Boiling Point

"Boss, what are you thinking?" squeals a Yakuza lieutenant as Beat Takeshi's messed up gangster Uehara clambers onto his exposed rear end. "Many things", is the answer he gets.

Boiling Point is a strange package of set-piece ideas, each scene like a mini-poem, with Kubrick-like attention to the set-up of each shot. It's the most brazenly experimental Kitano film I've yet seen. The Japanese title is 3-4x jugatsu (3-4xOctober) a further indication of the intention to be singularly unusual.

Wheras Kitano made such effective use of music in Violent Cop, here there is no score at all, even when the end titles run - though the trailers do feature a haunting tune and some close-ups from a canvas by Pieter Breughel.

V recently wrote off Tatantino off as a "wigger", and I was recently reminded by a re-watching of Kill Bill Vol. 1 how much less powerful his version of Asian Cinema is than the very best of the stuff he plunders. With Kitano genre style and the darkly funny side of cruelty are always just a cunning camouflage for interesting thematic content - Kitano, himself thrown out of school for rebellious behaviour, is said to hold a dim view of Japanese youth and this would seem to be one of the more prominent themes running through Boiling Point.

The ending has a certain Bobby Ewing in the shower-ness about it, but given the fact that everything that has come before is hardly a sequential story of the traditional kind, you are bound to forgive it this final lapse into unaccountability.