Fireworks!

Forget Tarantino, here's Takeshi

Hey, Quentin, here's something to wait until dark for: Takeshi Kitano's Fireworks (Hana-Bi), the spectacular Japanese cop tale at the Kendall Square, which is just totally a Tarantino kind of movie. It's so very cool and, let's say it from the top, so deeply, unapologetically violent.

In Fireworks it's a dread time to be a Tokyo policeman: you get mowed down by out-of-control yakuza in the line of duty. It's worse to be a yakuza smarting off to Fireworks' protagonist, Detective Nishi (Kitano), unless you enjoy a broken nose and a chopstick thrust through your eyeball. Before, Mike Hammer-style, he guns you down.

The bloodletting sequences are inevitably surprising, neatly choreographed, and swiftly over. Yet images linger, for the sequences are brilliantly edited and maximally effective, allowing us to feel the punch to the face, the hard kick to the ribs, giving us a glimpse of bullet holes democractically blasted throughout the anatomy.

But there's far more to Fireworks than the spasms of killing. Believe me when I tell you that there's poetry, tenderness, Eastern existentialist philosophy. There's a mesmerizing, tragic love story. It's no accident that Fireworks won the Golden Lion last September at the very intellectual Venice Film Festival. Or that the filmmaker/writer/star, Takeshi Kitano, has been declared, with his seventh feature, an important "auteur" of contemporary cinema.

Back home in Japan, Kitano, known as "Beat" Takeshi, is the most popular prime-time TV star, a ubiquitous comedian and talk-show host, Letterman and Seinfeld rolled into one. He's also a conceptual artist, a visual artist, a novelist. He's a major talker, a nonstop conversationalist. And he's written 55 books!

It's wonderfully curious to realize how different from his public persona is the cop Kitano assigns himself to play in Fireworks. Detective Nishi, when not on a rampage, is the most private of men. He virtually never talks in three-quarters of the scenes in Fireworks. He mumbles once in a while, he offers an occasional wan smile. He's a small, compact man with the tired, hardened face of an Asian Charles Bronson. He's faced tragedy: his best cop friend is paralyzed from having been shot; another cop was killed in front of him; his daughter has died before the movie begins; his wife is mute and depressed in a hospital, possibly dying of leukemia.

Oh, Nishi loves his wife! The most poignant scenes in Fireworks come when he takes her off in a van for obviously her last trip. They camp beneath Mount Fuji, they fish, they play guessing games. They pick flowers. It's all so simple, what they have and are about to lose. The secret of life?

Filmmaker Nishi makes it seem so -- and take note of the amateur paintings, which, looking like sentimental Keane variants on Seurat, cover the Fireworks screen for minutes at a time. What's it all about? In 1994 Kitano was almost killed in a motor-scooter accident that paralyzed part of his face. Although he soon returned to his madly workaholic media schedule, surely part of him saw the need for a slower, more contemplative, aesthetic, "connected" existence. He himself painted those pretty flowers and animals that spring up in Fireworks between the homicides.

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Women making independent films, women making short films: a double ghetto? The problem is addressed by a celebratory, one-of-a-kind "Women in Shorts" two-day festival at Brandeis University this weekend, March 21 and 22. The festival, organized by Brandeis's Women's Studies Program (736-3033), is open to the public at $5 a day, and it seems a terrific event. Among the highly regarded speakers are critics Patricia Mellencamp and Kathi Maio, filmmakers Barbara Hammer and Ayoka Chinzira, video artist Joan Braderman, and, perhaps a first, Belgium's acclaimed Chantal Akerman speaking solely about her short works, and showing "J'ai faim, j'ai froid" (1984) and "Saute ma ville" (1968).

On March 21, the festival opens with an all-time all-star selection of some of the greatest short films by women ever made, including Maya Deren's 1943 classic "Meshes of the Afternoon" and Jane Campion's precocious 1982 Australian film-school duo, "Peel" and "Passionless Moments."

On March 22, lots of contemporary films and videos will be screened. Among those I especially recommend are Ellie Lee's "Repetition Compulsion" (1997), a chilling look at the sexually tormented lives of women in Boston shelters told as a "film noir" animated comic book; Gail Noonan's "Your Name Is Cellulite" (1995), a hilarious, irreverent animation of a woman trying to feminize her big-assed, wonderfully out-of-control body; Barbara Hammer's "Vital Signs" (1992), the filmmaker dancing about, gallows-humor style, with a skeleton; and Irena Fayngold's "Getting to Homebase: The All American Pastime" (1996), a nigh-perfect conceptual video, one arresting 11-minute shot of the videomaker's hands, as she draws charts about her high-school sex life and holds up pictures of the boys in and out of her adolescence. For the last, there's Fayngold's monologue, too, poignant, humorous, and teasingly erotic.