Blood and Bones (2004)

I am a big Takeshi Kitano fan but think I prefer the films in which he directs himself to those films where he acts for another director (a possible exception to this is "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence".)  Not that he isn't excellent in everything that he undertakes, but in this very very long Japanese saga, the length of the movie (it does cover a period of about sixty years) detracts from a remarkable performance.  Mind you it is pretty hard to enthuse about a character who is totally hateful -- misogynistic, misanthropic, selfish, and just downright mean -- yet you just can't take your eyes off his bullying.  The story follows his life from his arrival in Osaka from Korea as a hopeful young man through to his death in North Korea as a bitter old man.  Despite Koreans being outcasts to many Japanese, he prospered, but at the expense of all about him.  A great performance but anything but likeable.

On a slightly different tack raised by this film, the Japanese are very prudish about showing full frontal nudity in their movies and tend to block out anything remotely pubic by either pixelating the image or having bouncing white balls over the offending bits.  In a bath-house scene in this film the blocking was done with huge shifting black shadows which was more than a little distracting.  This attitude being the case, I wonder why the action could not just as well have taken place elsewhere or whether the actors could have sported discretely placed towels.