Bad City

 [October, 2023]

1) can’t count the refrences to the Yakuza games. Like there is now a genre of movies-that-are-sort-of-like-Ryu-ga-Gataku games. But "Bad City" stars the-guy-who-was-Kuze, yeah, we’re doing Yakuza things.

1a: is Kuze my absolute favorite character in the Yakuza games? (not counting Takeshi Kitano-- he’s clearly his own thing) He’s fuckn up there. Pocket Circuit Fighter, and Goro are the other ones who spring to mind...Etrsuko the Obatarian, weapon master w the hat, a handful of Omi guys like Nishtani and Watase.....fuckn Shineda….but he’s also his own thing, in his way. 

2) They set up a situation where a two cops shooting a single unarmed ‘civilian’ seems like a damn reasonable thing to do. Interesting to happen in Japanese movie. In a culture essentially w out guns, you do a scene w an explicit justification for cops shooting an unarmed man. Like, you WANT BADLY for the cops shoot the unarmed man. Seems more like a thing you might see in an American movie where the cops shooting unarmed people is a) a thing that b) some people like to see defended.

Obviously, the wrinkle is that the ‘unarmed man’ happens to be an improbable martial arts badass who has inflicted enough head trauma on both the cops that they should actually probably be dead, and is in the process of inflicting more trauma on the one that does not shoot him-- and also killed their boss in front of them in an earlier scene, which, actually, could work either way for the self defense claim.

The issues with filming the scene in America are that it would be really weird for a fight to have gone on this long without anyone busting out a gun in America. The sequence is near the end of a scene where everyone showed up to throw down and it’s, as an American, downright weird that basically no one brought a gun or even left to go get one. I don’t own a gun, but long before the cops v marital artist part of the fight, there had been enough punches thrown that, if I was in that actual situation, my strategy would have become ‘find a gun somewhere.’ 

One thing, I guess, is in that the Japanese cops shoot people the people are probably unarmed bc very few people have guns. So, if you are justifying ANY police shooting to a Japanese audience it has to be shooting an unarmed subject. But my STRONG impression is that the Japanese cops shoot extremely few people. This seems more stylistic than political. 

The other thing is in the cops v martial artist fight you assume two American cops woulda shot the dude LONG before it seems as reasonable as it does in this film. It’s just how the police are. But also, in America, the marital arts badass beating, or threatening to beat, the cop, might also have a gun that he just hasn’t pulled yet, or is on the verge of ‘going for the cop’s weapon’ so shooting him is inherently reasonable. Good for everyone. 

Right, obviously-- in America the guy is ‘going for the cop’s weapon’ and shooting him is the ONLY thing to do. Sorry it took me this long.

Blue lives matter:

--I think it is safe to assume that every single black man in America is a final-boss-in-a-martial-arts-moive level badass. We’ve all heard Wu-Tang. 

But that’s not even what the HEROS in blue are up against. You just need ONE martial arts badass and you and your partner (do we even need to say he was days away from retirement?) are crippled or worse. How can you BE SURE that the guy you just stopped does not have an improbable mastery of jujitsu or something and could maybe even fuck you up with his chi? The ones you really have to worry about would let you get well into your harassment routine and then bam!-- sidearm kicked across the floor and your partner’s in a headlock. 

HOW CAN WE EXPECT OUR POLICE TO TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE PEOPLE THEY POLICE AND THE BAD GUYS IN MOIVES?