In the way Japan is making a version of Sideways, America needs to make a version of Bubble Fiction. The plot:

Mayumi Showa (Ryoko Hirosue) is a bar hostess whose mother has just died and whose b.f. has absconded, leaving her with gambling debts. When staid Finance Ministry salaryman Shimokawaji (Hiroshi Abe) follows her home, Mayumi assumes she's just incurred another debt. Instead, he reveals that her inventor mother, Mariko (Hiroko Yakushimaru), has not died: She's actually trapped in 1990 on a government-sponsored mission.

Courtesy of a time machine developed from a washing machine, Mariko had traveled back to the time when then-Finance Minister Serizawa (Kazue Fukiishi) made a disastrous policy decision that plunged the economy into still-increasing debt. Improbably, the government believes Mayumi is the best person to retrieve her mom.

Given the incentive that all her personal debts will be cleared, the bubble-headed but good-natured Mayumi dons a wetsuit (the time machine still needs detergent) to be transported back. Arriving in 1990, she meets a younger version of Shimokawaji, then a cashed-up womanizer, who believes her story about coming from the future because of the sexual possibilities she presents.

While protag tries to rescue her mother, save the Japanese economy and fight off Shimokawaji's advances, Mayumi's 2007 mode of dress ("Excuse me, miss, your pants are falling down"), dependence on her cell phone and provocative dance moves make pic a satire both on the way we are and the way we were.

This post owes everything to eric (the other one).