Speaking of Tatsuya Fujiwara [see below] it was announced this past weekend that his costar from the Death Note films, Kenichi Matsuyama, will be in a supporting role in the upcoming manga adaptation Kaiji. We're pretty outspoken about our admiration for Kenichi these days and Tatsuya kind of lost me after Battle Royale 2 but the Death Note films were so much fun I would give him the benefit of the doubt. Not that a film about gambling can even be compared with a thriller about death gods and their note books.
Based on Nobuyuki Fukumoto's manga "Tobaku Mokushiroku Kaiji" about a gambler named Kaiji (Fujiwara) stuck in a dangerous game trying to clear an enormous debt. Kaiji Ito moves to Japan after graduating from high school. Unable to find a job and frustrated with society at large, Kaiji spends his days gambling, vandalizing cars, and drinking booze. Two years later and his life no better, a debt collector named Endo arrives to collect money. The debt collector then offers two choices to Kaiji: spend 10 year paying off your loan or board a gambling boat for one night to repay your debt & possibly make a whole lot more. Meanwhile, the unscrupulous Endo is actually conning Kaiji, believing he won't come back from voyage. Kaiji is then up for the night of his life. Matsuyama plays Kaiji's colleague Sahara, who shares a similar fate. Tokyograph and AsianMediaWiki
This marks the first time the two young have shared screen time together since the Death Note films, wildly popular not only in Japan but around the world, and I bet the producers are looking at this as sure fire advertising gold. How much screen time they share remains to be seen but Kenichi is nowhere to be seen in the teaser trailer. The film opens in Japan on October 10th.
"Not that a film about gambling can even be compared with a thriller about death gods and their note books."
I've only seen the TV animations of both series (and some bits of the original comic for Death Note) but they're the most similar things to each other that I know of: take away the different illustrative styles by making them live action and the supernatural and more conclusive, serial nature of Death Note are the only differences between them. It may be that the animated Kaiji was intentionally made to be Death Note-like (more likely, in my reckoning, is that it was made due to the popularity of Death Note and producers noticing the similarity of this new craze to the long-running Kaiji) and judging by the casting of this live-action film, it's getting made for much the same reason – but with a gold tinge to separate it from from Death Note's steely grey. (^_-) (I actually quite like how colour has been used to contrast the golden splendour of the interior of Espoir with the Death Note-like steeliness of the mines, though one interesting contrast does not essentially an interesting feature film make.)
But more importantly, Fujiwara Tatsuya's nose isn't nearly long and pointy enough for him to be playing Kaiji. Where are the prosthetics?