Takeshis

C

Directed by Beat Takeshi

Takeshi Kitano is one of my favorite directors and some of his films are brilliant, but "Takeshis" just mystified me. The pointlessness of this movie seems almost beyond debate and the only thing making it even halfway likeable is Kitano's immense talent at delivering playful, quirky images and dead pan humour, so completely wasted on this effort that I almost feel like giving it an "F" just because I know Kitano can do so much better.

The plot of "Takeshis" sounds like it was thought up in a pinch and delivered to a studio head off the cuff. Takeshi plays himself, as a succesfull, rich director and leading man (which he is) but also plays his doppelganger, named Kitano, who is basically a chump version of "Takeshi." Kitano, who works in a convenience store and tries out for films Takeshi stars in, only to be rejected again and again, suddenly finds his life resembling Takeshi's films, from the violence to the multitude of yakuza to the appearance of fast women who seem suddenly infatuated with him. Why this is happening, I can only guess, but that's pretty much the gist of the film.

"Takeshis" appears to be Kitano's "Day for Night" or "8 1/2," his film about film. Unfortunately, however, unlike the latter two films,. which were both by filmmakers about the process of making films and both happened to also be brilliant, "Takeshis" is a convoluted, senseless mess. The plot is thrown out the window early in the game and Kitano seem content to string together a number of "Kitano-esque" moments of wimsy and deadpan humour and expects the audience to buy into it. Sure, there are some hilarious and very authentic moments of Kitano brilliance, such as a scene in a film Takeshi is filming in which he is playing mah jong with a floosy and gets annoyed by the sounds of chicadas outside his window and opens fire on them, then turns around and inexplicably murders the girl, but these scenes are simply kernels of greatness in an otherwise lackluster whole. It's too bad, really, but there appears to be a good reason why "Takeshis" has never been mentioned in the same breath as "Sonatine" "Hana Bi" or any of Kitano's best works.