MOVIE REVIEW : ‘COMIC MAGAZINE’: CAUSTIC SATIRE OF MEDIA EXCESSES

Sean Penn ought to love the ironically titled “Comic Magazine” (Beverly Center Cineplex), a corrosive satire from Japan on the excesses of the media in its relentless hounding of newsworthy figures. Darkly amusing, hard-driving and deeply disturbing, “Comic Magazine” has the glittering, metallic brilliance of Tokyo at night and is yet another in a spate of recent Japanese movies that reveal the chaos lurking beneath traditional Japanese impassiveness.

It’s as timely as the downfall of Gary Hart, a “La Dolce Vita” brought up to date, but it has none of the seductive glamour of the Fellini film. There’s nothing sweet about the life of Kinameri (Yuya Uchida), a famous Tokyo television reporter who specializes in covering the most sensational stories of the moment. Kinameri will do anything to get the story. He will climb a telephone pole to peek into a celebrity’s window, endure a drink thrown in his face by an accused killer and even risk his life to cover a murder in progress.

At first Kinameri seems ambiguous in his stoicism and implacability, which invites us to judge for ourselves the man and what he does. You have to admit he’s a gutsy guy, a total professional. But just as you find his methods deplorable, you realize that “Comic Magazine” is posing the ancient chicken-or-the-egg riddle: Which came first, the public’s insatiable craving for the lurid, or those dedicated to exploiting it so profitably?

To their credit, director Yojiro Takita and Uchida, who wrote the script with Isao Takagi, don’t evade the question; they come down hard on media irresponsibility. Furthermore, they are never guilty of hypocritically exploiting what they indict.

“Comic Magazine” begins with a statement claiming that every major news event depicted actually happened in Japan in 1985.

You may remember, for example, the case of Kazuyoshi Miura, the Japanese businessman accused of murdering his wife in Los Angeles and also implicated in the death of his mistress. He plays himself in the movie. When Kinameri asks him whether he believes that the media have so hounded him that his basic human rights have been violated, Miura points out that that’s exactly what Kinameri is guilty of.

“But I’m in an extremely competitive profession,” Kinameri counters without apology. Kinameri’s job is leavened with the usual mindless pursuit of inanities and celebrities, such as the dozen or so teen-age girls who call themselves the Pussycat Club and sing their big hit, which includes this refrain: “Don’t take my school uniform off / Not here. Not now.”

Gradually, we discover that behind his blank expression, Kinameri is coming to loathe himself for what he does. In his imagination, Kinameri sees himself as a baseball pitcher, endlessly trying to prevent anyone from scoring a hit. But when his boss comes up to bat, it’s no go: Kinameri is turned down in his request to pursue a serious expose of fraudulent gold futures trading and is instead assigned to the gaudy night beat, covering sex clubs and porno film making, even taking a course in how to be a successful gigolo.

But the brewing gold futures scandal, so emblematic of a greedy and morally bankrupt society, becomes too big and brutal a story not to draw Kinameri into the thick of it.

“Comic Magazine” (Times-rated: Mature) brings to mind “A Face in the Crowd” as well as “La Dolce Vita” in its scope and bravura. In a very real sense, it has been made from the inside: The slight, unprepossessing Uchida is a veteran pop singer known as “The Granddaddy of Japanese Rock ‘n’ Roll” and “The Mick Jagger of Japan,” and “Comic Magazine” marks Takita and Takagi’s graduation from Japan’s soft-core porn film industry.

Early on a man at a bar remarks to Kinameri of his profession, “No one does it quite like the Japanese.” But the rest of the world seems to be catching up.