In yet another sign that 2008 is the new 1928, Hollywood, impressed by the massive first-weekend success of High School Musical 3, is rushing a number of music-based projects into production. Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing has a fascinating entry on a documentary called The Great Happiness Space: Tales of an Osaka Love Thief. I don’t know how I managed to make it this long completely unaware of this film, as it played about 100 festivals last year and was even nominated for a Gotham Award for Best Undistributed Film (it lost to Steve Barron’s Choking Man). Regardless: the film is about Japanese “host clubs”, which, as Xeni puts it, are home to “sharp-dressed, good-looking 20something guys who are paid to make women feel loved. No, not to perform sex acts, but to feel cared for.”
The fact that there’s a need for this kind of thing in contemporary Japan seems to be in line with a lot of issues explored in a documentary that I *have* seen, Mike Mills’ Does Your Soul Have a Cold? That film, which explores the relatively recent explosion of anti-depressant use in Japan, is essentially a verite examination of loneliness and sadness. Great Happiness seems to take a more stylized approach to describing similar problems.
As far as I can tell, Great Happiness is still without a distributor, but the entire film is available for viewing on Google Video. I’ve also embedded the trailer above.
We love artists when they’re tortured, to the point that they’ve become an archetype in cinema. 
