Asian Beauty Appreciation

I’m sure you know the terms rom/com or dramadey. Well, despite its title Shiawase ni Narou yo  - there’s also a second title which appears on the intro to each episode (Let’s Be Happy!) this one hasn’t much in the way of comedy. So I’ll simply call it a drama. This is not say that there’s no humor at all, but like much else in the series, which ran 11 episodes from April 18th through June 27th of this year, the humor requires a certain suspension of disbelief. On top of that, what actually is funny is mostly driven by the situation rather that crackling funny one-liners.

First a quick look at the stars of the cast:

• Katori Shingo plays Jun Takakura – an advisor at a successful marriage counseling chain.
• Meisa Kuroki plays one of the agency’s clients and she’s easily the most beautiful client on their books.
• Naohito Fujiki plays a rich and successful lawyer, who could be subtitled a playboy out for what he can get.

Those are your headliners and if you read between the lines, you can see that this is also the plot synopsis because it doesn’t take much in the way of imagination to figure out where this one is going to go. Two boys, one girl – do the math.

That’s the simple overview. But the story is a bit more complicated. There are other clients, other involved parties at the agency, as well as friends and families of the three stars. Plus, I know I am repeating myself but I’m doing so for emphasis – you have to suspend disbelief very often in the opening few episodes.

Why is woman as beautiful as Kuroki’s character Haruna Yanagisawa without a boyfriend, and in need of a marriage advisory consultant? When we first see her, she’s spending money like it is going out of style, she’s shops, and shops, and shops, but there’s no drop in sight. Even though the digital displays at the boutiques are showing a readout in Japanese Yen – the figures are huge. She’s literally spending thousands and thousands of dollars on a single shopping spree. At her consultation, she says she doesn’t care what the men she’s introduced look like, just as long as they can make her happy.

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Imagine this: After a long, tiring day at the office, you’re ready to go out for a couple of tall, cold, Kirin Beers with a few of your mates at work. However – they decline. Just then your wife calls. Can you come home right away? We have a problem. It’s serious. When you ask her is everyone okay, she says, Just come home right away. It’s very serious….

When you finally get home, all the lights are out. Tadaima! (I ‘m home!), you say but there’s no answer. When you turn on a lamp – your wife jumps out and says turn it off. You’re dumbstruck – you have no idea. What’s wrong?

She directs you to get a flashlight, and to take a look out in the courtyard. And it is out there, in your own courtyard, which is your enclosed back yard – a young girl lies dead in your back yard. Hello…!

Not quite the Okari (Welcome home) response you expected. This is how the latest entry from the producers of Shinzanmono which I reviewed last year here, begins. This time, the series has returned to the broadcast medium in the form of a 2 hour Special Movie. The title is Red Finger.

Hiroshi Abe returns as Detective Kyouchiro Kaga

Detective Kyoichiro Kaga, portrayed once again by the wonderful Hiroshi Abe, returns to TV. This SP is a prequel to the series and takes place two years earlier. Kaga is still a great detective. And the beautiful Meisa Kuroki is once again on hand as a local reporter Aoyama.

Meisa Kuroki as Ami Aoyama

As the DVD cover tells us – when Maehara returned home to find a corpse on his property, this average salary-man and his family, were looking at just the beginning of a tragic chain of events.

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Akari (Aki) Dojima, played by Yukie Nakama, is an illustrator, and the third daughter of Chairman Dojima, the head of a construction company. During her childhood, she had an accident which left her crippled and forced her to spend her life in a motorized wheelchair.

The sudden suicide of Akari’s father sets off a chain of events. Members of Dojima family gather and their servants are killed one after another and an investigation begins. After that, the body of their driver (Kitaro), who had hung himself, is found in the garage.

So there’s your set-up for the March 2011 release Gaze (aka Mesen) taken directly from the DVD box cover. I decided to watch this one because I’ve been a fan of Yukie Nakama for a long time.  She’s the cover girl , and the lead actress, but this is far from a glamorous role for her.

In fact even though we get a brief peek at her in a hot-springs (onsen) this made for TV movie is definitely short on glamor. This is not to say that the female actresses are unattractive. No, with certainty I can state that all of the three daughters are quite nice looking, as is the girl friend of one of the sons. She’s played by Misa Uehara. While I’m at it – let’s not forget the family housekeeper either.

Misa Uehara as the girl friend who is marrying into this family

The head of housekeeping

The eldest sister

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My Darling is a Foreigner stars Mao Inoue as a manga artist and Jonathan Sherr as her transplanted to Japan, American boyfriend. The film is the tale of a cross-cultural relationship and the ensuing problems. This film is actually based on a very popular manga (more than 3 million copies have been sold), Darling wa Gaikokujin, written by Saori Oguri. That story was based on Oguri’s own life with her husband Tony.

The story has some humor to it, but not nearly enough. The tale has all the expected speed bumps:

Her father is against it and about his hoped for approval – ‘Not in a million years’, he says.

Tony’s use of spoken Nihongo (Japanese) is excellent but that doesn’t mean he will use the right word all the time.

Saori’s English is a work in progress.

Each of them, Saori and Tony, will be the one that is different at a key social setting – Tony is mistaken for the Minister who performed the service at Saori’s sister’s wedding by Saori’s Mom. When Saori finally says, “This is my boyfriend”, her mother is shocked and immediately pulls Saori off to the side (right in full view of Tony).

At a party of Tony’s friends – Saori is the only Japanese – and she feels so isolated that she drinks herself into a stupor.

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A shirtless man is dragged into someplace by a few masked men. He is definitely there not by his own choice. He’s roughly handled. He’s being dragged by his arms and his legs have been tied together during this transit – secured against movement There’s a hefty piece of tape over his mouth. But his eyes are able to see. He’s brought to a bed-frame and laid on his back and secured with his arms and legs taped down.

A sheet of glass is placed on his chest. We can see the terror on his face.

Another masked man approaches. He carries a baseball bat. Without a word, he swings the bat with all his might bringing it down on this bound man. Again and again. The camera pulls back and we see that this event is being watched by a group of about 15-20 people, mostly men with a few women. We only see them briefly. The bat repeats its deadly journey again and again.

This is the first couple of minutes and how the Japanese TV Special, Strawberry Night opens. We have just witnessed an execution, an execution clearly not sanctioned by the state.

This special aired last fall on November 13th, 2010 and a series will begin in January  2012. The star is the beautiful Yuko Takeuchi. I think she’s irresistible. In this show, and coming series, Yuko plays Inspector Reiko Himekawa who is the only female section chief in the Tenth Homicide Section of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department’s First Investigative Division.

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Stool Pigeon is a 2010 release from noted Hong Kong film director Dante Lam. Lam’s milieu is gritty cops and gangster dramas with plenty of bloody action usually in the form of car chases, heists, knives and gun battles, and he always adds the usual pretty girl or two to the cast. This film, which some have dubbed Beast Stalker 2, mostly because Lam has brought back his two lead actors from the original Beast Stalker in 2008 – Nick Cheung and Nicolas Tse – has all of the above.

Beast Stalker, which I reviewed here had Nick C as a crazed, half blind, contract killer and Nic T as the good cop. In this one, Stool Pigeon, it is Nick Cheung who is the cop. His duty is to recruit low level criminals or just released from jail cons and make them turn against their former cronies – in other words: become paid informants or stool pigeons.

One such ex-con is Ghost Jr., played by Nicolas Tse. He doesn’t trust the cops, and why should he? But his father died and left a massive debt of nearly a million Hong Kong dollars. With no around to pay them off, the loan sharks have pimped out Ghost’s sister, figuring if they prostitute her, the debt could be settled over time.

But Inspector Don Lee (Nick Cheung) knows this and uses it to leverage Ghost into becoming a stoolie. They want to get him into a gang of jewel thieves run by Barbarian and Tai Ping. They arrested Barbarian twice before but were not able to convict him either time. So the police higher ups want Barbarian badly, and so they turn up the heat on Inspector Lee.

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Ex is a film written and directed by a 27 year old Hong Kong woman named Heiward Mak. Despite her youth, this isn’t even her first directorial effort. Released in early June 2010, the film marked the return to the big screen in a starring role for Gillian Chung who had been tarnished by the Edison Chen photo scandal.

Ex is a relationship drama about a group of twenty-somethings in Hong Kong. Though shot in Hong Kong, and with a Hong Kong cast – the only locations I recognized were the highway and bridge leading to the Hong Kong airport, and the airport itself.

Chung as Zhou Yi, has given up her apartment and resigned her job to travel with her boyfriend Woody (Lawrence Chou). Only at the airport, while waiting for their flight, she has a fight with this boyfriend, and they break up. Witnessing this argument because they happened to be seated at the very next table are Ping, played by William Chan, and his girlfriend Cee, played by Michelle Wai.

It was kind of a forced, or staged coincidence, because Ping is Zhou Yi’s ex-boyfriend, and a device or gimmick was needed to have them in the same place. On top of that, Zhou’s passport and luggage have gone missing. So Cee agrees to put up Zhou Yi at their apartment for a few days until suitable arrangements can be made.

Do you see the possibilities of a love triangle looming? Though we are set up for it, Director Mak doesn’t take us down that path exactly. Instead of future complications – most of the film is from Zhou’s Yi’s perspective and it involves a good many flash backs to when she and Ping were a couple as well as some of her other relationships.

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As The Quiet American begins we hear these words spoken by Michael Caine as Thomas Fowler:

I can’t say what made me fall in love with Vietnam – that a woman’s voice can drug you; that everything is so intense. The colors, the taste, even the rain. Nothing like the filthy rain in London. They say whatever you’re looking for, you will find here. They say you come to Vietnam and you understand a lot in a few minutes, but the rest takes a lifetime.

As you watch this 2002 film, which is set in Vietnam, circa 1952, a series of thoughts and ideas will percolate in your mind. The film stars Michael Caine, Brendan Fraser, and Vietnamese beauty, Do Thi Hai Yen. There’s not much of a mystery about what will happen with these three people. Their roles look self-evident.

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Today was one of those Saturday afternoons with an open couple of hours to kill. I was in the mood for a light movie. Having seen Black Swan back in December, then having watched Natalie Portman walk off with the Oscar for Best Performance by a Female - she was in my thoughts. So I consulted her filmography, running down the list until I had come to The Professional. Portman had appeared in that film about hired assassins back in 1994. She was only a kid in 1994, and her costars were Jean Reno and Gary Oldman.

I had just recently watched and reviewed Rain Fall, a contemporary thriller set in Japan, and Oldman had been in that one too. So after a little bit more research I found Wasabi. This was a French film shot mostly in Japan and it played in the theaters in 2001. In this one, Jean Reno played a Parisian detective who had all of Dirty Harry’s style and none of Inspector Clouseau’s pratfalls.

But despite that pedigree, this was mostly – a comedy. Sure, such genre tags as Action, Drama, Crime, and Thriller were attached to Wasabi according to the IMDB. But trust me – this one was played for laughs.

Reno plays Hubert Fiorentini, a cop who would punch your lights out first just to get your attention, then, he’d ask you his questions. But as expected, his rough house techniques frequently got him in trouble with the suits – otherwise known as his bosses. After his latest dust up in a disco, he’s been commanded to visit his victim, the chief of police’s son, in the hospital, apologize, then go somewhere  – as in anywhere – on vacation.

Back in the day, say 19 or 20 years ago (there’s a running joke in the film about that 19 vs 20), he was working as part of a French Intelligence team in Tokyo. He met a local Japanese girl, Miko Kobayashi. One thing led to another, they married, and shortly after that, Miko vanished – never to be seen again.

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I did a piece about Japanese actress Kyoko Hasegawa back in August of 2009. That’s when I became aware of the film Rain Fall. This is a political conspiracy and a thriller combined, and the setting is in Tokyo. Kippei Shiina stars in the role of John Rain, an America with a Japanese father. He’s an ex-CIA covert operative, a trainer of US Navy Seals, and an assassin. In short, he’s one bad dude that you won’t want to mess with.

Gary Oldman stars as the head of the CIA’s Tokyo office. He chews up the scenery in an over-the-top performance. Oldman’s character, William Holtzer, is mostly office-bound where he commands his men from a state-of-the-electronic-arts war room. When he’s not barking orders like ‘Take the shot, TAKE THE  SHOT!, he’s cussing up a storm or bemoaning (Jesus Christ!) yet another missed opportunity.

The gorgeous Kyoko Hasegawa is on hand portraying the daughter of a Japanese whistle-blower. It will be Rain’s job to protect her.

Also on hand are a few Japanese police detectives, and the Yakuza. The detective is a wise and savvy veteran who gets a good handle on the case, but he can’t prove squat. The Yakuza are a shadowy presence. We will see the head guy a few times, but will meet some of his street soldiers on more than a few occasions.

The film was written and directed by Max Mannix. This was just his second time at directing a film. Names with two X’s are pretty rare; Xerxes, anyone?

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