White On Rice looks like a very funny movie. It stars Hiroshi Watanabe (he played a lieutenant in Letters from Iwo Jima—what a type-casting!) as Jimmy, a 40-year-old divorcee who moves in with his sister and shares a bunk bed with his 10-year-old nephew. He’s socially awkward, his coworkers think he’s strange and people recognize him from his past “acting” work in cheesy kung-fu B-movies. And if that wasn’t enough (a word Hollywood has never heard before), he has a crush on his brother-in-law’s twentysomething niece.
Hiroshi Watanabe in White On Rice, also known as The Brad Pareso Story: Caught In The Net. Of Life.
But as I was watching the trailer, somebody in our office shouted my name. That itself is nothing out of the ordinary; I spend 45 percent of the day watching videos on the Internet, 20 percent putting together the lunch order and 75 percent trying to do math to explain how I waste my time at work. But it was right when someone in the trailer shouts Jimmy’s name, so it sounded like I was in the movie. Like I was the white on rice, although I prefer brown rice (more carbohydrates! Also I don’t like white people).
This is not a good way to start the work week. I already had a roller coaster ride of emotion watching TV yesterday (the Jets and Giants won but The Office and House lost) and I was not prepared for this revelation—I could be Jimmy. I kind of am already. I’ll be 40 in a few years, and by then my nephew (WHOSE NAME IS JIMMY!!!) will be probably in a bunk bed. What if the wife I don’t have yet divorces me and I have to move in with him? I’m already a washed-up actor, appearing in such fine films as Mrs. Lein’s 1992 first grade class production of Peter Pan as Captain Hook Crew Member No. 7. God only knows what my coworkers think of me (thank God none of them read my column—I’ll never stop stealing your lunch money, suckers!). My life story White On Rice is already in theaters.
