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Takeshi Kitano is the man and he a new movie called GLORY TO THE FILMMAKER that played Toronto! Anton Sirius will tell ya' more!
Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. I know that it's your honest opinion, Anton, but you know who Takeshi Kitano is, right? You know he could kill you with just one eyebrow hair, right? I'm glad you're stepping up and being a man, telling it as you see it, but you better Yakuza/Ninja/MXC Champion-proof your house tonight. Sleep with the lights on, man...
As far as I'm concerned, Kitano is one of the five greatest living filmmakers, capable of doing almost anything behind a camera.
Broad comedy, however, is apparently not one of those things.
Glory to the Filmmaker! is barely a movie at all, really. Instead the first half of the running time is mostly taken up by aborted film ideas, the central conceit being that the great yazuka film director Kitano (played of course by Kitano) has sworn off making yakuza films, and needs a new idea. Finally he settles on a sci-fi disaster flick that features an asteroid hurtling towards Earth, only instead of telling *that* story it quickly morphs into a weird spy parody that intersects with the story of two incompetent female con artists. Or something.
Oh, and Kitano (both the 'real' great yakuza director and the character the great yakuza director plays in the sci-fi/spy parody movie) has a sort of life-sized doll that he uses as a stunt double and stand-in for when he doesn't want to be involved in something.
I'm used to Kitano's films being elliptical and inscrutable. This was neither. Instead it literally felt like a Japanese version of a weaker effort from the Zucker family tree, one of those comedies where they are just throwing ideas at the screen to see what sticks and at least half of them aren't. There are some very funny gags in here, both big and small (check the patient's names on the computer screens in the opening sequence, for instance). There is also some weirdness for the sake of weirdness, some painfully awkward physical comedy, and some stuff with no real payoff.
Quite frankly, Kitano already made a movie about not wanting to get stuck in the yakuza rut. It was called Takeshis, and it was brilliant. Glory to the Filmmaker! is like Takeshis re-cut and over-dubbed by the good people at Spike TV so they can show it as part of an MXC marathon.
For Takeshi Kitano completists only, and even then it's a near thing. There are worse films in the world, but there are damn few with as big a gap between potential and end product.
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He's a very unusual filmmaker, so his films don't work for everyone. But he's always interesting and unique. Loved Zatoichi.
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That is how I want to see this film conclude.
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Takeshi Kitano can never top his poetic film, 'A Scene At The Sea' or even 'Hana-Bi'. Those were brilliant.
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That's a Gothamist.com goof in the headline right there....
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