Thursday, May 08, 2008
Billboard for Miike's God's Puzzle
Ah, Toei. 2007 was their worst fiscal year in two decades. They're having a bit of a comeback with Partners: The Movie (Aibô Gekijô-ban - Zettai Zetsumei! 42.195km Tokyo Big City Marathon 『相棒 劇場版／絶体絶命！42.195km 東京ビッグシティマラソン』), which reached the 1 billion yen "hit" threshold (a standard which I think should be revised to 2 bil. in this day and age, at least for studio releases) in the five days since its May 1st bow.
Mathematically it's on track to outpace the studio's last big hit, Yamato, released at the end of 2005. Though that film had battleship-like staying power, remaining in the top 10 for 11 weeks and benefitting from a considerable older/senior citizen demographic that slowly emerged out from under their kotatsus to do what they did when they were young and see a movie at their local picture house.
In any case, the trend of sticking TV dramas on the photocopy machine and hitting "enlarge" to spit out a gekijô-ban is not going anywhere as long as returns are healthy for most releases (Partners: The Movie doing good, Sushi Ôji going bad before you could eat it). It's important that hits are spread around fairly evenly -- it's not really beneficial to the industry when one studio is doing so badly while another is doing well, so good for Toei.
Walking by the Shibuya Toei cinema tonight you could feel the positive vibes, with big hand-painted billboards for Partners and the above for Miike Takashi's upcoming God's Puzzle (Kamisama no Pazuru, 『神様のパズル』), complete with stick-out lettering.
I heard the subtitling for God's Puzzle (which was being done at the same time as I was working on Flavor of Happiness) was a nightmare with all the dialogue pertaining to physics, but it's sure to turn out well.
When I started writing this post about an hour ago there was a tremor in Chiba of magnitude 3 -- no problem. When I was finishing it off, there was an ocean floor quake of 6.7 off the coast of Ibaraki, resulting in a 5 on land. The city of Mito, where I was on set for Loft, was all shook up but luckily no major damage or injuries. It made its presence known in Tokyo, with my 4 foot cactus swaying away.
4 comments:
official site has two videos on it now... small miike and cast interviews and teaser / film footage.
nobody seems to have picked up on the apparent (and ironically funny) character taking-off tiki takeuchi's acting,
facial expressions, snarl and typical "looking over the glasses" pose...
Ichihara does the same type of gurning in 700 Days of Battle: Us vs. the Police. I think that's just his face.
Anyway, people are busy looking at Tanimura Mitsuki, I would've thought. Then again, she's only 17. Miike would make a good gravure photog.
i don't see the riki impersonation on those two trailers but i have seen some production footage on youtube where he looks like him.. it must just be a few scenes where he changes into that persona for some reason
Dear MR.Jason,
I'm an italian student who studies japanese at Ca'foscari University of Venice.I'm now writing my thesis and as subject I chose the translation of a japanese movie scriptfrom japanese to italian.And i chose Kamisama no pazuru.I tried many times to ask to the toei company a copy of the script for my work,but they never replied to me.I heard you did the english translation of the film.Maybe you can help me,maybe you own a copy of the script or you know a contact who can provide it.Right know i'm translating from the subtitles but the script is quite essential for my thesis.
I wasn't able to find a direct way to communicate with you,so please forgive me for having posted such a thing in your blog.I hope you read it from time to time.My e-mail address is elisa.gazzola@gmail.com
I'll wait for a reply.Thank you very much in advance
elisa
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