The popular media maw, from the Brit tabloids to the Hollywood paparazzi, chews up its subjects, from celebs to criminals, everywhere, anytime. If you're at the receiving end, it's probably an awful experience. Nonetheless, there's something special about the voracity of the Japanese media, with its huge, never-ending appetite for smut, scandal, crime — and actors making vapid remarks on movie theater stages. (Watching my fellow hacks frantically recording those remarks, I am always glad I work for publications with little or no need for them.)

In Hollywood movies, the media is usually an ineffectual nuisance that the good characters treat with sarcasm or silence. In many Japanese films, however, from Akira Kurosawa's "Shubun" ("Scandal," 1950) to Satoru Isaka's "Focus" (1996) and even Keiichi Hara's "Kappa no Coo to Natsuyasumi" ("Summer Days with Coo," 2007), an anime for children, the media is portrayed as a relentless menace, savaging careers and lives.

In Ryoichi Kimizuka's "Dare mo Mamote Kurenai" ("Nobody to Watch Over Me"), this menace has grown beyond its traditional breeding grounds — the weeklies and their ilk — to the Internet with its millions of bloggers and anonymous message-board posters. The film, Kimizuka's third as a director and umpteenth as a scriptwriter (his many TV and film credits including the megahit "Odoru Daisosasen" ["Bayside Shakedown"] franchise), sensationalizes this threat, with shot after shot of fingers typing away with a voracious insect energy, like army ants swarming over a meal.