Nicholas Cage is really an Oscar Winner?!?!?

We've only been here a week, but we're already in love with all of the corny commercials that air in Japan. The best are when you get an A-list celebrity selling something goofy. They think that no one will ever see them, so they do really bizarre stuff and collect huge paychecks for it because they're such big stars here. Cameron Diaz does poster spots for a cell phone called Soft Bank. Soft Bank, really... what does that have to do with cell phones? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that cell minutes here are charged in 9-second increments... 6 yen for 9 seconds; that's roughly 30 cents per minute. Maybe the cost just rips you bank account apart, so they call it "Soft" as in "flimsy bank account." Anywhoooo... Orlando Bloom does a really funky TV spot for a hair gel. The whole commercial looks like a car chase that happens at night and has absolutely nothing to do with hair gel at any point. Anne Hatheway, Natalie Portman, Charlize Theron, and Liv Tyler all do TV spots for a shampoo called LUX. But the best commercials by far are Nichols Cage's. He does pachinko ads (pachinko is like a sort of gambling akin to slot machines) where he's just talking to the camera about something weird and then ties it into pachinko somehow. He does like four or five. Here is the url to one of them that I got off the web here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6c4ALaUA60cIt's soooooo weird. I can't believe that he's an Oscar winner.
Oh, here's one for Joan: