Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on April 2011

What is it about Japanese directors working in English? Does the high level of traditional nonverbal communication among Japanese people make for lousy actors and, by extension, an inability in directors to recognize good acting from bad? Because this happens time and time again. (I’m not talking about the separate “cute” problem here.) Some ambitious Japanese director will shove a pretentious, opaque script at a bunch of highly mediocre foreign actors and tell them that they’re actually in the movies. This isn’t much of a review, and I’m sorry about that, but this isn’t much of a movie.