Chi to hone (2004)

User Rating:

7.1/10   

Director:

Yoichi Sai

Writers:

Sogil Yan (novel)
Yoichi Sai (screenplay) ...

Release Date:

6 November 2004 (Japan)

Genre:

Drama

Plot:

In 1923, the Korean teenager Kim Shun-Pei moves from Cheju Island, in South Korea, to Osaka, in Japan...

Plot Keywords:

Multiple Time Frames | 1980s | 1950s | Based On Novel

Awards:

18 wins & 8 nominations

Cast

Takeshi Kitano	...	Joon-pyong Kim
Hirofumi Arai	...	Masao Kim
Tomoko Tabata	...	Hanako Kim
Jô Odagiri	...	Takeshi Park
Kyoka Suzuki	...	Yong-hee Lee
Yutaka Matsushige	...	Nobuyoshi Ko
Mari Hamada	...	Sadako Toritani
Yûko Nakamura	...	Kiyoko Yamanashi
Kazuki Kitamura	...	Yoshio Motoyama
Shuuji Kashiwabara	...	San-myung Jang
Susumu Terajima	...	Hee-bom Park
Atsushi Ito	...	Yong-il / Young Joon-pyong
Miako Tadano	...	Chun-mi Kim
Mami Nakamura	...	Sanae Otani
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Jae Baxley	...	Fight Spectator
Taigi Kobayashi
Jun Kunimura	...	Yong-sang Jo
Naoyuki Morita	...	Young Masao
Takashi Nishina	...	Yong-su Kim
Kôzô Satô	...	Tae-su Kim
Sansei Shiomi	...	Sung-ki Kim

Also Known As:

Blood and Bones (International: English title)

Runtime:

Japan:140 min

Country:

Japan

Language:

Korean | Japanese

Color:

Color

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital

Certification:

Hong Kong:III | Malaysia:(Banned) | Australia:R | Germany:16 | New Zealand:R18 | Japan:R-15 | South Korea:18 | Singapore:R21

Company:

Artist Film

Trivia:

The title comes from a Korean song: "I got the bone from my father, and the flesh from my mother...".

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Kantoku · Banzai! (2007)

A violent man wreaks havoc with family and neighbors in Osaka's post-war Korean-Japanese community

This movie represents the first leading role Beat Takeshi has taken in more than a decade in a movie he didn't direct. The advance reviews of his performance were enthusiastic, and his powerful depiction of the violent and controlling Kim Shunpei more than lives up to the notices. Still, the film itself is a flawed creation; unable to pack all of the critical backstory of the original best-selling book even into a 140-minute film, the director settles for presenting a series of scenes that cycle repeatedly between set-up, violent outburst, and aftermath , with little connecting tissue and almost no effort to explain how or why the main character became the dangerous 'monster' he is. With leaps of years and even decades between scenes, it's clear that many of the book's defining incidents failed to make the screenplay, and while the lead and supporting performances are almost uniformly fine, I left the theater exhausted from the violence but feeling nothing for the victims--Kim's family, neighbors and employees--of it. (It is also probable that foreign audiences, not familiar with the cultural, political, and social issues surrounding the ethnic Korean community in Japan, will have trouble appreciating the crucial nuances of language and expression, most of which are unlikely to survive the subtitling process).