Game no Na wa Yukai Episode 1

 

The last time Kame was in a WOWOW jdorama, it was the very excellent Shoutai which should that he could actually act. Now he is an another WOWOW show called the name of the game is kidnapping. Kame plays an advertising planner who is working on a large project for a car company when his plan is shut down by the vice president played by Watabe Atsuro.

Kame is not going to take this lying down and helps Watabe Atsuro's daughter escape from her home. They both decide to stage a fake kidnapping in other for both of them to get their revenge on Watabe Atsuro.

I think my favourite things about Game no Na wa Yukai is that Kame's main character is not a nice guy. He is a womaniser, is ambitious and thinks he is the smartest guy in the room. Not all main characters have to be underdogs to make the audience support them, they just have to be interesting.

Watabe Atsuro makes a great foil if you have watched him in the classic Gaiji Keisatsu. He is perfect casting as the guy you do not watch to match wits with for our fake kidnappers to go against. Episode 1 is mostly the set up with hints of potential twists so let's see what happens in the next episode.

Colour me intrigued and I need to find out who this person is. She better show up in episode 2!

Kagero no Tsuji Seasons 1+2

Now that Nuve has started subbing season 3, I feel I should write something about Kagero no Tsuji. the Yamamoto Koji jidaigeki. He plays the main character Sakazaki Iwane, a poor ronin in exile in Edo because of a clan conspiracy, leaving behind his fiance Nao.

Kagero no Tsuji is about your basic great humble swordsman living among the peasants and banishing evil every episode like your town policeman. It is feel good bad guys will get their just deserts at the end show and the fights are decent and over as soon as Sakazaki's music ends.

The hear of the show is the relationship between Sakazaki and O-kon played by Nakagoshi Noriko. Sakazaki has an ex-fiance and later we learn where she is so there are plenty of obstacles for our main couple but after all the ups and downs they finally get together at the end of season 2, paying off 2 seasons of build ups.

Kagero no Tsuji is not my favourite jidaigeki (that title still belongs to Yoshiwara Uradoshin) but I think it does its job well. Sometimes after work, you just want to see justice being served and Kage no Tsuji knows how to give the audience what they want. Watchable for jidaigeki fans.

Mondays: See you this week! jmovie review

I have been watching a lot of time travel shows recently with Tokyo Girl, Summer Time Machine Blues and Toki wo Kakeruna, Koibitotachi so I felt compelled to watch Mondays when anonymous recommended it in the comments section. What compelled me was that Mondays was a time loop movie set in an office.

Wan Marui who was also in Toki wo Kakeruna, Koibitotachi is the main character Yoshikawa who is unaware that she is stuck in a time loop that goes from Monday to Sunday and back again starting with a pigeon crashing into the window of the office. However, two of her colleagues have become aware of the time loop and it takes considerable effort for them to convince Yoshikawa of this.

Mondays has a lot of the tropes of the time loop genre such as learning new skills, continuing to fail until succeeding and generally becoming a better person. The thing is Mondays does everything very well. Once the story starts going, it is very funny watching our main characters try to convince people of the time loop and to ultimately stop it.

Time loop stories are easy to shoot because you mostly only need one major set that you can reuse for the majority of the movie, so you can spend your budget and make it look like a real office. I thought that the office setting was refreshing for a science fiction story though I wish they had the budget to do the dance sequence and the mystery of who or what is responsible for trapping them in the time loop. I thought it was very Japanese-like for the people stuck in the time loop to still feel the need to do the work in case their week did not loop. I guess there is no such thing as calling sick for the week in Japan.

Mondays: See you this week! is a wholesome and feel good time loop movie without any flaws and a lot of heart. It kind of reminds me of Kisaragi, another movie set in one location except without the time travel. The question is do I give it a must watch like Kisaragi? It is certainly the best time travel jmovie I have ever seen and I think that deserves a must watch. I think the director managed to squeeze every drop of blood from the stone for this low budget movie. I am also a sucker because the final part of the movie is about a storytelling medium that I love very much. Flawless, with a lot of heart. My one regret is that I wish I had seen it at JFF 2023. 

On a related note, the Japanese Film Festival Online is going on now until 31 July. Looks like you can watch it from anywhere in the world. Support Japanese movies without paying a cent! I definitely recommend Anime Supremacy if you have not seen it. I need to activate my Netflix soon to watch Godzilla Minus 1 but I just don't have time for Netflix on top of my usual stuff. Thanks to anon for the recommendation!

Yakusoku Episodes 3~10

Yakusoku is finally finished and it is not a good show. The writing is not polished, the two main characters wear all black working in the countryside and the show doesn't even try to show the beauty of inaka. The police do too many things that make me scratch my head. The acting is nothing special, Nakamura Anne doesn't emote much and the guy just pouts throughout the series.

However, everytime an episode appeared on dramahd, I could not help myself and would download and watch the next episode straight away. Why? Because there is nothing about the show that I hate. It does not do anything good, but it does not do anything wrong either. It is not as bad as Triangle and it does not try to do too many twists like certain mainstream serial killer jdoramas.

In the end, Yakusoku gave me enough entertainment  for 10 episode but I have to delete because it is not worth keeping at 2GB per episode. Meh quality show which I surprisingly enjoyed and has not answered the question can Nakamura Anne act?

Looking for jidaigeki movies

Inspired by It's a Summer Film, I was feeling like a jidaigeki (samurai) movie today. I think I had Sword of Desperation on my list for a long time but could not find it in my movie portable HD. I checked my external HD and the movie was not there which was odd. I searched my blog and lo and behold, I had actually watched and reviewed in 2012!

This hit me with 2 thoughts: Firstly I have watched so many jmovies/jdoramas that I have forgotten so many of them and secondly, what other movies have I lost? I looked for The Last Ronin and it was also missing from both my HDs and I also watched it in 2012. Maybe something happened to one of my HDs in 2012 that I don't remember anymore.

The other thing I noticed while looking for Sword of Desperation and The Last Ronin is that I have so many old jmovies in dvd aka 480 format with cd1 and cd2 folders lol. I have rewatched Twilight Samurai many times but I definitely need to find at least a 1080p for that classic movie and definitely GS Wonderland. Even if I had not lost the above mentioned movies, they would have been 480p anyways. Time to update my jmovies and make sure I do not lose any this time.

It's a Summer Film jmovie review

Someone recommended this movie to me last year and I finally got around to watching it. It's a Summer Film is a movie about a Hadashi (barefoot) a member of the high school movie club who is a big fan of jidai geki movies. Unfortunately for Hadashi, the movie club is making a love movie so she is not happy and wants to make her own samurai film.

Hadashi is trying to find the perfect main actor for her samurai movie when she runs into the mysterious Rintaro. Together with her Kendo friend Blue Hawaii and Astronomy friend Kickboard, Hadashi works to get her jidai geki movie and show the movie club people what a real movie is. 

It's a Summer Film is a low budget seishun summer movie in the vein of Summer Time Machine Blues and the plot is basically the same science fiction story including elements of Toki wo Kakeruna, Koibitotachi, two shows by Katsuyuki Motohiro. I would not have been shocked if he had directed It's a Summer Film between both projects but the director is a different person Matsumoto Soshi.

I really like Hadashi's passion for jidaigeki movies and it reminded me how little I have seen of the classics. I have only seen 7 Samurai, Rashomon, a few Lone Wolf and Cub movies but not the original Zatoichis etc. One day, I will need to go through a jidaigeki classic marathon.

I really like the casting of the director from the movie club, Karin. She's got that slightly annoying ojyousan who is in love with falling in love shtick going on so you understand why Hadashi does not like her and makes a great foil for Hadashi.

I love the parts about making a movie because it's good to have a peek behind the curtain and watching the characters spend their summer trying to film a movie for the school festival makes me want to cheer them on. It is a movie that asks are jidaigeki and romantic movies that much different?

What I did not like about It's a Summer Film is that the science fiction parts aka time travel bits do not make sense at all. The script is clumsy like a high school kid and it is aiming to produce this feeling for the audience especially for the last shot but the movie had lost me by then. I feel the the writer should have only done the time travel revelation towards the end of the movie.

Out of the 3 of Summer Time Machine, Toki wo Kakeruna Koibitotachi and It's a Summer Film, I rate Toki wo Kakeruna the best and It's a Summer Film the worst. Really wanted to like it because it's such an innocent movie trying to be fun and good try but meh for me.

Oi Handsome! S2 Episodes 4~8

I think episode 4 of the second of Oi Handsome! is the peak of the series. This episode is about dad trying to find a reason to read Yuka's 5 year diary and avoiding guilt by trying to get anyone to give him the go ahead.

The episode is about Rika being encouraged to shift through her past relationships and this is connected with the song 5 bangai no Marie which I am hooked on. I love it anytime classic songs are woven into the plot of jdoramas.

The theme of the episode is about preconceived notions and I love the stories especially about dad using the female chief to teach his staff a lesson and the florist storyline.

The rest of the series is pretty funny though I think it peaked in the middle. I gave episode 3 a must watch and 4 is a classic as well but I cannot give the series a must watch as a whole for one simple reason: the series is an ad for the movie which is coming out on the 21st of June!

They saved all the storylines to be finished by the movie. I can't remember a jdorama series that told its audience to go the cinema to see what happens next. Most of the time, movies are done because a jdorama is successful like GTO.

Is this a new trend to get more money from fans? Is this the jdorama version of DLC to alleviate the cost of jdoramas? I can't complain since I most watch for free but it is unfulfilling, like a finishing a game only to discover that you have to pay extra money for the real ending DLC . cough Asura's Wrath cough.

Season 2 is still a very funny series and it made me laugh all the way through but not being able to watch the real ending sucks. Very watchable and you hardly get any family jdoramas this funny and written this well.

Godzilla Minus One / Gojira 1.0 jmovie review

 

The word on the street was that Godzilla Minus One was a good movie. I was sceptical because Drive My Car had won lots of awards and was crap and Shin Gojira was watchable but seemed to be praised more than it should. Finally decided to sit down for this 2 hour movie and I will start with the conclusion, Gojira 1.0 is very effing good.

Why is it that damn good? It is because Gojira 1.0 is a very good human movie with Gojira in it. Kamiki Ryunosuke is Shikishima, a kamikaze pilot who abandons his mission and is blamed for the deaths of a group of mechanics when Shikishima doesn't fire on Gojira. 

Shikishima is a man who has failed in his duty, is haunted by the deaths of the mechanics and is seeking a reason to live when he comes across Noriko (Hamabe Minami) caring for this baby Akiko and they both end up living with him like a fake family.

To feed Noriko and Akiko, Shikishima finds work on a wooden boat to destroy mines that foreign forces have planted around Japanese waters. There he meets the other members of the mine destroying crew who become his friends.

What makes Gojira 1.0 so good is that Shikishima is the heat of the movie. He is a protagonist who is still haunted by the war, and the war has taken everything away from Shikishima and Noriko and they both have their fake family with is threatened by the arrival of Gojira. The movie makes it easy to empathise with Shikishima who is haunted by guilt and fear but makes up his mind to protect what is important to him.

The second reason Gojira 1.0 is so good is that the action scenes are done very well and are very suspenseful. The first Gojira is water attack reminds me of Jaws and the suspense created felt so raw. I thought to myself this is the first Gojira movie I have seen where the danger actually felt real and our main crew of 4 people could actually die. 

The Ginza attack was beautiful and emotionally brutal. I have not watched the western Gojira movies besides the dinosaur one but I doubt they would have as much emotional impact as the one in this movie. The final action scene is very good. You know how it is going to go but it hits all the right beats for a very good climax.

Amazing directing from Yamazaki Takashi who also directed the Always Sunset on Third Street movies as well as Parasyte and Returner. Looking at his filmography, all his movies prepared him to do Gojira 1.0.  The only bad movie in his resume is the Kimutaku Yamoto.

Lastly I want to praise the writing and pacing. Everything is economical, dialogue gives us enough information and acting carries the rest. Everything is about Shikishima's war not being over and I think the movie is really about Japan trying to rise up from the ashes after the war. Must watch. The perfect Gojira. I don't think they can top this one but I want to see Yamazaki Takashi try!