![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.asianinny.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/07\/POTECHI-SLIDER.jpg\" "\\"POTECHI-SLIDER\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nNo one makes movies like Yoshihiro Nakamura. Whether it\u2019s the exhilarating Fish Story, about a punk rock single that saves the world, the complex conspiracy thriller, Golden Slumbers, or the NYAFF 2011 Audience Award winner, A Boy and his Samurai, his movies are like Rubik\u2019s Cubes whose solutions, as all the pieces snap into place, not only deliver an intellectual orgasm but usually reduce the audience to helpless tears. We\u2019re closing the NYAFF 2012 with his latest movie, POTECHI (CHIPS), about petty thieves, potato chips, and baseball stars. A mere hour and eight minutes long, the reviewer for The Japan Times says that even though it\u2019s \u201csmaller in scope and less showy in effect, its climactic epiphany left me in tears. I won\u2019t spoil it by saying why, just that this crazy world made more sense as the credits rolled.\u201d<\/p>\n
Based on a story by Kotaro Isaka, who also wrote Fish Story and Golden Slumbers, POTECHI (CHIPS) begins with two men sitting in the park. They look like they\u2019re whiling away another lazy afternoon, until it dawns on the audience that they\u2019re professional thieves. The younger of the two, Tadashi (Gaku Hamada from Fish Story) is trying to enlist the more seasoned veteran (played by Nao Omori) in his next job. Tadashi is obsessed with Ozaki, a pro baseball player who bats for the Sendai Kings and whose career is hitting the skids. These two things seem entirely unrelated, but over the course of the next hour, potato chips, baseball, high school memories, stalkers, and the theory of relativity will all smash together like electrons in a particle accelerator, and the Big Bang that results is the crack of a bat connecting with a ball, as Director Nakamura delivers another perfect home run.<\/p>\n
The key to this film is that it\u2019s set in Sendai, which was the epicenter of the 2011 earthquake that devastated the city, destroyed its port, and left hundreds of people dead. Nakamura\u2019s film is an attempt to bandage this wound. It\u2019s his way of reminding us that no matter what happens, we can\u2019t fall too far. It may feel lonely sometimes, like we\u2019re each isolated on a trapeze in the dark, working without a net. But when we lose our grip \u2013 there will always be someone to catch us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Japan Society Sunday, July 15 @ 8pm<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stay-connected-to-the-latest-local-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.asianinny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.asianinny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.asianinny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.asianinny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.asianinny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19623"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.asianinny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19623\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19627,"href":"http:\/\/www.asianinny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19623\/revisions\/19627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.asianinny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.asianinny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.asianinny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}