a5c7b9f00b In the year 2012 a comet approaches earth, threatening to end civilization when it impacts. On the streets of Japan, a single music store remains open, its proprietor insisting to his customers that the world is not coming to an end. He plays a forgotten song recorded by an obscure band 37 years ago, and insists that somehow, this song will save the world. A series of short stories spans the years from the recording of the song in 1975 to the modern day, and shows how–in roundabout fashion–the man in the music store is absolutely right. Sweet charming shaggy dog story about how a song saves the world from destruction. This is film that is rather impossible to describe simply except with the opening line of this review (to say more would either give too much away or require too much explanation). Beginning in the last five hours before a giant comet is set to hit earth and wipe everyone out, the film starts in a record shop (still open because &quot;its business hours&quot;) where a discussion of punk music leads to the album and song called A Fish Story. The film then spins out telling the story of the song, the group that created it and the sequence of events, of which it is but one part, that lead to the saving of the earth and to the men standing in the record store.<br/><br/>A frequently funny and smiling producing film this is a movie that will occasionally confuse you (you will wonder how it all ties together a mystery which remains until they reveal how it all ties together at the very end). It&#39;s a film with enough plot for five or six moviesthreads are spun out and dropped once we see the relevant bits. We could have probably followed any one of them to the conclusionwell but many are just stops in the greater scheme of things.<br/><br/>I liked this whimsical little film a great deal. My only real reservations come from my unhappiness with the over selling that the film got from the staff of Film Festival where I saw it. Many people went out of there way to tell everyone how great it was. Don&#39;t get me wrong it&#39;s a good movie, but its not quite the religious experience that at least one person inferred. Over selling or not I don&#39;t think I would have ever raved about the film. It&#39;s too rambling and too fragmented to ever be a full meal of a movie (I think some of the threads, especially the story of the band, would have been a better focus), it&#39;s really good after dinner piece of chocolate. This isn&#39;t to say that there is anything wrong with it, there isn&#39;t, its more something that you need to discover for yourself and not have handed to you with an impossible level of expectations. See the film if you get a chance, just don&#39;t worry about how it is, just know its worth your time. I came to this movie with high expectations since I had heard it loudly praised. Alas – Ozu, Kurosawa and Mizoguchi must be spinning in their graves. Each of them had more talent in his little finger than the entire staff and cast of this profoundly silly movie. We are supposed to be impressed by the way the 4 stories are twined together at the end – in fact, all we get is a handful of mini-films, each of them fairly ridiculous, cobbled together by a flimsy plot device. Everyone acts like a plank – they mightwell be reading from scripts sometimes. And the characters are cardboard cut-outs who appear to have stepped off the page of a cheap manga. Look at the exaggerated poses in the martial arts scene for instance. The old man in the record shop gloating because the human race has no chance of survival was especially irritating, and the moment when he got punched in the face was a rare highlight. This is sophistication? This is avant-garde? This is life-affirming humanist cinema? Lord save us all.
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