Koki Mitani is the reigning king of comedy in Japan, as the writer and sometimes director of a string of hit stage plays, TV series and three feature films that culminated in 2006 with "The Uchoten Hotel (Suite Dream)." This laugh-packed take-off on the 1932 Greta Garbo classic "Grand Hotel," based on an original script by Mitani, earned an astounding ¥6.06 billion at the box office.
As a consequence, Mitani is now in the rare position of being able to do nearly anything he wants in the movie line. He is also under pressure to surpass his own achievements (some of which is self-imposed). When he announced his fourth feature, "The Magic Hour," last summer — saying he wanted to make "a perfect comedy that will go down in history" and "make the audience laugh three times a minute" — I had a foreboding that he was about to commit what the French called a folie de grandeur. That is, an overblown disaster.
Fortunately, "The Magic Hour" is Mitani still doing what he does best — taking a clever premise to its comically logical (that is, absurd) conclusion with polish and craft, much of which he learned from a close study of Billy Wilder and other auteurs of the classic Hollywood comedy.