Hollywood thriller (the Keanu Reeves Johnny Mnemonic)?may not know that films are a kind of hobby for Kitano. How could he have time to do anything else? But of course he does...
...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...