Rinko Kikuchi cut from Babel in China
The strangest, most fascinating, complicated part of the recent movie Babel was Rinko Kikuchi’s scenes, where she portrayed a mentally distraught deaf-mute obsessed with finding someone in the world to love her. However, since her part involved occasional nudity, they cut a good five minutes from Alejandro González Iñárritu’s movie:
This reporter observed that apart from cutting out all of the scenes where Rinko Kikuchi’s character is naked, the film also cut a scene at the beginning showing a Morrocan kid masturbating, and one in which Gael García Bernal tears the head off a chicken. After watching the film, this reporter felt that the excised content basically had no effect on a normal viewing experience.
Of course, the reporter is simply reporting on national interests in China, and being Chinese of course is happy to have a Japanese woman’s body dropped from the movie.
If you’ve seen the movie I’m sure you will agree that the scenes where she throws herself towards an older man, tortured by her life without sound or speech to find some other intimate sensation, tangled in the investigators of her mother’s murder are the most passionately moving.
Utada Hikaru Divorced
Utada Hikaru just got divorced. She writes about it (in translation by Hikki):
Yesterday, on March 2nd, I, Utada Hikaru, and Kiriya Kazuaki, officially divorced.
To all the people who have supported us until now, we would like to thank you very much. Our apologies for surprising you with the short notice. We believe that both of us have learned so much and grown up with the 4-year and a half marriage. While we mutually keep changing, a perception gap on the direction of the future and concept of marriage has gradually emerged between us. The lack of communication in our life, passing each other while both are working internationally, is one big reason as well.
“Though divorce is a pity, it was good that we have met each other” - that is what we talked. As an creator and a dear friend, we hope we can continue watching the growth of each other. I am looking forward to following Kiriya-kun’s career in the future.
March 3rd 2007 Utada Hikaru
It’s a pretty mild divorce–probably the result of her growing musical ambition and her husband’s divergent movie career. It’s hard to stay together when you’re not in the same business.
Is She Real?
Nope, she’s a 3D computer model. Soon games and computers will be scary and lifelike and we’ll all freak out all the time and actors will no longer be needed once scanned… eek!