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 something different, or was at the time, for Kitano. He had generally been creating violent gangster films about the Yakuza. He first moved away from that genre with a film about surfers. When asked why his new movie had no yakuza in it, he said “Well you know yakuza have to chop off their fingers on their left hand when they disobey orders. And surfers have to paddle their boards out to sea. If a yakuza tried to surf, he would only paddle in circles.” This sense of humor defines all of his work, including the sentimental, touching tale told in Kikujiro.
Kitano has led an interesting career. Before becoming a film maker, he went by the name of Beat Takeshi as part of a comedy duo called The Two Beats. That was another career he stumbled into. He had been an emcee at a night club when the comedian they’d hired for the night got sick, and he had to take the microphone and give an on the spot comedy routine. People loved him, and he became an overnight sensation in Japan.
He would eventually become a popular TV show host, and even get a job designing his own video game for the Nintendo Entertainment System, called Takeshi’s Challenge. The game followed a salaryman who gambles, drinks and fights the yakuza. It featured bizarre challenges such as holding a button for an hour straight and a last boss who takes well over one hundred thousand individual strikes to kill. It wasn’t so much a game as it was a torture device, starting with a warning reading “This game was made by a man who hates video games!”
Kitano’s humor really is odd, and this film carries it on. The film follows Kikujiro, an old man, a lovable loser type, who escorts a young boy across Japan to go and meet his estranged mother. The man blows all their money on gambling, believing that the boy is psychic after predicting the winning horses in a three race lucky streak.
So Kitano is then forced to beg for food, scoring two sandwiches, and eating his own out of the boy’s sight so he can pretend that he’s doing without for the child’s sake. This is a very sweet moment, with Kikujiro showing that he’s not above lying to try and earn the boy’s respect and affection.
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.
It is, certainly, one of Kitano’s best. Sonatine is the film he’s really known for in the US, but Kikujiro is one of his many crowning achievements.
You should however, make sure beforehand that your service provider does not impose a monthly bandwidth limit on you. A way that collections can be added too, and make sure that you only get movies that you literally love. You’ll have a much better time and be the envy of everyone around you.