Sono “Okodawari”, Watashi ni mo Kure yo!! (roughly: "Give me that obsession!!") is a short (eleven 24-minute episodes) mockumentary series starring Matsuoka Mayu and Ito Sairi as themselves playing the hosts of a variety show based on a manga which examines a few people's quirky obsessions. Essentially, the conceit of the show is that it is a behind-the-scenes documentary of a variety show which does not exist based on a manga which does exist. Further confusing matters about half of people focused on by the show really do exist and are portrayed by the real people (mostly mangaka).

It's mostly cringe humor a la The Office or Christopher Guest films like A Mighty Wind or Waiting For Guffman. It's unclear the extent to which the scenes are improvised, but they might well be. You might think after you've watched the first four episodes, that you know how this show will go with each episode featuring a different strange obsessive, but then the series becomes more about Matsuoka and Ito's approach to the show and life in general and begins to tackle themes of how people create personas for themselves on screen and what it means to be authentic in the kinds of bizarre and scripted situations that crop up on variety shows. And the show does so while largely staying funny.

There are some mild twists, and a really silly denouement. There are a couple of plot points that are made and then immediately forgotten about. I'm not quite sure that it nails the landing or satisfactorily concludes its theses, but the mere fact that it attempts to address the issues of persona and performance in variety shows is surprising and interesting.

Under-girding the whole show is the delightful chemistry between Matsuoka and Ito. Who knows if they are as close friends in the "real world" but the friendship as its portrayed feels authentic, and provides a lovely foundation for the show.

It's a show that has not had many viewers, but is, nevertheless, well worth checking out.

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An Interesting Alt History of Edo Period Japan

I will preface this review by saying I have not read the manga which ran for 17 years, nor watched this year's anime on Netflix, nor seen the prior drama series from 2010, nor the prior two movies. I imagine that one's experience of this series could vary widely based on how much of the prior material you have encountered.

The premise of this drama is that Japan experienced an on-going plague starting in the reign of 3rd Tokugawa Shogun in the early 1600s that reduces the population of men to one quarter of that of women. Thus, part of what Ooku explores, in general, is what that change in demographics might mean to the roles of men and women. What would Edo-period Japan have been like if women were in charge?

This drama is roughly divided into three chunks covering incidents in the lives of the woman who took over the role of the 3rd Shogun, and then 5th and 8th Shogun. The 8th Shogun serves as wrapper for all the episodes as she reads about the lives of these prior two Shoguns. The manga continued through the 14th Shogun, and so this drama does not attempt to cover the entire run of the manga, and, indeed, one presumes Season 2 will cover more of underlying material. Nevertheless, this series (like many other manga and novel adaptations) does suffer a bit from trying to cover too much of the original material.

The cast is huge and the production fairly lavish though we comparatively rarely see what life is like outside of the Shogunal residence in Edo. Like many Roman and Chinese emperors, the Japanese Shoguns in this period seem to be fairly isolated within a system meant to protect them and insure the continuation of their dynasties. And, indeed, the Ooku was the quarters for the Shogun's concubines during the Edo period, and so becomes the quarters for the male concubines in this alternative history, and so part of what the series explores why and how men come to serve as concubines, and how the system works (and sometimes fails) to produce heirs to the Shogun.

The series does address some interesting and perhaps surprising issues over the course of this season, but I do think the quality and interest of the three sections are fairly even though they cover entirely different themes and have have mostly different casts of characters. There are some striking moments scattered throughout the series, and the performances vary from solidly professional to quite good. If you enjoy alternative histories and Japanese period dramas, it's well worth watching.

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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.

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More Yokai Sharehouse

If you've seen the previous two series, then you know the drill. Mio struggles with self esteem while saving the world with her loyalty and steadfastness and, of course, the support of the monsters in her sharehouse. I strongly disliked S2 because it immediately undid all her character growth from S1, and never even brought her back to the same level of maturity she reached at the end of S1. However, the movie here is somewhere in between the two seasons for me in terms of how much I enjoyed it. It's framed around a topical albeit tepid plot about how AI might reshape our world, and kudos for getting this movie out maybe 9 months after the news about chatGPT and AI art generators were breaking news.

All the usual suspects are here in addition to the five principal characters. Many of the major secondary youkai from the series show up for at least a cameo. The acting remains broad and OTT like the prior series, but Koshiba as Mio anchors the chaos as always and has some moments to shine. The new ML for the movie, Mochizuki Ayumu as Aito, does as well as one could expect in the tropey AI learns what it means to be human role.

If you liked either of the previous series, it is worth checking out, IMO. And if you just want to sample the world, it is comparatively standalone, though personally I would recommend the first season over it.

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A high-concept asadora let down by subpar writing

The grand idea of this series was to have an asadora that would span 100 years of Japanese history through the stories of the lives of three generations of women: Yasuko born in 1925 who is the mother of Rui born in 1941 who is the mother of Hinata born in 1965.

Yasuko's story (episodes 1-35) is actually quite good if utterly tragic. She is born into a family of confectioners in Okayama, and at age fourteen falls in love with a rich college student. But, don't worry, she isn't married and pregnant until age 16. All of her blood relations (except her unreliable older brother) as well as her husband are all killed in the war, and her mother-in-law irrationally blames Yasuko for her son's death in combat and chases her out of the household. Yasuko tries to raise Rui alone by selling sweets on the streets of Osaka, but when she breaks an arm in a traffic accident she's forced to return to the mansion of her dead husband. A rather ineptly written love pentagram results in her older brother absconding with her savings and fleeing to Osaka chased separately by Yasuko and, yes, independently 6-yearold Rui. Both return return to the mansion in Okayama where Rui tells Ysauko "I hate you" and so Yasuko flees to America with a tall blond officer from the American occupying forces. No, none of that week's episodes makes any sense at all.

Rui's story (episodes 36-77) begins after a time leap to her adulthood where with no motivation given whatsoever she leaves the rich household and cuts off all ties with her family. The generation that chased her and her mother out of the house are now dead and she has a perfectly fine relationship with her uncle who is now the head of the household. In Osaka she finds new joy as a laundress, and falls for customer who is a jazz trumpeter, Joe. He wins a bizarre one-off trumpet competition and lands a recording contract in Tokyo. But, unfortunately, his lips break while recording his debut record (as a former trombone player, I have to say that this plot point is utterly bizarre). He distances himself from Rui, and tries to end his life, but she saves him through the power of Satchmo. They get married, move to Kyoto, obviously, and start a shop that only sells kaiten yaki since that's the only recipe she managed to learn from her mother, and, apparently, it's impossible in the 60s to learn any other recipes. They have Rui and later her brother Momotaro. Joe is happily unemployed for 20-odd years until he suddenly has the bright idea of trying to play another instrument. No, that does not make any sense at all.

Hinata's story (episodes 78 - 112) has her finding a love of samurai dramas as a child and becoming an employee at a local studio's tourist trap where she is given the mission to "save period dramas" in Japan. She has an extended courtship with a samurai drama extra which does not work out after an 8 year time leap in which nothing changed whatsoever in their relationship. Eventually, an American film company comes to town looking to make a big budget Hollywood film in Japan and so Hinata saves the period drama in Japan by serving snacks like any good office lady and speaking the English she has learned via the same radio show that Yasuko and Rui used to study English. The final two weeks of episodes bring all three of women back together in a way that makes even less sense than the rest of the series.

A "drama that spans a century" seems like a solid concept, but the writing utterly fails the concept throughout this series. Like most asadoras there are many fun and interesting side characters, and the performances of the actors are up to the usual high standards for these productions. But the motivations of the characters for the various plot points are FREQUENTLY incomprehensible or non-existent throughout this asadora, and the necessary time leaps almost always reveal zero change in the characters lives in the intervening years. Much of what happens throughout would make sense if the particular arc took place over a year or two, but absurd plot points are spread out sometimes over decades in ways that truly ruin this series.

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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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Sakamoto Yuji's Version of a Chinese Classic

It is surprising that this series is not well known or remembered - it was the most viewed Jdrama on broadcast TV in Japan for all of 2006, is based on an extremely well-known classic of Chinese literature and was written by one of Japan's best screenwriters, Sakamoto Yuji. Part of the reason, undoubtedly, is that it is pitched towards an age range that would be watching and enjoying Power Rangers or Kamen Rider with lots of broad acting, obligatory climactic fight scenes, fart jokes and a surprising amount of male urination. It's almost certainly not the best version of Journey To The West of the last few decades (Steven Chow's first film deconstruction of the story probably takes that crown), but it is a good, wholesome take on the old Buddhist children's story with some unexpected twists along the way.

At eleven episodes Saiyuuki is a comparatively brief version of these tales, and, thus, this series skips the origin story of Goku (the Monkey King) and starts with the Japanese version of Tripikata, Sanzo Hoshi, freeing Goku from his 500 years of imprisonment in a rock and the Avenger team of Sa Gojo (Brother Sand) and Cho Hakkai (Brother Pig) already assembled for the journey. Each episode tells the story of the group encountering a demon along the way and overcoming the corresponding challenge with most of the encounters invented for this version (I'm pretty sure, for instance, there was no chapter involving time travel when I read a translation of the books). As is usual, for this series the group seeks to reach a sacred mountain, meet an incarnation of the Buddha and receive sacred scriptures, and no time is spent at all on the return to Chang'an.

Like the famous Japanese version from 1978 (the actor who played Goku in that version, Masski Sakai, appears here in the final episode as the Buddha), Sanzo Hoshi is played by a woman (in this case, Fukatsu Eri) but given he/him pronouns (at least in the version of the subs I watched). As in most versions of Journey To The West, Sanzo Hoshi is repeatedly captured and rescued by the rest of the troupe, but Sakamoto does give the character a bit more agency than usual. Sakamoto also adds an entirely noncanonical character in the form of a female thief, Rinrin, whose path intersects that of the travelers and ultimately becomes one of the team. Rinrin played by Mizukawa Asami is probably one of the best reasons to check out this version of the tale by providing a good, bantering foil and general competence in contrast to the impulsiveness of Goku.

Goku, as usual, is the focus of series, and is played by Katori Shingo who plays the Monkey King as kind of a blustering dumb jock/warrior but with some nice, quieter empathetic moments as well. Most episodes end with a fight scene where Goku's staff ultimately comes down on the head of the demon of the week who is then carted off to hell by a markedly breast-obsessed Taoist deity, Roushi (Lao Tzu) played by Okura Koji.

The 2006 version of Saiyuuki is a broad, largely comedic children's show with some nice lessons about working together and acceptance. Nevertheless, there are some surprisingly strong emotional beats along the way. It is probably worth seeking out, particularly if you enjoy Sakamoto's other series.

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Ashida Mana and Charlotte Kate Fox go head to head in this charming tale of a family in recovery. Ashida plays Sakura whose mother died six months ago, and Fox plays Alice who has just had a whirlwind romance with Sakura's father, Sato, who has married her in Las Vegas and brought her to Japan without disclosing minor details like he has four children and his previous wife had just died. Nevertheless, Alice works to win over the family, and Sakura mounts the barricades against her. After an amazing and well-deserved climax in episode 7, the series takes a sharp left at episode 8 before ending pretty much where you'd expect. The director lets Ashida overact, but in key scenes she delivers like the true artist she's always been. Fox' performance is much better tempered as one would expect, but she does keep up with Ashida. All in all, Our House is a sweet exploration of how a family can reshape itself after a tragedy, and another step in Ashida's progress towards world domination.

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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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Fruits Takuhaibin is the story of a call-girl agency seen from the POV of a middle-manager, Sakita, who returns to his home city after losing his job in Tokyo and falls into the opportunity to learn how to run a call-girl operation. The series is fairly anthologistic (though not to the same extent as say, Midnight Diner) with each of the first nine episodes focused on a story about a different women working at the agency. Sakita renews his friendship with a couple of people from his high school and their story serves as a wrapper for the other stories and is the basis for the last three episodes.

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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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?

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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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