Takeshi Kobayashi gets his full cast for "Bandage"

by Chris MaGee

With the announcement at the end of October that Ryuhei Kitamura had relinquished the director's chair on the Shunji Iwai penned "Bandage" and that long time Iwai collaborator, music producer Takeshi Kobayashi (above), was going to step in it gave a lot of people hope that this story of the rise of a fictional rock band called Land was finally going to make it to the big screen.

Well, the momentum hasn't seemed to ebb on the project with the announcement yesterday of the full cast for Bandage. It's a mixed bag of actors (Kie Kitano, Kengo Kora, Yuki Shibamoto, Ayumi Ito, Hideyuki Kasahara) musicians (Nobuaki Kaneko of RIZE), and models (Anne), but here's hoping that the combination of Kobayashi and Iwai makes magic happen again. The two previously collaborated on Iwai's transcendent 2001 drama "All about Lily Chou-Chou".

No character details were announced, but the film is still quite a ways off with a theatrical release scheduled for 2010, but we'll keep on top of this as more details come out.

Thanks to Tokyograph for the story.