Shotengai no Pianist (2022)

I'm a sucker for classical music, but also for the "slice of life" and "iyashikei" genres, so I had great expectations from this "Shotengai no Pianist". I'm sorry to say that it was quite a let down, unfortunately.
The script had a lot of ups&downs; alongside some better episodes graced by a few very good scenes, there were also a lot of lesser quality episodes and way too many boring and/or silly scenes (to name but one detail: the "comic relief" scenes with the "two stooges" were of embarrassingly poor quality, ridiculous rather than funny).
The same rollercoaster quality also affected the cast performances: I really liked some of them (particularly Toda Naho, Yuki Mio and Kubota Maki - now, the comic relief scenes with the latter two were actually hilarious!) whereas I honestly disliked most of the male cast (not only the afore-mentioned "two stooges" but also the ML was not to my liking at all, sorry but I can't stand that kind of "monalisesque" expressions...a faint smile, a slight worry, the constant stare in the void...not my cup of tea! But then again, I'm not familiar with this actor so maybe he's actually good and here he was just following the script and the director's directions, who knows).
The music was not as good as I was expecting it to be, too many "inflationed" pieces whereas they could've used this opportunity to introduce some lesser known but wonderful ones instead).
All in all, it barely gets the passing grade, as far as I'm concerned.

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