Catching Up on Some Older Kimura Takuya Dramas

My friend’s Wife has been bitten by the Kimura Takuya bug thanks to NETFLIX’s recent airing of a BUNCH of his shows, including GOOD LUCK, A LIFE, KAREI NARU ICHIZOKU, and most significantly, GRAND MAISON TOKYO, and she’s been simply "Koo-Koo for Kimura” ever since, and ready to explore more of his catalog!

“OK, My wife wants to see this “Long Vacation” show that  everybody keeps talking about!” my friend requested one day, and of COURSE I was happy to oblige! As some of you know, Long Vacation is just about my FAVORITE J-drama of all time, and the more fans I can introduce the drama to, the merrier! 

I told him I’d pass Long Vacation along as well as a few OTHER Kimutaku shows I thought they’d like, and chose classics HERO, A Million Stars Falling From the Sky, and CHANGE to the mix, as well as more recent dramas "Ando Lloyd", "I'm Home", “Mirai e no 10 Count”, “BELIEVE”, and both “BG: Personal Bodyguard” seasons as well.  A good assortment of Kimura shows!

Going through my files, however, I found several of them to be lacking in quality- back when I'd originally acquired them, files were usually 250MB in size and from crude sources. Worked fine for the time, but now seemed hard on the eyes to watch. I wanted them to experience the shows as best as possible, and so took to the forums to get better quality files.

Thankfully all those dramas were up and available, and while re-downloading both HERO and CHANGE, I saw that there were a few other Kimutaku shows available that even I hadn’t seen before (he has so many it’s easy for a few to slip through the cracks!): GIFT (1997), Love Generation (1997) and Concerto (1996), so I grabbed 'em all! Began watching them right away and have been having a blast! Of the three of them the one I’m liking most is GIFT, a VERY wacky and zany affair of a man with amnesia who becomes a courier for a shady organization while simultaneously  trying to piece back his past.

High points include a VERY cute Ryoko Shinohara in an early role- funny, Ryoko was one of the first J-actresses I knew when I began watching dramas, but she plays such tuff tomboyish roles nowadays that I was taken aback by how gigglishly GIRLY she was here- flirty and OH! Such a BABE!

The biggest shocker for me though is seeing actress Mitsuko Baisho as Inspector Sakuhara- I’m SO used to seeing her as a doddering old lady in dramas, it never occurred to me that there was a time when she was an admittedly pretty HOT Lady!!!! But WOWWW, she sure is HERE! I’m not kidding-  I’ve always respected Mitsuko in her drama appearances as those Granny types, but seeing her as this cool, sexy badass character is a whole new experience!

Just LOVE whenever she's in a scene, and at this moment I'm even going to say that Sakuhara's my favorite character on the show! SO KAKKOI!! 

Throw in Muroi Shigeru as Kimutaku’s outspoken boss and a sassy Satomi Kobayashi as an eccentric psychic and you’ve got a WILDLY entertaining drama!!

CONCERTO (Kyosokyoku) stars Kimura and Tamura "Furuhata Ninzaburo" Masakazu as architects competing for the affection of Rie Miyazawa. Not a big fan of infidelity and cheating dramas, but there’s so much going on in this one I can’t stop watching it! Great characters and great acting!

Rie Miyazawa in particular captivates, she’s so bubbly and cute in this one and it dawns on me that this might be the first drama I’ve seen with her as a younger girl, most stuff I’ve seen is her as an 0lder lady, playing mature wives and spinster-ey widows in shows like GuGu Gu Neko Datte and Shinhannin Flag! But she's simply a heartbreaker here, no wonder these two guys end up fighting for her....

Lastly there’s LOVE GENERATION- it’s hard to believe this is the first time I’m seeing it as this came right on the heels of Long Vacation and EVERYBODY wanted to see it! Sadly however, no station here picked it up, and unlike my friend Golden, (who soldiered through the series blind), I refused to watch it unsubbed, LOL!

Took a good 10 years til fansubbing became a thing and  a team translated it, but it still took me until NOW to get going! Watching it now, it very much seems like a continuation of Long Vacation as the two leads look exactly like they did in the previous show, though in entirely different roles, with Kimutaku as a womanizing "player" type and Matsu as a dorky spastic chatterbox! Great fun!

Speaking of Takako, when they were watching Long Vacation, my friend and his wife really detested the Ryoko character-(guess her wishy-washy naiveity grated on their nerves), but when they began watching HERO, not only did they really LOVE her character of Amamiya, they did not even realize it was the same actress who had played Ryoko! This is a TRUE testament of Matsu’s acting versatility- "We couldn't believe it was the same actress when we saw the credits!" they said with some awe and amazement!

Indeed, Amamiya stands out as one of Takako Matsu's most enduring characters, and it's feedback like this that I love hearing and what makes sharing dramas so rewarding!

LOL, and for some hilarious feedback: While talking to my friend’s wife about Grand Maison Tokyo, I mentioned that I really liked the lead actress Kyoka Suzuki, to which she said, “Kyoka Suzuki? Which actress is that, THE ONE WHO LOOKS LIKE A DUDE?” LOLOL I had to laugh and say “Ye Gads, no, THAT was international model Ai Tominaga!”

Ya gotta LOVE feedback like this HAHAHAHA

An Upgrade to my Rie Miyazawa Collection

 Though my favorite single from 90's idol, actress and singer Rie Miyazawa was her catchy and country-twangin' song 'Akai Hana" (which I gushed about here), the only albums I had of hers were two burned discs of her first two releases, "MU" and "Chepop".

These were burned for me by my friend Golden in the time when CD burners were not a common thing- back then they were not built-into your computers and existed as a total external unit. Few deemed it worthy to get one for it's price, and Golden had to pay upwards of 800 dollars for his- that's how new these things were. But it was a small price to pay to be able to share some of his favorite music and make his own CD mixes, and the Rie Miyazawa copies were among the many albums he passed on to us! (He also burned copies of Yutaka Ozaki's  "Seventeen's Map" and some Yuji Oda stuff, as well...sharing is caring!)

For the longest time I was pretty satisfied to hold on to those burned copies, but as I played them over the years and got to know the songs better and better, the more I fell in love with them and the desire to own legitimate copies became stronger...

A few months ago I got my hands on Rie's 1993 album "Rosee", a purchase I made because it was the parent album to that aforementioned "Akai Hana" single (and in fact OPENED with that song)...after falling in love with THAT album, knew it was HIGH TIME I made a real effort to get those original CDs, and thanks to a well-timed promotion at Suruguya, I was FINALLY ABLE to get my hands on both MU and CHEPOP at LAST!

JUST arrived today!!!

WELL, this is a DISTINCT improvement on those burned discs, at least VISUALLY!

The copy of MU is a real fan's dream, packed full of pictures, fold-out and a booklet, as I pored through the CD contents I could only marvel at it...just amazing! Sadly, my copy of Chepop seems to be missing its outer slipcase (a clear shell with Rie's image screened onto it) and only came with a plain case and the inside booklet...guess that's what I get for waiting so long! LOL

No matter, this is a wonderful buy and a fantastic addition to my small Rie Miyazawa collection!

Now I'm off to make NEW Mp3 copies of these albums- it'll be a nice upgrade from those burned copies for sure!

PS: Not that I'll be getting RID of those burned discs...I've had them so long they feel like "real' Rie CDs by now and I'm sentimentally attached to them, HAHAHA

My Verdict on Fuka Koshiba as Kiki: Not Bad!!

 Though I really liked the 1989 Hayao Miyazaki anime “ Kiki’s Delivery Service” (Majo no Takkyubin), I was not even remotely aware that they had made a live-action remake in 2014 until I became a fan of cute actress Fuka Koshiba and found that she had starred in the movie as the titular Kiki herself!

I watched the preview for it on youtube, and while it looked OK, I wasn’t eager to see the movie get tinkered with (like all those recent Disney Live-Action messes), and the youtube trailer clip comments didn't make it sound any more promising:

"Almost All Japanese People Hate this Live Action Version"

HAHAHA, I had no idea this movie was so disliked! I laughed out loud reading these comments, they're so harsh! But the more I read up on it, I saw that despite the bashing, there was an equal amount of folks who liked it and had fond memories of it! So the live action’s ultimate score was still "up in the air" (pun intended)!

As a loyal fan of Fuka Koshiba I knew I was going to have to see it as SOME point anyway, much like when I first made up my mind to check out “Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon” when my love for Keiko Kitagawa was at its zenith, and I figured the time was right!

WELL, after having finished it, I have to say that the movie with Fuka Koshiba as Kiki was not bad at all! In fact, I rather liked it!! I think part of what made it all right was that it was based on the original book that the Studio Ghibli movie was based on rather that a direct lift of the Miyazaki film itself, so things flowed a LOT differently.

In fact, there were things I thought were conveyed a lot clearer than the Miyazaki film, especially the part where Kiki loses her powers (and subsequently regains them), which I felt in the Ghibli flick were more abstract.

Also, at some point in the original movie, Kiki loses the ability to hear Jiji’s voice. I’ve read that her hearing him speak is supposed to be a reflection of the child side of her, and once she is faced with reality, she loses it and that makes sense, but it always struck me as a jarring thing. In the live-action (and, I presume the original book) she never loses the ability to hear the cat, though she does lose him literally for a short while after crashing her broom in the woods…

But when she finds him, their rapport remains perfectly intact!

The next BIG complaint people have about  the Live action Kiki, it's subpar CGI. True, a lot of the special effects left much to be desired, but while some of it was downright straight-to-video quality (LOL):

...I have to say I thought of lot of her flying scenes were handled quite well, very fluid and glidey and it always felt believable that she could just get on the broom and fly away in any scene!

There were also a lot of stars in this movie, Rie Miyazawa and Michitaka Tsutsui as Kiki’s parents, Machiko Ono as Osono, the woman who takes Kiki in, Yo Yoshida as Sumire the laundry Lady who befriends her, and even a small appearance by Miho Kanazawa as a troublemaking young lady….

Above all is Fuka Koshiba herself. I watched this primarily for the Fuka Goodness, and she is an absolute SWEETIE here!!! So expressive and energetic in her performance, you can already see in her the manic exuberance that would define her acting style!

She definitely has become one of my very favorite young actresses!