Drafthouse Films nabs Hitoshi Matsumoto’s “R100” Toronto hit

PanARMENIAN.Net - Drafthouse Films has picked up North American rights to Hitoshi Matsumoto’s R100, which had its world premiere at the Midnight Madness section of this month’s Toronto Film Festival, Deadline said.

The plan is for a VOD/digital and theatrical release next year. Its U.S. premiere came over the weekend at Fantastic Fest in Austin –the backyard of Drafthouse parent Alamo Drafthouse Cinema — where it got a strong reception.

The comedy centers on a lonely everyman who hires a boutique S&M agency that specialize in random acts of extreme public degradation. Needless to say a bizarre accident changes the terms of his contract and sends him into a spiral.

The deal was negotiated by Tim League and James Emanuel Shapiro on behalf of Drafthouse Films and Miyuki Takamatsu of Free Stone Productions on behalf for producers.

There's a definite genius at work in R100, the new surrealistic oddity from Japanese megastar Hitoshi Matsumoto. One half of the comedy duo Downtown, the tandem of stand-up comics who've been headlining popular variety shows in Japan since the 1980s, Matsumoto has been described by some as the country's version of Jerry Seinfeld, but bigger.

The comparison seems lightweight, though, once you've seen any of Matsumoto's films, namely the 2007 mockumentary Big Man Japan—about an average guy who sprouts up to a tall building's height and throws down against Godzilla-like monsters—and now R100, since, well, Seinfeld's sole movie from behind the camera (as a writer and producer) is Bee Movie. That 2007 animated flick for kids isn't in the same league as Matsumoto's latest, which, to simplify it, follows a nebbish, middle-aged furniture salesman whose decision to solicit an enigmatic S&M company called "Bondage" results in dominatrixes randomly interrupting his life, in public places, and humiliating him with physical violence and other ego-bashing.

…The further R100 gets into its cerebral, thinking man's absurdity, the more ambiguous and abstract the meta-narrative becomes. By having his movie-censors-within-the-movie demonstrating that they're just as bewildered as you, the viewer, are, Matsumoto makes it clear that he's both in on the jokes and in total control of them. The 100-year-old director seated inside the ratings board's theatre, his facial expression stern the entire time beforehand, closes the film with his very own "Black Hole Sun" grin. He, representative of Matsumoto, knows he's just blown everyone's minds, and you're right there laughing with him,” a review published at Complex Pop Culture said.