Comedy is big box office in Hollywood now, with such comic odes to male immaturity as "Knocked Up" and "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" grossing north of $100 million. In Japan, on the other hand, making the locals laugh in a movie theater is still the hardest job in the industry — and the returns for comedies accordingly tend to be modest.
It is also the genre that now produces some of the more imaginative and important Japanese films. Surely, you may think, I'm exaggerating? What's "important" about filming some funnyman's schtick?
But consider Satoshi Miki, a director of TV comedy and variety shows who began, in 2005, to make feature films. The early ones, starting with the psychiatrist-gone-wild comedy "In the Pool," were patchy affairs, with great comic bits and pieces but little narrative coherence.