Yûya Ishii	...	(Director)
Tahi Saihate, Yûya Ishii	...	(Writer)
Mikako Ichikawa	...
Sôsuke Ikematsu	...
Shizuka Ishibashi	...
Paul Magsign	...
Ryûhei Matsuda	...
Takahiro Miura	...
Ryô Satô	...
Tetsuji Tanaka	...

Comments: This is a tough one to rate. It's kind of nauseating from a dialog point of view, but it's also kind of touching. In fact, it elevates itself by overcoming its nauseousness (in an almost 'oh no don't shoot ... hey great shot' kind of way). And the actors get kudos for not falling to the level of dialog they're given.

"Falling in love with someone is just killing them very softly"
"When you say 'I Love You' does your mouth taste like blood? People kill and die all the time in the name of love"
"It's boring (or stupid) when two people are in love. One of them could just all of a sudden die"
"We get married and there could be an earthquake the next day. What's the point"?

The film is based on a poem by a twenty-something. You know poetry. It's a boy-with-baggage meets girl-with-baggage who spar their way to getting together, film. It's done softly, though. No one raises their voice or gets too mean.

It's thoroughly saturated in young angst and ennui. But it's also cute. So I'm torn. I could watch it again, but I could never listen to it again. It is not a subtle film, but it has some wonderfully subtle moments. It took me a few tries to get through this because every time I felt like I had enough something cute would happen. A scene with eye-rolling dialog would be followed by a shot of a hand on a backpack or two pairs of shoes in the foyer.

I think the boy/girl leads and the few subordinate characters did a fine job, and I think foyer Director: Ishii shows he got the chops to make lemonade from lemons--or whatever.

The more I think about it the more I think this is just a sitenoise film, whatever that is. @ebo might like it because its quality is real, but I don't think many others would. There's really no point to it, unless you are a twenty-something who is genuinely distraught with life in an urban metropolis.

"Maybe it's enough for us to wake up each day and say 'Good Morning' and give thanks for our food. Maybe that's enough"

Summary: Newcomer Shizuka Ishibashi throws herself into the role of Mika, a nurse by day, a 'girlie bar' hostess by night, subject to feelings of anxiety and isolation, and unable to reach through a hard outer shell that stops her from expressing tenderness to anyone else. Sosuke Ikematsu, one of Japan's most important young actors, stars as Shinji, who struggles as a day-hire construction worker with a sense of impending doom, but who still tries to find the source of an unnamable hope he feels inside. The setting is Tokyo in 2017, where empty words, a sense of doom, and feelings of isolation co-exist with hope, trust, and love. In the sense of real life conjured up in these two people is a new kind of film: the densest kind of love story.