Cannes

[Don Brown, Communicado]

There's an intersting wee overview of the Asian fare at this year's Cannes Festival in Time Asia this week.  You can find the full article at www.time.com.  Here's a snippet about Kitano's "Kikujiro".


"One man who plays both sides is Kitano, called "Beat" Takeshi at home.
When he isn't ornamenting nearly every show on Japanese TV, he is
painting, writing books and, lately, serving as writer-director-star of crime
movies that, at their best (Violent Cop, Sonatine), have the uninflected
concrete poetry of an epitaph on a yakuza's gravestone. In Kikujiro, Kitano takes a vacation from his dour muse; this is a brightly colored slapstick romance between a gruff guy and a nine-year-old searching for the
mother he has never met. All right, the whimsy sometimes gets spiked with
hemlock: the boy is briefly detained by a child molester who tells him,
"Take your pants off, and I'll take you to see your mommy." Lurching from
surrealism to farce to melodrama to sentiment, Kikujiro shows that there's
nothing more bizarre than a samurai cin?aste trying to prove he's a
sweetie. "