Yamada-kun and the 7 witches 山田くんと7人の魔女 [series]

Boy on witch on girl on boy action...

Ok before you run away from my tagline, lets do a cast list:

Yamamoto Yusuke - Yamada Ryu
Nishiuchi Mariya - Shiraishi Urara
Triendl Reina - Ito Miyabi
Ide Takuya - Miyamura Toranosuke
Tokuyama Hidenori - Yamazaki Haruma
Ono Ito - Odagiri Nene
Kobayashi Ryoko - Asuka Mikoto
Miyama Karen - Otsuka Karen
Kojima Fujiko - Sarushima Maria
Matsui Airi - Takigawa Noa

What a great cast right? For a cheap drama you cant ask for much more than this awesome list. It got my attention when I saw it and was the key factor in my decision to watch. I'm sure it was the same for many other people.

So hopefully that cast list helps you not run a mile...but the rest of the review might. 

Stick with me here, its another stupid cheap almost yaoi stupid school drama, but its so funny and pointless, I think its worth watching.

This is how I described it to my friend:

Yamamoto Yusuke of Ouran high school host club, and Nishiuchi Mariya of Switch girl, and a whole bunch of others at school with witchy powers that they can use or swap by ...kissing each other. 

And they all do... 

All the time. 

All the boys with the boys, girls with the girls, and of course Yamamoto and Nishiuchi... Constantly.

Oh yeah and they swap bodies...

And kiss each other while in each other's bodies.

I watched because I love both the main actors, but after maybe episode 2 I was starting to wonder what the hell I had stumbled on. 

They have no shame, I wonder if the original manga was really super rude because it feels like maybe it was originally full of yaoi side stories or something, because it feels like they are bubbling under the surface in the drama. 

But I don't have the time in my life to read manga when I barely have time to watch the dramas as it is. My reading level is way to low and it would probably take me an age to get through one book even with dictionaries and Japanese friends in my arsenal. But anyway I heard its the same writer as Yankii kun to Megane chan so it probably was just that weird.

Anyway, tangenting. So yeah I was thinking, this was made 2013, does anyone really think Tokuyama Hidenori looks like a school boy anymore? Come on. I mean, I dont care, I'm happy to see him in anything but... come on. With that voice that sounds like he has been smoking and drinking for at least 10 years... and that look in his eyes that screams yaoi king since 2007...

Kobayashi Ryoko is so gorgeous as always. I would love to see this cast together in a serious drama too, I think we could see some genius. With all that great hair.

Just look at that gorgeous face in the picture below. She is so beautiful. 

I think she and Tokuyama would make fabulous babies ^^ Please make that happen. Ive seen Clone Babies and Bunshin I know they gots the tech to do this sh*t. :p

As if you need a plot for this stupid premise, but whatever, the story is following these two idiots, one a super book smart witch and one a yankii loner with the ability to copy a witch's power. 

They both love each other, but cant admit it, so take the opportunity to kiss each other when and wherever possible when they find out they can swap bodies that way... because they need to do that... for... reasons... of course.

Other witches start to be unearthed and they search for a way through the madness that is their school life, trying to seek out the remaining witches and discover their powers, mainly out of boredom, and all end up tangled in a mess of power struggles an stupidity. It is such a stupid drama. Really stupid. Just so ridiculous. But fun, and watchable. 



Its just Yamamoto's style, this is one of his dramas through and through. I wouldn't be surprised if he never stops making these. Doing his Joey from Friends acting until he dies purely out of the fun of it. 

I'm keeping this short as my laptop is so hot I think its going to explode any second. Go watch this stupid drama if you want to see some endless high school students who are way too old to really be high school students constantly kissing each other. Joys.

~

Kou kou nyushi 高校入試 [mini series]

This post is not working out for me... I'm going to give up if my formatting f*cks up one more god damn time...

I'm impressed, not exactly with the drama itself,but more that they managed to stretch 1 day over 13 episodes. 

This entire series covers an exam... Impressive that it wasn't slow or boring really. Though it was completely ridiculous.

Nagasawa Masami in a white trouser suit... I cant even explain. 

Worth watching for that alone. It's a weird drama. 

It felt like it wanted to have a strong message but then didn't want to bother trying to squeeze it into the impossible.

Definitely getting my fill of Masami lately. Lovely Tokuyama Hidenori (Ai no kotodama, Kamen Rider Kabuto) and his deep voice don't feature as much as I thought they might - they didn't really flesh out his character much - but it was great to see him. Brief appearances by Araki Hirofumi didn't go a miss either. (^_^)

There isn't much to say really, it didnt leave me with much of a lasting impression. 

I feel like it was going to try and be much more than it was then decided not to. So the story falls a little flat.

 But it is worth a watch all the same if nothing else but to see how to make one exam last 13 episodes and how to make marking papers seem so dramatic!

I cant get the text to justify without it messing up everything for no reason 

so i will just leave it looking messy like this and have to deal with it. damn it. f*cking blogspot.

~

yankii bokou ni kaeru ヤンキー母校に帰る [series]

Yup, this is the one, Ichihara looks like my dog.

Ok so try to put out of your mind all the things you learnt from Gok and tumbling and gachibaka etc. the teachers and delinquents in yankii bokou are inspired by a real situation. The way the teachers pull together to support the students is not like anything we see in the usual school dramas. This is because the school is based on a real school which became the first in Japan to open its gates to drop out students.

After a documentary followed the events of Yoichi high school in Hokkaido for 15 years, TBS decided to make a drama back in 2003 inspired by the feelings and intentions of the people involved. It has the usual themes covered in most school dramas – as you would expect, but the way problems are dealt with, and the honest responses of the students are often moving and inspiring.

I can’t fault it.

Why would I even want to? I forgot throughout the show many times that this was based on real situations, and every time the teachers had meetings to discuss what was best for the students I found myself feeling in awe of the honest intentions they had.

This is by no means a story of one brilliant teacher fighting to save all his or her pupils from the evils of the world and including all the other stiff unyielding teachers in the seemingly insurmountable dilemmas. All these people are fighting for the same cause, all the students want to start over and those intentions are faced head on with belief and hope. This is not something you see in dramas much. The absolute faith that in these kids the good will out when given the opportunity runs at the very front. It is immensely cheesy at times but actually a lot more subtle than other school dramas of similar ilk. It is no gok. There are no fights in warehouses. Come to think of it, no-one is even on the roof at any point through this whole drama. Mind you, it is Hokkaido. It’d be f*cking freezing.

Cast:

Takenouchi Yutaka - Yoshimori sensei

Shinohara Ryoko - Kanai Momoe

Ichige Yoshie - Kanai Sayako

Yo Kimiko - Andou sensei

Aiba Masaki - Yashiki Tetsuji

Harada Yoshio - Iwazaki sensei

Sayaka - Nanae

Kato Natsuki - Akane

Murano Mia - Wakana

Nukumizu Youichi - Nobu

Ujiie Megumi - Chiaki

Nagai Masaru - Kazuto

Ichihara Hayato - Tooru

Ichikawa Yui - Yuuki

Oshinari Shugo - Chiba

Otsuka Chihiro - Sakuta Kumiko

Takase Yukina - Sawada

Ishigaki Yuma - Shimada Tetsuki

Hayami Mokomichi - Hideo

Koike Teppei - Motoya

Emoto Tasuku - Junichi

Ok, so gushing over. I have a lot of respect for this drama and I guess I’ve made that clear enough. Now I MUST mention my favourite poodle Ichihara Hayato. This is the drama I first saw my dog’s human equivalent, and became a little too enamoured with a certain shigedgehog’s voice twin, mainly because he looks like my puppy and has the most awesome speaking voice in the world.

I started this drama almost two years ago now and forgot all about it. On watching something else where Ichihara cropped up it reminded me of when he looked so much like my little puppy in yankii bokou. I spend my time surfing between wanting to stroke his hair and wanting to tell him to pull his god damn trousers up. He must buy his clothes at the giant world emporium in massive land – either that of he fell through a huge rapper’s washing line and got tangled up in his clothes before going to shoot for the drama.

Also, I feel I should again mention ishigaki yuma’s bizarre ability to look totally the wrong age. Or right age. Or whatever.

My head hurts with thinking about how the hell he shrunk so much after gok in 2002 and yankii bokou in 2003, to be mr tiny fighty kamishiro in holyland in 2005. ah, and I should mention Tokuyama Hidenori is in this too, being generally leather jackety and smooth. The class we follow in the drama is flooded with well known faces. Yashiki sensei’s class aswell. – ah that brings me to aiba masaki with his gorgeous hair and ridiculously try-hard character. I like yashiki sensei and kind of wish they had done more with him.

The special... dare I mention the special...

Well, I got to the point where yoshiie cut off his toenail and just couldn’t put up with any more of the over the top yakuza wannabe sh*t. it didn’t feel realistic, well written, or thought-out. I didn’t like the characters – even the likable ones – even the teachers I already liked from before! How the hell did they get it so wrong? I know I shouldn’t comment when I watched like 30mins of the 2 and a half hour long thing, but no matter how much I love kazama shusuke (akihabara@deep) no amount of him or the love for the series that came before this special was going to keep me watching for another two f*cking hours.

The main problem at first I think is that I just can’t find sakurai sho believable as a yankii. Sorry. He looked like an utter d*ck and nothing he said made me understand where he was coming from. The flash backs to him being violent looked sh*t – I just didn’t believe in him. when kazuto got p*ssed of in the series I felt everyone’s intimidated feelings, when tooru shouted and threw stuff I totally felt his stress and frustration. Sakurai sho just looked like he was taking the p*ss in some bad budget spoof. It is a shame, I don’t know what doesn’t gel about it, but matsuda shota (liar game, hana yori dango, tsuki no koibito) and kimura ryo (who I f*cking love, akai ito, nodame cantabile, hana kimi, puzzle, heat island) both very watchable actors – didn’t even make this palatable.

I may attempt it again and update this post. But I will need to be really f*cking bored. I’m hoping that as it is such a long special that lots of stuff happens and it all mixes up in a really interesting way – but everyone annoyed me so much in that first half an hour I just didn’t have the energy to stand it.

I didn’t want to rant about the special, really I should just be praising the main series for being so great. I feel it could have been longer with no drain on the momentum. Whether it was good or not though, just knowing where it all came from is enough to make it a worth while project. I hope it continues to inspire and remind people of the effort some people really are making in the world – it isn’t all just idealised pretty words in dramas.

~

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.