Brandon’s movie memory

It seems that Kitano wants to make a new film. He is unsure of himself… only gets four words into the title (in a hasty typeface) before giving up.

He tries a bunch of different genres:

But none of them are working out. It’s all been done before.

Wait… what about a comedy with a girl, her mother and a duck puppet?

Yes! Kitano is triumphant… he shall film this comedy!

Throw in some more characters… a cross-dressing mad scientist and his giant robot:

Aaaaand we’re off:

But wait, things are starting to fall apart. The film crew is spotted, effects and costumes and backgrounds are revealed to be artificial. The narrative is making no sense.

Finally a series of giant explosions destroy it all… the comedy, the genre stories, all the Kitano identities and characters and false sets!

The title! Glory! No uncertainty anymore!

Kitano’s final diagnosis:

A program of shorts that played at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival to mark its 60th anniversary. Pretty terrific bunch of 3-5 minute shorts by possibly the best group of directors ever assembled… worth watching more than once. Each is about the cinema in some way or another, with a few recurring themes (blind people and darkness, flashbacks and personal stories). Katy watched/liked it too!

First half of shorts (second half is here):

Open-Air Cinema by Raymond Depardon

One Fine Day by Takeshi Kitano, continuing his self-referential streak.

Three Minutes by Theo Angelopolous is a Marcello Mastroianni tribute starring the great Jeanne Moreau.

In The Dark by Andrei Konchalovsky

Diary of a Moviegoer by Nanni Moretti

The Electric Princess Picture House by Hou Hsiao-hsien

Darkness by the bros. Dardenne

Anna by Alejandro González Iñárritu

Movie Night, the first of two gorgeously-shot outdoor movie starring chinese children, by Zhang Yimou.

Dibbouk de Haifa, annoying business by Amos Gitai.

The Lady Bug by Jane Campion.

Artaud Double Bill by Atom Egoyan.

The Foundry, comic greatness by Aki Kaurismäki.

Recrudescence, stolen cell-phone bit by Olivier Assayas.

47 Years Later very self-indulgent by Youssef Chahine.

Takeshi Kitano plays sort-of-himself, a superstar gangster actor. But mostly he plays a beat-down loser wannabe actor who keeps failing auditions for small parts on TV shows. His neighbors laugh at him, and he works at a convenience store. But one day a real gangster hides in the store then dies in the back room, and the loser Kitano finds himself with a “Falling Down” style bag full of guns… goes on a mighty rampage. Or does he? Dream sequences and fantasies are flowing in and out of the picture.

There aren’t as many Kitanos as I thought there’d be, and the whole thing made more sense than I thought it would. Lesson learned again and again: when everyone says a movie is difficult and confusing, that don’t necessarily make it so.

As usual, The Internets come in handy here. A couple weeks later, I saw the dvdbeaver review with a ton of great screen shots… really a great looking movie, full of signature Kitano setups, but I was too busy following the story and reading subtitles to notice at the time.

Rotterdam Film Festival calls it “a mocking, almost surrealist film about the star Kitano, his oeuvre and his failed alter ego”.

Trivia: Tetsu Watanabe the noodle cook was in Fireworks and Sonatine, Kitano’s friend Susumu Terajima was in Brother and Fireworks and everything else, and the manager & taxi driver was Ren Osugi, the chief from MPD Psycho.

So two approaches. I’m tempted to consider this viewing a test run, this writing a rough draft, and sit down with all of Kitano’s films, watch or rewatch them, then see this one again to catch more of the references. On the other hand, even though it’s an extremely self-referential film, I know the Kitano persona well enough to get the overall joke, and I enjoyed watching this… why not take it on its own merits instead of turning it into a study project? Kitano’s films are all worth re/watching anyway… maybe I’ll get to ‘em after my upcoming Seijun Suzuki fest.

In the meantime I’ll have to say I liked this one more than I thought I would… it pretty much made sense, and looked great.