journal features

movie review - Fireworks

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 1999.07.30

This is a Japanese movie about a cop who loses his way during a bad patch. His five-year-old child is dead, his wife is struggling, and then cops start getting shot in an investigation of the Yakusa. One young colleague dead, his partner ("Horibe") confined to a wheelchair, and his wife ailing in a hospital, our man loses his job and begins a new life.

With a solemn, immobile expression, Kitano stolidly plunges into a life of debt to the gangsters he once pursued, and tries to take care for his loved ones. It doesn't end well, but along the way the cop, his wife, and his partner find their own flavours of peace.

Along the way, there's a good deal of artistic interludes as the crippled Horibe becomes a painter. The montages presented in that way foretell the outcome of the others' journey.

Recommended.

rand()m quote

Immature poets imitate mature poets steal bad poets deface what they take and good poets make it into something better or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique utterly different than that from which it is torn the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time or alien in language or diverse in interest.

—T.S. Eliot