Sorry, this movie sucks

Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

I'm kind of befuddled by this film. Its about Sawako who ran away from home five years earlier and who returns home, boyfriend in tow to help out with her fathers clam factory when he takes ill. She is by all counts a failure having been abused by life with multiple jobs and boyfriends since she left home. Somewhere along the way she makes a decision and her life changes.Nominally a comedy I didn't really find this funny. I had been told it was a ruckus comedy, but its not. Yes it had laughs but its all kind of sad, with Sawako being a lower middle girl who is accepting of her miserable life, hence her strange boyfriend and his daughter.The film seems to be set in a world thats a couple of steps off from the real world. Its the sort of film that a sheltered teenager might write about growing up if all they knew of life was TV.For me the film took the better part of its running time to get going and once it did it didn't really go anywhere.Ultimately I think the problem is that film gives us a bunch of middling characters and makes a middling film about them. This would be okay if we didn't like the characters so much, but we do, probably more than the director, with the result being that I for one felt they deserved better.Not bad, but not really good either.

(See the previous review for a very good plot synopsis)I went to see this movie in Tokyo because Pia Magazine (the leading Japanese language entertainment magazine in Tokyo) had done theater exit polls for several movies and this one had scored best with 50+ respondents giving it an average of >90/100 points. Clearly Japanese audiences liked it.I liked it too, in general. There were parts that were quietly funny and pleasantly quirky. There were scenes that were very funny. The performance of the leading lady, however, was somewhat mixed. She was very convincing in some scenes, less convincing in others. Also, the overall pace of the movie was a little slow. It probably could have been edited down by about 10 minutes with beneficial effect.

After five years, five jobs, and five boyfriends, Sawako (Mitsushima Hikari) still has not fully arrived in Tokyo. Her favorite phrases are "can't be helped" and "working class is why." On breaks from her humiliating job at a toy company, Sawako listens to two co-workers discuss men, climate change, and the global financial crisis with the same hilarious apathy. They pursue Sawako everywhere, even chiding her about her middling boyfriend while she sits on the toilet.Kenichi (Endo Masashi), a toy designer at the toy company, has determined to live an "eco lifestyle." Sawako spends evenings with him and his daughter Kayoko (Ahira Kira), while he clumsily knits a sweater vest, baby blue like his own, intended for Sawako. Instead of a good-night kiss at her door, Kenichi asks Sawako for her empty cans to recycle.When his latest design – a plastic Ma on wheels – fails miserably in focus group, Kenichi decides he and Sawako should return to her home town and run her seriously ill father's clam-packing business. Considered an ungrateful daughter by the factory women, however, Sawako doesn't seem to stand a chance against their verbal abuse and general uncooperativeness.But in Sawako Decides (literal translation of the Japanese title is "Hello From the River Bed"), we learn the power of a "lower-middling woman" – chu no ge no on-na. After a long, painful recovery from the most comically literal rendition of a "painful memory" I've seen, Sawako decides that since she's nothing special, she'll just have to tough it out.With this newly defiant mediocrity, Sawako confronts the factory women and starts to re-invent the family business, beginning with a rewrite of the Kimura Shellfisheries workers' morning pep song into a surly "Internationale" for the modern worker.Director Ishii Yuya may have hit on the trope of the decade with his observation that "the image of small shellfish squirming in the riverbed also contains a hopeless gravity that was a perfect fit." He says his influences are musical even more than cinematic, and I believe him; Sawako Decides is wonderfully paced. And Mitsushima Hikari is an expressive, physically precise comic genius.