Must Download Internet Movies: Takeshi Kitano’s Kikujiro
Takeshi Kitano arrived on the filmmaking scene in Japan with his film “Violent Cop”. He had been an actor and a comedian and… Really just a general purpose renaissance man up until that point. He was cast in the comedy action film Violent Cop as a supporting character, but when the director dropped out, he took the reins of the film as the new director and rewrote the entire script into a sort of Dirty Harry story about a sociopath detective who will literally stop at nothing to kill the bad guy. Kikujiro is a much different film than that one, and certainly belongs on your must download internet movies queue.
Kikujiro is really a step outside of the norm for Kitano. It’s sweet, touching and sentimental, where his movies are typically much more cold and hard, defined by their violent content. He first stepped outside of this world with a film about surfers, which led to the question “Why no Yakuza in this one?” His answer was that, since surfers have to paddle their boards out to sea, and yakuza have to remove fingers in penance for sins against their brotherhood, many yakuza have five fingers on one hand and three on the other, so they would only paddle in circles out in the ocean and never get anywhere! That’s Kitano’s sense of humor for you, and it’s definitely on display in Kikujiro.
Kitano really has had an interesting career. Having once been a popular stage comedian, he stumbled into that career, too. He had been the emcee of a popular nightclub when the comedian of the night got sick and Kitano had to take over. The rest is history.
Eventually he became a popular TV show host, and even got a chance to make his own video game with Takeshi’s Challenge. This game was really more of a torture device than anything, with ridiculous challenges such as demanding that the player hit a button thousands of times to progress, or sing into a microphone plugged into the Nintendo for an hour straight. The game was made, as the title screen declares, by “a man who hates video games.” Well, the game certainly hates the player.
Kitano’s odd sense of humor comes through very well in this movie. Kitano plays Kikujiro, an old man who fits the lovable loser archetype. He escorts a young boy across Japan to meet his estranged mother. He winds up blowing all their money at the tracks, thinking the kid is some kind of psychic after predicting three race winners in a row.
Later, Kitano is forced to beg for food for himself and the boy. He gets two sandwiches, hides one, and tells the boy “You eat, I don’t need food right now”. He then hides around the corner to eat his own sandwich. It’s a funny scene, showing that he may be a lovable loser, but he really wants the child’s respect and isn’t afraid of lying to get it!
The movie is, again, very sweet. Watching the old man and the young boy bond is moving and touching, and within one another, the two find their own definition of the word family.
The movie Kitano is known for in the US is Sonatine, but just as Chow Yun Fat is a comedy star in Asia, not an action star, Kitano is a man capable of much more than just gangster flicks.
Sometimes they even convince themselves that while the downloaders might get in trouble, they are safe themselves. Parugu Movie Download As much as we’d like to all believe that everyone is as pure of heart as we are, this isn’t always the case. In addition to this, quality is also very bad under most circumstances.
