Tue
25-Oct-2005

takeshis'

Al and I met up with Charles, Miranda and Rob for one of the stranger offerings of the London Film Festival. Takeshis' follows on from the box office success of Zatoichi by being one of the most random, experimental films I've ever seen. It is essentially all about Takeshi Kitano and his own career as an actor and director. He plays himself, Beat Takeshi, the movie and TV star, and also an everyday life version of himself, Kitano, a shy cashier who works in a convenience store. The dreams of shy Kitano and the movie sets of Beat Takeshi blend into each other as their lives run parallel or intersect, the action playing out over lots of sumptuous sets and scenes from a smoky mah-jong parlour to a beautiful beach scene in which Takeshi pumps out hails of bullets into lines of samurai warriors and the flash of the guns turn into stars which shoot towards the sky.

dubai

Matt is working in Dubai this week. It's a crazy place - a kind of hyper capitalist dreamworld being built on the sands of a scorching desert. Like some kind of Baudrillardian hallucination of the real, they are investing their fast dwindling oil reserves in a vast complex of hotels and leisure facilities. The tallest buildings in the world; an underwater hotel; a collection of artificial islands shaped into a map of the world; animatronic dinosaurs; a ski dome where you can ski on snow and skate on ice while looking out through transparent walls at the 40 degree desert heat outside. It all looks quite astonishing - there's a good article here on its sinister glories.