KICKBOXING ACADEMY (1997). One word describes this movie: hilarimous. This is the sort of garbage destined to show up on cable TV ten times a day along with countless 80s teen comedies, the main difference here is that Kickboxing Academy is actually funny; not intentionally of course. This basically has every cliché from 80s sitcoms, done in the 90s of course, complete with a bizarre nod to Karate Kid III, and a collection of asinine evil characters, and equally asinine good ones. The only interesting thing about this movie is how they were able to take a plot line that would hardly be able to fill 24 minutes of Full House, Growing Pains, or 8 Is Enough and make an 84 minute movie out of it. It’s good “kickboxing” (or is that taekwondo? I’m not too sure) school versus bad kickboxing school, as the titular academy run by a blonde bimbo, who inexplicably is a “kickboxing” expert, despite hardly being able to throw a punch without grunting like a little girl, and who is dating Steven Bauer (Scarface was a long, long, long time ago), a nefarious lawyer making a play for her school along with evil tycoon Maddox (a slightly effeminate guy who only needs a snifter of cognac and a proud mastiff at his feet to complete the illusion of evil tycoonness), pissed off that the bimbo killed his son (!) in a “kickboxing” match years ago; and an equally effeminate “Vietnam vet” called Tarbeck (Tony Pacheco, any relation to porno star Richard Pacheco?) who’s only dream is opening an “Army/Navy Surplus” store, constantly says “sucka punch” and “nuts” and goes bonkers at the end, somehow managing to switch from a M-4 assault rifle to a Tec-9 between edits. It all comes down to a climactic duel between the two schools, but not before some psychological warfare, like trashing the Kickboxing Academy’s school, cutting the brake lines of its star pupil, and bullying the other members of the school incessantly. “Embarrassingly bad” doesn’t quite sum up the idiocy contained herein, between amateurishly staged fight scenes (even a ninja attack!), and even more amateurish acting (especially from some of the child actors). My favorite bit is the conclusion wherein Bauer’s evil scheme is uncovered, and his embarrassment in being in this movie becomes apparent, “great I’m ruined” he says woodenly (shades of “Scarface was a long, long, long time ago” resounding from his voice), as he awkwardly walks out of frame. Add to that some of the goofiest “skater” stereotypes imaginable, plot holes, continuity goofs, and even an “I don’t need you, I don’t need any of this!” moment, and you’ve got a four-star piece of shit.

KIKUJIRO (Kikujiro no Natsu, 1998). Kikujiro (the Japanese title means “Kikujiro’s Summer”) stands out as an oddity in Takeshi Kitano’s filmography, not only because it is unabashedly one of the cheesiest and most sentimental films of the last twenty years or so (maybe of the last fifty, who knows), but also because it is so brazenly commercial. Every scene seems to be geared towards middle-aged women, or sentimental retirees looking to get away from depressing news stories and violent, nihilistic films, like the ones Kitano himself formerly did. What is interesting is that after his scooter accident, which nearly killed him and paralyzed part of his face, Kitano’s films became much more open to a wider audience, the filmmaker who produced movies almost to spite audience expectations of him, films that were violent, bleak and borderline surreal; yet, at one point in this film Kitano’s childish character Kikujiro (the movie is named for him, and not the little boy he accompanies) is told to “stop playing gangster”, which is perhaps a signal that Kitano had grown tired of playing cops and robbers in his films (his next film, the extremely violent Brother, is a gangster film that, at times, borders on self-parody). So, Kikujiro is what it is, a commercial, sentimental piece of pap that seems more interesting in displaying Kitano’s sizable comedic skills than anything else. This is not to say that Kikujiro is a bad film as such, it really isn’t, it is, however, a somewhat manipulative, heart-on-the-sleeve enterprise that borders on the embarrassing at times, aided nicely, though, by Kitano’s presence, and his willingness to poke a little fun at himself.

Little Masao (stone-faced Yusuke Sekiguchi) is lonely boy with nothing to do for summer vacation. He lives with his grandmother, and longs to meet his absent mother, who abandoned him years ago (the father is completely absent), he meets up with an old neighbor (Kayoko Kishimoto, from Hana-Bi), who forces her loser husband Kikujiro (Kitano) to accompany the boy on a little trip to finally meet his mother. Almost immediately Kikujiro gambles away the pair’s money on bicycle races (rather strange things that look like horse or dog races, except with overweight men on bicycles). Kikujiro, an immature cry-baby, blames the boy for his losses and ignores him long enough to allow a pedophile to take him off for some attempted molestation, a scene that comes mighty close to almost shamelessly tasteless, save for the punch line, in which Kikujiro himself is nearly molested by the bald-headed pervert. After that the pair head to a high-class hotel and waste their money while Kikujiro nearly drowns in the pool. From there on the movie becomes your standard issue road movie, and it becomes a kind of weird postage card for the Japanese tourist industry, showing Japan as a beautiful, rural nation filled with eccentric, but kind characters, save Kitano’s Kikujiro, a consistently selfish and oafish fellow who can’t even bring himself to thank any of the people who help him and the boy out. Each of the people they meet up with have their own little eccentricity, the young couple that consists of a juggler and a break dancer, or the hick security guard who indulges in a little manzai banter with Kikujiro (and is played, in a nice cameo, by Kitano’s old comedic partner, Beat Kiyoshi). After wasting time at a broken down old bus stop, the pair take to the road on foot, Masao with his cute little angel wings (angels being a sentimental distraction in most of Kitano’s post-accident films), and Kikujiro with his constant schemes, most of them bordering on the criminal (bashing a passer by’s car with a cane, blowing out the tires of a car to get a ride, but rather, causing it to veer off the road and crash). While some overly-sensitive viewers might see these scenes as being wrong-headed, namely the violence and scuzzyness, it holds up as being in the spirit of Kitano’s work, namely the idiotic childishness of his characters, who’s violence and cruelty are merely extensions of the fact that they’ve never really grown up and become men. In fact, Masao comes off as stronger and more mature than Kikujiro ever does, and comes off as slightly more dour, as he is unable to have a relationship with the mother that abandoned him, while Kikujiro has more-or-less abandoned his mother in a geriatric home (which, I suppose, might bring up the film’s only real bite, in as far as the fact that Kitano’s previous film’s have contained such anger towards Japanese society in general, since Masao has been abandoned by his irresponsible mother, while Kikujiro has abandoned his own mother, in other words, the younger generation learns a lack of responsibility from the older one). As it turns out, Masao’s mother has taken up with another man, and has a small child, a bit younger than Masao himself, clearly, she has forgotten about him. A bit understandably, if excessively, Kitano kicks the sentimentality into high gear, what with angel bells, angel figures in the sand (Kitano finally retires, however briefly, to the beach, where Kikujiro’s gruff exterior finally gives way to Masao’s pathetic charms) and a computer generated angel that floats from heaven and into Masao’s pocket (or is it his heart?). From the man who ended Sonatine with the hero blowing his own brains out, or Boiling Point with the hero taking a dump while fantasizing about blowing up gangsters in a kamikaze plunge, this is a bit too much. Angels, in the Kitano films made after his accident, are featured prominently, the last image in Hana-Bi being an angel with broken wings, or the doomed young man in Kids Return, who’s angel figurine seems to represent his impossible love of a pretty classmate, angels seem to both be figures of perfection and harbingers of death; not here, however, as the angels featured are nothing more than sentimental trinkets. Now the road movie aspects end, and the film becomes a more typical Kitano creation, as he and the boy meet up with an artist (who, for some reason, Kikujiro seems to respect), and a pair of goofy bikers, and retire to the countryside, to play some largely improvised games. If you’ve ever wondered what a cute Takeshi Kitano film would look like, look no further, as his film resembles the final scenes of A Scene at the Sea, but without the tragedy, it’s in a genre of film that come out regularly in Japan, that of the stickily sentimental comedy, but is never released outside that country, and for good reason, as the Japanese resemble their old allies the Germans in one aspect at least, in that their popular entertainment is, rather than the vast and profound works we’d imagine, tepid and overly kitschy, the worst moments of Mahler, rather than Goethe, or Kikujiro, rather than Tanizaki. The sentiment of Kikujiro is half-cynical (ticket sales being the bottom line), and half genuine, as Kitano seems to have really changed after his accident, the nihilist of previous years given way to someone of a more humanistic vein, but rather than the humanism of a Kurosawa, with its generally negative, warts and all viewpoint, Kitano’s is the humanism of a borscht belt comic, the sort of we’re all okay in the end attitude, the comic who will get a laugh at all costs, even at the price of his dignity. I’m not saying Kitano is that low, he isn’t quite in the league of Jerry Lewis yet, he’s certainly a bully, in both his films and real-life, but he isn’t quite the world-devouring egoist that Lewis is (Kitano may at times tell some maudlin stories about his upbringing or suicidal tendencies, but they are in a matter-of-fact way, as if everyone else has had the same problems in life, whereas Lewis’ are of the perpetually suffering artist who’s art ends up as nothing more that a weep Olympics directed at the audience as a way to achieve some attention if nothing else [if I hear one more time about Lewis’ umpteenth suicide attempt this week I’ll scream]). Kitano’s comedy is hardly subtle, it is always at someone else’s expense, and usually comes close to physical violence, but Kitano is somewhat thoughtful about the nature of comedy, that comedy is violence. When the guy slips and falls on the banana peel, its funny to the viewer, and painful for the faller. This is why the final section of the film is the best, and why these parts are always the best in Kitano’s work. The sense that he has left the realms of the plot and is centering more on playing around, its like good musical improvisation. Kitano himself is a sloppy scenarist, his early films didn’t have any sort of plot at all (Kitano perhaps realized his own limitations as a screenwriter and made good on them), while his later ones have rather elephantine ones that pile one point onto another, so when Kitano frees himself from telling a story and simply plays around with the conventions of filmmaking and amuses himself with what’s going on, his films are more satisfying. Kitano is a purely visual filmmaker, one can watch his films with no subtitles, or no sound, and still get a sense of what’s going on, since he essentially builds his films from still images, like a slide-show, and plot is secondary to the careful crafting of images. The final shot of Kikujiro, standing alone and looking forlorn is excellent for the very reason that anything can be read into it, like the early cinema experimentation with the bowl of soup intercut with the man and the blank-faced woman. Kitano’s skill is then essentially for silent film, but like most silent films, he must keep things to the broadest of scenarios, when he departs from them, with overly complicated plots, like Brother, or irritatingly stupid ones, like Dolls, he fails completely. Kikujiro is half-way between the good and bad Kitano’s, the playful director and the crassly popular entertainer mixed with the pretentious artist who takes himself somewhat too seriously, it is a film that suggests that you will be moved by the sentimental scenes, but has no such expectation for the funny ones. Kitano, at his best let’s the viewer decide what should be moving, and would should just be funny, and Kikujiro represents a filmmaker midway between the summit of his powers and his decline.