The second of Takeshi Kitano’s “creative” trilogy, Glory to the Filmmaker looks at the problems of the writer-director in the 21st century Japanese film culture. As in Takeshis’, Kitano himself has a double persona, but this time it is not a person but a literal dummy.
The film opens with the dummy going through a medical exam, and the MRI, X-rays, and Ultrasound all show that he is completely empty.* A narrator then informs us that he foolishly swore never to make another yakuza movie, and now has to come up with some other ideas. This leads us into a quick survey of the state of Japanese film at present. He decides he wants to make a movie like Ozu but has to abandon it because, “Who wants to watch people drinking tea for 30 minutes?” He also correctly notes that no one could believe Kitano the actor as one of Ozu’s middle-class characters. He decides to do a romance movie about a man who has lost his memory and his girl friend, but the screenwriter forgot the ending. Then he tries a tear-jerker about a blind painter and his girlfriend, but this is too absurd to continue.
He refuses to make a Zatoichi sequel, trying out a ninja story instead. That too collapses in contradictions and absurdities, just as does his horror movie. He notices that nostalgia for the fifties and sixties is big at the box-office and decides he could do that, since he lived through the era as a child. The scenes that result are anything but nostalgic, wallowing in poverty, wife-beating, angry shop-keepers, fights over money, and children fighting, more like the way it actually was.
So the only thing left is a CGI extravaganza. This too goes off the rails, in a sequence so extended that we (and apparently Kitano as well) soon forget where it started, until an abrupt end-of-Japan sequence that leads to the final credits.
The early sequences are brief, but what becomes funniest is not the satire of the clichés but Kitano’s reaction to each failure. Each time a project fails, the dummy commits suicide – hanging himself, being thrown off a bridge, even trying hara-kiri. 
Once we enter the extended sequence, the deadpan comedy shifts to the “movie” itself. Because the end of the world story needs some women, he introduces two professionally cute women, a mother and daughter team who still both dress and act like children with a cute animal backpack and a purse with a goose puppet inside. They turn out to be dodging loan sharks, so they try faking car accidents for pay-offs leading them to a rich man’s car in which they mistake Kitano (or his dummy) for the rich son. They eventually decide to marry off the daughter, only to discover that they have the wrong man when taken to visit his family who turn out to be dirt poor farmers. She stays anyway and gives birth to a doll baby. This section leads Kitano into sight gags that fly all over the place. Because so many of the gags are inserted almost at random, as in his earlier Getting Any?, this section soon wears out its welcome. Some of the gags are trite, like the dojo sequence or the references to Terminator or The Matrix, and some just silly, like the presentation given by the rich man about his foundation. or the mad scientist and his robot.
In a way, this is like a Jacques Tati movie, since Kitano almost never speaks, but Kitano himself is not a very physical comedian. His typical shambling walk is far from the fluid flexibity of Tati’s gangly persona. He has the deadpan face of Buster Keaton but none of the nimbleness, not least because he is turning sixty but also because he just never did pratfalls. He can think of physical humor, but he gives it to other actors, or to his dummy. The use of a dummy is another layer of joking because physically the man and his double have about the same expression and the same physical dexterity throughout.
As a study of the travails and dreams of the writer/director, Kantoku-Banzai will never be mistaken for 8½. Even so, the failures of each of Kitano’s attempts give us a good survey of the state of Japanese film in the period. Though it is not possible, for me at least, to identify specific movies being parodied, we can easily identify the clichés of each genre and the absurdities that any thoughtful movie makers would have to navigate as they attempted to find some commercial success while maintaining their own personal sense of integrity. Particularly significant is his reminder that nostalgia ain’t what it used to be. (It is perhaps telling that his own autobiographical Asakusa Kid was adapted to the screen, directed by, and played by other people.) Ironically, the movie foretells Kitano’s future: He would make one more movie about a struggling artist, another box office failure, then return to the yakuza genre with the highly successful and excellent Outrage.
* The empty dummy patient is identified variously as Ozu, Kurosawa, and Fukasaku. They are an unexpected set of idols for Kitano, though he had of course appeared in Fukasaku’s last movie, Battle Royale, but there is little doubt that their spirit is missing in the early 21st century.
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