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.

~

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.

Rescue: pride of orange 特別高度救助隊 [series]

Maru your face is so epic I may die. Your furrows of worry are the best.

Maru’s furrows = Marrows.

Ok the only reason I watched this was for Masuda Takahisa’s awesome face, I swear it was the only thing keeping me going. It was terrible and brilliant then terrible then brilliant again. I think I will go with it being brilliant, but believe me it was still very terrible.

The painful constant monologue, when people were in desperate need of saving, was frustrating and excruciating. Over and over again. But I guess it made it funny too. Nakamaru Yuichi has the most awesome concerned eager face in the world. Maru your face is epic.

He actually didn’t stop shouting throughout the entire program. It was geniusly funny in ways I’m sure they didn’t intend – ah maybe they did. Who knows. The writers of this show seemed to be off the f*ckin’ planet anyway.

This is bound to be a pointlessly unhelpful review and you probably won’t understand a word I say as my memories of this series are too wrapped up in jokes inspired by the dire melodrama to make much sense. I will try to be coherent.

 

Maru plays Kitajima Daichi – god only knows how I can possibly describe him accurately to you.

He is like a small puppy with all the enthusiasm of a girl scout trying to save her grandma, with only love and cookies, from a bulldozer.

Massu plays Tezuka – Daichi’s best friend, another lovely little puppy with a cute worried face.

I love watching Massu trying to look like he is having a hard time doing sit ups and chin ups and stuff when you know really he could sh*t all over everyone when it comes to that stuff.

These two are firemen. Yup. In silver News / Kat-tun-esque suits. So, everyone feels right at home then. But fire fighting is not enough for them, nor is the silver. They want to become part of a special rescue unit called the super rangers パー！and use said girl scout determination to undertake arduous training and become super-special-mighty-morphing-orange-eito rangers.

Or something like that.

We have lots of familiar faces for the other recruits, including Daito Shunsuke (fujoshi kanojo, tumbling, nobuta o produce) Yamamoto Yusuke (atashinchi no danshi, tumbling, rinne no ame, hana kimi) Ishiguro Hideo (gokusen, kamen rider den o, 1 pound no fukuin, Princess princess D)

here is them all staring at the sky for some reason:

Even baka Sato Jiro is in this series being his usual mental self. It isn’t right without him. I’ll say again what I have said before. He should be in every series ever made.

Rescue is full of shouting, disobeying orders, bringing personal issues to the pot, being irrationally angry at everyone else, sudden half naked chin ups in a restaurant/bar, main characters dying left right and centre unnecessarily because the rescuers all monologue instead of dig them out of the rubble, and lots of the

super-happy-ninja-orange-eito rangers stopping to stare at fire as if they have never seen it before.

Aside from the writers having not done a great deal of research into things that cause fire and therefore made believable scenarios it was the usual *things go bang and woosh fires explode and things fall down* and then super-orange-special-awesome-ninja-eito rangers rush in to save the day, or to stop to bring all their personal issues to the pot, or just to look shocked at fire for 20 minutes.

There were lots of great bits that made me think *ah this is why it was so popular.* Then with the frustratingly sh*t bits I was carried through my Massu’s amazing face which I would be distracted by even if zombies were sprouting up from the ground and turning into flowers as Johnny Kitagawa road passed on a Tegoshi’s pink elephant spraying magic zombie flower potion onto the dribbling hoard from the trunk.

The most brilliant part was probably Maru’s furrows of worry. Every time something serious was happening I was curled up on the floor laughing at the Marrows on his forehead so prominent you could wash your laundry on them like a wash board.

Actually, Maru come here a minute, let me borrow your forehead for a bit, I’ve got some socks I forgot to put in the wash last time. Just don’t let Roro near it, he’s murder with a wash board; he’ll ruin your washing and charge you for it.    ...hang on, theyre all at it.

Anyway. Back to the f*cking point. What is the point? The super-special-needs-orange-eito ranger guys having existential crises every time anyone was hurt or was scared or breathed. It was relentless and infuriating, then became brilliant, then plain frustrating, then kind of insulting that we were expected to go along with that sh*t, then it was brilliant again. I was very dizzy by the end of it all but those two weirdoes kept me going. How wonderful to have Maru and Massu in a series together with the most worried expressions anyone could muster.

I don’t know what else to say, clearly nothing else stuck with me but Massu’s general awesomeness which I already had such a problem with I have had to seek help from an addicts anonymous helpline, and the epic Marrows that I had no hope of accurately capturing in the screen shots. It was worth it in hilarity value on that alone.

More team NakaMassu please. It makes the world a better place. I’m sure there were meant to be lots of heart warming and soul searching moral messages in this series but when the orange NakaMassu power rangers – I mean eito rangers – I mean super rangers descend all I can do is laugh. What a stupidly great program. Or greatly stupid. Maybe both. Yeah both.