Results tagged “Ittoku Kishibe”

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Funny, touching, enthralling, horrifying, and finally heartbreaking, Face is precisely the kind of movie I love most to encounter and then tell others about. No category will encompass it succinctly; it’s an original. One critic called it the greatest Japanese film of the last decade or more, and it’s not hard to see why. It tells a story of great ambition in such a modest, careful, understated — and often hilarious — way that its greatest shocks and most powerful moments sneak up on you from behind and stay with you for a long time.

I wonder if some of Face’s sheer bite and sassy vigor comes from the fact that it’s based, however loosely, on a true story: a bar hostess murdered a co-worker, fled, and hid out for years on end before finally being caught. But that seems unfair to director Junji Sakamoto and his lead performer, a stage actress named Naomi Fujiyama. Sakamoto brings a strange combination of quirky black humor and blunt pathos to this story, and Fujiyama’s performance is so unaffected and natural that we forget a camera is watching.

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The key to Violent Cop is not in the violent moments, but in the shots where Detective Azuma (Takeshi Kitano) just stands there. Late in the movie, after he has been thrown off the force and his friend has been killed, he stands in the office of his commander, unflinching, unblinking, unmoving. This is a man whose reaction to all of life has been distilled down to exactly two stances: indifference or violence. There is nothing else there.

The first scene in Violent Cop, easily the darkest and most unforgiving movie Kitano ever made, sets the movie’s bleak tone: a gang of teenaged boys beating a homeless man senseless. At first there’s nothing but the man smiling toothlessly as he eats something (soup?); then a soccer ball comes plummeting into the frame and bashes into his belongings. The camera lingers dispassionately as the kids punch and kick him; when he collapses, they applaud, cheer, and head on home. Azuma (who has been presumably watching all along) spies one of the boys returning to his house, strides in, and tells the kid to turn himself him. "I didn’t do anything!" the boy whines. "You didn’t do anything? Then I didn’t do anything, either!" Azuma bellows, and pounds the kid’s head against the wall.

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Rainbow Kids, directed by Kihachi Okamoto, is one of those movies that sounds like it can’t miss, but for some reason it does. It’s a Japanese version of a plot we’ve seen a few times: a gang of kidnappers abduct someone who’s only too happy to go missing, and is soon running the whole shooting match. This time around the kidnappers are a trio of ne’er-do-well twentysomethings who have already done time for petty crimes, and who graduate up to kidnapping a wealthy matron, Old Lady Yanagawa (Tanie Kitabayashi), who has billions of yen in property to her name. She’s a sweet old thing who likes hot tea and hiking through the woods, and the presence of three masked desperadoes in her life gives her something to do.

As it turns out, Yanagawa decides that the best thing to do is to use the whole kidnapping ruse as a way to put one over the chief of police (Ken Ogata) and get her immediate family to pull themselves together and act like a family for a change. She stage-directs a media conference by remote control, throws the cops off her trail again and again, and in the end reveals a set of motives for the whole thing that isn’t just grandmotherly affection for her misguided abductors — although that’s certainly a big part of it.

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Every truly great movie I have ever seen has, in some way, been about the human face. Bergman considered the human face to be the one true subject of all cinema, and made dozens of films about that one subject. Even a film as removed from individual people as Koyaanisqatsi has many shots where we simply stare at other people and realize there is nothing quite as alien as another person.

Shinya Tsukamoto’s Vital is about life and death, but also the serene face of Tadanobu Asano, one of Japan’s most remarkable living actors because he suggests more when holding back than most people do when emoting. His face in this movie is a mask behind which a great abyss waits, and there are moments where he prods at his own face as if wanting to pull it off. Is there anything in there?

Asano plays Hiroshi, a young man who wakes up with no memory of his life after a car accident. His parents are patient and gentle, and prod him towards something that meant a great deal to him before the crash — a burgeoning interest in medicine. He enrolls in medical school and buries himself in his studies, not as a way of escaping his past but perhaps as a way of rediscovering it by proxy. One semester he sits down with a group of other students to dissect human cadavers, and discovers something hauntingly familiar about the corpse he’s about to dismantle. This was Ryoko, a girl he once loved.

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I always get a chuckle out of how the Japanese form such fanatical affinities for American pop culture (and vice versa), and “Geroppa! [Get Up!]” is like a comedic love letter to such sentiments. It’s a goofy screwball comedy about a yakuza boss who has two big soft spots in his heart: his love for James Brown and his adoration for his estranged daughter. I wondered, though, if the movie tries to get too many of its laughs by simply presenting Japanese people getting funky. Then again, let’s face it: the sight of anyone except James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, getting funky is probably going to inspire big laughs without being terribly mean-spirited.

Gangster boss Hanemura (Toshiyuki Nishida, a veteran of the Tsuribaka Nisshi movie series) has little to be funky about at the opening of the film, though. He’s been found guilty of racketeering and in a few days will be sent back to prison to serve a five-year sentence. Most of his enthusiasm for the yakuza lifestyle has collapsed, and he’s preparing to disband his clan and send his compatriots back out into the world to live normal lives. His right-hand man, the tall and normally reticent Kaneyama (Ittoku Kishibe), swears he’ll do anything for his boss in these last few days. Come to think of it, Hanemura does have two things in mind: to see James Brown one last time in concert, and to be reunited one last time with his estranged daughter.

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Takeshi Kitano’s Zatōichi is not only one of the best movies Kitano has made so far, it’s a distillation of everything he’s ever put into his movies. In his time Kitano has moved through grim, nihilistic police-and-yakuza dramas (Violent Cop, Brother, Sonatine, Hana-bi), bittersweet childhood stories (Kids Return, Kikujiro), tender romance (A Scene at the Sea, Dolls), slapstick comedy (Getting Any?) and absurdist farce (Boiling Point). Every single one of his movies has always been identifiably his. Now, in his revisionist take on a character that has been the subject of dozens of previous movies, he does what other directors have typically done with Shakespeare or Chaucer: he takes the material and makes it unmistakably his own.

Zatōichi the Blind Masseur figured into dozens of films adapted from Kan Shimozawa’s novels, released over the span of several decades in Japan. Most of the movies starred Shintaro Katsu in the title role — a wandering masseur with a sword concealed in his cane, righting wrongs wherever he went by simply sticking to his principles (and his weapon). Zatōichi (the “zato” being a titular prefix; his real name being Ichi) is as identifiable a character to the Japanese — both in his look and his manner — as Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp is to most everyone. The interesting thing is that American audiences who aren’t as familiar with the character can start here and probably get just as good an understanding of what makes him tick as they would from any of the original movies (which are all good-to-excellent as well). Kitano was not only able to preserve the spirit of the original character, but channel it through many of his own concerns.