Kitano's OUTRAGE is outrageously good

 It's only January 5, but already I've seen a film that will surely occupy a prime position on my top ten list at year's end.

As my gut predicted, Takeshi Kitano's Outrage (Autoreiji; 2010)  is a controlled masterpiece, and the best film the auteur has made since the sizzling Hanna-bi (aka Fireworks).

Kitano's yakuza films are fascinated by the small details of gangster politics, so it is a small detail -- a wrong decision -- that triggers a brutal war between factions in this deft, crisp, exceptional piece of filmmaking. As usual, the drama provokes splashes of crimson that denote the disintegration of a crime family. Kitano, though not the key participant, takes an enforcer role that shows us his Sunday best.

Written, edited, and directed by Kitano, Outrage does quite the opposite of glorify the gangster life. It paints for us an underground society that is, for most, a vicious hell on earth where nobody is to be trusted, money is more important than anything, and relationships are not worth spit.    Every act is one of self-advancement, and every step on the ladder to the top is but a cruel mirage for gullible players.

The violence is very wince-worthy and impactful. We get chopsticks jammed in ear drums, an excruciating assault with a dentist drill, and a brutally beautiful scene involving a car, a rope, and one unlucky fuck whose time is up.

Music by Keiichi Suzuki, who also scored Kitano's Zatoichi, has a somber, electronic base that adds an interesting but not distracting element to the proceedings. Katsumi Yanagijima, who shot Fukasaku's brilliant Battle Royale, does a superb job with Outrage's visuals. The soft, subtle tones perfectly contrast with the frequent displays of glorious and disturbing Grand Guignol.

 This is a harrowing, compelling yakuza drama from a master of the moving image.

***

The Japanese Blu-ray is of exceptional quality and is English subtitled

It is available from amazon.co.jp or cdjapan.co.jp

Violent Panic For Kitano

Very happy to read two extremely positive reviews of Takeshi Kitano's new yakuza film, Outrage, out of Cannes this morning.

The writers compared it to the director's best works such as Violent Cop and Sonatine. Personally, my favorite flick of his from this period is Hanna-B (aka 'Fireworks'), followed closely by Violent Cop and Sonatine, but I ain't gonna argue the point.

Recently, Kitano has been flying in other directions with works such as Achilles and the Tortoise (a film I liked quite a bit), Glory to the Filmmaker, and Takeshis' (I'm a fan of this also, with reservations) .

What rubbed me the right way in Variety's review of Outrage ('Autoreiji') was the referencing of Kinji Fukasaku's yakuza work.

In Maggie Lee's Hollywood Reporter review, she wrote:

'In fact, his representation of internecine gang rivalry and imploding power structure stands up to Kinji Fukasaku's seminal "Battle Without Honor" series in complexity and unsentimental attitude, with humor as mean and dry as a straight-up martini.'

Such referencing of one of my three favorite directors of all time has made me super-hot for this flick (not that I wasn't already).

I've been binging on Fukusaku's flicks for the last few months in an effort to catch up on everything I haven't seen. Fortunately, many more are becoming available in various shapes and forms from a litany of sources.

His Violent Panic - The Big Crash ('Boso Panniku: Daigekitotsu'; 76) really blew me away, and not for the reasons I imagined it would. The film has long been touted as featuring one of the most spectacular car chase sequences ever filmed in Japanese cinema. While the chase sequence is impressive, it is more like an extended car rally in the It's A Wild, Wild, Wild, Wild World vein. Fukasaku revisited the same type of scene himself in his '92 The Triple Cross and did it better.

Interestingly, Panic's opening stanza features a montage of bank robberies, also replicated in Triple Cross. There are several other similarities, too.

Car chases aside, the magic of Violent Panic can be found in its rich character mix and blending of melodrama, violence, unsentimental romance, and crime thriller elements. Fukasaku, whose last complete film was Battle Royale, thrived in the crime genre, and was able to make sense of seemingly disassociated elements within a particular story, finally knitting them together in a cinematic ball of dynamite.

Speaking of dynamite, crime flicks don't come much more incendiary than Fukasaku's blistering Hokuriku Proxy War, a '77 effort set in a predominantly snowbound area of Japan in which a yakuza torpedo, played with brute authority by Hiroki Matsukata, violently resists the outside influence of big city yakuza types. His war against them is stunning to behold.

Closing out recent viewings was the director's Outlaw Killers -- Three Mad Dog Brothers, a truly stunning tale of three violent, amoral miscreants who kill, steal, chop, stab and rape their way through one hundred minutes of flapping celluloid. Made in '72, the same year as the masterful Under the Flag of the Rising Sun and Street Mobster (Fukasaku was one busy fucker that year!), this frantic walk on the wild side is buoyed by a brutal turn from Bunta Sugawara, who plays a character not unlike Tetsuya Watari's psycho gangster 'Rikio Ishikawa' in Graveyard of Honor, and Fukasaku's in-your-face and at-your-balls direction that drops you in the middle of the carnage. Made just prior to the Battles Without Honor and Humanity series, the energy levels, as usual, are through the roof.

With Takeshi Kitano's Outrage on the horizon, and Fukasaku being whispered in the same breath, it's good times for cinephiles.