Blood And Bones (DTS Version) (Hong Kong Version) DVD Region 3

Kitano plays Kim Shunpei, a Korean immigrant who comes to Osaka, Japan in 1920 as a teenager. Working at a fish paste roll store, Kim claws his way out of poverty to become a father and leader in the immigrant community where he lives. But this is not the heart-warming story of the downtrodden pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. What we see very quickly is that Kim is a thoroughly malevolent brute who secures his position as community leader not through benevolence and accommodation, but by violence and intimidation.

The very first scene of Blood and Bones shows Kim brutally beating and raping his wife in front of his children. He cheats on his wife flagrantly, keeping his mistress in a house down the street and bringing her into his family after he inevitably knocks her up. He comes home drunk late at night swinging a hatchet about the house and beats his children, even throwing his daughter down a flight of stairs. At his fish roll factory, Kim keeps his employees in line through similar acts of intimidation. When one of his employees asks for overtime pay, Kim responds by burning his face with a hot coal. As his business grows, Kim expands his enterprise to loan sharking, grimly prowling the neighborhood carrying a big stick and mercilessly flogging all who owe him money.

Based on a semi-autobiographic novel by Korean-Japanese author Yang Sok Gil, Blood and Bones has a sprawling, epic scope with a feel similar to a Bernardo Bertolucci film. Blood and Bones covers six decades and runs nearly two and a half hours, and can't be described as anything but epic. And yet, despite the grand scope, director Yoichi Sai manages to give Blood and Bones a closed and almost claustrophobic feel. He achieves this by keeping the story anchored to one immigrant community; in fact, to one street.

As the story progresses through the decades, we see Kim's family grow, and his sons, daughters and mistresses have children of their own. But few leave the neighborhood and soon Kim's extended family all but occupies the entire street. Not by choice, mind you, but by the sheer force of Kim's will. The years of terrorizing both his family and his neighbors have created a pervasive sense of hopelessness and self-imposed isolation amongst everyone around Kim. Their spirits have been so thoroughly broken by Kim's abuse that the thought of simply leaving never occurs to them. As the decades roll by, nothing seems to ever change, with only passing planes or a new car signifying that time has, in fact, passed.

Although Blood and Bones is constructed as a character study, it's really just a backdrop for a smoldering performance by Kitano, with the rest of the cast simply fading into the background as Kitano unleashes a career's worth of fury on the audience. Director Sai waited six years to cast Kitano in the role, knowing he'd be the perfect actor to play Kim. And it's no surprise, really. When you boil the character down to its essence, Kim is like all the characters Kitano has ever played, with the exception of an emotional vacuum in Kim that is not a characteristic of Kitano's other characters.

The nearest parallel to Kitano's Kim is Nishi in Hana-Bi, a man who swings between extreme love and extreme anger and takes out these emotions on the people around him. But unlike Nishi, Kim is a man completely incapable of love or tenderness, and knows only anger and violence. And unfortunately that's the movie's greatest shortcoming. We get almost no insight into why Kim is the way that he is, with the exception of some nasty looking scars on his back, indicating that Kim may have been the victim of some sort of abuse or persecution in Korea. As a result, the audience has little chance of understanding or sympathizing with Kim.

And outside of Kim, there's precious little else to Blood and Bones. In the first decade, Kim beats people up and has a mistress. In decade two, Kim is still beating people up and has another mistress. And so on. The only wrinkles to the story come in the form of the various calamities that befall Kim's family, but after a while there's only so much heartache the audience can take. The fact that Kim remains an intriguing figure throughout the film is a testament to the power and intensity of Kitano's performance, but unfortunately that's not quite enough for a film this long.

Movie Grade: 3.5/5

By Gopal - BeyondHollywood.com

Kim arrives in Osaka a penniless immigrant, an unskilled laborer in a country with deeply ingrained bias against Korean immigrants. If Kim is capable of any emotions beyond lust, greed and anger they are certainly not on display here, as he violently abuses his wife, terrorizing his children in the process. But with that violent streak comes a fierce will to succeed and Kim eventually succeeds in establishing a successful fish cake factory, quickly rising in wealth and stature.

But don't think for a moment that Kim's rise in wealth will quell his baser instincts. If anything the taste of success makes him all the hungrier for more. He keeps his own family living in squalor, little more than slave labor conscripted to feed and care for his workers while Kim himself takes on a mistress and builds her a beautiful new home directly across the street from his family. When the unknown son of an earlier rape arrives - played by Odagiri Joe - it isn't long before he is thrown out with a beating to send him on his way. He continues to beat and rape his wife. He burns a worker's face. He knocks out his own daughter's teeth, inspires such hatred that his own son attacks him with a knife. And this is all before he embraces the added violence that comes with establishing himself as a loan shark.

Told from the perspective of Masao, his legitimate son by his much battered wife, the film plays as a peculiar character study of Kim, peculiar because Masao clearly knows next to nothing about his own father. And who can blame him? Masao is terrified to get close enough to learn anything about him. Kim is less a person - or even a monster - in the film than he is a pervasive, malevolent force. When he is present the family strives to simply stay out of striking distance. When absent they live in fear of his inevitable return. The film does reach beyond being purely about Kim, however. We witness the rise of Japanese militancy, the seldom spoken-of situation of ethnic Koreans in Japan, the effects of the post-war collapse, political dissent fomented by the Japanese Communist Party, and much more. This is all told from a unique perspective, one both inside the culture enough to speak of it with first hand detail but also outside enough to be openly critical. It also shows in painful detail the ongoing generational consequences of family violence.

The recent Hong Kong DVD release is perfectly adequate, if not spectacular. The first disc includes an anamorphic transfer of the feature that strikes me as a little soft but is otherwise fine. The original Japanese audio tracks are included along with good quality English subtitles that clearly mark which lines are spoken in Japanese and which in Korean. The Korean dialogue appears in quotation marks, which is a very important feature for a cross-cultural film such as this, particularly for those unable to distinguish between the two languages on their own. Unfortunately the extras on the second disc do not include English subtitles.

Impeccably crafted by director Sai and flawlessly acted by all involved Blood and Bones succeeds in meeting all of the lofty goals it sets for itself. It fully deserves the accolades that have been showered upon it thus far. It is also a very long, very difficult film, one that will likely alienate a great many people based on subject matter and level of violence alone. This is a grim picture, graphically violent and disturbingly realistic, without a shred of hope. Whatever made him this way, Kim is quite simply a bastard, a truly horrific human being, and Sai pulls no punches in presenting him as such. Incredibly well crafted, but miles away from what one might commonly call "entertainment".

By Todd Brown - Twitchfilm.net