Word: yakuza
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...sheet of glass that floats above an immaculate Zen rock garden?is strewn with the bodies of dismembered yak-uza. A willowy blonde with wild eyes, clad in a blood-smeared yellow tracksuit, brandishes her Samurai sword, preparing to dispatch three more victims. She grits her teeth. The yakuza scowl back. As sword meets flesh and the three villains slam backwards through a wooden lattice, the mastermind behind the mayhem can't suppress a smile. "Pow!" exults an elated Quentin Tarantino, bounding from his perch beside the camera to congratulate Uma Thurman, the killer blonde, on a beautifully executed fight...
...their script, or to their little thing that they wrote, or to the decision that they thought was the right one yesterday in the shower." But today's biggest beneficiary of Tarantino's gift is Hu Xiaokui, a 17-year-old wushu student and the youngest of the 76 yakuza on the House of Blue Leaves set. "I was supposed to die today," he says, "but when Wuma (what the Chinese call Thurman) was about to kill me, the director saw something in my face that made him change his mind." He saw an innocent kid who provided a means...
...like Kazuki grows up believing everything is negotiable. The adults in the novel aren't outraged as they come to suspect Kazuki of murder. Instead, they plot ways to use Hidetomo's death to their financial gain. The only characters that seem shocked at all are a low-level yakuza and an orphaned peer of Kazuki's, both of whom seem powerless in the face of their own realizations. Power, Kazuki realizes, is just another word for money...
...Toyoda Toshiaki's Blue Spring also takes on adolescence through an all-boys school. Though dressed up as celluloid eye candy, the film is seethingly bitter at its core. The setting is a young-yakuza breeding ground where everybody wants to join someone else's gang or start his own. Boys kill each other at school. Authority is a distant rumor. The boys' only respite comes through playing a heart-stopping variant on the game of chicken: they stand at ledges 30 meters above the concrete and see how many times they can clap their hands before grabbing...
...evildoers unites ultraviolent comic artist Hideo Yamamoto, from whose manga the film was created, and screen violence helmer Miike Takahashi, who created last year's cult sensation Audition. Kakihara is a sado-masochistic punk gangster caught up in an underworld where dysfunction speaks louder than love. When his yakuza boss mysteriously disappears, Kakihara hunts for his abductor. In the process, he turns a mansion into a phantasmagorical torture chamber. Then he meets Ichi (Naori Omori), a schizophrenic hit man tormented by the pleasure he takes in ultraviolent killing. Director Miike obviously wants to signpost Japanese society's ills and does...