It’s been a minute (twenty years) since I’ve seen this. Officer Kitano lives a depressing life in forced retirement with his sick wife, one friend dead, another crippled and suicidal, and loansharks after him. So he robs a bank, funds the suicidal friend’s new painting hobby, and takes his wife to the beach, fighting off the gangsters and capitulating to the cops.
Won the top prize at Venice, same year as Ossos, Chinese Box, The Tango Lesson, and 4 Little Girls. As usual, Josh Lewis gets it.
Very good concept, two-part movie combining various Beat/Kitano personas. In each half he’s an elite hitman who gets recognized during a job, so the cops enlist him as a mole to take down a drug dealer. But it’s a typical crime movie for the first half and a silly-assed comedy in the second. Feels long for a one-hour movie, after remembering that zany Japanese comedies are rarely funny to me.
V-Cop is introduced beating up a high schooler who attacked a homeless guy, hell yeah. The new chief likes his style but wants not to be disgraced by association, V-Cop doesn’t care, has little respect for the bosses. Turns out cops are supplying the drug dealers, and VC’s baddie-killing investigation technique gets him fired. He’s having a nice day as a civilian when punks kidnap his sister and a hitman stabs him and blows a bystanders’s head off. Final showdown: VC and the hitman blast each other full of holes, he finishes off his sister, the drug trade carries on with barely a hitch. Great theme music, a familiar Satie tune.
I liked the rookie partner’s expression when VC ran over a suspect:
I’m starting to wonder if these movies do have continuity and they’re not just starting over every time with the same cast playing new characters. I checked my writeups for parts one and two, and still don’t know for sure – but hey, one of those cops is back in this one.
The bulk of the movie is the higher-ups of a Japanese crime family plotting against each other: Ren Osugi, Sansei Shiomi, Toshiyuki Nishida. This goes on forever, and right when you can’t take any more of it, Kitano flies in with his buddy Ichi and they shoot a hundred guys. A few women appear, all of them prostitutes. I’m making this sound bad, but of course it’s a good time, and I’m looking forward to the brand new Kitano joint.
I skipped the last couple Kitano movies – rude behavior to the great man after he gave us the commercial self-destruction trilogy – and am now delighted to discover that he’s still got it. This is an epic 1500’s warlord power-struggle story with about fifty characters, and he nearly keeps it to two hours without making the plot confusing (it really helps that they introduce and re-introduce everyone with onscreen titles). Plus it’s great-looking, fun, and full of beheadings and other gruesome stuff, and gleefully anachronistic – even not knowing any Japanese I can tell they’re conversing more like yakuza than samurai. But I didn’t realize until the name Hattori Hanzo came up that it’s based on real history – all these characters have wikipedia pages.
Kubi means “neck”:
Kitano plays Monkey, the most degraded of the warlords until his plans and alliances come together at the end. He’s scheming with bald Hidetoshi Nishijima (Drive My Car guy, Creepy cop), who’s having a secret affair with rebel-in-hiding Kenichi Endo (a major Miike guy). They’re working under/scheming against the current ruler Ryo Kase (an Outrage lead). It’d take all day to name the rest of them but I’ll note that both leads of Ichi the Killer are in here somewhere (psycho Tadanobu Asano plays a Kitano ally).
I love when no-prestige 1990’s studio flicks appear on Criterion Channel – here in a revisionist black-and-white version. Much better than I first thought, made by an ambitious artist who got caught in the Hollywood crap machine. The new coloring and the passage of time help you see “the movie that was in the movie.”
In a WWII prison camp, Beat Takeshi is a sadistic guard led by humorless youngish Capt. Yonoi (the film’s composer, Ryuichi Sakamoto). Lawrence (Paddington 2‘s Tom Conti) is a prisoner who speaks some Japanese and represents the Brits, a bunch of sensible dudes until David Bowie (same year as The Hunger) comes along.
Cruel Story of Middle Age. A classy-looking narrative movie with tricky subject matter, feeling more like a prestige 80’s international coproduction than those late 60’s Oshima youth films. Cool rumbling music, and lots of singing, never as fun as the pub songs in the Terence Davies movies. The story is mostly survival tactics, power games, betrayals and brutality – strange that the lead actors were two rock stars and a comedian.
I thought everyone in Outrage had been killed except for one cop and new boss Kato, but here’s Takeshi still alive and I had to try to keep track of the various crime families again. This did turn out better than the original, but I’m still hoping Election and Drug War destroy ’em both.
People: Tomokazu Miura of M/Other is in charge of some clan, and young hotshot Ryo Kase of I Just Didn’t Do It and Like Someone In Love is his #2 man.
Takeshi and Kimura:
Takeshi teams up with scarfaced ex-rival Kimura with his two dumb-as-hell employees to wage war on these guys. Baddies are brought low by other baddies. Another clan is somehow involved. The Japanese Dr. Guggenheim (Akira Nakao, a regular in 1990’s Godzilla movies) is the first to die. Then lots more die. There is a brief appearance by a woman.
The Japanese Dr. Guggenheim:
We get two partner cops to identify with. Sourface Shigeta (Yutaka Matsushige of Last Life in the Universe) is the outsider who needs everything explained to him, and his sneaky balding corrupt partner (Fumiyo Kohinata of Dark Water) wants to start some shit and get the action going. Beat Takeshi shoots the balding guy at the end, after everyone else is already dead.
L-R: balding cop, sourface cop
A good variety of music, and the score has hints of Dead Man. Scenes end with fade-outs as if to provide space for TV ads. My main concern was listening to the language and noting that half of all sentences end with a sound like arrOH, or errOR. Fumi thinks it’s some kinda gangster embellishment.
Watched with Katy because of the Hunger Games connection. Kind of a not-so-great summer teen-action flick, but it’s still fun and interesting enough to justify rewatching. Also it’s got Beat Takeshi. Has the same-ish final line as teen deathmatch story The Long Walk (not counting all the weird special-edition dream sequences that follow the proper story, like a selection of extended/deleted scenes).
The Battle isn’t televised (even the gov’t overseers don’t have cameras, only microphones inside the kids’ explosive necklaces), and its very existence seems to come as a surprise to the kids, who don’t realize its seriousness until they’ve been in the island-arena for a while. Katy points out that this would make the Battle less of a deterrent than the Hunger Games – more of a personal vendetta by Kitano against his former students.
Mild, oft-injured Nanahara (Tatsuya Fujiwara) and his sweetie Noriko (Aki Maeda of Gamera 3) are the survivors/escapees who head to the inferior sequel. They’re helped by Kawada (Taro Yamamoto), winner of a previous Battle forced to fight again. Fortunately, all teens in movies circa the year 2000 knew how to hack into government systems, so one group concentrates on taking down the surveillance machines, and Kawada figures how to remove the necklaces. The other “transfer student” is friz-haired Kiriyama (Masanobu Ando, the tough one in Big Bang Love), who signed up for the fun of killing people, finally blinded in an explosion set by the hacker group and killed in a machine-gun battle with Kawada.
Among the others: Chigusa (Chiaki Kuriyama of Kill Bill), evil gal Mitsuko (Ko Shibasaki, star of One Missed Call), and Nanahara’s best friend Kuninobu who gets killed by exploding necklace during Kitano’s introductory speech.