ryuganji: film news from japan

Japanese audiences will get their chance to see Asano Tadanobu’s take on Genghis Khan before most of the world when “Mongol” opens here on April 5th, in direct competition with J.J. Abramzilla’s “Cloverfield” and cutie du jour Kaho’s manga musical “Utatama”. Although Sergei Bodrov’s long-awaited biopic missed out on winning this year’s Oscar for best foreign language film, its nomination and its star’s heavily-reported trip to the award show with wife Chara brought about far greater media exposure and a much better chance of a decent box office run.

Coming back down to earth after his Hollywood adventure, Asano has just finished work on a follow-up to his directorial debut “Tori” with an instalment for the digital omnibus film “R246 Story“, a mixture of drama and documentary using the connecting motif of Route 246, a national highway that stretches from Tokyo and toxically past my place all the way to Shizuoka. Joining Asano behind the camera are an odd mix of participants: actors Nakamura Shido and Santamaria Yusuke, former MMA fighter and all-round renaissance man Sudo Genki, and pop rappers Verbal from M-Flo and Illmari from Rip Slyme. Naturally, the weirdness doesn’t end there.

Asano’s contribution is “224466″, a sci-fi fantasy where he plays an E.T. from a rock’n'roll planet who’s lost his crucial drum kit and is beginning to weaken. An old man named Torakichi (Kase Ryo) and a wee girl called Shidomi (Omori Ayane) come to his aid and try to track down the one person who knows where the drum kit is: Osho (Nagase Masatoshi). To get the info out of him, Shidomi has to engage in a guitar battle with a boy axe wizard… Arai Hirofumi and Toyohara Kosuke also appear and the script is by, who else, Aoyama Shinji.

Nakamura also dabbles in the fantastic and ridiculous for his “Jiroru: Densetsu no Yo-na-o-shi”. “Jiroru” mixes the name of the legendary folk hero Jirocho with that of rock god Yazawa Eikichi’s long-defunct greaser band Carol, to whom Nakamura pays homage to in this film, while the rest of title means something along the lines of “Legendary “Revolution”. Jirocho (Matoba Koji) returns to his own time after a journey to the present and calls on his underling Mori no Iwamatsu (Nakamura). He tells him that the youth of the future are idiots who have no idea that route 246 is connected to his hometown of Shimizu and are labouring under the misconception it’s a national highway. What’s more, they have no concept of duty, humanity, honour, or rock’n'roll. He orders Iwamatsu to take the Jirocho family Cadillac back to the future to put things right. Osugi Ren and Nakamura Yuri also feature, and “Honey and Clover” scribe Kawahara Masahiko provides the screenplay.

More alien antics abound in “Arifureta Kisho” (literally ‘A Commonplace Homecoming’) from Sudo, who handles directing, acting, and writing duties in conjunction with Fukihara Kota. A group of young men carrying out a traffic survey of UFO hotspot route 246 rally around Inoue (Sudo) when they learn he’s taken the job to search for a lost lover. His sketch and description of her is vague and nearly incomprehensible, but the others decide to do the best they can with it. Then Inoue suddenly announces he has to return to his family home, and says he’s giving up the search… Tsuda Kanji, Mashima Hidekazu and Hayashi Yudai also star.

Zainichi Korean MC Verbal takes a different tack with “Dead Noise”, a documentary on the future of Japanese hip-hop exploring ideas of Japanese culture and identity through a series of interviews with major figures in the game.

Meanwhile Ilmari, indisputably the world’s top Finnish-Japanese rapper, sticks with fiction in his “Club 246″. Juri (Ishida Takuya) is a shy, strictly average kid who can’t get his mind off Saki (Haru), a popular chick who inhabits the local hip-hop nightclubs. Making an effort to bust out of his shell, he ventures into a club for the first time in his life but is shocked to discover what awaits him.

Finally, Santamaria Yusuke sets himself up with Nagasaku Hiromi for his relationship drama “Bento Fufu” (literally ‘Packed Lunch Couple’). An unmarried couple whose comfortable life together has grown stale. Eating packed lunches together is their everyday routine, but the more accustomed to each other they become they less they communicate. As the man sits unable to break the silence, the woman’s frustration reaches boiling point.

“R246 Story” opens from late August. There’s some good pics from the production announcement and a still from Nakamura Shido’s Yaji-Kita-ish effort here.

Finally, staying with the rock theme, no self-respecting Asano acolyte needs me to tell them that his album “Cry and Laugh” is available from Amazon Japan. That cover owes more than a little to Soundgarden’s “Jesus Christ Pose” video if you ask me though. But you didn’t.