K-Drama 
A Slow-burn Love Story Between A Western Writer And A Samurai Daughter
ばけばけ or The Ghost Writer's Wife is the fictionized biography of Lafcadio Hearn (called Lefcada Heavin here) and Koizumi Setsuko (called Matsuno Toki or Otoki here). Hearn was born in Greece and raised in boarding schools in Ireland. He moved to America at 19 and became a successful journalist and reporter in Cincinnati and New Orleans before further roving the world to write travelogues at 37. Setsuko was the daughter of a samurai family who were at bit of a loss at what to do after the feudal structure in Japan was eliminated by the Meiji Restoration. This series begins shortly after Hearn landed in Japan at age 40 and took a job as an English teacher at a middle school in Matsue.Hearn was clearly a bit of an eccentric even by the standards of his time and place. He had damaged his left eye when playing ball at age 16 and completely lost the sight in that eye, and had always been myopic to begin with. Hearn was pretty distant from his immediate family and so was a bit rootless. Heavin is presented as a kind of an ur weeb: he is utterly taken with Japanese culture and fascinated by its traditions, customs and folklore. Heavin is played by Tommy Bastow who had previously appeared in 2024's Shogun.
We get quite a bit more of Otoki's backstory in this series. Her grandfather had been a retainer of the local Daimyo in Matsue, and he is committed to the old ways of the samurai. But the family's income was eliminated after the Meiji restoration, and an important part of the plot of the series is how inept her father is after the transition to the new constitution and economic structure under the Meiji emperor. Otoki is played by Takaishi Akari, and about 5 weeks into the series I was like, "Who is this actor, and what else has she done?" I do recommend her strikingly different but equally great performance as a teenaged assassin in the Baby Assassin franchise (3 movies and a television series to date). Takaishi has a very readable face, IMO, and much of the charm of this series is that it is very easy to guess (or project onto) what Otoki is thinking in her silent reaction shots.
Takaishi won best actress and Bastow won best supporting actor for their performances in ばけばけ at the Television Drama Academy awards in March.
The focus of this series is more on Otoki but we do get a bit of Heavin/Hearn's backstory along the way. I was very happy when the series spent two episodes on Heavin's prior marriage to a previously enslaved woman, Martha (Mattie Foley IRL) from when he had been a reporter in Cincinnati. I had expected the series to completely hide that part of Hearn's past, and I must give the production huge kudos for casting the black American actress Misha Brooks - I am no expert in what Ohio accents would have been in mid-1870s Ohio, but Brooks' modern midwestern accent is perfect for the part, and her performance is notably good in this brief tangent for the series. Notably less good is how the writer chose to end those episodes which I shall rant about as an as a slightly spoilery option at the end of this review.
The writing and the direction in this series are well above the average for asadoras as well. One of the key directorial choices throughout the series is to get a bit closer to natural lighting throughout. Thus, the relatively frequent night scenes are often lit by candle light, and the production sometimes leans a bit hard into the darkness. Everything is pretty much discernable, but you might wish to watch this on a larger screen at night to get the full experience and enjoyment of this series.
By any standards this series is not a quick romance, but it is a delightful and beautiful one. The two do not meet and instantly fall in love, and the process of their getting from here to there is quite lovely. Otoki has an unusual (for her time and place) interest in ghost stories from well before she ever met Heavin, and Heavin discovers a mutual interest in them through her recounting of them to him. As writer Heavin is initially just looking for a source for stories he can incorporate in to his books being printed and sold overseas, but ultimately has his life is changed and unexpectedly fulfilled by this interesting and unique woman from a distant culture. ばけばけ nails that process of bonding, and the series is heartwarming and moving throughout. It is well worth the time investment for the watch.
Beyond here lieth spoilers for two episodes (out of 125) in the middle of the series:
Look. I understand the writer's challenge of trying to present and wrap up Hearn's relationship to his first wife in 30 minutes of television. Hearn did indeed get fired from his newspaper when his editors learned that he was married to a previously enslaved woman. But what the series did not have time to explain was that Hearn then just started working for the competing paper in town and the circulation went up at that other paper because of his writing to the point that the previous paper tried to hire him back. In real life, Hearn and Mattie were married for a few years, and tried to reconcile several times but ultimately drifted apart permanently, and then Hearn moved to New Orleans. Part of what came between them was undoubtedly the racism of the time - mixed-race marriages were not legally acknowledged in Ohio until a few years after Hearn and Mattie parted ways, and one can only imagine the pressures the two experienced while they were together. It is indeed difficult to tell that story in a brief aside in this series.
Nevertheless, choosing to present the reason that Heavin and Martha broke up is because Martha attacked her boss with a razor is shockingly racist. The whole scene is maybe 3 minutes in a 9,375 minute drama, and so I cannot condemn the whole series for that one scene, but there has to have been a way to write a permanent ending for Heavin and Martha's relationship without making Martha a violent, razor wielding criminal.
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Yone's story immediately after the war
This drama is a follow-up special to the great summer asadora of 2024, Tora ni Tsubasa written by the same screenwriter, Yoshida Erika. It focuses on Yone's experiences from the fire-bombing of Tokyo through to the formation of her law partnership with Todoroki. It is set a very grim time in the history of Japan, and shows how some very dark moments in her life shaped Yone's character in the later episodes of Tora ni Tsubasa.There is some overlap with the cast of the asadora, but Yone's friend-group from law school is mostly only shown in flashbacks taken from the previous series. Ito Sairi as Torachan does appear for an utterly delightful scene at the end of the special, but mostly the special focuses on Yone, her old boss Masuno and her sister Natsu (who is played by a different actress than in the asadora, but that role was much smaller than in this special). Tozuka Junki also reprises his role as Todoroki, but only for a few scenes after the emotional denouement of the special.
Dio Shiori as Yone is excellent as usual as the fiery (probably) non-binary future lawyer. She delivers on a couple of emotionally devastating scenes. And Hirayama Yusuke has much more to do than in the previous series, and acquits himself well.
The scene with Torachan is a must-watch for fans of the previous series, and if you are not up for all of this comparatively dark special, you can safely go to 1:07:29 and watch the last four minutes. All in all, the special is a good exploration of Yone's character and provides some deeper insights into her life.
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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
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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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The Best Series On Netflix (at time of writing)
From the series description here on MDL and on Netflix you might think that this series is just another tepid or, perhaps, melodramatic slice-of-life from the third rate drama-producing nation, Japan. Instead, this series is an innovative, uplifting look at one woman's life from her early teens through her 20s, and is a stunningly beautiful depiction of her interesting family in Kobe.My Family is a slightly fictionalized version of the active essayist and humorist Kishida Nami and is based on her writings about her family. (She posts her essays at https://note.kishidanami.com/, and the website ALLWRITE in the series is clearly based on note.com. Most of her old posts are paywalled, but the most recent is generally available for free for a week or two and Google translate works on them reasonably well at this point.) The series was directed and co-written by Ohku Akiko who won Best Director for this series at the Japanese Television Drama Academy Awards.
Here Nami is called Nanami and is portrayed in a revelatory performance by Kawai Yuumi. The series explores how and why Nanami became a writer through a somewhat nonlinear but highly satisfying narration of various challenges that her family has had to face over the years. This series goes deep, and Kawai's performance masterfully exhibits a huge range. And we get two naked scenes of Kawai that will have women-kissers grabbing tissues ... well, along with everyone else: to dab their tears.
Sakai Maki delivers an equally amazing performance as Nanami's mother, Hitomi. She has the most physically demanding role in the piece and has to hit several emotional lows throughout the series which she does with complete commitment.
But beyond the leads, the depth of the acting bench is in this series, frankly, astounding. What does it say about the writing, directing and acting in a series when one of my favorite characters is simply the personal assistant (to the head of ALLWRITE) Saito played by 16th on the MDL call-sheet, Kabashima Hikari?
And, of course, there is Nanami's bff Multi played by Fukuchi Momoko. What can I say: she is delightful and fay.
The key, of course, is that all of the various characters in this series have their own stories that we get flashes of, and often interlock in unexpected but believable ways. They are all living their own lives over the years, and all have their own goals that often support and intersect Nanami's along her way.
And it cannot be said loudly enough: this is the kind of casual representation of differently-abled diversity that is sorely lacking in ALL media throughout the world. It's not just that there are at least 9 actors in this series with Down Syndrome. It's that frequently in the background there are wheel chair users, hearing impaired people signing, and a vision-impaired person just going about their lives.
I almost never touch on re-watchability in my reviews. Mostly, it is not relevant to my media consumption. But since this series was fansubbed a couple of years ago, I've watched through it a few times, and gone back to episode 8 in isolation a few time more. Not because that episode addresses an issue that I have faced in my family, but because the episode is that good. I will state that it still holds up on the Netflix version even though they did not fork out the dough for The Rolling Stones' She's A Rainbow which is the only change I could detect throughout the series from the original broadcast version. The score by Takano Masaki is otherwise excellent throughout.
Oh, and can we talk art direction for once? Look, I'm not sure exactly what blue and orange are supposed to represent here. The blue is clearly linked to the ocean and perhaps the subconscious (thanks, Jung). And maybe the orange is the activity in the world that Nanami represents. (It's certainly her color throughout the series.) But I do know that those two colors feature in many if not most shots, and that the series is visually intriguing throughout with Ohku often putting her camera in unusual places that are clearly chosen to make a point.
My Family is an extremely interesting and rewarding series to watch. Yes: there will occasionally be moments in the edit that you will not understand until later in the episode or the series as whole, but all the questions raised are resoundingly addressed and answered in ways that are often funny, moving, or tearful and quite often all three at the same time. The quintessential question of the series is: is Nanami okay? Watch the series and find out.
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One of the weakest asadoras in the past decade
Mai Agare! was the winter asadora which started in the fourth quarter of 2022, and is the fictional account (as opposed to a fictionalized biography) of Mai who aspires to soar into the sky. She makes a lot of progress towards doing so in the first half of the series in which she grows up and heads to college where she becomes the pilot for a club which works on building human-powered aircraft, and then shifts to flight school where she successfully graduates and is all set to become a commercial pilot in Japan.And so, naturally, at that point the script turns abruptly from the exciting world of piloting to ... the manufacturing of screws and the plight of small production factories in Osaka.
Look. I'll spare you all the details, but I'm entirely the target audience for the second half. My Dad engineered parts for the B1 bomber in the 70s and the Boeing 767 and 777 jets in the 90s. He had his name on several process patents for the use of titanium. I have written tons of poetry. All of those things touch directly on plot points in this series. I should be the one person who should be eating up everything being served by this series in the second half, but let me tell you: the storylines in the second half are ... just ... so ... boring.
The scripts also suffers from tepid or nonexistent resolutions to many of the running story arcs. Are the Goto islanders able to recruit young people to establish lives in the islands and revitalize the community? Does Mai's brother face any real long-term consequences for his illegal investment activities? Can Takashi overcome his writer's block? Can local Osaka machine shops and factories band together to bring in more business opportunities? The answers will not surprise you, and are presented in ways that might well be a cure for your insomnia.
As other reviewers have noted, there also seemed to be real issues in the production budgeting for this series with no expenses being spared for the first half including at least one aircraft apparently specifically built for the production and lots of shots on location at a fight school and also at the reasonably distant Goto islands. After that the story is stuck in a handful of sets including the Iwakura family house which miraculously expands as needed over time. They splurged a bit more for the final two weeks where they still mostly skip over what would probably be a much more interesting plot than the rest of the second half with a couple of multiyear time jumps.
On the other hand, the cast consists of good, solid acting professionals doing what they can with the material. I have enjoyed Fukuhara Haruka in several other things, and would even recommend her turn in her two seasons of the live action Yuru Camp even though those series have even less plot than this one. Here she plays Mai as persistent and cheerful, and she handles the narrow range of emotions required for the role perfectly well. She has little to no chemistry with either of her love interests, but, to be fair, all sexual chemistry is apparently against the asadora style guide in general.
If you enjoy the asadora format, this series is one. If you've never tried an asadora, there are many I would recommend before watching this one with Amachan still being the best pure fiction series and the recent Tora ni Tsubasa being the best fictionalized biography in my experience and opinion.
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Non's Sophomore Effort Is Slow But Charming
This is Non's second film, and this time she "only" wrote, directed, edited and starred in it. It's an art film about art which is always dicey territory, but Non manages to keep the story from being pretentious or self-indulgent by grounding the narrative in the mundane lives of its characters while limiting her representations of the impulses of creativity to brief but necessary moments of cgi and practical images of ribbons.Set at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, it captures the stress of the time and the way it forced us to isolate. Here the stress is compounded for Non's character Itsuka and her friend Hirai as their art school is being put on hiatus right before their graduation and their final projects and exhibitions are canceled. Itsuka shelters in her apartment alone and utterly fails to find a way to continue painting even though she routinely had done so there in the past. It is a story about reconnecting to that creative impulse through the not always welcome intrusions of friends and family.
The film has a larger budget than her first film, Get To The Punchline, and her editorial skills have improved, but the film is a bit slow and probably does not merit it's 2 hour runtime. That being said, it has some solidly funny moments, a beautifully moving climax and a satisfying denouement. The cast is solid and Non exhibits a greater range as an actress than she has in her prior roles.
All in all, it's a good journeyman effort and a surprisingly satisfying next step for this interesting young filmmaker.
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The agency is presented as a quirky and mildly dysfunctional little family that works pretty diligently to keep the business going and the girls safe. The characters at the office are reasonably likable and the actors do a decent job with the material they are given. The story of the day-to-day operations of the agency seems to be a reasonably sober and accurate if slightly gritty depiction of this side of the sex industry in Japan. There is a bit of humor that does land throughout the series, and rather more banjo in the soundtrack than one might expect.
The show is fairly sex-positive but the tone of the production is definitely not approving of the call-girl business in general. Nor is there any fan service here: the women and what they do with their clients is presented in a matter-of-fact manner, and while several gorgeous actresses are part of the cast, they are not presented for the male gaze even in scenes with their clients.
The failure of the series is inherent in its set-up: the show is about Sakita coming to terms with his new job. The arc of the series centers on his repeated failures to be a white knight for the woman at his agency. And so while two of the women he works with are almost certainly raped (trigger warnings for episodes 3 and 12), two of them are kidnapped, and one is physically abused at a rival agency the story only focuses on how those incidents affect him. I think we're supposed to be cheering the fact that Sakita genuinely cares for the women he works with but the series itself really does not.
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Shiawase Kanako no Koroshiya Seikatsu Season 2
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Again fun but way too short
Our ditzy killing machine is now thoroughly settled into her new job as an assassin, and she must face the consequences of her growing reputation in the business. Kanako is a social creature in an antisocial profession, and so she begins to look for a way to make some new friends which she soon does with a group who become entangled in her life in ways that are complicated and hard to resolve in ways that can leave everyone safe and happy.Non remains extremely well suited to play Kanako though the character probably demands less range in this iteration. There is a tiny bit of character growth for her over the course of the series as it tangentially addresses the question, "How should we live?" But the focus of the series is more on her new friends and their relationship to her and the other people in her life.
The pacing of the series is a bit faster than the first, and maybe a bit faster than is ideal. I get the impression that the storylines are likely quite a bit more compressed than they are in the manga (which, tbf, is often the case in manga adaptations), but this series probably pushes that compression a bit too hard, and would have been a bit more effective had it covered the same storylines over a few more episodes. But it's still comprehensible, and it's light and breezy as it rushes through the story beats.
In the middle of this season, I was beginning to want to critique the series as having less heart than it's obvious rival, the Baby Assassin franchise (which gets mentioned in the end credits commentary - always remember to keep watching for those snippets at the end), but the final episode won me over entirely.
If you enjoyed the first season, then it's highly likely that you'll enjoy this second season. The fight choreography is a bit more over-the-top reaching more typical superhero fare, and the acting is pushed a bit broader as well. But the series remains a tight comedy, and gave me my biggest laugh of the year.
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It's Not As Boring As It Sounds, But ....
Faking Beethoven is a rather straight-forward biopic of Anton Schindler who served as Ludwig Van Beethoven's secretary for a few years towards the end of Beethoven's career and life. Schindler was one of the earliest biographers of Beethoven and was competing with a few other of Beethoven's associates to leverage the composer's name, frame his legacy and make some money via publication. Schindler had been suspected of strongly controlling the narrative of Beethoven's life (or at least his later years) from the first edition of his biography in 1840, but it was not until 1977 that it was proven the lengths to which he had done so. After Beethoven died he acquired the conversation books that people had used to speak to Beethoven after he had gone fully deaf and then severely edited them and added new lines and content. He then tossed away most of them, and sold the remainder to a major Prussian university. It was a only mild scandal in the academic world (since there are many other sources for documenting Beethoven's life), and I will note that the whole thing was not even considered worth bringing up when I took a course on Beethoven's symphonies as a student at UC Berkeley in the mid 80s for which a later biography was required reading. People at the time were much more interested in whether an unsent love letter by Beethoven to his "Immortal Beloved" was, in fact, meant for a guy (which it might have been but no one knows for sure).And so this film details the history of Schindler's time with Beethoven, and the subsequent publication history of the various editions of Schindler's biography of the man. The film is written by Bakarhythm, and so it leans comedic but less so than many of his works. However, the script is entirely too reliant on voice-over throughout the film. Yamada Yuki manages a journeyman's effort conveying a weirdly obsessed fan of the composer who got to be part of his daily life for a few years and wanted to shape the world's understanding of the man to conform to his vision of his erstwhile employer. Furuta Arata has fun as "the great man" who is well documented by many other sources as being volatile, gruff, complex and interesting.
The film is not Amadeus nor does it aspire to be. But one has to wonder if there are not many more interesting stories about Beethoven's life that would serve to make a better film. Heck, we get tangentially get a bunch of Beethoven's relationship to his nephew Karl in this film which is a far more dramatic story than what this film centers. This film is probably a must watch if you are a fan of Yamada. For everyone else, the film is a bit more vibrant than you might expect given that it's really about one guy's efforts to assert his narrative about a famous public figure over a handful of rival narratives in ways that are of little consequence even for the academics who do care about accurately documenting Beethoven's life and legacy. And so I'd say if you're interested in the period in general or the later life of Beethoven, then you likely would enjoy the film.
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