Films about funerals are about as common here as films about weddings — meaning common indeed — and both are subsets of the family drama, a key genre in Japanese cinema since forever.
Why center a film on a ceremony that in Hollywood is usually relegated to one brief scene?
As seen in Masahide Ichii's "Stormy Family," an apt title for a drama about a dysfunctional family, Japanese funerals not only draw together family members who rarely meet, but also last long enough — if the wake and cremation are included, as they generally are — for ancient resentments and antagonisms to surface. This is often a recipe for comedy, and Ichii, who also wrote the original script, cooks up a clever opening that promises just that.