Directors and producers who score big hits become big powers in the industry, ipso facto. They can consequently make films that would get their less successful brethren laughed out of a pitch meeting. A new case in point is "Kamisama no Puzzle (God's Puzzle)," an SF thriller by hit-making director Takashi Miike ("Crows") and producer Haruki Kadokawa ("Otokotachi no Yamato") that wrestles with — I am not making this up — the weightier questions of theoretical physics.
Distributor Toei, not wanting to commit box-office suicide, is not advertising the film as such. Instead they are playing up the presence of hot young stars Hayato Ichihara and Mitsuki Tanimura, while making its subject matter sound like good, crazy fun. ("Make a universe with rock and physics!" goes one line of ad copy.)
I'm a physics buff — I have a small shelf of books on popular physics and devour articles about string theory and multiverses. And, like most laymen who haven't done real physics since high school, I promptly forget 99 percent of what I read.