New Japanese film reviews appear every last Friday of the month.

Tokyo Tower **

This is really TV fare served up as a feature film, a perfect rebuttal of Junichi Ishida's famous line, "Infidelity is culture." Rich people in fashionable careers lounge around in swanky bars, hotels and restaurants, every second shot a glam interior lensed through a window - with rain cascading down the pane. Every third shot is of Tokyo Tower, at night, under snow, or glimpsed through cherry blossoms. Very arty, in a trendy drama way. The story, based on a book by Kaori Ekuni, is pure fluff: a married 40-year-old woman Hitomi Kuroki plays with sensitive toy-boy Junichi Okada, while pimply youth Jun Matsumoto beds bored housewife Shinobu Terashima. The affairs are extremely modern: hectic, fleeting, and shallow. Both youths and women seem more concerned about their carefully moussed hairstyle (they all wear the same diagonal bangs and wispy tendrils) than with each other. The trite nonsense drags on and on until the veteran actresses start exercising their acting muscles (leaving the glamour boys in tears), the awesome Kimiko Yo makes a welcome reappearance, and in a desperate last attempt at entertainment, Shinobu dances some electrifying flamenco.

Kumo no Muko, Yakusoku no Basho **

A new independent animated feature written and directed by Makoto Shinkai (who did "Hoshi no Koe"). A romantic sci-fi drama set in a parallel world, where Japan is a divided nation (governed by the US and the Union), and a needle-like tower pierces the clouds in Hokkaido. Shinkai provides a cool combination of 2D characters on almost hyper-realist backgrounds, but is more interested in adding intricate special effects to the settings (his favorites are refracted light, reflections and cigarette smoke). This may be a function of the low budget - in too many scenes, the only thing "animated" is a wisp of smoke. The mysterious story concerns three Aomori school-kids, Sayuri, Hiroki and Takuya, who enjoy one blissful summer and then grow apart. The boys take jobs in military research, but are plagued by dreams of a lonely Sayuri in a deserted world. They later discover Sayuri has narcolepsy! Worse, she's held in a military hospital, because if she wakes up, she'll unbalance the parallel world and destroy everything! She's a sleeping time bomb! Totally wack concept, exquisitely rendered.

Riyuu ***

Miyuki Miyabe's novel "The Motive" was supposed to be unfilmable, until veteran director Nobuhiko Obayashi decided to have a crack at it with this worthy, unwieldy effort. At over two and a half hours, this is murder mystery as laborious gumshoe investigation. Four people have been murdered in a high-rise Arakawa apartment, only none of them lived there - and none of them are related. With a fly-on-the-wall, faux-documentary style, Obayashi sets about interviewing everyone involved, cops, witnesses, suspects, neighbors, some shot straight to camera, in an effort to find the motive behind the baffling crime. On they way, over 100 well-known TV actors, led by Ittoku Kishibe, Akira Emoto, Renji Ishibashi, Aoi Miyazaki, ad infinitum, portray a wide cross-section of Tokyo society. The movie turns into a potted history of post-bubble Tokyo, and rather than looking for clues in the murder mystery (it's hard enough to keep track of all the protagonists) one is forced to simply sit back and meet the neighbors, and the neighbors' friends and business partners. A long-term sociology experiment disguised as a whodunit.

Kumain Kanaba? ***

An independent film by Hideo Nambu, this one takes its title for the Tagalog for "Have you eaten yet?" It starts like a Suo-style comedy, with struggling, 50-something rice farmer Yasuo Daiichi desperately chasing every slight chance of bagging a wife. When yet another "go-con" (dating party) fails, Daichi goes straight to a Philippine pub and marries hostess Ruby Moreno, visits her parents, and suddenly ends up cheated, divorced, penniless and homeless in a Manila shantytown. Daiichi does what any Japanese man would: he starts working for the Yakuza pimping young Filipina dancers to Japanese. Things go well for a while, until Daichi falls in love with a regal young waitress Alice Dixson and her rice-farming family - who resurrect all of his quasi-religious love of the soil and agriculture. Nambu keeps the tempo rollicking along, Bara Komatsu's cinematography is a delight, the strong cast of Japanese and Filipino actors fleshes out the roles nicely, and the unpredictable storyline and surprising humor hold the attention almost to the end. If only the last quarter didn't turn into a born-again peon to the righteous rice farmer.

Realism No Yado (DVD) ****

Director Nobuhiro Yamashita has been compared to Jim Jarmusch, the American master of minimalist comedy. This film, based on a manga by Yoshiharu Tsuge (whose other books "Nejishiki" and "Muno no Hito" have also been filmed), is very reminiscent of Jarmusch's "Stranger than Paradise" in style, with its amiable trio of losers, sly camera jokes, fade-to-black as a punchline, deadpan humor, and wacky supporting characters. Hapless filmmakers Hiroshi Yamamoto and Keishi Nagatsuka arrive in the boondocks to meet an actor who doesn't show, then spend a few days losing all their money to a bunch of rude, cheating locals. After a night in a ryokan run by a boozy Pakistani, the two rubes move on to find a bra on the beach - and then meet its owner, as topless Machiko Ono comes running at them from the dunes. Yamamoto and Nagatsuka have a nice vaudeville thing going, and Yamashita provides punchlines to their minimalist, humdrum riffs by letting the camera drift away from them to reveal some kooky detail. It sounds arty and formalist, but the accumulative effect is dippy and charming. Yamashita knows what to do with a camera and a funny bone.