Despite a dodgy plot, for most of the running time this was passable enough entertainment. The filmmaking looks professional, and there's a mystery about a car accident, murder, and a charming man who entices a successful novelist, only to vanish the next day.
Where it all winds up, though, is one of the strangest examples of a flat, unsatisfying story that will probably disappoint everyone except the director's family. After spending most of the movie making the novelist heroine look stupid, the movie decides to make the sheriff hero look stupid too.
This leaves us all the more aware of the film's other weaknesses. One odd choice was to have most of the characters speak Japanese, even though the story is set in California.
Now, the heroine Aki is supposed to be a novelist from Tokyo, visiting the US on a book tour, so I get that Japanese is her first language (though this begs the question of how she came to speak English so fluently). But all the friends, acquaintances, and even some strangers she meets in the US are other Japanese-speaking people, including residents of San Francisco. In real life, lots of Japanese-Americans don't speak Japanese, and in this movie it's never really explained why so many characters speak it to each other.
In one scene where Aki visits friends for dinner, for instance, there's a bunch of unrelated people and they all speak Japanese for the whole scene. One of them is even said to be a Yale grad who's a big fan of Stanford University football for some reason!
Nor does the film explain just why Aki spends so long investigating the criminal activities that unfold around her without involving the police, especially after they get dangerous.
There is also a physically impossible bit of business implying that someone's about to put two bodies in what appears to be little more than a duffel bag! And carry it away, to boot!
This is on top of a plot that gets confusing, as film noir plots tend to do.
All in all, a waste of a good performance by Pepe Serna as the sheriff.
Where it all winds up, though, is one of the strangest examples of a flat, unsatisfying story that will probably disappoint everyone except the director's family. After spending most of the movie making the novelist heroine look stupid, the movie decides to make the sheriff hero look stupid too.
This leaves us all the more aware of the film's other weaknesses. One odd choice was to have most of the characters speak Japanese, even though the story is set in California.
Now, the heroine Aki is supposed to be a novelist from Tokyo, visiting the US on a book tour, so I get that Japanese is her first language (though this begs the question of how she came to speak English so fluently). But all the friends, acquaintances, and even some strangers she meets in the US are other Japanese-speaking people, including residents of San Francisco. In real life, lots of Japanese-Americans don't speak Japanese, and in this movie it's never really explained why so many characters speak it to each other.
In one scene where Aki visits friends for dinner, for instance, there's a bunch of unrelated people and they all speak Japanese for the whole scene. One of them is even said to be a Yale grad who's a big fan of Stanford University football for some reason!
Nor does the film explain just why Aki spends so long investigating the criminal activities that unfold around her without involving the police, especially after they get dangerous.
There is also a physically impossible bit of business implying that someone's about to put two bodies in what appears to be little more than a duffel bag! And carry it away, to boot!
This is on top of a plot that gets confusing, as film noir plots tend to do.
All in all, a waste of a good performance by Pepe Serna as the sheriff.