The movie 'Blood and Bones', is a movie, everyone certainly knows it is not an 'entertaining' film of all Japanese Dramas, but with all the bells and whistles, this movie certainly got us learning about the factors of what some people just don't understand when they're swimming around with money all around them.Kim Shun-pei, is a man who was once a kid from South Korea and moved his life to Osaka, Japan. He was a man, who showed nothing but hatred and greed. His hatred, got everyone driven to depression and suicide. With Kum Shun-pei's greedy and violent attitude, women by women, making them pregnant, to lawn for his money. A fish cake factory, that he once ran, destroying the face of his employee, beating up his employers and his sons, he was surely a troubled man with nowhere else to run and hide.Personally, this movie is, as I said, certainly not an entertaining film, but the image we see on this film, shows us the reality of what some people face without love and eternal feeling. With greed, violence and rape, this film surely showed that sometimes life, back and now, is what some lack. I rate this movie a 10 out of 10 because it is yet, a very touching movie and it's a movie to witness the atrocities of others when love is totally absent.

It's been a while since Kitano Takeshi concentrated on acting in a movie i.e. not also directing (in both Gohatto and Battle Royale, which he did not direct, he had only a small role). "Bloob and bones" gives us Kitano in top form, with award-winning calibre performance. Be warned though that this is a brutal, joyless movie, lacking even the relieving Kitano humour because he did not direct it. Watching this movie, I terribly missed the warmth in Kurosawa's movies even when they depict the same realistic, brutal world. I particularly miss Kurosawa's "Red beard".Kitano plays Kim, as a Korean who immigrated in the early 20's, as a teenager, to Osaka, Japan. Told with voice over of his son, the story takes the audience right to Kim's old age, when he dies in bleak North Korea, in loneliness, with only his youngest son digging his grave in the snow. While the temporal scope is epic, the spatial scope is limited to almost entirely the street where Kim lives most of his life, first as a small fish cake factory owner, then a loan shark. This movie is long, repetitive, brutal, humourless, but not boring mainly because there is a big ensemble of support characters.There is first of all his wife who came to him with a daughter from a scandalous affair. There is his brother who married his step-daughter, thus becoming his step-son-in-law. There are his own daughter and son, that we first see as kids, the latter being also the voice over narrator of the entire movie. There is the young man who turned up at his door, announcing himself to be his son from a rape. There is his daughter's husband, a wretch she married just to get out of his influence. There is a young man, an idealist "poet communist" who would have been his daughter's saviour had he not been thrown in jail when she needed him most. There is his favourite sensual mistress, who unfortunately was unable to bear him a child, and later became totally incapacitated after a brain tumour operation. There is the woman that he hired to look after the invalid who was his mistress, and became herself his mistress instead and bore some children, including a son. There are his two biggest debtors, the first killing himself and the other somehow died when he sent gangsters after them.But in the end, this is a movie about a man that would become the object of the audiences' absolute detestation at the end of the movie. And yet it is Kitano's piece of brilliant acting that makes this man real, understandable if not forgivable, rather than a loathsome caricature. Through Kitano's portrayal, we see a man who has never been taught compassion, alienated in a hostile environment, beating down (literally) anything that is in his way – a man surviving on his natural, animal instincts. And yet, in these raw instincts we do see a small glimpse of kindness in the way he cares for the invalid who was once his favourite sex object. Don't expect to see tenderness because this man is not capable of any, but remember that this woman has failed him in a worst way, in not being able to produce any offspring. She could have incurred his brutal wrath but in the scene when he bathed her (she looked ghastly and couldn't even talk, coming back from the brain surgery), we see the closest to tenderness that this man is capable of.This is not an easy movie to watch but should not be missed by those who have enjoyed Kitano's acting all these years. Stay through the end credit. You may not be able to read Japanese but in complete contrast to the hellish mood of the movie, the piece of string orchestration during the end credit is heavenly.

Yoichi Sai's long film is about a Korean immigrant (to Japan), played by Takeshi Kitano, who cares about nothing but his own pleasure and gain. His destructive personality and violent temper decimate everything and everyone around him. Based on a true story, the script does not attempt to explain or justify Kitano's character. It presents him without judgment.The rapes and beatings (mostly of family members) are relentless and occasionally surreal. One brutal exchange between father and son takes place during a rainstorm and is visually arresting. Another sequence, where father and son respectively destroy each other's homes, has a dark, humorous edge.The director chooses his shots carefully and recreates the periods in which the film is set (circa 1923 to the mid-80's) effectively but never ostentatiously.Although there is much repetition, the film does serve up a smörgåsbord of atrocities for exploitation fans. The treatment of women is harsh. One beating, in particular, of a young woman by her coarse husband, is strong stuff indeed and flawlessly conveys the cycle of violence a perpetrator creates within his own circle and extended family. Clearly given a generous budget and clearly a labor of love, BLOOD AND BONES is well worth seeing and should not be forgotten.Kitano is extraordinary.

Apparently this movie set out to make its viewers feel bad, and it certainly worked for me. This is one of the dullest scripts I have seen turned into movie lately. Having read sk4ek's comment on this, maybe it would be fair to add that it was made from a novel, and I watched the subtitled version (and I don't understand Japanese), so it seems I probably didn't get a lot of what made the novel good. Anyway, the script is all about what a gargantuan a**hole Kitano's character is, but whatever else happens just doesn't add much to the story. Just imagine the worst things a father could possibly do to his family, sequence them on a timeline, and you have the plot of this movie. But there simply is no character evolvement, no turning point, nothing that gives an interesting twist to things, they only keep getting worse.***mild spoiler below***Once I thought the story was going to take off, when another illegitimate son of A**hole Father moved in with the family, finally someone who had the potential to give a swerve to the plot line. After being defeated in a fistfight, he tells the boy who narrates the whole story to study hard, walks away and gets shot ten days later off screen. Segue boring story continued. The cinematography is alright, but not outstanding, and not enough to save this movie.