Sometimes as a reviewer of Japanese films I feel I am on the wrong side of the cultural divide, with no way to bridge the gap.
Such a disconnect struck as I watched Junji Sakamoto's "Jinrui Shikin (Human Trust)," a thriller based on a four-volume "economics suspense" novel by Harutoshi Fukui. I am not bored by the subject itself — I even thought of majoring in economics in college (the math dissuaded me).
What stymied me was the film's form of didacticism-as-entertainment, with characters delivering mini-treatises derived from Fukui's tome. Imagine Oliver Stone's "Wall Street" rewritten to make Gordon Gecko, the film's piratical stock trader, sound like a garrulous department head expounding on the mysteries of finance to a grimly attentive subordinate.