A brilliant comedy from Japan about a radio station going live with an original drama written by Miyako, a housewife, who entered a contest the station gave. She is played superbly by the plainly dressed but pretty Kyoko Suzuki. From the beginning, the madness starts. Her screenplay keeps getting tweaked to the point where it is unrecognizable and the last second script changes keep the tension up. Throughout, the characters are so rich: The temperamental actress Nokko (Keiko Toda),the too appeasing producer, the opinionated engineer, the suffering manager of Nokko, Miyako's husband who thinks the screenplay is about him, and so on. Its screwball comedy at its best, frantic, unrelenting and, at times, hilarious. I would not usually give a 10 to a movie such as this, but this one not only keeps your interest, it gets better and better. Even Ken Wattanabe is here, playing a trucker who, while driving his big rig, tunes into the melodrama and is moved by it all. Writer/Director Koki Mitani does a superb job of keeping the pacing perfect in this film. You have to see it, it is really terrific.

The film begins as a rehearsal is ending. A radio play is to be put on only hours later and everyone is congratulating a housewife for the script--which was a winning entry in a script-writing contest. From all appearances, the final live radio show should be a "cake walk". However, a monkey wrench is thrown into the equation when a very temperamental actress asks for "just a few small changes in the script". Unfortunately, the changes aren't small, as they have a major cascading impact on the script. Plus, the other voice actors are jealous and want changes to be made as well. Soon the original simple tale of a lady who works into a pachinko parlor in Japan is morphed into a tale involving a lawyer and her astronaut boyfriend that it set in gangster-infested Chicago!! And with each "little" change, the original script becomes less and less evident. Additionally, each change seems to set off a cascade of script revisions. Again and again, impossibilities become realities in this wacky script--such as scenes involving the mountains in Chicago (it's actually one of the flattest major cities on Earth) and a boyfriend who has just been named "Donald McDonald"--thanks to inspiration one voice actor who happens to be eating McDonald's food!!

The film starts off pretty slowly and is only mildly funny at first--you need to stick with it. Over time, it starts to take off and become seriously funny--mostly thanks to a great ensemble cast and writing that somehow makes the entire cast quite endearing. In particular, the minor supporting characters were great--I particularly loved the cowboy trucker. A truly original film that is sure to please anyone who has a sense of humor. Good stuff.

At a time when Japanese movies are becoming less and less imaginative and more and more standardized, THE RADIO HOUR stands as one of the happiest surprises from their industry in many years. Koki Mitani's script and direction are beautifully assured, and the actors, particularly the hilarious Jun Inoue as the cheerful, prankish Hiromitsu, couldn't be better. Mitani doesn't bother directly explaining anything to the audience; rather, he expertly shows a wide range of human behavior, each quirk of which leads to yet another bizarre twist in the ongoing live-broadcast drama. Fortunately, Mitani likes all his characters, and with marvelous economy, sees that we well understand why they behave the way they do. In fact as the story unfolds, one begins to see Mitani's story as something of an allegory for the filmmaking process, or the process of any endeavor, including the theater or the radio, that involves a broad number of collaborators. There's the actor who'll go along with anything, and the actor who won't; the actress who demands a star turn (but mainly because she feels underappreciated); the technicians who've seen it all before, and scramble to improvise; and, finally, the playwright herself, increasingly weirded out by what's becoming a perversion of everything she intended. But, finally, was what she intended any better than what what the rest of the team threw together? They needed her to get started; she needed them for the same reason.

Collaboration means interdependence, and if the audience is finally happy, as Mitani ultimately suggests, then what better outcome could there be? There is not a finer or more cheerful film to come out of Japan since the last works of Juzo Itami, and it is fitting that his widow, the great actress Nobuko Miyamoto, contributes a (nearly invisible) cameo, to one of the few Japanese films to emulate the spirit of her late husband's art. And like Itami's films, THE RADIO HOUR is that rare Japanese comedy that audiences anywhere can enjoy