A blueprint for total disaster

A fatal hard-drive crash (signaled by the sound of the computer going whack-whack-whack instead of the usual varoom) is one of those complacency-shattering events that, like getting a tax-audit notice or bad biopsy report, causes one to reflect on the fragility of existence -- or collapse into a quivering heap of panic. In my case, it also forced me to see again a movie that I'd written about weeks ago -- usually the equivalent of going back to a party to retrieve a bag after already saying one's goodbyes.

I'd first seen Koki Mitani's new comedy "Minna no Ie (Everybody's House)" at a press screening, a venue about as friendly to the genre as a tax office or hospital waiting room. I heard a few scattered chuckles and chortles at the story of a mild-mannered couple building their dream house and falling into a nightmare as the Titanic-size egos of their designer and builder collide, but I didn't get the impression the film was especially boffo. Then, again, if a comedy can get a rise from a press-screening audience -- usually jaded industry types for whom looking supremely bored is a matter of principle -- it can get a rise from any crowd outside of death row.

Seeing "Minna no Ie" again at a packed Ikebukuro theater, with an audience whose average age was 25, I was struck by how well it played, with the people around me laughing on the beat, as though they were being prompted by an invisible laugh-track recording engineer. I was also struck by how my own reaction to the film had changed: I was laughing along with them -- the sign of a simple critical mind, I suppose.