ryuganji: film news from japan

As Jason Gray has mentioned a few times over on his blog, production and distribution company Stylejam have been enjoying a bit of a purple patch this year with such commercially and critically successful indies as Miki Satoshi’s “Tenten” (Adrift in Tokyo) and Aoyama Shinji’s “Sad Vacation”. Next up is comedy “Fine, Totally Fine” (Zenzen Daijobu) with newly minted international actress Kimura Yoshino, Okada Yoshinori from the “Kisarazu Cat’s Eye” series, and the inimitable Arakawa Yoshiyoshi (real name: Arakawa Yoshitomo), Matsuo Suzuki protege and master of the perpetually gormless expression. It’s written and directed by Fujita Yosuke, another product of Matsuo’s “Otona Keikaku” theatre troupe who has created opening videos and inserts for the group’s stage productions since their inception. This will be his feature film debut, but he has already written and directed a movie called “Gurupu Damashii no Denki Mamushi” for the Otona Keikaku offshoot sketch group and rock band Group Damashii, who are led by “Maiko Haaaan!!!” writer Kudo Kankuro and star Abe Sadao. Incidentally, one of the assistant directors on that film was Iguchi Noboru, whose “Machine Girl” has been getting a lot of coverage over at Twitch.

Speaking of Twitch, Logboy has introduced “Fine, Totally Fine” there already, but I was inspired to bring it up here by this blog entry about some unsettling likenesses of Arakawa (pictured above) created for “Fine, Totally Fine” by figure sculptor and modeller Sagae Hiroshi, whose work has appeared in numerous films including Tsukamoto Shinya’s “Tokyo Fist” and “Gemini”, Ishii Teruo’s “Jigoku”, and the Godzilla and Gamera series. The props are currently on display at Cine Quinto in Shibuya, and you can see more of Sagae’s work via the “Sagae’s figure gallery” links here.