Wrapping Up Some Unfinished Dramas

With my success last month of blowing through a WHOLE SMORGASBOARD of older dramas, I decided to try my luck and clear up a whole folder full of unfinished drama clutter!

Strawberry Night

 So I had downloaded the 2012 Strawberry Night Series and was quite confused as this was a sequel to a 2010 Special I hadn’t seen! I put this aside and figured I’d watch it

 SO! Just this past month I FINALLY got ahold of that very first SP and was stunned to find it was the SAME STORY as the Fumi Nikaido drama! Huh, I had no idea the Fumi show was a reboot! In any case, I did watch the SP and was now clear to finish up that original 2012 series!

Well, dove right in and WOW was it good! Yuko Takeuchi in one of her most compelling roles ever! So charismatic,cool, and driven, it's hard to believe they would even dream of rebooting the series with someone else. "Cause I love Fumi, but she ain't no Yuko Takeuchi! For THAT, there's ONLY ONE! 

BTW, it was a “Vampire Heaven” reunion in Episode 3 with BOTH Tsubasa Honda AND Aya Oomasa making appearances!

Jiu

Somehow even the combined efforts of two actresses I really love, Mikako Tabe and Meisa Kuroki, didn’t stop this drama from falling into that void of unfinished dramas for me!

Well, watching it again, the individual episodes have been entertaining enough, documenting both Tabe and Kuroki's characters individual journeys as they move up in the system of violent criminal apprehension...
Hunter~

 I've never warmed up to Ryoko Yonekura despite her being in some excellent dramas, but Mirei Kiritani was in this, so I picked it up anyway....

The story of a group of housewives who use their resources to become sleuths who track down fugitives for the rewards sounds like a fun premise, but somehow I lost interest with this one despite really loving Mirei Kiritani in it.

Well, we're picking it up again, and I have to say it's been a lot more engaging this time around! Enjoying the slapstick sensibility of the show a lot more- everyone's hilarious!

 When one of the ladies says, 'Hey, we kind of look like Goranger, don't we?", it tells you all you need to know about this show!

 Plus, it's been awhile since i've seen Mirei Kiritani in anything and its so nice to see her face again! Well worth finishing up this time!

Perfect Report

 I’ll be honest with you: I thought I’d FINISHED this drama up a long time ago- imagine my surprise looking in my folder of unfinished dramas and seeing this in there!

But it's a fun one to revisit, and  Yasuko Matsuyuki is as cool as ever, though I never quite believed Aibu Saki as the air-headed girly girl. Love the way Matsuyuki's character never calls anyone by their names, instead calling them "Fake Smile", Washed Up Old Man", etc, etc, so funny!

PS: I already mentioned how I don’t care for Keisuke Koide, and I have to see him play the SAME cliched uptight guy grudgingly assigned to work under an outspoken female leader on BOTH Perfect Report AND Strawberry Night!

GOLD

Geez, been so long since I dropped Gold that I completely forgot everything about this drama and had to start all over again from the beginning!

How long ago did I drop this? So long ago that it was before my Love Thang for Emi Takei! I think at the time I had only seen her in Otomen. Kind of funny watching it now and knowing her so well. Actually I was surprised how star-filled this drama was upon revisit! It’s an all-star cast!

Yuki Amami always seems to play the same kind of character, but I dunno, I really liked her character of Yuri Saotome who was very sympathetic despite them painting her as a stubborn hard-headed person. 

Also been awhile since I saw Masami Nagasawa in a role I like, her role of meek and spazzy Rika Niimura is a winner! Really enjoying this one second time around...

EDIT: Holy TOLEDO, was that drama great!When they say a dram a is “heartfelt”, this is what they’re talking about! Probably cried my eyes out in every episode! Gving this show a tentative 9.5 rating on MyDramaList even though I feel it's a solid 10/10!

PS: Loved everyone in this drama, but just HAD to find out who played the adorable girl Maiko Jindai who was matched with eldest son:

Turns out it’s Nao Minamisawa, the actress better known to me as Natsuki, one half of the Cafe Choice waitress duo in the excellent drama “Suteki Na Sen Taxi”!! Just one more reason to love this show!

Long Love Letter

And we DO mean LONG! My gosh, this drama has sat on my hard-drive for at LEAST 10 years and maybe more! 'Bout time I got around to finishing it!

By my recollection, I watched only two episodes of this before getting distracted with other shows. All I remembered was a school getting teleported to another place, and Takako Tokiwa as one of the teachers trying to take care of her students while dealing with it. But, man, re-watching it,  there was so much I didn’t remember-

 Like GOLD, I was astounded to see so many stars in the cast: Takayuki Yamada, Tomohisa Yamashita, Emi Suzuki, Satoshi Tsumabuki, and even Asami Mizukawa!! With Yosuke Kubozuka and Tokiwa as the perennial “leads’, this was an all-star cast!

 Gotta say though, this was s STRUGGLE to get through. A school teleported to a barren wasteland is one thing, but a class full of selfish, arrogant students (and teachers) all rebelling against order, hoarding goods for themselves, wasting water, wasting food and acting cocky throughout is NERVE wracking to watch!

 Sadly, it's not that this is BAD writing, because I KNOW that this is what would happen in REAL LIFE if something like this were to happen- (if COVID19 shows us ANYTHING, it's that some humans are very, very selfish and out for themselves!)- but JEEZ, I don't want to SIT through an entire drama of it!!!

Nagareboshi

 I always thought I had watched this drama, but at best I might have watched just the first few of them, because I don’t remember anything from this. I think I might have mixed it up with Suizokukan Girl???
Funny that I dropped this because it's actually quite a compelling story, following a kindhearted guy (Yutaka Takenouchi) whose sister needs a liver transplant and needs someone who can be a donor, and, after only arriving at dead ends, meets up with a suicidal and desperate girl (Aya Ueto), with the promise of financial reward, agrees to marry into his family and become his sister's donor...

 Finally finishing the drama, I gotta say: I REALLY loved it!!! A very turbulent drama with its ups and downs, but you hung on because you cared about the characters. Great scenes and AWESOME acting!

Takenouchi was usual low-key calm persona as usual, and Aya Ueto’s character was one of the best I’ve ever seen- every sweet, vulnerable, tough and sympathetic, all in one. Now I remember why there was such a buzz about her back in the day, she's so good in this.

Thank Goodness I made an effort to finish up this- would be so sad if somehow I cheated myself out of it and it ended up being unwatched forever!

This was another STELLAR Month of GREAT J-Drama catching up!!!
Posted by zdorama @ zdoramaagain.blogspot.com

A Trip to the Past with the Suteki Na Sen Taxi SPECIAL!

A few weeks back I was talking about favorite dramas and mentioned off-the-cuff that he was curious about one of the dramas I always gushed about, Suteki Na Sen Taxi! Yep, I LOVE this drama and wasted no time uploading the drama so he could check it out!

Since I had to upload each episode individually, I ended up watching the WHOLE SERIES all over again and I tell you, it was JUST as good, no, even BETTER than ever! This 2014 show has REALLY endured, and one wishes they’d keep on making ‘em!

We then discovered that there had been a Suteki Na Sen Taxi  SPECIAL in 2016! WHA! I had no IDEA! Sadly, all the trackers I visited had no seeders for such an old show. 

Once acquiring it, I wasted no time popping that one in and MAN, it was so GOOD!

Specials are a weird thing…recently most dramas have been using these as unofficial “last” episodes for the shows, but back in the day they were almost always reunion shows which reunited the cast for a fun feature-length movie, and the Suteki Na Sen Taxi special as all that!

Well, when I say the entire cast reunited, I mean that loosely as the SP takes Edawakare on a Trip to a Hot Springs, so we only see Cafe Choice at the beginning of the show- Bakarhythm and Nao Minamisawa are back (as well as that wacky show they keep watching) and although Nana Seino couldn’t make it, they had a hilarious gag to explain why she wasn’t there!

Sometimes these reunion specials are unnecessary addendums to the series (the Zettai Kareshi SP comes to mind) but sometimes you get a story that really deserves its 2 hour running time, and the Suteki Na Sen Taxi Special was FUN and EXCITING (with new twists on the time-jumping) all the way down to the last minute!

Edawakare is trying to enjoy his well-deserved stay at the Onsen, but as usual he has to put his sightseeing things on hold as he finds people in need of his services!

The movie is split into three separate vignettes about three separate guests at the Inn, and at first I thought that that was all it was going to be, but by the fourth act, the three stories have converged and we see the various guest interacting with each other and joining up for the final story!

Act One is a lighthearted and super funny story of an ailing Baseball star named Komatani (Tamayama Tetsuji) who has come to the hot springs with his Coach (Takashi Ukaji) to work out his slump.

 But with a weakness for showing off in front of the ladies, Komatani ends up with more injuries than he started out with! Eda comes to the rescue once more!

Act Two involves a young man named Mitsou (Shigenori Yamazaki) and his pretty fiancee Mio (Miori Takimoto) who are making their trip to celebrate his proposal to her.

  But, as these thing usually go in Suteki Na Sen taxi, Mitsuo just CAN’T say the right thing, and before he knows it, his fiancee is announcing that she just can’t marry him!

Will the use of Eda’s Time Taxi help him resolve his issues?

I have to say…I forgot how doggone adorable Miori used to be! She looks so grown-up nowadays, she used to have this real Chipmunk cheek look to her!

The third act tells the tale of a teacher named Kanemoto Sensei, a teacher who would like to be like GOKUSEN, but thanks to constant berating by her fellow teachers and students' monster parents, has been reduced to a sensei who is afraid to voice her opinion on anything.

But when one of her students runs off after an apparent failed confession to the boy she likes and is rumored to have gone to a suicide spot, she must take stock in herself and make an effort to engage with her class!

As played by adorable Fumika Shimizu, Sensei Kanemoto is the most hilarious, spazzy and hyper teacher ever! As you may recall, I LOVED her in Kaseifu No Mitazono and was sad to see her leave after the first season, happily I get my full quota of Fumika goodness in this special!*

Throughout the movie there are cutbacks to the characters chatting with a sombre old man named Kubota (Yutaka Matsushige), and by the time of the fourth act, he becomes the main focus of the story....

And in a wonderful turn, all the characters from the previous stories team up to help Eda solve this final case! 

More hilariously, a fun ode to the original series is when the gang crams into Eda’s Time Taxi and the headgear they are forced to wear (To make the time trip seem more Sci-Fi) are all props from the previous episodes! 

 

Must say this was QUITE a treat seeing brand new stories of Edawakare and his Time Traveling Taxi after YEARS since the original show, and Oh, if they’d only make MORE!

*PS: Funny thing about Fumika- I was SO sure it was her playing Kanemoto that I was shocked to see the drama credits listing the actress playing her as “Sengen Yoshiko”. I was like, “wait…WHO?” After reading up, I found that for some religious reason, Fumika Shimizu had adopted this new name under the Spiritual Movement’s company. Stranger than fiction!

Posted by zdorama @ zdoramaagain.blogspot.com