Swing Girls [DTS]

There we meet a class of girls, 16 altogether, who have been sentenced to a make-up math class for the summer vacation. Tomoko (Juri Ueno) -- bored out of her mind with the droning of the teacher (Naoto Takenaka) -- volunteers for the job of taking bento (box lunches) to the members of the school brass band, who are on their way to a critical baseball game with a prefectural rival. Her classmates, including the boy-crazy Yoshie (Shihori Kanjiya), the terminally shy Sekiguchi (Yuika Motokariya) and the beefy, phlegmatic Naomi (Yukari Toyashima), immediately offer to help. Class dismissed!
Enough to say that the girls get careless, the band members get sick -- and replacements are needed. The band's only survivor, the dorky-but-cute Takuo (Yuta Hiraoka), recruits three: Sekiguchi, who can toot a recorder, barely, and two guitarists from a recently dissolved punk band. Then Tomoko has a brain wave -- if they all join, they will get out of class permanently. Takuo is suddenly teaching 16 new musicians -- none of whom know diddly about the swing band jazz he proposes they play.

From here things get twisty, with reversals of fortune, narrow scrapes and funny but touching triumphs over adversity. The less committed fall away, until only a band of hardy, jazz-loving survivors, led by Tomoko, is left. Much of this is similar to Waterboys and other Altamira films. But Yaguchi, who also wrote the script, takes standard plot changes in fresh directions that may verge on the bizarre but are never dull.