ACF 608: Boys On the Run at Japan Society, Sunday, July 4th, 2010 at noon

Boys On the Run / Boizu on za ran
Directed by Daisuke Miura
Japan, 2010, 114 minutes, 35 mm, color
In Japanese with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Co-Presented with the New York Asian Film Festival
Showtime: Sunday, July 4th, 2010, at 12:00 noon

Life has put me a bit behind the eight ball in that I haven't been able to watch my screener DVDs as much ahead of time as I normally would. That's again the case with this film, so I don't have the time to put up a full review now.

Kazunobu Mineta, who plays Tanishi, looks a lot like Jerry Lewis did in his early solo films in the '50s and early 60's, and I'm old enough to remember seeing those films in the theater when they came out. Tanishi is in some ways a lot like a Lewis character, but darker and sicker.

The film might be termed an anti-romance. What I loved about it was that, aside from knowing that Tanishi would screw up, the film was unpredictable, which made it quite engrossing.

ACF Rating: 3 out of 4 stars, highly recommended, but be advised that parts of the film are pretty explicit sexually and other parts are rather gross.

Here's a brief description from the Japan Society website:
A movie that will capture the heart of the serial masturbator in all of us. Based on the manga by Kengo Hanazawa, Boys is all about Tanishi, a 29-year-old virgin who spends his leisure time pleasuring himself with porn and slaving away at a dead end job. He even manages to screw up an almost-relationship with a real live woman, who winds up leaving him for his hunkier colleague (Ryuhei Matsuda). The only answer? Fight! And fight Tanishi does, as much as he possibly can

Order tickets here.

For the complete JAPAN CUTS schedule, click here.

JAPAN CUTS screenings take place at Japan Society, 333 East 47th Street (between 1st and 2nd Avenues, New York City.