Godan Episodes 3-6

Godan is show that asks a lot of interesting questions: How much should one place the importance of one's company over every other thing? Is there a limit to the excuse of protecting the livelihood and families of the employees? Would you risk them just to do the right thing? Is vengeance worth it at the cost of possibly saving lives? Are sons suppose to bear the sins of their fathers?

How beautiful is Renbutsu Misako? Are the WOWOW writers on performance enhancing drugs because they are able to write shows that are far and above all the crap that exists in jdoramaland?

The most surprising thing for me is finally realising that Mr Love & Farm is not the main character but rather Kobayashi Kaoru aka Master from Shinya Shokudo is. Its not often that you have an interesting 'villain' who honestly believes he is doing the right thing and Kobayashi Kaoru has so much conviction in his acting that I do have empathy for his character and understand where he is coming from.

I kept expecting Godan to fall apart like so many shows and everytime they introduced some new element to the story I was expecting Godan to screw it up but its surpassed my expectations every episode until the strong ending.

I've said before that i don't want to see another WOWOW cover-up dorama but for Godan, they've created a cover-up dorama that is about a lot of other things. Must watch.

Godan Eps 1&2

I didn't have high hopes for Godan cause I was thinking it was yet another WOWOW cover-up show. My main reason for watching is Renbutsu Misako, who plays the fiancee of Tamayama Tetsuji, who I most remember from that so bad that its watchable Ushi no Negai wo Love & Farm.

Love & Farm promised Misako that he would quit smoking after the wedding but Misako makes him quit before with the stupid excuse of he might as well quit now. Love & Farm wisely does not point out that argument is illogical.

On to main story. Love & Farm works for the PR department at a pharmaceutical company and Master from Shinya Shokudo is the vice president. Three suicides have recent happened to people who were taking this medicine and Master wants Love & Farm's help in this matter and promises to promote Love & Farm to division chief.

Love & Farm does not realise that he is in a jdorama and that if something sounds too good, its not going to happen or there is going to be a cost. (Wait, I think this applies in real life as well) In addition, Nagarakawa is also in the red and is trying to merge with another company.

Hhhmmm. Misako in OL uniform.... I mean Misako also works at Nagarakawa.

Master plans to become president of the company after the merger and these two French speaking people are from the other company. However, they are more interested in absorbing Nagarakawa and leaving everyone else to dry. And they also bring up something about an incident 40 years ago.

Out of the 3 suicides, only one of the victim's relatives suspects that it is due to the medicine. Love & Farm visits the widow and gives her an omiage only to be shocked in finding that there is money in the box. He's been working 10 years and yet easily believes his boss's promise and never thought that there would be money. However, Love & Farm does recover and presses the widow to accept the money. At least he has a brain though he was staring at the money for too long.

Love & Farm seeks counsel from the Nagarakawa lawyer who tells him that all talks will be confidential but ignores the fact that the lawyer is from the President's faction.

 

Episode 2 sees Love & Farm investigating the 40 year old incident which the vice president was also involved in which leads to a shocking discovery which might be a bit hard to buy for me but I'll go along with it.

Godan is about making difficult choices. Love & Farm obeying his boss's instructions in helping to hush an incident. The widow accepting the money because she has three children to care for. The people of Hatai who payed a very heavy price so that Nagahara could keep the town alive. Since Nagahara is now in the red, what could would the truth coming out do for anyone including the victims.

Oh yeah, there's the story of Master's ungrateful daughter who wants to marry a poor actor and complains about her dad working all the time. I would like to see a jdorama where the kids get kicked out and find out that the real world is not so easy.

Godan takes your usual WOWOW cover up story and asks a lot of interesting questions from various perspectives, or so I think. Whether or not those questions will be examined will be seen in the next three episodes but I'm glad its been better than I had hoped. Very watchable so far.

Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso

I've read some good things about Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso and its not a harem anime so I decided to check it out. It is a beautifully drawn anime about a piano prodigy who lost his ability to hear music due to some traumatic events and this mysterious girl who drags the prodigy back into the world of music. Mystery girl also like to inflict physical violence on our main character. I am very worried about anime teaching the children of Japan that physical violence is ok.

Anyway, the first five episodes were really effing good and I thought this might be the new Welcome to NHK. Then the anime slowly started grating on me. Why? Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso became an over-explaining anime. Every single emotion and thought from the main characters has to be verbalised to the audience. It is a non stop boring monologue from the main character. Someone tell the freaking director non-stop monologues are interesting when they reveal things that cannot be shown overwise. The other exception is of course humour.

Its like playing those crappy games like Tiers to Tiara 2 or Itsuwari no Kamen where they spent more money on voice acting than the actual gameplay. I'm not just talking about during the performances. Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso commits the cardinal sin of way to much telling the audience and not enough showing. The main character has his issues but its repeated way too many times that he comes off as whiny.

The root cause of the problem is the number of episodes which is way too long to tell the story and things just drag. In some parallel universe, there is a 10 episode Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso with compact storytelling that stands alongside Welcome to NHK as one of the best anime ever. However, in this universe, Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso is a promising anime that turns into a radio play. Do not watch. There is no point. Better to just listen and turn off your monitor.

Garasu no Ashi

WOWOW have done it again. I'm running out of superlatives for their doramas. If I were the Prime Minister of Japan, I would not raise the consumption tax unless the minimum wage was raised and I would declare WOWOW a national institution cause they make doramas that are head and shoulders above everyone else's. WOWOW should get special government funding cause they are the only ones who prioritise storytelling over idoru promotion.

Anyway, Aibu Saki stars as the main character, Setsuko. She's married to the owner of a love hotel and is having an affair with the accountant. Setsuko's husband gets into an accident and then we start learning some shocking things about her past.

I say this for most WOWOW shows but its worth saying that Garasu no Ashi looks so good..

...I mean the scenery looks so good.

Episode 1 was ok. Setsuko had a really difficult childhood and episode 1 ended in a wtf cliffhanger but I didn't really care about her character and then I saw the preview for episode 2 and I had to watch it straight away.

Speaking of not caring about Setsuko, I had mixed feelings about Aibu Saki's performance when I was watching. I was unable to feel any empathy for her because she seemed so detached, even to the audience and then I realised that this was exactly the feel Garasu no Ashi was going for. That her armour was so thick that it was impenetrable even by the fly in the wall. (the audience) I think Setsuko is Aibu Saki's role of a lifetime.

Using the little girl and the cleaning lady in the story is a great two birds with one stone move because it allows the audience to see the cracks in Setsuko's armour without her voicing her thoughts and explaining everything like so many anime. The cleaning lady's voice over in the hospital during the last episode was excessive though.

Garasu no Ashi does remind me a lot of another great WOWOW show, Hitori Shizuka. They are both very similar stories but the performances are very different.

 Garasu no Ashi also has some really awesome lines.

All I have to say is one of the must watch jdoramas of 2015. Huge thank you to wabisabi subs!

Jdorama review: Mutsu

Nishijima Hidetoshi plays a doctor who can diagnose any illness by sight while doing the thinking pose. Because he's worked in a prison before, Dr Tameyori can also see when someone is going to commit murder. Did I mention not too think too hard when watching this show? Later in the show Dr Tameyori is supposed to be involved in research but we never see him do any.

Densha is a cop with anger issues stemming from his strong sense of justice, whatever that means. The big mystery of Mutsu is the murder of a family of four which Densha is determined to solve. Of course, he has an overacting boss who always shouts at him for overstepping his boundaries etc etc. Zzzz.

Ito Hideaki runs his own hospital and has a hot secretary.

Did I mention the sexy secretary?

Ishibashi Anna is a psych doctor who's only job in the show is to babysit one patient.

And that patient is Menma, I mean Hamabe Minami who belongs in a psychiatric hospital instead of a regular one but this show is not concerned about common sense.

Oh yeah, there's the creepy hospital janitor with no eyebrows.

The acting in Mutsu is very bad. Sometimes its ok but most of the time its very inconsistent with overacting that mad me cringe.

There are a lot of interesting ideas and cliffhangers but the execution is so clumsy. The family murder reminded me of Kazoku Gari, another Densha dorama but nowhere as good. I watched all the way for the mystery and its actually not bad but they just had to put in a long stupid debate with the villain and a karma ending that you could see coming a mile away.

Mutsu is a trashy, badly executed murder mystery with just enough eye candy, I mean twists and turns and interesting ideas to keep me entertained.

Shin Kanpai Senshi After V

Kanpai Senshi After V, the super sentai parody show was one of my favourite shows from last year. The second season however, is such a wasted opportunity. The first half of the season is incredibly boring, rehashing a lot of storylines from the first season.

Individually, there were no new and interesting stories for the 5 members except for Blue. Actually the most interesting characters for Shin Kanpai Senshi were Blue and Sousui (the evil boss/commander) which really saved the second half. Blue for disguising himself as a henchmen and trying to help Sousui and Sousui's various stories such as him forgetting how to be evil or his relationship with his daughter.

If the writer had no idea how to keep the members of After V interesting, the way to go would be to show them as the opposite of who they were suppose to be. Sousui is the bad guy who is actually good and After V should be good guys who are bad because of their incompetence/laziness/priorities.

Sousui's daughter is such a wasted opportunity. They could have done a lot of funny stuff first with her fighting with her dad, then working at the izakaya while her dad tries to hide his identity and most importantly a love story with Red! It would have been a lot funnier than Sousui disguising himself as New Yellow and they could have milked so many father daughter scenes with Sousui trying to be the bad guy and also a good dad. I know the show is called Kanpai Senshi and not Evil Boss working at an izakaya but Sosui is the character with the most room to explore.

The second half as Shin Kanpai Senshi was good. Plasma-1 was interesting as the robocop who was more interested in defeating evil than being a hero and of course Blue and Sousui's story. I highly recommend the first season, Kanpai Senshi and if you loved that one then you can watch Shin Kanpai Senshi but keep your expectations down. Disappointing but the second half managed to salvage it into an ok show. Only for big fans of the first season. Kii!

5 things I don't like about Prison School

1. The wacky premise doesn't deliver anything interesting, except maybe the ending.

2. The series just feels like an excuse to fit as many S&M situations into the story rather than having an interesting story to tell.

3. I didn't find it funny at all. I think you need to be M to enjoy the humour.

4. None of the characters were interesting so I didn't care what happened to them, except for Mari, the president of the underground student council.

5. The only thing I wanted to see was Mari get her comeuppance but even that was denied. If there's one person who deserves to get tied up and have things done to her, its Mari Kaichou. You could say hers is the best performance in this show but the lack of a payoff after building up so much hate for her is stupid.

SUMMARY

Technically Prison School has a lot of elements that I enjoy but everything feels so flat to me. Compared with Minna! Esper Dayo! which was wildly inconsistent, Prison School just feels so dry. I am sure there are people who will enjoy the dorama but for me it was a waste of time.