Here’s one of those titles that sort of slipped through the cracks of web coverage last year that probably shouldn’t have. Thankfully the people at Japan Society have other ideas, and are going to screen Gummi, Chocolate, Pine at Japan Cuts on Thursday and Saturday. Click here for event details. The movie is based on the autobiography of Kenji Otsuki, vocalist of rock band Kinniku Shojotai. Takuya Ishida stars as a high school-aged Otsuki and Nao Omori plays him as an adult. But more importantly (to me at least) is the fact that Keralino Sandorovich—my personal favorite filmmaker that’s made 3 movies or less—wrote the screenplay and directed.
Sandorovich (better known as Kera) is sort of a jack of all trades in the Japanese entertainment industry. In the 80s he became a central figure in the Japanese new wave rock scene by forming the band Uchoten and acting as front man for almost a decade. He went on to establish theater troupe Nylon 100°C in 1993 which he still runs today. He occasionally writes for TV on the side and his material is always well-received, if not completely clamored for. His love of Monty Python has given him a unique mastery of the nonsense genre. This was probably best realized in the 2006 BS Fuji comedy A Delicious Way to Kill, which was one of the first movies I gushed about on this site—not to mention one of the only comedies you’ll ever see score a 4.5 star rating on Yahoo! Japan Movies. So yeah, he’s good. Japan knows it; the rest of us should too.
Subtitled trailer:
Tags: keralino sandorovich, masahiro komoto, mei kurokawa, nao omori, takuya ishida, tasuku emoto, yuta kanai
...i covered it. i still want to see it too.
Posted by logboy at 2:40am EDT on Thursday, July 10, 2008