Quality over quantity...simply brilliant!
I had already had the chance to deeply appreciate Kanai Junichi's refined skills as screenwriter/director in the short movie "Transferring" and in the dorama "Bishonure Tantei Mizuno Hagoromo", and I had already become a big fan of the FL, Konishi Sakurako, while watching her drama "Keihan Ensen Monogatari". It was therefore with some pretty big expectations that I approached this "Neko", and I'm very glad to be able to say that those expectations haven't been betrayed! Quite the opposite, it's even better than I'd imagined it would be! ^____^The script is absolutely brilliant, managing to touch topics like love, life and loss, in such a delicately beautiful way; at the same time, the depth it reaches in such a short time (six 20' episodes, basically the same length of your average movie) proves once again that quality trumps quantity.
The cast did a great job too, not only Konishi Sakurako but also the ML, Maeda Oshiro (whom I had only seen in minor roles so far and therefore not really noticed; I really hope he'll get more leading roles from now on!) and my beloved Sakai Wakana added some more value even by acting in a single episode (but what a great role! Once again, quality over quantity, right?)
The direction and photography are exquisite, and the music lovely throughout the entire series.
Perfect 10!
Was this review helpful to you?
I really disliked it, sorry...>___<
I should've trusted my guts and dropped this immediately, after all....>__<It had some (few, waaaay too few) good moments, but those were literally drowned in a plethora of frustratingly terrible, poorly written scenes.
I've sometimes used food metaphors while praising some drama (writing stuff like "it masterfully manages to mix so many different ingredients and ends up creating an original, delicious flavor" or something like that), but here it's just the opposite: the clueless screenwriter (whom I'm adding immediately to my personal blacklist!) came up with a painfully uncohesive story, filling it with idiotic characters and mixing up genres and styles in an obnoxiously chaotic, incoherent way (back to food metaphors: mixing something sweet with something sour is perfectly fine if you come up with, say, a delicious plate of Sweet&Sour Chicken...but here it's as if she'd dropped a spoonful of strawberry jam on a tomato, and then covered the whole thing with mayonnaise, cocoa powder and wasabi...sorry, but I'll pass! >____<)
All this imvho, of course.
Was this review helpful to you?
What a lovely lil' dorama! ^_____^
I hope you'll forgive me for quoting/paraphrasing what I had written in my review of "Hotarugusa", as it's befitting for this lovely "Miyako ga Kyoto ni Yattekita!" too! ^__^;And that is: amidst the recent, ever-surging wave of "westernized" j-dramas (...), it does one's heart a whole lot of good to find a small gem like this!
The whole dorama is a heartfelt declaration of love for Kyoto, all while portraying the lovely story of the reunion between a divorced father and his 20 years old daughter, whom he hadn't seen in 12 years.
The script is wonderful, filled as it is with witty dialogues, touching scenes and a light-but-totally-not-shallow general atmosphere; the leads, Sasaki Kuranosuke and Fujino Ryoko, both delivered a great performance; the music is adorable, particularly that ubiquitous tango; last but certainly not least, Kyoto in all its glory is such a perfect setting and the short documentary clips, introduced by Fujino-san herself, shown at the end of each episode are just the cherry on top!
What else can I say? I literally enjoyed every single minute of it! Perfect 10! ^___^
Was this review helpful to you?
Similarly to what happened with that movie, in fact, until a matter of just minutes from the end of this "Blindly in Love", I was gonna give it a perfect 10, put it right away in my personal top10 of all times, and basically review it as a masterpiece. But then (no spoilers, don't worry ^__-) the ending was....well, let's just say: not what I think it should've been.
Still, differently from that other movie, I can't say that this was totally ruined, only slightly.
I wholeheartedly suggest it anyway, as the script (at least, 99% of it) is really beautiful, the cast marvelous (I already wrote many praises to Kaho's beauty and acting skills, and I'll gladly repeat myself once again here: she's simply "WOW"!!! Hoshino Gen as the ML was also absolutely brilliant, like the rest of the cast - honorable mentions for the always great Kuroki Hitomi and Hiraizumi Sei!), the directing top notch, the music lovely. Once again, if only they'd wrapped it up more nicely, this would've been a real masterpiece. It's still a very good movie, though. 9/10
Was this review helpful to you?
Why the long premise? Very simply put, because that's exactly what this "Cheat" feels like: a "vorrei-ma-non-posso"!
The directing, the editing, the photography, the music...all top notch and very closely imitating the style of such "heist" genre's masterpieces as the "Ocean's" trilogy or, staying in Japan, as "The Confidence Man JP".
The problem is, this dorama can't actually reach that very same level of excellency due to two big faults it has:
1) the script is good, but not perfect; whereas the cons plots are mostly well written and intriguing, the rest is just "meh": the comic relief is a bit of a "hit or miss" (the whole idol-related side story, for example, is just ridiculous), the characters are bidimensional, and some scenes and twists feel a bit too forced;
2) the cast as a whole is not up to par either; some of them are actually good (Fukuhara Haruka is lovely as usual and Kaneko Daichi is pretty funny!), but others are just embarrassingly terrible (Honda Tsubasa manages to reach new....depths...in the not so fine art of overacting - I thought nobody could do worse than Naka Riisa, but it seems I was mistaken! - and Kazama Shunsuke is outright unbearable, constantly acting as if he were God's sexy gift to humanity, URGH! Dude, no offense, but you're, like, three feet tall! Come off it, will ya? ^__^;...)
(Before Honda's and Kazama's fans jump at my throat: I haven't seem them in many other roles so far - actually, only one other drama for each of them, respectively "Shomuni 4" and "Nemureru Mori" - and I honestly don't remember whether they were good in those or what, so I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt: maybe the fault here lies with this script, I can't say for sure, so: peace! ^___-)
Still, even with all its faults, "Cheat" ain't too bad either; and if you, like me, are a fan of the genre, you'll probably find it enjoyable enough, all in all...^__-
Was this review helpful to you?
This review may contain spoilers
After this, I feel like I desperately need the soul equivalent of a long, warm shower!
I'll start with a warning: there was no way for me to properly review this dorama and explain why I loved it at first and ended up hating it (and believe me, I don't use this word lightly), without some spoilers.So, before you keep on reading, let me ask you a question: have you watched "Full Metal Jacket"? If you haven't, then maybe play it safe and stop reading. But if you have, here's one more question for you: would you say that Sergeant Hartman was a fine educator or a rotten S.O.B.?
If your answer is the former, then stop reading and start watching this dorama, there's a high chance you'll love it! But if your answer is the latter, then you might want to keep reading - spoilers included - so as to avoid wasting 9 hours or so of your life (over 12 if you include the SP) on this.
And now I'll proceed explaining why I think so (spoilers from now on, consider yourselves warned):
I was captured right away by the thought-provoking premise, and it kept me thinking and (probably over-)thinking for the first few episodes. I even thought, for a brief moment, that maybe the scriptwriter had had an incredibly prophetic view of his future (and our tragic present), thus using this dorama's distopian classroom to portray a society where those in charge seem to have loads of evil fun pitting us "commoners" against each other and even unleashing chaos - the only thing they care about being that we obey, don't think and follow their rules which are more and more absurd each day - and clearly counterproductive, at that. Ok, I was seeing too much into it, LOL, but that's just to show you how intrigued I was!
Slowly but progressively, though, the story kept getting sillier and sillier with every episode. Short after the middle of the series, I started suspecting where it was heading: to an utterly insulting ending where they'd say that this monster (Amami Yuki's character couldn't deserve titles like "teacher" or "educator", and sorry if you disagree, but this is my informed opinion as someone who's worked in this field!), I repeat, where they'd say that this monster had actually been a "good (hell, even great) teacher", that it had all been just some "tough love" and that it had all "turned out well after all".
And that's where I started hating it.
Because I believe that if you treat people badly (Akuma-sensei - sorry, Akutsu-sensei - pun intended - traumatizes her pupils day in and day out, and her behavior sums up to psychological torture in my book!), I repeat, if you treat people this badly, no good *whatsoever* could *ever* come from that. To even imagine such an idiotic development is total BS, sorry.
If you treat people like this, some bad sh*t is bound to happen instead! Just like with Sergeant Hartman and Private "Gomer Pyle" in "Full Metal Jacket", you know...?
Approaching the end of the series, each episode unfortunately confirmed my suspicion, and I was more and more disappointed, and then really *disgusted* by the lousy, idiotic last episode (*every single scene* of it felt like an insult to my intelligence: the commercial-like family scene, the fight with the punks - nani sore?!? Where the hell did those crawl out from? A Chuck Norris movie maybe?!? And then again, the 180° U-turn from monster to ideal teacher / hero, even lecturing the kids on how it's wrong to hurt others - true, of course! But....how dare *she* say that?!? You gotta be f***ing kiddin' me, c'mon! And I could go on and on but I guess you got the picture...in one word: "BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD!!!").
After watching Arimura Kasumi no Satsukyu" I had felt...cleansed, that's the word!
After watching this series to its end...I feel like I desperately need the soul equivalent of a long, warm, scrubbing-all-over shower! Such a terrible feeling it has left me with!!!
The acting was good (I mean, the kids' acting, as Amami Yuki's character being the expressionless monster she was, the poor actress couldn't show her acting skills, unfortunately. And the rest of the cast, alas, were little more than extras, so it's hard to judge them - except to praise Kaho for her adorable "onee-san"). The music was okay. I'll go with a 4/10, also considering that to correctly asses the "rewatch value" I'd need negative numbers...
Was this review helpful to you?
1) there's little - and often just nothing - heroic in war; war is bad, it takes out the worst from people, and that means cowardice, betrayal, lies, atrocities etc.
2) what passes for "history" in the mainstream is actually only the "winners' version";
3) the "losers' version" is often - if not always - at least a little more accurate and true to life; why? Simple: losers can't so easily cover their crimes and sugarcoat the truth as winners do.
All this premise so as to explain why I particularly like Japanese productions about WWII: they aren't propagandistic fairy tales, they show war for what it is, in all its absurdity. Just like this dorama does, all while portraying the real story of Ri Kouran / Li Xianglan / Yamaguchi Yoshiko, a Japanese singer and actress from Japanese-occupied Manchuria.
Commenting on another dorama ("Chanpon Tabetaka") I wrote that it felt "like an asadora's digest", but then I didn't mean it as a compliment; here instead it's really as if they had taken the best and most relevant scenes out of an asadora and managed to make a 4-hour movie out of them. Great job indeed! The script is very well done, the acting very good, Ueto Aya - wearing qipaos/cheongsams most of the time - is positively gorgeous and the historical settings, costumes etc. simply great. I also really appreciated the respect the production showed to realism, i.e. using Russian-speaking actors to portray the main character's friend Lyuba and her family (and adding those small touches that alone can give realism to a scene, like when they're all drinking tea at one point and Lyuba asks if they have any jam - 'cause she would want to drink tea "the Russian way", of course! Small detail, but it shows the authors did their homework, doesn't it?).
Last but not least, some lovely music makes this lil' gem of dorama shine even more. Perfect 10!
Was this review helpful to you?
Was this review helpful to you?
Was this review helpful to you?
This review may contain spoilers
Unsatisfied with the vast majority of the current season's J-dramas, I decided to go and try one of the many "Golden Age" ones I still hadn't watched, and picked this "Aishiteiru to Itte Kure".Well, sometimes even older dramas can be a real let down, as it was the case here, alas.
First things first, what I liked: namely, the *marvelous* OST (WOW, seriously, perfect 10 there!), the unmistakable "90's Flavor", and the always good performance by Tokiwa Takako - whereas the rest of the cast, imho, didn't do so well; most were sub-par, but I don't think it's entirely their fault, as the material they had to work with was the real problem.
In a scriptwriter's career (even when we're talking of someone like Kitagawa Eriko who's done some real masterpieces!) there's bound to be the occasional lousy work, and this was precisely such a case.
It started quite well, except for the honestly annoying subplot involving the stepsis; but then in the second half it became more and more trite and poorly written, with the last episode being particularly terrible, to the point it ended up being involuntarily ridiculous. HUGE spoilers ahead so stop reading NOW if you wanna avoid those!
*****SPOILERS*****
Misunderstanding after misunderstanding, the FL convinces herself (and wrongly so) that the ML has cheated on her, so she goes and cheats on him with her childhood friend, the 2nd ML (who took advantage of the situation, ok, but then again she had been taking advantage of his kindness for the whole series, so hard to cast the blame there, imho). Even after the misunderstanding got cleared, FL and ML still break up, she has apparently realized that it's better to be loved than to chase after someone rather cold (which might have been less romantic, but I was still fine with such a development, it would have been mature and adult and realistic and honestly quite a nice change after all). So she's bound to move back to Sendai to marry the 2nd ML and help him run the family inn. All fine and dandy, right?
But then the Nth set of coincidences unleash (seriously, the way the characters keep running into each other by chance, you'd think this series was set in a small village, rather than in the tentacular metropolis, LOL) and she runs into the ML, goes with him to an apartment/villa at the seaside ('cause yeah, what normal Japanese wouldn't have a seaside house with a fireplace, right? Mattaku...), where they open up a bottle of champagne ('cause yeah, the house is uninhabited, but of course there's a fine bottle on hand just in case!), almost have sex but stop midway after he picks up her keys ('cause yeah, what normal dude wouldn't pick up some keys while going at it, right?) and she notices the keychain belonging to the 2nd ML, thusly bursting in tears.
Come dawn, a *ridiculous* scene on the beach ensues, where we discover that deaf people apparently have the superpower of being able to understand what you say if you just put your throat on their shoulder (seriously, Kitagawa-san?!? Or was it Stan Lee who wrote that scene? Who knows, maybe the ML got bitten by a radioactive mosquito? Again, mattaku...)
Then she gets back to the 2nd ML, who's the usual, understanding nitwit and leaves alone, brokenhearted but with a big smile (oh, boy) while she stays in the Big City to pursue her acting career.
Three years later, she's been so "successful" that her single-line scene gets cut, but apparently that pays well enough that she's dressed all in style with Italian/French designer's clothes. And then the leads meet again by chance in front of an apple tree (more like, a completely different plant to which some poor sap of AD has glued half a dozen apples bought in the closest supermarket!!!), and so they can live happily ever after. *BARFS!*
Wasn't it for the OST and for Tokiwa, the grade would be even lower. 4/10
Was this review helpful to you?
Wow, seriously, I've watched it a coupla weeks ago and I'm still getting goosebumps just by thinking about it, so good it was!
The script is absolutely P-E-R-F-E-C-T, it works like the finest of Swiss clockworks and *every single scene* is a total delight to watch. Even the most minor of side characters feels tridimensional, and the scenes involving them are fabulously deep and brilliant (take for instance the beautiful subplot involving the "haafu" and his mother! Or the fantastically bittersweet one with the old couple!).
The acting is top-notch, as one would expect from such a *stellar* cast!!!
The production value / "packaging" literally reaches Himalayan heights too.
This goes directly in my personal top10 of all times!!!
Was this review helpful to you?
This review may contain spoilers
I must confess I started this "Miwa-san Narisumasu" without really having high expectations about it. On the one hand, it's a "yorudora" (similarly to the "asadora", many short episodes of 15' each, credits included) which made me wary it could've been aimed (as somehow more typical of the yorudora, in fact) at a much younger audience than poor old me; on the other hand, as you might already know if you've read my other reviews, romance ain't really my favorite genre.I'm happy to be able to say that this drama totally exceeded my expectations!
First of all, romance isn't really such a big part of it, but rather a side ingredient (just like the pinch of sugar we Italians like to add to our tomato-based pasta sauces, if you get what I mean, LOL). Secondly, it felt more mature and a little deeper than the usual yorudora, which was also a very nice surprise. Last but certainly not least, the whole cast did really well and contributed highly to the viewing pleasure.
So did the pretty high production value and the generally very nice script, although this latter wasn't absolutely perfect imho. In all fairness, I felt a few parts here and there were a bit weak, and most of all, the ending was way too rushed and left some things way too open (but then again, I've watched this RAW so chances are some details, and even more than that, escaped me...?)
I can still wholeheartedly recommend it though. 9/10
Was this review helpful to you?
I liked this so much, I'd want to give it more than "just" 10/10!!!
Seriously, there are times when you watch something so tremendously satisfying, that you kinda feel bad for not being able to rate it more than "just" the top grade, and it is precisely the case with this fabulous "River, Nagarenaide yo"!Hard to explain why it hit me so much without giving anything away (and that'd be a pity 'cause it would deprive you of the pleasure of finding out by yourselves!), I'll just say this: the premise is as interesting as they come; the way they actually made it work was nothing short of a serious stroke of genius; the technical difficulties I can only imagine but must have been something indeed, chapeau for the way they brilliantly overcame them; the cast did *marvelously*, with a special mention for the amazing, lovely, gorgeous (I could go on and on!) Fujitani Riko; the setting is simply F-A-B-U-L-O-U-S; the "packaging" absolutely top-notch (I normally am not really a fan of hand-held cameras, but there was no other way to make this work!).
What are you waiting for? Go watch this *now*! You'll thank me later! ^____-
10/10 and instant top10 of all times, as far as I'm concerned!
Was this review helpful to you?
M-A-S-T-E-R-P-I-E-C-E !!!
If you, like me, are big fans of the typically Japanese "iyashikei" genre, chances are you'll totally *love* this "Izakaya Bottakuri", just as I did!I must confess having become a bit tired of the whole "food drama" subgenre, as it has an unfortunate tendency to be terribly repetitive (in a nutshell: you show some food, the main characters stuff their faces with it, rinse&repeat), of course bar a few exceptions. But what we have here is much, much more than just a food drama! Sure, there's that aspect as well, but masterfully mixed with an incredible amount of humaneness, a relaxing atmosphere, beautifully written characters, some lovely music and a perfect "packaging". Fabulously written, directed, acted (they're all very good, but let me just name Katayama Moemi who's the very definition of "gorgeous" here!)...a true gem, highly recommended, folks!
Just to give you an idea of how much I've liked this: from now on, I'll have to add this small izakaya to the short list of fictional soothing places I'd really love to visit, alongside the adorable "Café Alpha" from "Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou" and the whole "Neo Venezia" from Amano Kozue's "Aqua/Aria" masterpiece! ^___-
Was this review helpful to you?
Wait!
I know you've already read the synopsis, I'm not such a lousy reviewer as to needlessly repeat it, trust me...so bear with me for a few more seconds, will ya?
Where was I?
Oh, yeah:
...and they came up with a master plan: to have a dorama made, starring Kumada Rinka as the ideal wife (she's beautiful, kind, feminine, honest, sweet...add a few dozens more qualities and you'll get close to understanding how perfect she is in this!) so that even such old and staunch bachelors as yours truly would actually change their mind at least for the duration of the dorama and think that it'd be nice to get married.
I swear, these Japanese are a clever bunch! Chapeau, guys! ^__________^
p.s.
Jokes aside: it's a refreshingly clean, sweet and heartwarming lil' dorama, with a beautiful script and great performances by the whole cast! Highly recommended!!!
Was this review helpful to you?
