One of my guilty pleasures is watching "Kaiun! Nandemo Kanteidan," which translates loosely as "Get Lucky! The 'Anything Goes' Appraisal Team" in English. It has been airing on TV Tokyo since 1994 and has encouraged countless folks to unearth family treasures for inspection by expert appraisers. Quite often, however, the experts unmask the "treasures" as cheap copies, to audience laughter and sheepish grins from the owners.
In "We Make Antiques!," Masaharu Take's smart, if self-indulgent, comedy about a pair of scammers in the local antiques game, we see that the appraisers, typically owlish gents in formal kimono, are not always on the up and up either. And the game's gamesters, from the makers of fakes to the dealers who hawk them, prey on the appraisers themselves.
Take and scriptwriter Shin Adachi, who also collaborated on the award-winning boxing drama "100 Yen Love" (2014), are hard-eyed realists in an industry full of pop-culture-fed fantasists — and their new film is thoroughly grounded in the actualities of the antiques trade. Despite the peppy jazz score, the silly comic chase sequences and other hackneyed attempts to enliven the proceedings for the masses, the film is, at heart, entertainment for elderly "Kaiun!" fans, who will get the occasional arcane references to Japanese history, literature and crafts.