Beat Takeshi

I remembered him in the variety programme roughly translated as Takeshi's Castle where hundreds of Japanese youths and the occasional expatriate (read: Americans/British/European/Australian/fuck this could go on) go through challenges after challenges to get to the last stage where they fight a couple of warlords and get to the prize.

Heck, I don't know what the prize is cause I don't remember seeing anybody win. But there's always Takeshi.

The challenges were damn funny. Like contestants forming groups of ten and made to wear giant foam bowling pin costumes. The person who is the first pin will have his/her back to the bowling ball while the rest face the on rushing ball. It's really funny. Then there is the Sumo wrestling bit where contestants pick their opponents. If they are lucky, they pick a scrawny Japanese engineer (no offense to engineers everywhere) who wears a computer tan. An easy pushover, even for woman folk (again, no offense to women folk everywhere). And if you are unlikely, you pick a real Sumo wrestler. Hahaha, I have seen some contestants who will not even try and just fall out of the Sumo ring without being touched.

And the final challenge takes place in a court where the remaining contestants (rarely numbering more than 5) will be issued vehicles with a rice paper target board and waterguns. All of Takesi's guards will be playing against the remaining contestants hence outnumbering them by 3 to 1. Oh, and the guards have longer range waterguns and smaller target boards. It also seems to me that their target boards are stretched rubber instead of rice paper.

But one day, during a BBC Two special on Asian movies about 4 years ago I caught this really wonderful albeit weirdly violent movie called Hana-bi which I later learned that it meant Fireworks. The thing I remembered the most was this painting of a snowscape at night. Everything in the painting was made up of Kanji characters representing the element being painted eg. the snow was made up of several Kanji characters for snow in varying sizes and orientation. The paintings in the movie are really drawn by Takeshi himself.

So when Brother was shown here I watched it. And when Zaitochi was shown here I watched it as well. But they were all so different from Hana-bi. So now I am wondering if I should watch Takeshis.

Ok, I have nothing to blog so this is crap. And computer tan is a patented phrase used exclusively by yours sincerely. It refers to the pale whiteness displayed by workers sitting in front of their computers for more than 7 hours a day.