These past few years, I've been feeling jaded as a film fan. I've seen so many different films over such a long period, I sometimes feel as if there's nothing new for me to see. This is not true, of course, but it's sometimes a struggle to stay out of film ruts.

Hana-Bi (Fireworks) is a 1997 film written, directed and edited by Takeshi Kitano. This is the first film of his I've seen and only because TCM played it late at night one day last week, It's still available (as of yesterday, anyway) to view on tcm.com. This is a very enjoyable film, but you should view it with no particular expectations. Lovely musical score as well.

I won't say much about the details of the film. I will say that this film was not at all what I expected it to be and it's one of those films that I feel ended too soon, which is a huge compliment to any movie.
The film has violent sequences, but unlike the theatrical trailer for the film- which suggests that the film is hyper-violent- violence is never gratitous in the film, but only serves as punctuation throughout the story.

Takeshi Kitano plays a super-tough cop and it's fun to watch him deal with the yakuza et al.

Additionally, as a bonus to me, this is the very first film in which I can recall seeing an Al Mar knife. I've collected Al Mars for more than thirty years and I would have remembered seeing an Al Mar blade on film. Al Mar has always been something of a boutique knife maker, with production totals paling on comparison to, say, SOG or Gerber or the like.

The knife which shows up in the film is known as the Sidekick. It was available from Al Mar in the 1990s. In the United States, this knife was available with two different handle options; Titanwood, which is a wood which has been pressure treated with a hard resin, makes it kind of like Micarta. The other handle option for the US market was called Stone Micarta, which reminded me of synthtic kitchen countertop-looking material. Not at all attractive. I don't know why they never offered the nice, understated black linen Micarta handle for this knife in the US, but mainly for the Asian market.

Anyhoo, here it is. Handsome knife, and I was surprised to see it.

Para, while I never collected Al Mar knives, I always had appreciation for them. I think I saw some Al Mar knives in the movie Cyborg with Jean Claude Van Damme...Al Mar Knives is listed under company credits on IMDB

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Originally posted by Windhover:
Cyborg with Jean Claude Van Damme...

Which would explain why I've never seen them in a film.

OK, I took a look on youtube and found a clip from the film. At the two minute mark, we see an Al Mar Pathfinder.





Perhaps there are others, but there's at least that one in the film.

I saw the movie in 1998 or 1999. I knew at the time I saw it, that I was too young to fully appreciate the probable greatness of the movie. I have not watched it since, but I keep telling myself that someday I may have the maturity to understand the nuances that I missed in 1998 or 1999. A search of “Beat” Takashi shows that he is truly something of a renaissance man.

The musical score by Joe Hisiashi has stayed in the back of my consciousness since I saw the first trailer, it was that hauntingly good. I am perhaps one step removed from a philistine when it comes to understanding what inspires composers (having never played an instrument) or properly appreciating the music greats in general. That said, one Hana-Bi track in particular always nagged at me as though I had heard it before. The flow was of track #5, in my opinion, is reminiscent of Rhapsody in Blue at around the 10:30-11:45 mark. I have long maintained that Hisiashi must have been consciously or subconsciously inspired by Gershwin when he composed track #5.

Ooh, Fireworks. That was my favorite film from 1997. I remember coming out of that movie in the theater and my buddy was like, "I wish I could slap stupid people in the head like Takeshi did in that film."

I dig Beat Takeshi's stuff. Sonatine, Violent Cop, Boiling Point, that Zatoichi remake... It's been awhile since I've watched one.

I've gotta check this one out.

Also "Zatoichi" since I loved the original movies with Shintaro Katsu.

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Originally posted by LastCubScout:
Zatoichi remake...

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Hana-Bi (Fireworks) 1997 Japanese crime film

It's available free online here: https://archive.org/details/Fireworks1997

Great movie, made better once you learn a little bit of background after watching. Sonatine was great as well. Thanks for the reminder, I forgot about these.

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Originally posted by bald1:

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Hana-Bi (Fireworks) 1997 Japanese crime film

It's available free online here: https://archive.org/details/Fireworks1997

There's no embedded English subtitles, so you'll have to turn on closed captioning and set it to English.

If you have access to TCM from your cable or sattelite provider, then you can watch films on tcm.com. I just checked and this film is still available there. It's a higher resolution than the archive site copy.

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Originally posted by parabellum:

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Originally posted by bald1:

quote:

Hana-Bi (Fireworks) 1997 Japanese crime film

It's available free online here: https://archive.org/details/Fireworks1997

There's no embedded English subtitles, so you'll have to turn on closed captioning and set it to English.

If you have access to TCM from your cable or sattelite provider, then you can watch films on tcm.com. I just checked and this film is still available there. It's a higher resolution than the archive site copy.

Understood. I watched it with the captioning on at the archive site as I don't have access to TCM. Interesting film. Thanks Mike!

I watched this over the weekend on tcm.com and enjoyed it quite a bit.
Like most good movies, I'll need to see it more than once to pick up things I missed the first time around.

The lead character played by Takeshi Kitano looked familiar.
As it turns out, I had seen another of his films a year or so ago entitled "Brother".
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0222851/

This post is a great reminder that I need to watch this one again. This is probably my favorite Kitano file and is a part of my old home DVD collection. I also love his next movie, Kikujiro (Kikujiro no natsu), a much lighter fare where he and the same actress that played his wife in Hanabi play husband and wife again but as very different characters as opposed to the silent-types they were in Hanabi.