I tried to watch Violent Cop, but apparently if you rent a DVD, copy it to watch later, and then “later” lasts a decade, the disc won’t read anymore. Bummer, that. Didn’t think this would pair as well with Outrage, but I put it in anyway.

Shigeru (Kurodo Maki, later the computer-hacking straight man in Miike’s Detective Story) is a young, deaf, space-cadet garbage man who picks up a surfboard from the side of the road, repairs it and tries it out. A neighbor girl with big ears follows and watches. Two soccer kids first mock then copy him, while the regular surf bum kids watch him slowly improve and he gets the attention of the owner of a surf shop. He’s not some kind of surf hero though, just a quiet kid with a hobby, who gets reasonably good before he disappears into the waves one day, leaving the big-eared girl to send his surfboard out with the tide like a burial at sea.

Kitano’s third movie as writer/director, defying expectations after a couple of gangster flicks. IMDB’s claims that he got his painterly sense of composition and started caring about asthetics after his accident in ’94 is clearly bogus. This has got some slightly rough editing, and is more visually minimalist than Dolls or Fireworks, but the same artistic sensibility is clearly there. Ends with a real nice montage of outtakes and extra shots.