1993
Written, Directed, Edited and Starring Takeshi "Beat" Kitano
When considering whether or not to watch Sonatine, disregard the fact that the American DVD release is produced by Rolling Thunder, the production house created by Quentin Tarantino for the purposes of releasing movies that he feels you should watch. Like Chunking Express, another Rolling Thunder release, Sonatine isn't one of the movies that Quent has plagiarized (or "referenced") when creating his schlock-art masterpieces. Kitano was already, and remains, a Japanese superstar when he released Sonatine, but the success of the movie both at home and abroad took his career to a whole new level. Up until Sonatine, he'd written and directed multiple films that stayed loosely within their own genre--Getting Any? was a pretty straight forward Airplane style comedy, Violent Cop and Boiling Point were hyper-violent moody crime thrillers, and Scene by the Sea was a goof on the arty romance piece. Sonatine refused those categories--it contains much of Cop's violence and pace, but the off the wall humor and absurdist set-pieces of Getting Any? appear as well. While the film is one that is most often treated as a slighter version of his later masterwork Fireworks, that's a mistake as well. Sonatine is a singular triumph--a film that thoroughly exhausts every mainstay of the yakuza (and for that matter, American mafia) library, but it places them among some of the most riveting comedy ever done. From the gorgeous nighttime roman candle battle to the human beings as paper dolls sumo fight, the movie is so overstuffed with absurdly hilarious moments that, despite the high body count, it's most remembered for the laughter it produces. With Sonatine, Kitano finally made good on the promise of his earlier "entertainment" films and showed that he was capable not only of creating art, but that he was extraordinarily good at it as well. In a film climate that either slaughters its auteurs or shuffles them into niche genres, Kitano has shown himself courageous with his willingness to experiment as far as a camera is willing to take him, and unlike Woody Allen and David Gordon Greene, he's excited to have an audience alongside him.
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