Koi wa ameagari no yô ni

Now, as much as I do enjoy Asian cinema, then I found "After the Rain" (aka "Koi wa ameagari no yô ni") to be somewhat of a swing and a miss from writer Riko Sakaguchi and director Akira Nagai.

Why is that? Well, because the movie was unfathomably slow-paced with very little of any entertainment happening throughout most of the movie. Sure, the movie was very well acted and the characters definitely were interesting, but boy the pacing of the movie was a killer.

In fact, it was so atrociously slow-paced and uneventful that I gave up 63 minutes into the ordeal. I just simply couldn't expose myself to any more of the dull storytelling.

And yes, the movie does deal with a very stigmatic and taboo topic, one that definitely could have made for a more interesting movie, had the script and storyline been more wholeheartedly constructed and written.

Nana Komatsu (playing Akira Tachibana) and Yô Ôizumi (playing Masami Kondo) definitely carried the movie phenomenally well with their individual performances and there was just a very unlikely chemistry between the two on the screen. However, if they had a proper storyline and script to work with then the result of the movie would have been much better.

This movie was a bitter pill for me to swallow, especially since I wanted to like it, given the performances by the two lead performers. But there simply wasn't enough happening in the movie to keep me interested.

As such, I am forced to rate "After the Rain" a less than mediocre four out of ten stars. And I also have to say that I am not going to ever be returning to finish watching the rest of the movie.