THE SHONEN MERIKENSACK Review

I feel a bit guilty saying this, but I almost didn't bother going to see The Shonen Merikensack. Kankuro Kudo's film has been promoted to within an inch of its life in Japan, to the point that I was already getting sick of it before it had even opened. My bad: this is one of the best comedies I've seen in the past few years, Japanese or otherwise. Comparisons with This is Spinal Tap are inevitable, but the movie holds its own even in such esteemed company.

Kanna (Aoi Miyazaki), a ditzy OL with a taste for cutesy nail art, is about to reach the end of her contract at a major record label when she stumbles across a web video of a live show by punk band The Shonen Merikensack. It's noisy, violent and virtually tuneless. That's punk, her boss tells her. What's punk? she asks. In barely any time, the video has become an internet sensation and the band has sold out a national tour - with Kanna in charge of managing everything. The only catch? The footage in question was actually 25 years old, and the band's members are now washed-up middle-aged geezers. Former bassist Akio (Koichi Sato) is a drunken layabout living in Tokyo, while his brother, guitarist Haruo (Yuuichi Kimura), now works at the family cow farm and still hasn't got over a 25-year-old feud with his sibling. Drummer Young (Hiroki Miyake) has to play standing up because he finds it painful to sit down, and - worst of all - singer Jimmy (Tomorowo Taguchi) has been largely confined to a wheelchair since the onstage accident that ended the band's career the first time around.

Over the course of some uproariously funny scenes (made all the funnier in light of such real-life atrocities as the recent Sex Pistols reformation), they try to rekindle their mojos and embark on a tour around the country in a van that Kanna has borrowed from her father's sushi shop. The band's gradual progress from atrocious to borderline awful is spliced with flashbacks of their history and vérité interviews with some of the key players along the way (most memorably Pierre Taki as their former manager, complete with broken nose).

It's frequently hilarious and (thankfully) never maudlin: any tendency towards sentimentality is crushed by a side-plot involving Kanna's boyfriend, Masaru (Ryo Katsuji), an aspiring singer-songwriter who pens romantic ballads of quite unspeakable awfulness. I suspect that some of the jokes will go over the heads of Western audiences: the biggest laugh at the screening I went to was saved for a lyrical pun that's basically impossible to translate, and the film is brimming with obscure pop culture references that even a lot of Japanese viewers won't get. Still, the majority of the punchlines will make sense to pretty much anyone (including - amazingly - a recurring fart gag that's actually well aimed), and they're anchored to a story that, for all its absurdities, has enough believable human drama in it to make you care.

I'd hesitate to call this a masterpiece, but mainstream Japanese cinema doesn't get much better.