sreyda
Junior Takeshi Fan
2 ships passing in the night
Posts: 85 
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Post by sreyda on Oct 3, 2007 22:04:37 GMT -5
Double posting, sorry. Sreyda, I LOVE your avatar and your signature. Those ads are my favorites. Your avator advertisement always make me cry  but in a warm way.  Thanks, they're my favorite too! That ericson commercial is just so heartwarming and that I'm TV commercial is just so adorable. Oh Helena, he's not just a little restless, he's extremely restless xD right Mrs. Carlos? |
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Post by wowposter on Sept 18, 2008 6:29:46 GMT -5
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Post by ognyana on Dec 16, 2008 9:00:58 GMT -5
A very good film. Ryu Kenichi/Liu Jianyi played by Takeshi Kaneshiro is above all praise for the verity of the character. Natsumi by Mirai Yamamoto is, unfortunately, more ‘readable’ – somehow she makes it evident that Natsumi will turn out to be a bad egg. It seems to me Natsumi should have been more of a mystery, more of a closed book, but alas… The ending is superb. What jokes dress code plays… It’s surprising but uproariously funny for me that Yuan Chenggui (Eric Tsang) looks exactly like our Russian mobsters back in the 90-s – the same shaved head, the same thickset body, the same swagger, the same loud colour jackets (they at least are gone now). In comparison with that outfit of his the Japanese yakuza in other films look like a bunch of office clerks in their black suits and white shirts; what I mean the only thing that gives them away to a Russian eye is their keeping straight, almost grim faces. Ryu Kenichi’s outfit reads different in Russia – he doesn’t look like a maverick mobster, ‘a bat’, but more like a student of the ‘angry generation’ of the 80-s - 90-s. In the 80-s looking like this a person in Russia was bound to arouse interest of the police on the beat, but not for being allegedly a mobster, but for being an ‘antisocial element’ – a petty black-marketeer (fartsOvschik), a rock fan, an independently thinking ‘angry’ student (all the three categories somehow crisscross and intertwine). If the Ukraine has had an ‘orange’ revolution recently, we had a ‘black leather + pony tail” revolution in the late 80-s – early 90-s. If apprehended by the police, a man looking like that faced a thorough beating, a very short hair cut with blunt scissors, and being ‘tabbed’; if the worst came to the worst (caught more than once or expressing ‘alien’ ideas) – a spree in a mental hospital with forced treatment or a stretch of ‘intensive labour’ therapy dosed out for those ‘spongers’. There was also another possibility – being caught not by the police, but by the local working class street gang – with the special emphasis on being beaten almost to death and sadistically ‘shorn’. There existed an ‘underground System’ of mutual help, hiding places and ‘friends of friends’ that worked like magic in many cases (remember the 'underground railroad' ?). That’s why though for Ryu Kenichi the occupation is shadowy and the stakes are much higher – his own life, the manners and the facial expressions are very much recognizable to anyone who lived in Russia in the end of the 80-s and through the 90-s, and the dress code tells us that this is a POSITIVE character (though I believe that’s not exactly the message sent to us by the film makers  ). Back then and to those who remeber now his outfit reads: Hey, he looks like one of us, he has the guts to run the risks. Send a word down the line, brother, he’s a ‘svoi’ (our man, man of the System) … |
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but in a warm way. 
). Back then and to those who remeber now his outfit reads: Hey, he looks like one of us, he has the guts to run the risks. Send a word down the line, brother, he’s a ‘svoi’ (our man, man of the System) …