Megastar Kamenashi caused a stir recently when he greeted fans at the film's premiere at a festival in Italy along with Director Satoshi Miki (above)Director Satoshi Miki’s new comedy
“Ore Ore (It’s Me, it’s Me)” is more on the cultish than the commercial end of the scale, with its head-scratcher of a story about a first-time scammer who starts encountering various versions of himself in a bizarre new world: karmic payback for impersonating a stranger via a stolen cellphone to the man’s own mother.
Miki admitted as much to me when we met at the
Udine Far East Film Festival in Udine, Italy, where “It’s Me, it’s Me” had its world premiere on April 19. Nervously puffing a cigarette at the welcoming dinner, held at a restaurant next to Udine’s historic hilltop castle, he thanked me for recommending his “hard to understand” film to the festival as a program advisor. “(Starring actor Kazuya)
Kamenashi is the reason it’s getting all this attention,” he added, referring to the media uproar at home when the film’s selection for an opening-night slot was announced.
Not that Miki was a nonentity, even in this small Northern Italian city. With his long hair, scraggly beard, dark glasses and ball cap, he was easy to pick out in a crowd. More importantly, his films had been the subject of a special section we screened, with Miki present, at the festival’s 2008 edition and his face was still familiar to many local fans.
One's a crowd: Kazuya Kamenashi plays a character whose duplicity leads to triplicity in Ore Ore (It's Me, It's Me), as he splits into three different versions of himself following a scam.But he was also only telling the truth: By a serendipitous set of circumstances that would be tedious to detail, the film’s star, Kamenashi, flew from Paris to grace us with his presence for 24 hours, a presence that drew fans from as far away as Hong Kong and a TV news crew from Japan. For them, he was more than an actor playing 33 roles in a quirky comedy: He was the most popular member of one of the biggest boy bands in Japan,
Kat-tun, as a well as the star of many a hit TV drama and the films made as spin-offs from them.
This was similar to having Justin Timberlake show up at a funky little film festival in Sendai, with one big difference: Whatever walls of security surround an American celebrity such as boy-band singer turned film star Timberlake, he does not live in the sort of protective, controlling bubble that formed around Kamenashi while he was a young teenager, courtesy of Johnny & Associates, the almighty (in Japan) talent agency that manufactures male pop idols the way Toyota does cars.
At the prescreening dinner and after, however, that bubble consisted of an anxious young male minder from Johnny’s, no doubt aware that enforcing the agency’s media rules in unruly Italy would be impossible, and a hairdresser/makeup artist who, save for flouncing a Kamenashi curl or two, stayed discretely in the background.
That is, half a world away from the country that best knows and rather suffocatingly loves him, Kamenashi was finally off the leash — and enjoying the sensation. He greeted his hosts, beginning with festival director Sabrina Baracetti, with a word or two of Italian (“Buongiorno“), a smattering of English and a generous amount of unforced charm.
( Read more...Collapse )ORE ORE Movie Presscon, KAT-TUN as Surprise GuestsLast May 14th, KAT-TUN‘s Kamenashi Kazuya attended the special preview of his upcoming movie “Ore Ore” together with director Satoshi Miki and co-stars Kase Ryo and Uchida Yuki.The movie is unique with Kamenashi playing 33 roles; playing 33 roles has been a challenge throughout the filming that Kamenashi experienced a state called “runner’s high”, which in his case will be called- “actor’s high”
. “I saw Kamenashi baking a rice cake in the dressing room and he was amusing, I think that the movie has also challenged his mental state,” Kase Ryo joked.
In addition, KAT-TUN also made a surprise appearance to sing the movie’s theme song,
“FACE to Face“. 500 fans in the venue shed tears and scream with joy upon getting up-close with KAT-TUN, “I hope that you’ll enjoy the theme song as much as you will enjoy the movie,” Tanaka Koki said to the audience.
source:
JAPAN TIMES, MIKU via
Jnewseng,
YTI don't know how much mainstream can a Miki Satoshi film go, but J-storm is trying so I hope this movie does decent at the box office
