First look (and listen) at Shunji Iwai and Takeshi Kobayashi's "Bandage"

by Chris MaGee

Now that Shinya Tsukamoto's "Tetsuo The Bulletman" seems to be disappointing audiences at the Venice Film Festival (what a shame!) Japanese film fans have to look forward to yet another near highly anticipated film project to sate their movie dreams, that film project being the Shunji Iwai scripted, Takeshi Kobayashi directed music drama "Bandage". Rumours about this film had been floating around online for at least a couple of years with speculation that none other than Ryuhei Kitamura (Versus, Azumi) was going to be helming Iwai's screenplay about the struggles of a Japanese indie rock band during the 1990's, but in October of last year rumours became fact when it was reported that "Bandage" was moving forward without Kitamura in the director's chair. Instead it was revealed that longtime Iwai collaborator and the man who helped compose and compile the music for "All About Lily Chou-Chou", Takeshi Kobayashi would be holding the reins of the film. (Read our full "Bandage" coverage here. It'd been a while since anything had been heard from the "bandage" camp though, and that had me and a lot of other people wondering if the film had gone back into production limbo. Thankfully it hasn't. According to http://www.tokyograph.com/news/id-5236 the lead actor from "bandage" will be releasing music from teh film in advance of its January 16th, 2010 Japanese theatrical release.

Jin Akanishi, lead singer of Japanese band KAN-TUN will be starring in "Bandage" as the lead singer of a fictional Japanese band called LANDS (what's with all the upper case?) and he will be releasing a solo album under the name LANDS before the end of 2009. The first single from the album, titled "Bandage" of course, is already gearing up to hit Japanese airwaves and in the YouTube clip taken from Japanese TV (below) not only can you get a sample of the song, but some snippets of footage from the film itself. The song isn't much to write home about, so lets hope "Bandage" the film is a lot better.

Thanks to Baidu.com for the above image.