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Simply A Masterpiece

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.

As always, Takeshi Kitano focuses on characters excluded from Japan's 'economic miracle'. His protagonist Masaki (Ono Masahiko), is a hopeless loser: no education (he is slow on the uptake); no prospects (he works part-time as a petrol-station attendant); no baseball skills (which implies a deficient sense of his place in Japanese society). He imagines crashing a stolen oil-tanker into the yakuza headquarters. In his mind, this suicide gives meaning and shape to a life-time of underachievement. Kitano's own extended cameo as Uehara, the Okinawan gangster who commands self-sacrificing loyalty from his friend Tamagi despite expecting his to sever a finger, submit to sodomy and so on, is a creation in the league of French writer Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi: a lord of misrule, the embodiment of the disorderly underside of orderly Japan. As a controlled, music-free account of violence, crime and immorality on the verge of erupting through society's placid surfaces, the film is remarkable enough. What makes it phenomenal is Kitano's completely instinctive reinvention of the grammar and syntax of narrative filmmaking, unique in the popular cinema of the 1990s. Although it gave Kitano his second director credit, Boiling Point has all the hallmarks of a film by a debut director determined to get every idea he has ever had about film, life, death and baseball up there on the screen. His subsequent films, such as Sonatine (1993) and Hana-Bi (1997), are more mature but cannot recapture the raw aesthetic excitement of these beginnings.

I rented this movie to see a Japanese action-gangster movie. It was the best most intelligent action movie I have seen since `Ronin' (Dir. John Frankenheimer). I was pleasantly surprised when it turned out to be so much more than action. I was challenged by this film I found myself wanting to know more about one actor in particular `beat' Takeshi. He has the commanding presence that actors such as DeNiro, Walken and Klaus Kinski demand. So I went online and was again surprised when I found out he wrote and directed the movie as well.

*3-4x jugatsu* is a cocktail of drama,crime and absurd situations that never convince.The plot isn't interesting at all and its boring after 30 minutes. Sometimes very bloody,sometimes very hilarious but the humor comes on the wrong moments. The cast does a good job and that's the only positive element of this movie. 4.5/10

While not as good as some of Takeshi Kitano's other films like Violent Cop or Fireworks, this still has much to recommend it. For one, this has Kitano's always-stunning direction and twisted mix of comedy and shocking violence. Kitano himself appears in a small role as a gangster, and it's perhaps his most twisted role to date. I would probably only recommend this film to Kitano fans, since it is very muddled and not as tight as his other films. But as a Kitano fan myself, I did like it very much.