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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This review may contain spoilers
A Charming Slice Of Life With Twists
THIS IS A FULL SPOILER REVIEW but spoilers will only begin after the Read More button.Unreachable is a slice of life drama centered on the lives of three young women sharing a house on the outskirts of Tokyo. Written by one of the best current screenwriters in Japan, Yuji Sakamoto, it explores the day to day life of three childhood friends as they make their way through their daily lives as they go to work and school, and ultimately address their past and relationships within and outside the trio. Glancing at the cast consisting of Yokohama Ryusei and the three women played by Hirose Suzu (Misaki), Sugisaki Hana (Yuka), and Kiyohara Kaya (Sakura) one might guess that there might be a love story here and, indeed, love does play a part, there is no romantic love story in this film.
It is a film about three women dealing with a world that fails to see them, and how they are constantly trying to reach out to others to affirm their identities.
It is highly recommended that you do not read the rest of this review until after you have watched the film or unless you do not care about spoilers at all.
Unreachable is a slice of death drama centered on the daily activities of three ghosts haunting an abandoned house on the outskirts of Tokyo. It is a ghost story told entirely from the point of view of the ghosts. Horror and ghost stories are a miniscule part of my media diet, and so I do not know if that's a trope in the genre, but it would not surprise me if it were. In any case, that premise is revealed about a quarter of the way through the film.
The girls were nine when they were killed by a knife-wielding psychopath while they were preparing for a choir competition at school. (It occurred to me while watching that the set up would make much more sense in the context of the continual school shootings we subject ourselves to in the US.) But they have continued to grow up together in their own parallel world where they can grab copies of whatever material things they need, but cannot seem to be detected by any creatures in our world. Yuka has decided to go to college and study physics to see if there is any physical explanation of their state, while Misaki and Sakura have adopted working roles that at least allow them to pretend that they are part of some social groups.
As such, the film focused on the young women's attempts to reach out to others, and, in particular, their relationship to the people who still grieve their passing. One of the plot threads deals with a family member confronting the killer who was recently released from prison, and that's a theme that Sakamoto dealt with at length and much more deeply and effectively in my opinion in his 2011 series Still, Life Goes On.
The more interesting plot thread is that between Misaki and her childhood friend, Tenma played by Yokohama. The tragedy continues to haunt Tenma and Misaki truly wishes to help him find his way to healing and getting beyond his grief and survivor's guilt.
Prior to this year, Sakamoto has rarely ventured into genre fiction with the only notable exception being his version of the Chinese classic Journey To The West in his 2006 series Saiyuuki. This year he also wrote the time travel film 1st Kiss which was much more successful at the box office. But he is, as ever, the master of the telling detail, and in this film there are several instances where the revelations of those small details will likely pierce your heart.
Is our world Unreachable to the three young women? Sakamoto resolutely refuses in this film to answer that question unambiguously. But it is entirely clear that the short time that the three spent here continues to effect and shape the lives of others, and that that love is not Unrequited.
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Low budget but well acted and well shot and edited
Ramblers is a low budget road movie. Tsuboi, a screenwriter, and Kinoshita, a director, were supposed to supposed to meet up with a mutual friend, Funaki, out in the sticks for a vacation, but he overslept and did not make the train. The two quickly decide to go on without him, occasionally checking in with Funaki to see if he's going to join him. The two are pretty much stangers at the start of the trip, and the thought that Funaki might still make it is more of a Waiting For Godot situation. Nevertheless, they find their way between various scenic spots, ryokans and onsens in the area and have encounters along the way.The point of this indie film is more about the film-making and showing off the skills of director Yamashita Atsuhiro on the film festival circuit. It's not quite a Dogme 95 film, but seems to rely on available light and on-scene sound with plenty of ambient noise. There are some interesting shots, and some fun set pieces with fixed cameras and characters wandering in and out of frame.
Other than that, it's almost entirely free of plot. Nevertheless, the acting is good and there are some surprises and cringe humor to maintain your interest. The largest segment of the film has the two encountering a young mysterious woman (played by Ono Michiko) alone on a beach, and then sharing their adventure with her for a bit. In the end the two run out of cash, but have established a professional relationship by the time they have to head home.
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A story of hopeless misery
Kawai Yuumi won the best actress award from the 2024 Japan Academy Film Prize for her performance in this film's depiction of drug addiction, domestic violence, prostitution, addiction recovery programs, self harm, child abandonment, social service failures, and the exploitation of the vulnerable in general. If you enjoy films like 2004's Nobody Knows, then this film is probably exactly the kind of thing you would like. It is a well-produced film based on a true story with all the endless misery and gritty realism one could want with fine performances by Kawai Yuumi as Ann and Sato Jiro as a police detective, Tatara, who tries to pull Ann out of the mire that her life is under the unrelenting abuse from her mother Harumi played by Kawai Aoba.Ann has been forced into prostitution by her mother since she was 14 and has been an intravenous meth addict for a couple of years when the film starts. She gets arrested when an abusive client overdoses, but an idiosyncratic police detective gets her enrolled in his addiction recovery program. She keeps being drawn back in reach of her mother because she loves and worries about what will happen to her disabled grandmother if she completely abandons the family. Any light suggested by Ann's road to recovery is only present in the film to be quashed in the denouement that made the news in Japan.
Both Kawaii Yuumi and Sato Jiro have excellent moments of portraying the anguish, grief and anger of these characters' lives. But, honestly, Kawaii had at least three more effective and moving scenes in her jdrama Kazoku Dakara Aishitan Janakute, Aishita no ga Kazoku Datta than anything in this film and I would direct anyone who is catching on to her talent to seek out that series long before diving into this film.
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A Slice Of Life With No Dramatic Stakes
Imaginary OL Diary was the 2017 winner of the annual Mukoda Muniko Award given by a small committee of television writers to one such writer each year. Sakamoto Yuji, one of the members of the selection committee, called it his favorite drama series and said it is a "world-class masterpiece". And as much as I stan Sakamoto, I have to disagree with that assessment, and note that both he and Bakarhythm have written series that are much better than than this one. Bakarhythm's Brush Up Life is a world-class masterpiece. This series: not so much.This series is the thoughts of a thirty-something bank teller, and the quotidian details of her and her friends'/co-workers' work life at a bank branch. They get ready at the branch's locker room, talk over lunches and dinners, and occasionally work out or go shopping together afterward. That's it. That's the series.
On the positive side, Bakarhythm is probably the best writer of dialogue currently working in Japan. He has a great ear for the normal dysfluencies of natural speech, and it's flow and repetitions. The series is pretty much focused on the difference between the tatemae of what the women say and do and honne of what they really feel and want. There is a bit of exploration of how they police each other's tatemae, but it never really rises to any level of critique of that policing. It's tone is more, "well, that's just what we do." But you can see the seeds of the conversations, relationships and interactions in Brush Up Life in this work which shares some of the same actors.
The elephant in the room, of course, is that the cishet man Bakarhythm plays the protagonist in a sort of minimal drag: make-up and clothes and that's it. I guess we're supposed to oooh and ahhh at a guy writing and acting from the POV of a woman of his age and at all of the rest of the cast acting like he's just one of the girls. It's a perfectly valid exercise for any writer to try writing from POVs outside of their experience. But do we laud any woman writer for routinely doing exactly that for virtually every series she writes? Have not men played women in classical theater both in Japan and the West for centuries?
And so I had to constantly ask myself as I watched: would this series work with a woman playing the protagonist? I still enjoyed the series with that thought in mind. But I do not think it was any kind of revelation about gender norms, nor do I think it was it trying to be. Instead, it's a deep dive into the minutia of daily work relationships at a bank branch with no dramatic stakes whatsoever. They talk about who has refilled the toilet paper in the woman's room the most often, and collectively deal with a broken space heater in the locker room. And if that's the level of excitement you are looking for in a drama, this series will provide it.
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Mostly Forgettable
What to Do with the Dead Kaiju is a parody of kaiju movies in general and a couple of the most well known franchises in that genre in particular. The premise is pretty solid: a large reptilian kaiju has just stomped through Tokyo and died at the mouth of a river and the government neither knows why it died nor what to do with the resulting decaying hill of flesh. The government dithers and various ministerial departments seek to score political points while addressing the threat to the environment.The protagonist is Yukino who is the close aid of the Minister of the Environment and married to Mashiko who is, in turn, similarly the chief flunky of the Prime Minister. Complicating matters is the fact that Yukino is still carrying a torch for Arata who had disappeared in a mysterious white light for a couple years and is now a lieutenant in the Special Forces put together to fight kaiju. The love triangle is neither interesting nor well executed, but it's the only plot linking the scenes together, and so enjoy it to the extent you can.
The humor is fairly low, but not all that effective (but, as always with comedies, YMMV). There are a few slapstick moments that might raise a chuckle. The focus of the film, however, is more on bureaucratic incompetence and malfeasance as issues arise with the decaying mass of flesh. The script telegraphs what kind of ending is coming about halfway through and then sticks with that plan through to a pretty unsatisfying climax. The film is not terrible, but there are better Japanese comedy movies out there.
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If You Liked The Series, This Is More Of That
All the boys and their cats are back for a tepid continuation of Neko Bukken. If you enjoyed the chill nature of the series, you will likely enjoy this movie that continues from where the series left off. The acting and production quality are pretty much what you saw in the series, but the writing is ... well, let's just say that it's what you might expect for the worst episode of any episodic television series that you like. The script pretty much reverses the character growth of all the housemates in order to bring them back together, and presents a plot objective and obstacle pulled from the dustiest bin of tropeville which the protagonist Yuuto proceeds to address in the stupidest way possible. Because of the wisdom of cats, or some such nonsense. Abetting him as usual is the long-suffering Yumi who manages to get a backstory that is nearly as ridiculous as the larger plot of this "film". And in the end, the people of the Cat Property all come together to live happily ever after. Yay?Was this review helpful to you?
Tomb Raiders in Japanese Occupied Manchuria
An ancient tomb full of treasure guarded by traps and demons! Fanged Zombies! Ninjas! An evil milk-drinking villain! Jenny Zeng in a black leather body suit! What more could one want? Abandon all plot-logic, ye who enter here.That being said, if you're willing to go into the film with low expectations for it making any kind of sense, it's not a terrible romp in the genre. Five mutually antagonistic adventurers seek to liberate the treasure of an ancient Chinese emperor, and encounter unexpected twists along the way. Who will make it out alive? And will the writer remember what they were looking for to begin with?
Expect terrible CGI, shockingly slow fight choreo and one surprising guitar ballad that absolutely does not fit the moment.
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Well. It's a story.
This creaking but light movie tells the story of an aging male singing group, Hello Knights, and their tepid adventure in a country town where they encounter Ai, a young woman who wants to be singer and is interested in joining the group because she thinks there's a chance that her father is in it.Non plays Ai in her first film role after being black-listed by the agency system in Japan after she left her agency following her excellent and much beloved role as Aki in 2013's Amachan. Other than looking gorgeous in 60's styles for the group of enka singers, she's perfectly adequate in a role that is as underwritten as all the rest.
I guess the film was intended to rely on a nostalgia for 60s trot ballads to drive the story, and, indeed, the scenes of petty, internecine conflicts between the band members and Ai's mildly quixotic attempts to join the group are all framed by serviceable performances of songs of that era.
It's mostly harmless, and I did not fall asleep.
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A Quality Survival Show
Nizi Project 2 is the second half of the survival show that resulted in the creation of the Japanese girl group NiziU ("Needs(y) You"). In this series the selected trainees from part one go to Seoul to train at JYP Entertainment and some of the women are ultimately chosen to debut with the group.Unlike other survival shows, Nizi Project 2 does not emphasize the eliminations at all, and, in fact, almost all of the women are in seriously consideration for the group until the final episode. Instead, the focus is on training, preparation and performance with four new slots for puzzle pieces added to each of the trainee's necklace to be granted when each trainee "levels up" their skills. Once again, the necklace does not matter much because JYP can grant puzzle pieces pretty much whenever he wishes. Of course, it's pretty hard for some of the better candidates to show improvement since they were already performing at fairly high level, but no one would expect JYP to leave those trainees out of the final group, and so there's little suspense for those few.
JYP presents five sets of missions which are covered in sets of two episodes each, and once again the focus of the show remains on the preparation and the performances. Unlike most survival shows there is roughly a month of preparation and training time before each performance which is much more in line with the comeback cycle of modern K-pop groups and the additional time means that the performances are arguably of a higher quality than most survival shows though it must be said that some of these Japanese trainees here have had far less training time in general than their counterparts in the South Korean system who typically appear on survival shows.
We do get to see the interactions of the women in their dorms and in training than in the previous series, and we do get a few additional background segments. But, as in the previous series, the show spends most of its time on the preparation and performances. Thankfully as in the previous series, there are few if any product placement segments. One of the missions is performed in front of a studio audience who are, strangely, allowed to vote once before and once after JYP makes his pronouncements from his lofty desk (I'm not sure that this variation of voting is all that great of an idea since the audience is choosing between two options and so the people who change their minds nullify their own vote and those who don't essentially get two votes. But in no sense does the audience vote matter much in this case because no one's survival on the show is on the line at that point.)
Some Japanese-speaking JYPE talents serve as hosts and commentators for a few of the episodes, but, once again, this is mostly JYP's show, and once again he is mostly insightful and helpful with the occasional critique which seem overly harsh for what appear to be perfectly fine performances.
All in all the show is a fairly delightful promotion for what promises to be interesting foray of a K-Pop-style girl group into the the Japanese market. Several of the women who make the final group are extremely easy to root for and of similar talent and charisma to those in TWICE and IZ*ONE (which were both formed via similar survival shows).
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Soichi (Hakamada Yoshi) is having an affair with his co-worker Akari (Kakei Miwako) after hours at his office building, and awakens in the morning to find his wife Akari (Tokunaga Eri) stabbed to death on the floor besides him. Hijinks ensue.
Some of the twists you'll see coming pretty much from the beginning, and some are just ridiculous.
Probably not worth watching.
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This review may contain spoilers
This is an anthology special that suffers severely from a lack of any unifying through-line other than the fact that each segment features dogs. Most of the segments are intended to be comedic but the humor uniformly fails to land. The longest segment is a melodramatic story centered on early onset Alzheimer's which, if you're interested in a J-drama on that topic, go watch Beautiful Rain rather than this barely adequate short film. Ashida Mana does appear in the final story and has maybe three lines, including one which is meant to summarize the whole mess, but, sadly, even her usual delightful performance cannot salvage the film. Not even avid dog people will find much here of interest. Was this review helpful to you?
The central character here is Mamoru/Marumo who decides to take care of the twins of his late friend so that they won't be separated. He is woefully unprepared for being a parent, but learns quickly and soon comes to love his unexpected little family. Abe does a solid job of portraying his character's growth.
As usual, Ashida Mana will bring you to tears in the final episode with a prodigious amount of subtlety and complexity to her performance though, it must be said, Suzuki Fuku does manage some of the heavy lifting that final episode as well.
It's largely a comedic drama, but there is some exploration of meatier issues as well. The okite or rules that serve as a moral for each episode do make the show a bit didactic and tend to push the series into After School Special territory. However, they are also used as a key plot point in the resolution of the drama and so probably can be forgiven.
All in all, the show is well acted, mostly light fare with some emotional punch.
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