BOSS

April through June, 2009 Japanese drama that stars -

Takenouchi Yutaka

Yes, this one deserves all, five suns!

It's about a rag-tag group of detectives from various departments in and around the Tokyo area who converge to form a so-called secretive team but who are actually relegated to the 'basement' section of the department because of insubordination or other, disciplinary issues in their career records.
The lady cop apparently fell in love and that's what ruined it for her.
Another dude is openly gay.
Another has mental issues after a botched assignment and so on and so forth.

Each week (or episode) showcases one of these characters in-depth while sticking to the main plot, which is to catch the nasty guys before they do something really bad.
It's a cult plot to overthrow the government or something of that nature, but even if you have to keep up via subtitles while trying to stare intently at the hunky eye candy on the screen - you should be able to follow the story with as relative of ease as I had.

The plot-twist amazed me, too.
I take pride in knowing what's going to happen or whodunit rather early in the game, and even though I bit off a few nails toward the end, I held out hope that my godly hero wasn't to blame for what was going on from the very start.

BOSS was a definite winner, and I think the 17 rating it received over there is indication of that fact.

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Buzzer Beat / ブザー・ビート / Gakeppuchi no Hero / 崖っぷちのヒーロー

11 episode, Fuji TV sports romance drama that aired in Japan between July 13 & September 21, 2009.

First of all, it starred my FAVORITE, Japanese actor, ITO (HOT-TAY) HIDEAKI!!

Second, I watched this in conjunction with DREAM (Korean drama I'll dissect next), and by comparison - BUZZER BEAT was better - BUT, not by far.

~ Let me explain ~

The Japanese drama also starred a guy named Tomahisa Yamashita -

 

He's not bad-looking, and I had to admit he's got a pretty, awesome CHEST, too. His hair kind a bugged me, but not too much.

And, either it was his character who seemed a bit, too mopey for me, or he's like that all the time? Hang-dog, emotionless, boring kind a guy? I don't know, but it drove me crazy a majority of the time that I watched this exciting and well-written drama.

I liked his skin, too. It was golden, smooth, and flawless - like the hip clothes he tended to wear - crop pants in purples and print t-shirts under a flannel shirt.

Still, if I met the guy in person and had to spend any amount of time with him, I'd probably have ended up SHAKING him physically and begging him to WAKE UP! Offer him copious amounts of coffee or something, I guess.

To me, it was like he wasn't digging the part or the job, and he just, wanted OUT.

He played Kamiya Naoki, a wanna-be basketball player for a second-rate team in Japan, and it was his lack of faith in his talent which kept him from being the best at the sport. He grew up playing the game, and as a child, he swore that he would become a great baller some day, and yet as a young adult, he still carried enough doubt in his mind to hold him back.

At the beginning, he's dating one of the cheerleaders, Nanami Natsuki (Aibu Saki), who also works for the basketball organization, and she knows there's something wrong with her boyfriend, but her way of bringing out the best in him backfires when she has repeated sex with another teammate, and a guy not, too many girls watching along with me at aznv.tv found attractive -

Kaneko Nobuaki (金子ノブアキ) as Yoyogi Ren  

I liked him, though. He was a 'dude' in every sense of the slang term, and I guess after seeing one Ken-doll, effeminate actor after the other, Nobuaki was a welcome change of pace sensually speaking.

I've also, always had a penchant toward naughty boys, too, and until the end of this drama, Kaneko's Yoyogi played the antagonist to the hilt. He's a good actor who brings realism to his work, and I appreciate his efforts, so I hope to see him in something else soon.

What I didn't like was that my honey, Ito's Kawasaki (the coach) lost out in love to Yamashita's Naoki. It was another of the ubiquitous fated to love you with a triangle twist stories, where HE leaves his cell phone on a bus, and SHE finds it - but, instead of getting to return the item to its rightful owner, she instead meets Kawasaki, who retrieves the cell for Naoki and falls crazy in love with HER at that instant.

SHE, btw, is Kitagawa Keiko as Shirakawa Riko.
Such a pretty woman! Love her hair, her eyes, her skin -- she even wore a few, cool tops, and she showed off her curves as well - another, refreshing change of pace in the Asian drama department! Or, maybe it's that I'm coming from the Korean aspect, where all the girls dress like 30-something, single school teachers? She did a lot of running in kitten heels, too, which I'll never understand or figure out how it's possible to do!
She'll either end up busting an ankle or getting a really, bad back when she's older - who knows.
I can't do it!

Anyway, Riko is a budding violinist with the same, self-doubt plaguing her as Naoki has with his game. Every night, she finds Naoki practicing on the court across the alley from her apartment bedroom window, and it's the same place she likes to go to practice her violin. While she's trying to be nice to Kawasaki, who is now in dogged pursuit of her heart, she is falling deeper and deeper in love with Naoki, who is still with the cheerleader messing around behind his back.

You get where this is all going, right?

It's a cute story with good characters and a surprising ending (but only from the American not understanding Japanese culture stand-point, I assure you).

The music was great, too!

Let's get to the fun stuff now, shall we?

!! the PICTURES !!

(sigh)

(yes!)

(everyone suspected the guy on the right had a thing for Kawasaki-san)

(he even looks FAB in the gekko!)

he kind a gets the feeling Naoki-san is doing something behind his back -

his sinewy, broad back.

 

(he's gotta go to Boston, and he knows

something ain't right with him & Riko)

I CRIED!!  (come to me!  i'll cheer you up!)

(ok - what I wouldn't give to be on THAT beach!)

See what I mean about Yama's chest?  (and his hair?)

(giggle)

~ Now for the kawaii aspect of the drama ~

the apartment where Riko lives (love the colored balconies!)

Kawasaki-san bought Riko a huge bouquet of red roses after a mall concert, and Naoki-san had this, single sunflower.

love, love, love

pretty!

love this top (sorry so blurry, though)

silly

funny!  the fat WHITE chick in the background.

I hope, when I go there, I get to be in a cameo!

I wonder, do they get to meet or even SEE any of the hunky actors?

pouty boy

m-hm!

guy's got kissable lips, yes?

(funny, the cell in a plastic bag!)

how's THIS for eye candy?!

ta-ta for now!

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Over Time - オーバー・タイム

I'm not sure this 1999 drama even warrants a review.
First off, it's inexcusably next to impossible to find anything online that stars HIDEAKI ITO, and this promised me he would be there, yet he wasn't.
At least not in the way that I would have preferred.
It was likely his debut work, thus relegating his royal hotness to cameos and a less than bit-part in Over Time.

Minus more onscreen appearances by one of my favorite, Japanese actors, Over Time was not, that bad a drama.
It starred Sorimachi Takashi as Kaede Soichiro, a photographer with a big heart, and Esumi Makiko as Kasahara Natsuki, a hair stylist with un-Asian personality traits.
She's tall and pretty, but in the show, they made it seem as if she was not attractive.
She's boisterous and has a deep voice, but her friends encourage her to talk stupid, (asthmatic and childish), the way all the other girls talk.
She's outspoken, which is apparently considered a crime in that part of the world, and she's always having to say Gomen nasai even if she doesn't, really mean it.

Coincidentals occur like clockwork at the beginning of this drama, which set the tone for a bumpy ride and lots of nail biting moments (for me, at least).

The storyline for Over Time is about friendship vs. love. The big question is obviously can a man and woman be simply, just friends.
The answer in reality is yes, with no hesitation whatsoever.
On the big screen, it's entirely different because the actors are hunky or sexy, so it's virtually impossible to avoid the human impulse aspect of that type of a relationship.
Platonic is feasible and even understandable, but improbable if the writer hopes to captivate his/her audience through 11 or 12 episodes. They're trying to say that the more you get to know someone, the more you want to see them naked, and I will never buy that theory.
I know lots of great guys whom I shudder to think of in a bathing suit, much less in the buff. We talk about neat things, we laugh a lot, and we can go drinking together, but that's where the story ends. It's reality.
If I looked like an actress, I could see where some guys might want to take it to the next level, but I'm not alone when it comes to looking average as opposed to dynamite.
Lots of people think that it's a great idea to become good friends first, and then branch out to the love aspect of a relationship. That way, you know what you're getting with few, if any, surprises later on.

What Over Time did for me was to make me wish I had grown up with a small group of close-knit friends to spend time with, share delicious meals with, and to talk about life with on occasion.
When I watch these dramas, I often wonder if people actually live this way, or if like me, the writer wishes it were so for them as well.
Once I was invited to a hot-pot, and the food was marvelous, yet the conversation was in Mandarin and I didn't know anyone other than the girl who invited me.
Another great thing about these dramas is the setting, or in some cases, the scenery.
Over Time took place in the winter, which is depressing.
But what I wouldn't give to spend a few months or even a year living in one of those quaint, little apartments somewhere in a place like Tokyo, or Seoul, or Taipei, or even Hong Kong.


In Over Time, the characters lived together in an upstairs apartment, with a forever sign on the apartment below them that read: FOR RENT
The view from bedroom windows was of the Tokyo Tower, which glows red until midnight, when it shuts off til darkness the next night.
At one part in this drama, Natsuki moves out, and her new apartment is nothing more than a room with a view. You open the door and immediately hit the kitchen sink, which is right next to the window overlooking the tower, with her bed on the wall opposite that window. That's it!
So cozy, so peaceful, so ... Asian.
98,000 yen equals $993 a month rent for that room. UNLESS they pay months in advance or something, I don't know.
Maybe all I'll ever get to do is watch from this side of the world and dream.

funny aside: Over Time means in the future while overtime means beyond the expected limit.

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With Love

This is a 1998 release from Japan that was another unexpected surprise for me. Reviews seem to want to compare it with You've Got Mail, and yet both the movie and the drama came out at around the same time in the same year. Others claim it drags on, which might be true for some, but it's a drama, not a movie. I don't know that if this had become a movie that it would have had the same impression, but who is to say.

The lead actor, Takenouchi Yutaka as Hasegawa Takashi, is a college drop-out who formed a band that became popular for it's new, Indie's style. He's madly in lust with the lead singer, whom he has a two-year, live-in relationship with, and then she up and leaves him with a 'so long' written in english on a teruteru bozu.

Six years later, he's an aimless soul working as a jingle creator for commercials, and he mistakenly sends a piano piece to the wrong e-mail address, where Murakami Amane (Tanaka Misato) opens it, listens, and falls in love with the beautiful melody. She writes to HATA, (HAsegawa TAkashi) and explains about his mistake, but adds that the piece is wonderful, and that it made her feel good.

Amane can't use her real name for e-mail, so she chooses teru teru bozu. Her real name means rain - sound, and she thinks the rain part is bad. Teru teru bozu are hung to bring sunny weather, or upside down to produce rain.

I laughed to discover that the words translated mean shiny, shiny buddhist priest.

Here in America, we call them tissue ghosts and hang them about at Halloween.

Anyway, the name intrigues Hata, thinking back to his girlfriend Lena, and Amane, liking the idea of getting lost in a fantasy world (the internet) by creating an alter-ego to mask her real life, begins to send Hata messages, when Hata finally replies with, "Who are you?" in English. Amane puts herself in Paris, where she thinks she wants to be after having gone through a bad break-up with a guy who used her to try and embezzle from the bank where they both worked. She tells Hata she used to work at a bank, but that she now roams about the streets of Paris. Hata tells her that he's a composer who went back to his elementary school to teach music.

In reality, they both work inside the same building, and it's adorable how she mistakes the abbreviations outside his office (AVA) for Adult Video Agency instead of Audio Visual Advertising. It's no surprise she would think this, since Takenouchi is a steaming hunk of sex on two feet in this drama. His long hair, his brown skin, his EYES, and that voice ... (sigh). (*^.^*)

Hata is screwing around with a night DJ, and Amane is trying desperately to avoid the pesky advances of Yoshida Haruhiko (Oikawa Mitsuhiro).
Amane is a straight lace, shy woman and Yoshida is a wealthy businessman, so a majority of the viewers felt that they fit together more suitably than she would with Takenouchi's character. I think that's near-sighted and dumb. (>.<); I usually always have to ask dos de? Why are looks so important, and why are people always labeled as this or that based solely on their appearance? Hata and Amena met almost immediately in this drama, and right away, he seemed to treat her like a second-class citizen while she treated him like he carried a switchblade in his back pocket. Even as they got to know each other better, that first-impression stayed with them, and it was such a shame, too. I know in my heart the ending could have been so, much better if the writer maybe had just let go of that notion.

The ending was pitiful, to say the least, and it's not at all what I expected. Still, I am one of few who think it was worth the 11-episodes (which the translators referred to as versions, and this made me giggle). Speaking of translation, this was practically flawless, so kudo's to the Nippon team! Of course this was before the 21st century, before online translators got their dyslexic hands on the Asian drama machine and ruined it for the rest of the world.

I didn't care for the title song, My Little Lover by Destiny, but I adored Once in a Blue Moon by Takashi Hasegawa. Here it is for your listening pleasure (and viewing pleasure if you're like me and dig a man with long, sexy hair).

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