Kuro Shitsuji 黒執事 [movie]

So close... yet seriously miles away from anywhere that resembles a dark and broody film...

Yes I was disappointed. But as soon as i found out the main was Gouriki I knew what I was in for. Are they just casting her because she is the only girl they know with short hair? Because wigs people! Wigs! Please stop casting her in things I should love by rights, and turning my beloved TV into pig swill. I don't care that she was absolutely amazing in Otoko demo onna demo nai sei, she sucked in EVERYTHING ELSE. And when do I ever use caps on this blog.

Cast:

Mizushima Hiro - Black Butler Sebastian

Gouriki Ayame - Genpo Kiyoharu  / Shiori

Yamamoto Mizuki - Maid Rin

Yuka - Hanae Wakatsuki

Ohno Takuro - Matsumiya Takaaki

Kaito Ken - Genpo Arihito

Maruyama Tomomi - Akashi

Yuu Shirota - Charles

Yasuda Ken - Tokisawa Ichizo

Hashimoto Satoshi - Aoki Munemitsu

Ibu Masato - Kuzo Shinpei

Kishitani Goro - Nekoma Saneatsu

Kurihara Louis - Jei

We have another Horikita Maki on our hands with Gouriki. At least with Maki she is likable, she's as bland as all hell but at least she is likable. 

Gouriki has no redeeming features so far and I'm annoyed that she keeps cropping up in things I would usually love. 

She had a flicker of nice acting for a couple of lines she spoke right at the end ^ but other than that I got nothing. 

The rest of the cast was really great - the cutest maid ever Yamamoto Mizuki really should have been the main but as I am not queen of the world this did not happen. 

Plus I dont think anyone would believe she was a boy.... But they still had Gouriki wearing f*cking eyeliner so go figure.

You might be able to tell from my tone and less than linear speech flow that I was annoyed with this movie. 

Poor Mizushima Hiro was doing his best Kamen Rider cheese acting and all the emotional eyes acting that he could muster but was met with bird faced Goubiki (beaky / biki - counter for birds - see what I did there? No? well yeah I guess that was super lame) - Oh just seriously her acting is so boring. 

Kuro Shitsuji is supposed to be dark and broody, instead we got flat and uninspiring, it should have been sickly humourous, but instead we get a one sided charisma show from which we can only feed from the butler - nothing from our dear master at all. 

The story was interesting - the subject matter could have been really described well by a dark more sinister tone, but instead it felt like watching a mystery drama. 

No sense of urgency even though everyone is on the brink of war death nasty future kinds of evil. 

I dont know what the hell they were thinking making the movie this way. It had so much potential and a budget they could play with. 

Yuka (Akumu chan) was fantastic - really seriously putting Gouriki to shame - if you hadnt already spied the distance in skill level between her and Mizushima then watching Yuka go crazy at the end should put the nails in Gouriki's crappy cardboard coffin. 

There is nothing raw about her. She doesn't bring anything out of the characters she plays which makes them appealing. I wanted so much to be surprised by her, but she pales in comparison to her fellow actors. And it really winds me up.

As with most things that I watch, I tried to put all that aside and just watch, and let myself just get into the story. 

I think Mizushima helped convey all the subtle weird things that go through the black butler's mind very well. 

His character was described by all the slight movements of the eyes, narrowing and widening without changing the tone of voice, he is king of that. 

Smiling with his eyes but not a flicker in the mouth - he really is super king of that. 

The black butler is a demon, this kid makes a deal with him so she can take revenge on the people who killed her whole family. 

The black butler wants her soul in return for his aid and protection, but the more twisted she becomes by her desire for revenge and hatred and mistrust of humans, and the more darkness she falls into, the more he happy he will be to take her soul. 

There is a conflict within him, caring for her all those years but also wanting her to die, it leaves him almost in love with the internal struggle they both have. This is all shown very very subtly through this movie and you might miss it if you didn't know it was there - or if you weren't paying constant close attention to the butler's emotional eyes. 

The young master is a little more simple to deconstruct, she is just a vengeful human, but spending so much time entangled with a demon who wants her to ultimately die for him takes its toll on her - her personality is darkened by this even more. Not that we see that. Goubiki just looks like someone stole her biscuit.

On the hunt for a killer who threatens society in a unexpectedly huge way, they realise that the master's history is linked to this case, and so things explode in a mass of treachery and deceit around her. 

I think my description does this movie a little too much justice - I made it sound darker than it was - as dark as it should have been. 

There were some great moments, dont get me wrong. I just think it fell a little flat. It could have been amazing but it felt cheap and standard.

Still, Mizushima looked fantastic. That's pretty much all anyone is going to watch this for.

~

Tokyo Dogs 東京DOGS [series]

after watching arakawa... this was weird

i say after arakawa - which is truly very strange, but i dont mean that this show was weird exactly. it is just that Oguri Shun plays such a normal character here that it is quite a leap from Soncho.

im currently watching rich man poor woman so i thought it might be a good time to review tokyo dogs. 

Oguri Shun has recently got married and is still getting great roles, i always enjoy watching him, ever since Binbo Danshi. (when he met his wife, squeeeee!)

now, im going to get confused as to which series im reviewing here. im not doing arakawa, im going to wait until after the movie (yatta!) and im not doing rich man poor woman, just yet.time to focus on tokyo dogs. if i can remember anything about it. 

ah yes, Mizushima Hiro and Yoshitaka Yuriko feature along side Oguri Shun in this drama. Mizushima and Oguri are unlikely partners in the police force (paired together despite their complete dislike for each other) and Yoshitaka plays yuki, who is not only the love interest but the most important piece of their puzzling police case.

Marou (Mizushima) is a bit bizarre. he was kind of a yankii in his younger days and now he is a detective who doesnt really know how to do much but fight and shout a bit too much, he is obsessed with pretty girls (until he meets yuki) and offers the majority of the comedy to the show, the character allows Mizushima to let out his quirky weird tendencies at every given moment.

Takakura (Oguri) saw his dad get shot when he was just a little kid, he trained in the US and became an elite New York City cop determined to catch his father's killer. He is stern and hard, with only that purpose in mind. 

The two policemen get paired up to finally try and bring this killer to justice and in comes Yuki, all memory-buggered and watery eyed, not knowing what the hell is going on or how she is involved, but tangled in it all the same.

They all look f*cking fabulous in this drama, as you can tell from the screen shots. gorgeous, the lot of them. all the characters are good, their banter is hilario, that was meant to be hilarious but spell checker suggested hilario so im keeping it as that. :) 

i thought it would be a bit boring, like a grown up version of shibatora without the premonitions, but it turned out to be really really good. i raced through the whole series in two days and totally enjoyed it - i think even without any sort of premise i could just watch those two idiots bickering with each other for hours.

there is a long question of who did what and bla bla bla - as you get in this sort of story, youre not sure whose side some people are on, there is danger and death on every corner, and lots of Takakura being a total dick to Yuki and making her cry - which is great because Yoshitaka is beautiful when she has tears in her eyes. and she basically looks that way the entire show.

I love how Oguri Shun can be so funny when he is playing such a straight character. it was an inspired choice to cast these two together. It was a bit like hana yori dango pairing him and trout mouth Jun together - but with a better story to show chemistry between good actors. 

It is worth mentioning some other side characters, or rather, their actors; Katsuji Ryou from shouni kyumei, atsu-hime, sore wa totsuzen arashi no you ni, etc etc. i like him a lot, i think his role was adequately stupid and odd. this drama also had wonky jaw woman Tomosaka Rie from samurai pastry chef movie chonmage purin. Mikami Kensei from deka wanko, beck, hanawake, bloody monday, and yamapi is an undertaker - i mean - saikou no jinsei no owarikata. and playing detective Majima, the wonderful Otsuka Nene from tumbling, saigo no yakusoku, iryu, tokyo tower, kurosagi, hero, and a million other things. Majima was a great character with a nice little story arc of her own. 

Yeah this wasnt really the most interesting review ive ever done but blogspot keeps deleting big chunks of stuff i write for no reason so im simplifying my life by cracking this out in a few minutes. 

the series is better than i make it sound. i fail at my job. but im too busy enjoying Oguri Shun's new drama to give a sh*t. 

~

Kamen Rider Kabuto仮面ライダーカブト[series]

 obaachan said this: so much gay it may have been made out of rainbows

How on earth do I go about trying to review this mental series. I watched most of it on the train on the way to uni as I was kind of desperate to finish it off when it started getting really exiting. Yes it does, you’ll have to take my word for it, from the outset it doesn’t look like it will be that great but it really pulls together about half way through. This was the series right before den-o.

What a great cast though. That is one of the things that kept surprising me. People would turn up left right and center that I knew from other stuff and it was great to see them in a stupid show like kamen rider. These series’ are getting better and better as time goes on. You can see that by how much better Den-o was than any that have preceded it. But Kabuto was such fun it holds its own place in the grand scheme of all things kamen rider.

 ~

This time we are fighting alien shape shifter type beasties called worms. They kill a person then take their form and stomp around all wormy being mean and bad and mean. There are a hundred million riders in this one, well maybe not quite that many but sometimes too many to keep track of. Not a bad thing though because as you expect, at a few points during the series their powers combine and they go all kinds of kamen rider ape sh*t on everything that moves. There is a bit of governmental nasties, goodies who were really badies, badies who turn good, then sorta bad again, and even a bit of weird timeline bizarre bending nonsense thrown in to get you ready for den-o.

Cast:

Satonaka Yui – Hiyori

Sato Yuki – Kagami / Gatack

Mizushima Hiro – Tendo / kabuto

Okumura Natsumi – jyuka

Teshima Yuka – Renge

Yamaguchi Yoshiyuki – tadokoro

Nagata Anna – Misaki

Tokuyama Hidenori – Yagurama / Hopper / the bee

Uchiyama Masato – Kageyama / Hopper / the bee

Kato Kazuki – Kazama / drake

Kanzaki Airu – Gon

Miwa Hitomi – Mamiya Rena

Yamamoto Yusuke – Kamishiro / sasword

Umeno Yasukiyo – jiya

Man this cast list is huge.

Satonaka Yui is just so beautiful. I really like how her Hiyori uses boku instead of watashi, she is so quiet and understated and genderless that it works somehow that the actress playing her is so stunningly flawless.

My main overriding memories of this series come from towards the end as usually happens with long series’ like these. So I won’t go into much detail and ruin it all.

There are some great changes that happen to many of the characters throughout and a real growth and progression evolves so it is kind of hard to review. I can barely remember how it all started but I do seem to remember gatack being utterly useless for a good long while before becoming all kinds of crazy cool and mega serious. He stays a total doofus for like half the show. We like him.

Be aware that this series needs an almighty boy love alert, my god, watching this along side ningen bem was like a storm of gayness raining down on my computer. If the friendship between kabuto and gatack wasn’t enough, the fallen bees all gothed up taking refuge in each other was the absolute gayest thing id seen until holyland. Brilliantly funny. Staring off into the sunset arm in arm talking about how they only had each other and nothing else forever. How they did all that with a straight face is beyond me.

But besides all the gay, it has all the standard kamen rider stuff you come to expect. Rubber suity bad guys, fights with bizarre sword / gun / insect like weapons that make no sense in our physics, no real solid explanation about what kamen rider really is or how they originally came to be, or how the general public aren’t that shocked by seeing a kamen rider crew busting down the street to save someone from some sort of alien youma bug issue – I would’ve thought it would cause mass panic but I think the general backdrop to most kamen rider films and series’ is that weird stuff exists in the world and people know that.

They do explain (eventually) how these particular riders were ... maybe not formed, but maybe, inlisted...? but that is about all the info we get. As per the norm, we must suspend all current knowledge which contributes to our understanding of things in order to follow kamen rider in its plight to entertain with high kicks and stupid phrases. *rider shooting!* in an inappropriate American accent. Love it. *one, two, three!* so imaginative right there. My god. Still, mizushima camply *henshin*’s like no other.

Mizushima is gracefully funny – killed me almost every episode. The same with Sato yuki. Their boy love will they wont they friendship was rediculous at best. Tokuyama Hidenori sex voice man was great as ever. And the overall story was worth getting invested in. Not as complex as Den-o but great all the same. There is certainly one thing in kabuto that isn’t in any other kamen rider I have seen so far...

...The unashamed homage to sailor moon. I actually nearly died it was so funny. I’ll just say this; Matsumoto Hiroyuki who played Nephrite even turns up to do a make up battle with drake and they even use the make up! henshin cry – and it was very funny to see both Matsu-Hiro and Kato in glorious make up, and being as camp as usagi-chan herself. Drake does it a few times and it was amusingly stupidly flamboyant for a masked rider fighty dude, but when nephrite turned up I nearly lost it completely.

Between that and the goth boy love issue with the two za bee boiz, the stupidity reigns on high. But the three leading characters are strong enough to carry the show, I just havn’t spoken about them much because all the other stuff was so funny.

After watching kamen rider kabuto I ended up watching Tokyo dogs which is another mizushima drama also staring oguri shun. Polar opposite roles. The calm collected arrogant destined fighter kabuto, and the weirdo energetic cop marou. Then with that I also watched Arakawa – another oguri shun drama where he had an even more of polar opposing role to that of his stern detective in Tokyo dogs; the chief of a bohemian town by a river who is man who thinks he is a kappa... I can’t even begin to explain...

I love how these brilliant actors can have such righteously different characters and gloriously unrecognisable ages where their real identity is so completely lost to the new character I can barely remember who the hell is ever what when and how. Who are you again? Who am i? ...what?  I’m forever on drama wiki chasing up a face I can’t place even though I have JUST seen them in a movie or drama, these guys (genderless intention of the use of this word) are amazing.

oh yeah and I have no idea where the kabuto film comes in to the series by the way. I missed it. At some point in the middle somewhere.