Saturday, February 10, 2018

Premiere screening event of new movie "Kenen"

The premiere screening event of new movie "Kenen" was held at Shibuya TOEI on 16 January which was attended by the director Yoshida Keisuke and cast members Kubota Masataka, Arai Hirofumi, Enoue Keiko and Kakei Miwako. The movie will be shown in cinemas from 10 February.

The story which is based on the themes of envy, jealousy and hatred between family members, features two pairs of siblings who are on bad terms with each other. Kubota plays the role of Kanayama Kazunari who is a good-looking, honest and serious salesman of a publishing company but his elder brother Takuji (Arai) is the exact opposite i.e. a troublemaker who doesn't give a damn about anything and is just out of prison. On the other hand, Enoue plays the elder sister Ikuno Yuria who takes care of the family printing factory business and is secretly in love with Kazunari while her sister Mako (Kakei) is pretty and works as a gravure idol while helping out at home but is not very smart.

Kubota commented that he had watched the director's last movie "Himeanole" which led him to feel that the silence in one's life can be actually that scary. Reflecting on his own relationship with his two elder brothers in real life, Kubota revealed that although they are on good terms now, they used to fight until they got injured and even went to the extent of throwing the game machine at one another but the positive thing that came out from this experience was his strong body. As for Arai, he commented that the script was very interesting and hoped that more audiences will support such movies or else it would be difficult for the industry to continue coming up with original stories in future.

The director related that how he came up with the story was due to his interest in listening to people talk about those who they are jealous of and dislike and how they gossip behind other people's backs. When the pent-up frustration finally gets released, he wanted to show how different it would be for men and women thus giving birth to this movie. He also praised Kubota and Arai for being the best actors in Japan.

Meanwhile, Kubota and Arai spoke of how different they are which is reflective of the brothers in the movie. Arai "complained" that they have no common interests at all other than their love for meat and he was stunned when he heard that Kubota doesn't play games, hardly reads manga and cannot drink alcohol. As this was the first time he encountered someone like this, he wasn't sure how to interact with Kubota initially even though they have the same attitude towards work.

When asked about their impressions of each other, Enoue said that Kakei looked exactly like how she appears on TV so she felt worried about how the latter behaves and yet was jealous of her at the same time. On the other hand, Kakei said that she was able to act as real sisters with Enoue and went all out during their quarreling scenes.

When asked about his ambition for the year, Kubota said that since this is his last year in his 20s, he would like to repay a debt of gratitude to his manager who has been supporting him all this while. As his manager hardly ever praises him, Kubota was very happy when the manager told him that this movie was the No.1 favourite among all the works which Kubota had appeared in so far. Arai then joked that he would probably be quite offended if his manager were to say something like that to him.

Sources: Natalie / Eiga.com / Oricon

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