Dogging Mr. Hatoyama's budgeting efforts has been a plunge in tax revenue as Japan's export-oriented economy struggles with a falloff in international trade brought on by the global economic crisis.
There's even a competing "Tristan" out, a feisty budget effort from the Naxos label.
It never happened, but this excellent low-budget effort beat Arnie's movie in many ways.
"In a period of crisis, when there is high unemployment and we wait for some growth, everyone must participate in the budget effort," she said.
But if it doesn't do anything on the revenue side of the budget, the savings needed pretty quickly move back into the "unfairness" territory traversed by its 2014 budget effort.
The blockbuster lives side by side with the low-budget effort - just for the pleasure of it, of doing it all, of conducting the grand, lavish display and the careful still life at the same time.
It's not the derivative scares and rudimentary effects that keep this low-budget effort percolating but the improvisational energy of Mr. Santos and Mr. Villarreal, whose ease, chemistry and humor never flag.
"This is an idea that I would say every major Wall Street firm has come to us and said, 'You really should consider it,' " said Paul Francis, the governor's operations director and an architect of the budget effort.
Last year's big budget effort by M&S, once a Christmas high-flyer who spends well over £23m a year, was little more than a glitzy product ad using the beyond-saturated Uptown Funk by Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars.
SHERLOCK HOLMES It's still 1891, but Arthur Conan Doyle's master detective seems to have been redesigned along the lines of a 21st-century action hero in this big budget effort from the director Guy Ritchie ("RocknRolla").
