Louder!: Can't Hear What You're Singin', Wimp
2 people found this review helpful
OTT in a good way
The premise is completely absurd and the writing is barely functioning connect-the-dots to reach the visual moments that the writer/director Miki Satoshi wanted to achieve. But those visuals are worth it, and the direction is lively, inventive and original.It is a comedy, and, as ever, YMMV, but there were several bits that genuinely made me laugh. Expect the kind of humor and set pieces as a Stephen Chow film though we can argue about whether Miki is as successful at executing them.
It is a story of Sin ... who in this case is the mysterious lead singer of a heavy metal band who has been injecting illicit drugs directly into his vocal cords to achieve the volume and range that the music demands, and it is immediately clear that his throat cannot take much more of the abuse. Abe Sadawo nails the stage presence and has a fine comedic turn in the role as an artist who knows his career is almost done and is looking to pass the torch.
The singer he chances upon in a midnight scooter rampaging meet-cute is Fuuka (Yoshioko Riho) who is talented, but whose issues prevent her from singing barely above a whisper.
The film is not really a musical. There are only two songs (or three, if you count Shubert's Ave Maria). But, surprisingly, it is kind of a romcom with most of the expected story beats seen through a broken kaleidoscope.
Will the couple kiss? Will Fuuka sing out loud? Will Sin be redeemed? Watch the movie and find out.
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A Quality Survival Show
The Nizi Project is a survival show made in collaboration by JYP Entertainment and Sony Music Japan to create a "global" girl group by which they mean a Japanese girl group that they hope to market internationally. The idea is to create a J-Pop group using the training methods, aesthetics, and standards of K-Pop. This 10 episode series is the first of two which resulted in the creation of the group NiziU ("Needs(y) You"). This first series is mostly set in Japan and covers auditions in 8 cities in Japan, an audition in Hawaii and one in Los Angeles as well as a subsequent elimination process to select a group of trainees to be sent to Seoul for the second series of the show.The host and only vote which matters for this show is JYP himself, Park Jin-Young. He does take care to listen to his staff, but at each step of the process, it's pretty clear that he is the one who will be making the decisions, and, ultimately, choosing who will go on to Seoul for training (and, in the second series, who will be in NiziU).
Each of the women who pass the audition episodes are given a necklace with four slots for bedazzled puzzle pieces. Filling all four slots will result in the women being sent to Seoul, but the gimmick is pretty pointless since JYP can grant additional puzzle pieces to the women pretty much whenever he wants to. The necklace does, however, serve to frame for the viewers the four abilities that the women are to be judged upon throughout both series: singing, dancing, variety show skills and likability/cooperation/discipline.
Unlike many shows in this genre, the focus is almost entirely on preparation and performance. Very little time is spent on the women's background stories, dorm-room interactions or variety show games. Furthermore, I do not believe there were any product placement segments at all (other than the music used for the performances - you will hear a lot of JYPE's TWICE and ITZY) in either series.
JYP is charismatic and knowledgeable, but he can be capricious in his criticism occasionally lambasting the individuals for being outside the narrow scope of what he considers the essential standards of K idols even when the performances are good.
The candidates themselves are the usual mixture of pop-star wannabes of various levels of skill and and training with a few ringers who have already been training at JYPE for years. There is not much tension for a few of the women who probably should have debuted a year or two ago, but, nevertheless, it is very fun to meet all the candidates and see what they can do.
The fact that there are no live audiences and no viewer input whatsoever is probably why this is one of the best singing competition shows ever produced. There can be no accusations of vote rigging or producer manipulation of audience voting via wildly disparate allocation of screen-time when there is only one voter who is not even seeing the final edit of the show. If you always wanted a singing and dance competition where the focus is entirely on, you know, the singing and the dance, then this is the show for you.
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Sono “Okodawari”, Watashi ni mo Kure yo!!
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It's mostly cringe humor a la The Office or Christopher Guest films like A Mighty Wind or Waiting For Guffman. It's unclear the extent to which the scenes are improvised, but they might well be. You might think after you've watched the first four episodes, that you know how this show will go with each episode featuring a different strange obsessive, but then the series becomes more about Matsuoka and Ito's approach to the show and life in general and begins to tackle themes of how people create personas for themselves on screen and what it means to be authentic in the kinds of bizarre and scripted situations that crop up on variety shows. And the show does so while largely staying funny.
There are some mild twists, and a really silly denouement. There are a couple of plot points that are made and then immediately forgotten about. I'm not quite sure that it nails the landing or satisfactorily concludes its theses, but the mere fact that it attempts to address the issues of persona and performance in variety shows is surprising and interesting.
Under-girding the whole show is the delightful chemistry between Matsuoka and Ito. Who knows if they are as close friends in the "real world" but the friendship as its portrayed feels authentic, and provides a lovely foundation for the show.
It's a show that has not had many viewers, but is, nevertheless, well worth checking out.
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Shiawase Kanako no Koroshiya Seikatsu
11 people found this review helpful
Way too short, but fun!
This series ends up feeling more like an extended comedy sketch than a full drama series, but the acting and action scenes are on point, and, ultimately, the series does have something to say about the empowerment of the main character and her refusal to be defined by "normal" society.Non plays Nishino Kanako, a recently unemployed office lady, who is offered a job as a hitman and discovers that because of her experience of years of bullying and harassment has acquired the skills to be preternaturally good at the job. The series is happily and ironically cheerful and kawaii as the bullets fly and the blood flows, and Kanako's chibi imaginary animal friends make childish puns as she finds her way in this new world of contract killing and peril.
Every episode features action sequences that are well executed and fun but almost completely bloodless but for occasional splatters and post-combat pools. A polite fiction is maintained throughout that everyone Kanako kills almost certainly deserves it, but the whole thing is so far from any kind of reality that that polite fiction does not really seem to matter much. There are at least a couple of plot points that make no sense at all (wait: didn't she kill that guy?), but the series is so unserious that you probably won't care either since the writer and the director certainly don't.
As I often say in my reviews of comedies: YMMV. But I found the series to be light and funny, and the comedy bits pretty much consistently landed for me. But, at the same time, there is at least one touching moment from Kanako's backstory that was genuinely moving. Non was pretty much born to play this kind of role: a simple and "pure" (?!) person going through a process of discovery to find that she is capable and valuable just as she is. The irony here that her "purity" is the ability to efficiently and relentlessly kill people works for me, at least.
In the end Kanako is offered a choice between the normal life that society says she should want or, instead, continuing to be what she is really good at. And we are left happily cheering her on.
The button at the end of the series says explicitly that there will be a season 2 on Netflix, and one can only hope. But the best information at the time of writing this review is that the button is a joke, and there are no such plans at this time.
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Well-acted but stupid
It's a high school drama with an idiot plot that's not entirely redeemed by some good to excellent performances.Hirose Alice takes the lead as Urumi-sensei who is starting work at a large private school after a long break in her career. As usual, she hits the emotional beats well, playing here a person who is recovering from an incident in her past. Urumi is insightful, blunt but self-aware, and so is constantly biting her tongue until various episodic denouements make her write a speech and speak her mind. The fact that her character almost works is a testament to Hirose's charisma and ability as an actor.
Two of actresses playing students in her class do particularly good jobs conveying nuanced performances of the kind of emotional entanglements that can happen in high school in particular. Seino Asahi is pretty new to television but is excellent here as Hina, the popular mean-girl in the the classroom who is almost completely unaware of how she is treating the others. And her main victim, Iroha, is played by the much more veteran Toyoshima Hana who is really blooming as an actress and is showing good range across her many recent roles.
On the other end of the spectrum, the series features two of the most scenery-chewing villain performances I've seen in years in Ito Atsushi as Moriguchi-sensei and Hagiwara Mamoru as Haruki. I've seen Ito in several other things in which he has done a good, solid, professional acting job, and so I must assume he was acting as directed here and so any blame for his and Hagiwara's OTT performances must directed at the two directors with Uchida Hidemi in particular having helmed the wretched episodes 7 and 10. Ironically, Ito played the nominal lead in 2007's Watashitachi no Kyokasho (Our Textbook) in which he played a parallel role to that of Urumi-sensei here in a far superior drama that covers many of the same issues in a private high school setting.
The writing is pretty bad throughout with the banal themes of "bullying bad" and "over-adherence to hierarchy and collectivism bad" being blared in every episode. As noted above, episode 7 is particularly awful where the script goes full Rashomon for an incredibly stupid set of soap-tastic reveals that are otherwise entirely irrelevant to the series as whole but also results in the same stupid scene being played out at least three times.
There are good jdramas covering this territory in novel and interesting ways. Off the top of my head: Watashitachi no Kyokasho (2007), 3 Nen A Gumi: Ima kara Mina-san wa, Hitojichi Desu (2019) and Saiko no Kyoshi: Ichinengo, Watashi wa Seito ni Sareta (2023). Go watch those instead.
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This review may contain spoilers
This asodora has some unexpected twists in the last 25 episodes when the land lady, Tomo, reveals her Force power, the protagonist Mineko turns out to be a Tanuki robot from the far future (2017) and a group of the characters band together to execute a daring rescue mission.Before that it's warm story taking place between 1964 and 1968 examining the migration of workers from rural provinces like Ibariki to urban centers like Tokyo. The spine of the plot is centered, lamentably, on an amnesia trope (a lame trope or the lamest trope?), and everything about one of the associated characters, Kanamoto Setsuko, makes no sense whatsoever. But that's about the sharpest criticism that can be leveled against this otherwise uniformly delightful morning drama.
The main character is charming enough, but the really great moments of the series fall to several of the tertiary characters who are still dealing with the consequences of WWII. The rapid changes of the 60s form the backdrop, and the Tokyo Olympics, Beatlemania, miniskirts and Twiggy all play a role in the lives of these characters.
Special mention also must be made to two of actresses, Sakuma Yui and Ito Sairi, who were in Transit Girls together a few years before. Sakuma's role is quite substantial as Mineko's best friend Tikiko who goes to Tokyo at the same time as Mineko and seeks to become an actress. Ito's role is much smaller but recurring, and the two do get a few scenes which had me as a fan of Transit Girls wishing for them to kiss (again).
As a whole, it's the usual high quality that one expects from an NHK asadora though personally I think Amachan deserves the higher rating between the two.
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An Interesting Alt History of Edo Period Japan
I will preface this review by saying I have not read the manga which ran for 17 years, nor watched this year's anime on Netflix, nor seen the prior drama series from 2010, nor the prior two movies. I imagine that one's experience of this series could vary widely based on how much of the prior material you have encountered.The premise of this drama is that Japan experienced an on-going plague starting in the reign of 3rd Tokugawa Shogun in the early 1600s that reduces the population of men to one quarter of that of women. Thus, part of what Ooku explores, in general, is what that change in demographics might mean to the roles of men and women. What would Edo-period Japan have been like if women were in charge?
This drama is roughly divided into three chunks covering incidents in the lives of the woman who took over the role of the 3rd Shogun, and then 5th and 8th Shogun. The 8th Shogun serves as wrapper for all the episodes as she reads about the lives of these prior two Shoguns. The manga continued through the 14th Shogun, and so this drama does not attempt to cover the entire run of the manga, and, indeed, one presumes Season 2 will cover more of underlying material. Nevertheless, this series (like many other manga and novel adaptations) does suffer a bit from trying to cover too much of the original material.
The cast is huge and the production fairly lavish though we comparatively rarely see what life is like outside of the Shogunal residence in Edo. Like many Roman and Chinese emperors, the Japanese Shoguns in this period seem to be fairly isolated within a system meant to protect them and insure the continuation of their dynasties. And, indeed, the Ooku was the quarters for the Shogun's concubines during the Edo period, and so becomes the quarters for the male concubines in this alternative history, and so part of what the series explores why and how men come to serve as concubines, and how the system works (and sometimes fails) to produce heirs to the Shogun.
The series does address some interesting and perhaps surprising issues over the course of this season, but I do think the quality and interest of the three sections are fairly even though they cover entirely different themes and have have mostly different casts of characters. There are some striking moments scattered throughout the series, and the performances vary from solidly professional to quite good. If you enjoy alternative histories and Japanese period dramas, it's well worth watching.
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A very chill food show
The story begins in media res: Mugimaki Satoko was diagnosed a couple of years ago with an autoimmune disorder which is not life-threatening but leaves her chronically fatigued. She has quit her previous, high-stress job at a big, successful company, and is now working part-time at a small, supportive design firm doing the accounting and other administrative tasks. Her current issue is that her savings is dwindling, and she must come to terms with the idea that she'll never be able to own her own place and that she needs to find a cheaper place to live.She ultimately settles on an apartment in a danchi (large tower blocks built after WWII) where she finds herself living across the landing from her aging landlady, Suzu, who is currently boarding a young free-spirited guy, Tsukasa, who does odd jobs and helps around the complex and goes on long backpacking excursions. Tsukasa and Suzu introduce Satoko to yakuzen, a Japanese form of traditional Chinese cuisine where there is less of a distinction between food and medicine. Satoko finds that she likes the food and hopes it can help her condition, and when Tsukasa refuses to teach her what he knows about it, she finds some books and starts teaching herself.
Over the course of the series, Satoko meets new people around the danchi and makes some friends along the way. She tries some new things and not everything works out the way she hopes as she tries to figure out what her life can be as she lives with her condition. She's a bit afraid of her future in the long-term, but she finds comfort in this ancient approach to eating. She shares what she learns with her friends, but while yakuzen is a healthy approach to eating with an emphasis on plants, it's adherents do not tend to proselytize about it. It very much falls under Michael Pollan's dicta: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants".
There are no major dramatic stakes in this series, and it's very much a slice of a year or so of Satoko's life. She naps, cooks and shares meals with her friends as she grows accustomed to her new life with her condition. Her new approach to her diet does give her a bit more energy to consider what she wants for her future and come up with some new goals as she relinquishes her previous aspirations. By the end, Satoko has come up for a vision for her new life. It's weak tea.
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Chanmina's Girl-Group Survival Show
Here's an idea: let's take all the budget for a girl-group survival show and allocate as much of that budget as we can on the finale and hold that finale in a packed 20,000-seat arena. We won't have a host or a narrator. All the earlier rounds will be filmed in various rooms around the agency, plus, maybe a small gym for one performance round to hold an audience we won't even bother to show on camera.Honestly: it's great.
The popular rapper Chanmina and SKY-HI, the head of the agency, do all the work as hosts and judges, but even SKY-HI's role is primarily to echo the things Chanmina says and leave the production in her capable hands. There are a few choreographers and a solid vocal coach, but this series is primarily Chanmina's show.
Chanmina's idea for the group is to provide an opportunity for and develop the talent of women who have been rejected repeatedly by the industry. And she is wholly committed to the project. After the initial auditions and cuts take the candidate pool down to 30, she bleeds at every further cut, and so tries to do so as compassionately and transparently as she can. Unlike most other survival shows, there is no audience voting, and the cuts are decided wholly by Chanmina and SKY-HI.
The show is otherwise pretty standard: the women are divided into groups and given pieces to perform over a few rounds to display their skills in singing, rapping and dance. However, whereas every survival show I've seen stops at the final selection of the members of the new group and announcing its name this series gives us one more episode to reconnect with every single member of that initial 30. And while the editorial choices in that final episode are unusual - we step back in time before the arena show for 45 minutes of the 80 minute episode before getting snatches of the other women's performances in front of the stadium audience - the climactic performance of Sad Song by the top 10 and Chanmina is one of the most moving moments I have seen on any survival show.
Most of this series was filmed in August of 2024, and in an another interesting production choice, the final 10 are given 5 months to prepare for the arena show. Of course, the real reason for that long preparation is that Chanmina was pregnant, and she had her baby in November. The only mention of that fact occurs in the last 10 minutes of the final episode when Chanmina says that she now has seven daughters ... and her daughter. But, in terms, of appropriately assessing talent, it is hard to imagine a more fair way than giving candidates that kind of stage including all the stagecraft, back-up dancers and musicians as well as that much preparation time to really show what they are capable of. I can't imagine we would ever see its like on any future survival show, and the results are pretty spectacular.
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Great actors in a tokusatsu? Why not?
I have not read any of the manga nor seen either season of the anime, and so I cannot speak the faithfulness of the adaptation or the film's consistency with the rest of the franchise.The film is an all-ages dive into the human body from the POV of blood cells where the red cells transport oxygen and CO2 and various other cells fight off injury, illness and the occasional inconvenient bowel movement. The bad guys are infections and stray mutations played as OTT as any villain in every afternoon television tokusatsu from Kamen Rider on. And so the question naturally arises: is this film worth seeking out if you're over the age of, say, 10?
For me the answer is an unequivocal yes largely because the casting and the performances elevate the material substantially. Look. They cast Nagano Mei AND Ashida Mana. Based on everything they've ever been in you know their characters will be crying. In this film Nagano is a red blood cell in Ashida's body. In the first two acts, Nagano's character is new on the job and never knows her way around; frequently straying into unsafe places where she is inevitably saved by a white blood cell played by a brooding and cool Satoh Takeru. The film to that point is a light action comedy.
However, the stakes are raised significantly in the final third of the film, and the performances both within and outside the bodies get darker and more real. I do think the film walks the line of how to address illness and death extremely well, and you will be perfectly safe watching it with kids. I must particularly shout out Fukase Satoshi as the final boss for bringing some depth to his performance that gives Nagano and Satoh something to work with that's a bit more real than your usual tokusatsu villain.
Abe Sadawo is along for the ride as Ashida's single, out-of-shape and overworked father and raising the question of just how many times he will play Ashida's father. He brings his usual comedic flare, and easily keeps up with Ashida and Nagano when the film turns darker.
The special effects, huge crowd sequences and fight scenes are all top notch as these things go. The environments inside the body are all creative and fun while still providing a solid metaphorical understanding of how cells in the body work to resist illness, fight infections and heal.
All in all, Cells At Work! is a quality live-action adaptation and an enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours.
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Love Live! School Idol Musical the Drama
1 people found this review helpful
A short, light but enjoyable mess
The Love Live! franchise is a set of projects running since 2010 that include over 50 issues of manga, 4 anime series, 3 anime movies, games, apps, novels, live music events and a stage musical. I have seen none of those, and fans of the various projects would certainly know more of the context, but my impression is that there is little to no continuity between the projects and the common thread is that they are all about girl idol groups formed as school clubs in high school and aiming to participate in an annual performance event called "Love Live!" This series is the first live action television drama of the franchise and is based on the 2022 stage musical.The protagonist of this series is Rurika who is the daughter of the principal of the prestigious, academically focused Tsubakisakka Girls' High School. Under the pressure of her mother's watchful eye, she's current #2 in the weekly tests, but she has gotten a dream to become an idol which could start by forming an idol club at her school. Meanwhile, Anzu is the daughter of the principal of a new and trending performing arts high school, the Takizakura Girls' Academy. Anzu is the center of Takizakura's successful idol group which is about to have its major label debut. However, while Anzu's the ace of her group, her being an idol is more her mother's dream than hers.
None of the major plot points in this short series make any sense at all, and the characters are all tired tropes and archetypes of the genre. But, to be fair, the whole franchise seems to be squarely pitched towards tweens. Despite Love in the title there is no romance anywhere, it's certainly in no ways near a GL, and there are no named speaking roles for any males.
The series is also not really a musical in the sense that the actors do not have any non-diegetic songs. There are a few typical idol songs throughout the series, but they are all sung at practice or performances.
Despite it's obvious flaws, I found the watch light and enjoyable. Rurika is played by Watanabe Miho, a former member of the idol group Hinatazaka46, and the character charmingly pressures all her friends to join her in her dream of being an idol. Anzu is played by Tomita Nanaka, the current center of the idol group ≠ME, and she does what she can with a character whose actions do not make a whole lot of sense. The acting overall is pretty broad, and the stakes are fairly absurd. But somewhere in there is a message about how the best idol group is the friends we made along the way.
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A Good, Solid High School Romance
I have not read the manga nor seen the anime, and so I cannot speak to the faithfulness of this adaptation. Nevertheless, this live action series is better than I expected. It is a very typical high school romance given a bit more life than usual through by focusing on the two leads entering the world of cosplay, and by the performances of its two young leads, Nagase Riko and Nomura Kota.Nomura's Wakana is shy and introverted, and so I'm sure you'll be shocked to learn that Nagase's Marin is outgoing and extroverted. The roots of Wakana's social isolation is absolutely absurd - he was teased as a youngster for liking dolls which, you know, gender stereotypes, but the thing is that his family's business is handcrafting ... dolls and so you'd think at some point before his second year of high school he'd have mentioned that fact to, I don't know, ANYONE AROUND HIM, and accepted and owned the fact that he likes making them. Instead, we have Marin breaking into his bubble of isolation to avail herself of his sewing skills as she begins to explore her new interest in cosplay.
An uncharitable reading of this series might be that Marin is just yet another MPDG dragging a socially delayed Wakana out into something like a wider range of interests and social interactions. And as always YMMV as Marin perpetually grins and invades everyone's personal space in what I assume is genkiness straight from the pages of the manga. But I do think these tired tropes are redeemed a bit by what's happening romantically within the characters, and the fact that the resolution (at least in this season) is not exactly what you might expect given the set up.
Both Wakana and Marin have very small families for reasons that are never touched upon let alone explained: Wakana is being raised by one of his grandfathers, and Marin is largely living alone occasionally visited by her father who is frequently away on business. The series thus focusses entirely on the joint creative adventures that the two share as Wakana makes costumes for Marin. And I do think the series shines as Wakana discovers that his skills are valued in that community and as Marin receives well-deserved attention for her presentation and performances of the characters she loves and brings to life. And I do think both Nagase and Nomura portray their enjoyment of this shared interest quite well.
I also must shout out Ikeda Akana in the small secondary role of Sajuna, a more experienced cosplayer. She plays the role with a very deft deadpan that brings an unexpected and much-needed touch of humor to the series.
My one slight, genuine negative note about the series is purely cinematographic. The production clearly intentionally went for a wide-aperture, utterly washed out look throughout the series. Were they trying to hide acne on the young actors? Neither Nagase nor Nomura seem to need that. Were they avoiding having to clean up exteriors for the MANY shots of the characters backlit by bright windows? Who knows, but at times the feel of the series is that all of this is taking place on the surface of the sun.
But that niggle aside, I do recommend this series as a light high school romedy that does not have much to say, but is a cheerful diversion nonetheless.
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A Chill Sci-fi Web Series Available On YouTube
Three aliens from billions of light years away on the planet Skuld land in Tateyama, Japan having intended to land in Southerland, Scotland. They are beings of pure data and are here to learn about Earth and meet Remi, a part-time property manager, and her friend Ryo. The brief episodes touch upon life and love and art from the three's alien perspective. The stakes remain relatively low throughout, and the script could use some tightening. But the performances are good from the young cast, and the drama is quite well shot and edited. The series is ultimately sweet, but probably not all that memorable.Was this review helpful to you?
Slightly sweet, slightly sad but very formulaic
Wada Masao is the bass player for the popular rock fusion group Gesu no Kiwami Otome under the stage name Kyūjitsu Kachō (Weekend Manager). In 2018 he appeared on the Netflix reality show Terrace House for the end of its Opening New Doors series where he wooed one of the housemates by making his clam curry for her. In 2020 he released a cookbook which formed the basis for this series.Each episode follows the same structure. The show begins with a cold open of the young salary man Wada Masao at work or rehearsing with his band. He then goes to the local grocery when its about to close where he encounters a sales clerk and a stock boy (played by the real Wada Masao who has, maybe at stretch, a dozen lines over the course of the series). Back at home he prepares a meal. Most of the ingredients and timings are mentioned, but I'm doubtful that these scenes would suffice for someone to execute the recipes. At that point, a woman who he has encountered recently appears at his apartment, eats the meal with him and praises his cooking ... and then disappears because these nightly fantasies are all he has going at this point. He then calls his childhood friend Tomoko who is working in New York and there are some final credit scenes with his band or work.
So, in part, this series is about the formation of Gesu no Kiwami Otome. (The diegetic music played by the band is a couple of their songs though Masao's other band Dadaray provides the title and credit tracks for the series.) And, in part, the series is about Masao becoming more assertive, deciding what he wants to do with his life and choosing between a conventional work life and pursuing music more seriously. The series has a few good moments and the last couple of episodes work quite well. The acting is mostly understated and the vibe of the series is quite chill. (You were expecting action scenes in a series based on a cookbook?) All in all, I found the series mildly enjoyable, and the series ends with a nice little crescendo.
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