I Just Didn’t Do It, Koji Yakusho, Masayuki Suo, and the Oscars

Wednesday, September 19, 2007


According to reports from Variety Asia, the Japanese movie I Just Didn’t Do It, by writer/director Masayuki Suo of Shall We Dance fame (the original) has just been selected as Japan’s official entry into the Oscars for foreign language film.

The movie which stars Ryo Kase(Letters from Iwo Jima) and Koji Yakusho (Babel, Memoirs of a Geisha, Shall We Dance) takes a critical look at the Japanese legal system through the story of a falsely accused man.

From the The 45th New York Film Festival description:

Masayuki Suo, the director of Shall We Dance, trades sweetness for a tart taste of Kafka in his new film, with a dash of Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man. Falsely accused of groping a schoolgirl on a jammed train, Teppei (Ryo Kase, from Letters From Iwo Jima) is advised to plead guilty, pay a small fine, and get on with his life. But he maintains his innocence and won’t be persuaded to compromise. Suo’s follow-up to his 1996 smash hit begins as a criminal justice procedural and develops into an engrossing study (and damning indictment) of a flawed justice system, in which the presumption of innocence is basically non-existent.

A trailer from YouTube: