This will be about the shows I've watched, the music I hear and the words I've learned. I hope to inspire and teach as I learn as well.
And as the title of my blog says....I'm not done yet!!
Kiriyama Shuichiro works as an information management officer in the prefectural police station. As he is very observant and has interest in the unresolved cases which have gone past the legal time frame (statute of limitations) i.e. the culprit cannot be charged even if he/she is caught, he investigates the cases without permission with the aim of "confirming" the culprit only. Some charateristics of this character would be his dark green spectacles, his wallet containing 20,000 yen at all times and he likes udon and nyuumen.
This drama was sort of a disappointment. Don't get me wrong. As usual, Joe-kun rocked my world. This man is a talent beyond anyones imagination. Why isn't he world reknowned? Dunno.
Anyway, the disappointment stems from the fact that both seasons of episodes were sickeningly repetitive. Then there is the fact that they hint to a "romance" and then the second season just blew it off like a north winter wind. What the.....?
This had a good start and then it fell apart as the series continued and I got bored as hell. I watched in angst just hoping that since the story was repetitive they would heat up the romance....but that failed me too.
There is only so much that Joe-kun can do. What a waste of perfectly superb acting skills that got flustered in this weak drama. *sigh*
Long ago, the Grongi Tribe terrorized the Linto until a warrior named Kuuga appeared and defeated the Grongi, sealing their leader within a cave. In present day, a multi-talented man named Yuusuke Godai finds himself linked to the mysterious stoned belt that was found within the escavated cave as the Grongi are ressurected and resume their murderous game on the desandants of the Linto, humanity itself. It is up to Yuusuke, along with the assembled Science Police, to use the various powers of Kuuga in order to stop and defeat the Grongi Tribesmen from their continuous killing and ensure the happiness of others. However, as endgame draws near, Yuusuke learns that there is a horrible revelation behind Kuuga and the Grongis' leader.
OMG! One of the first works from my Joe! He looks so totally different. Actually, the only way I realized who he was..was because of the mole on his chin. After awhile, I got used to looking at him looking so young and different. I'll call him "au naturale". His hair was dark and he actually looked Japanese for the very first time for me. LOL! Is that not weird? Anyway, on to the review........... Sad to say, this KR bored the hell out of me until the last 10 episodes....then it started getting interesting. I will say this fell into the KR theory....masked rider on crotch rocket (motorcycle). But the story, which I thought would be interesting....fizzled beyong belief. But I hung on to the end. Why is it that the KR stories don't end with the ultimate happy ending. You know guy gets girl....and they live happily ever after? Damn. I cried at the end. It was "happy" but it didn't fullfill me at all. I will say the Odagiri Jo, we all know and love, was awesome. The naive and funny Jo is the best. Don't get me wrong. I love him in all of his movies and dramas but when he plays the innocent...well, my heart melts a little bit. Anyway, this was okay but like I said it bored me. So at this moment, I'm taking a KR break for a while and then will hit Kabuto and Kiva.
It is Aoi's (Saki Kagami) seventeenth birthday. She has been raped by her friends and deeply shocked. She turns to her family for support and comfort only to be rejected. She decides to do away with herself and is about to jump from the roof of the school building, when she receives an e-mail message on her cell phone. It was a wrong number, but she finds consolation in the message and decides not to kill herself. However, she cannot bring herself to go back home and wanders the streets. She is picked up by Kanai (Taishu Kase) who was scouting around for girls, and begins to work at a bar as a hostess, calling herself "Ai." She starts selling herself and encounters Ishikawa (Hiroshi Abe), a shady character who spends a lot of money in a reckless way. Ai leads a day-to-day existence for money with Akemi (Maho Nonami), the most popular hostess at the bar. Her sole consolation was in exchanging e-mail messages with Toshi (Joe Odagiri), the one who had sent her that e-mail by mistake. Ai does not tell him how she makes a living, but comes to love him, and moves in with him. However, the production of the five pornographic videos, which she had agreed to do in exchange for five million yen, had already begun by then....
This was a surprising movie. Maybe I'm a little hentai but I thought this was like a sex movie. LOL! Okay, it had sex but not what you think. There was only one part in there that left me thinking "Woah!" Instead this was a thought provoking movie that told a story of innocence lost and parental idiocy. The father beat the crap out of her. Why? She was gang raped but it was her fault? Something wrong with that. Yeah, I would have left home too. When I realized that my Jo-kun was in this movie, I was all giddy inside. This guy totally rocks my world in TV and film. He didn't let me down in this movie. His portrayal of Toshi was stunning. Rough on the outside but all gooey in the middle. That is Odagiri Joe. His vulnerability always shines through. His kind heart is always on the outside and that is why his vulnerable characters always shine through. This movie is dark with bits of light that shine through. The beginning and the end are significant...so pay attention because they coincide with the other. The most beautiful moments are those words and sentences they exchange over their cell phones. Don't expect a happy ending....I was. In the end, I was brought down to my knees spilling more tears............ I should look like a raisin....I don't know how much more water I have left in my body from all these crying moments.
In the basement of Irabu General Hospital is the office of psychiatrist IchiroIrabu (Suzuki Matsuo), who has inherited the hospital from his father. His unkempt, scraggly appearance belies his credentials. Under his white smock, he wears a leopard-striped shirt and army boots. His demeanor is gruff and unprofessional. He's loud, harbors a severe Oedipal complex, is prone to violent outbursts and barely hears a word his patients are saying. In short, he seems a complete slacker. But somehow all these detracting qualities add up to a strange magnetism that draws his patients to him out of, if nothing else, a sense of a shared fate and empathy. At Dr. Irabu's side is the voluptuous nurse, Mayumi, who seems to take no interest whatsoever in her job or her boss. All they share is a fondness for needles. Dr. Irabu, meanwhile, has taken to swimming at a local pool during his off hours.
At the pool, Irabu regularly runs into a man who seems quite obsessed with swimming. He is KazuoOhmori (SeiichiTanabe), a brash, confident young company man who has been put in charge of a large outlet mall development project. He has a wife, a mistress and a reputation for getting the job done. But the project has him very busy and more anxious than usual. Wondering how to best deal with his accumulating stress, he happens upon a magazine article that prompts him to take up swimming. He finds it to be just what the doctor ordered. But as the demands of his job begin to get in the way of his newfound ritual, he sees his health deteriorating, which only further fuels his craving to swim, eventually implanting a "pool dependence," which he must satisfy.
Meanwhile, a salesman at medium-size manufacturing company, TetsuyaTaguchi (Joe Odagiri) one day wakes up to find himself with a 24-hour erection. In great discomfort and pain, he rushes to an urologist who offers little help except to pass him on to Dr. Irabu, who quickly realizes that Taguchi is a man who can't express his feelings, particularly to women, and is highly suppressed. Irabu is direct. "There's something you're not telling me." In fact, Taguchi's wife, Sayoko, recently left him to be with a company friend, with whom she had an affair. But Taguchi has never let her go emotionally, and has bizarre nightly dreams of her. He knows he must stop being such a pushover but how? Fixing his constant erection takes primary concern, however, which is increasingly causing him more pain and embarrassment, especially at work. At one point, he is ordered to go on a business trip with clients at a hot springs resort. With his erection showing no signs of receding, Irabu finally tells him he must confront his ex-wife.
Irabu is visited by one more patient, a serious, hard-working magazine writer by the name of SuzumiIwamura (MiwakoIchikawa). Her meticulous investigative instincts make her a good expose writer but they also threaten to be her undoing as she craves verification. Once a thought gets into her head, her mind won't let it go. This leads to a neurotic condition where she constantly worries about whether she's left the gas or electricity on at her apartment, or the door unlocked. At one point, she even worries that she left the burner gas on at Korean barbecue restaurant. She finds it increasingly difficult to go anywhere and repeatedly leaves in the middle of her work to rush home and check her appliances. Irabu prescribes a series of highly unconventional exercises such as going and throwing rocks at a rival hospital. Suzumi, though suspect of Irabu's seemingly self-driven methods, gradually comes to trust him until the day he jars loose a startling incident from her childhood that lies at the root of her problem. An incident with criminal ramifications, no less. The two have no choice but to investigate further in hopes of reaching closure.
I have to laugh at this movie. I laughed because it was funny imagining Joe Odagiri with a constant erection. I think that entire part of the story was the only part of the movie that kept me watching. The rest...........bored me to tears. I mean, yeah, the doctor was riot. He was insane. LOL! This movie was so unconventional. At times, I was like..."Huh?" I'm sure there was supposed to have been a moral to this story. I guess it was a reminder that we all have some sort of stress or erratic behavior of some sort. We just have to face our problems or laugh them off as we go on. This was a good time waster. When Joe-kun plays in comedic roles, he totally rocks. He sometimes comes across as the innocent when he is cleaned up and shaved. But then, when he plays the "bad" guy.....he rules there too! In all, the movie was okay in general.
Blood and Bones painstakingly describes the life of infamy lead by Kim Shun-Pei, an unskilled laborer from Cheju, an isolated island in the far South of Korea, from his arrival in Osaka in 1923, full of dreams and ambitions, for lack of more distinctive qualities, to his unmourned death in North Korea. Expatriated into Japan during the era of its colonial rule over the peninsula, he seems to be seeing/seeking (as do his compatriots) a land of opportunities for fortune, fame (to a lesser extent) and prior to these fantasies, work.
But unlike his fellow immigrants, Kim is a man who knows no law but the one dictated by his own iron will, and hardly any other means of expression than his two fists and his rage, with which he will establish his authority over the small community of his peers, a silent diaspora scattered in a few alleys that will remain their horizon for the rest of the film.
This was an excellent movie! Kitano Takeshi was awesome as the abusive, controlling father. I've read that this movie was critiqued for the "abuse" towards Koreans in Japan during Japan's occupation of Korea. I didn't see that in this movie. What I saw was a normal reaction to how ANY ethnicity would react if a father who was the way he was would respond. Black, White, Asian, Mexican, Persian, etc...if were put about in those types of conditions, I would believe, would react the same as the Koreans did during that time. I didn't even see a "Japanese" person depicted (even though the Koreans were actually Japanese actors) in the movie. It was all about the Koreans and how a family and the people involved in that family lived, loved, and learned and reacted to the man who took what he wanted and gave nothing back. It was definitely a sad movie. There wasn't a single happy moment during the whole movie. I would hope they would have a part two of the movie because I'd like to see how the rest of the "children" became and how Masao lived after his father moved back to North Korea. Oh yeah, Odagiri Joe was in it!! His part was quite big for the only 20 minutes he had in the whole movie. He was the first born son who was conceived out of rape. He was actually the most loving of the children especially towards Masao. I wouldn't recommend this movie to everyone. Some serious mature scenes in this movie (yeah, I mean sex!) that was kind of gross since it was of the "old man". Ick! Arai Hirofumi I cannot believe I have not a single picture of Hirofumi-kun in any of my other previous posts of his movies. WTH? So here I go. He doesn't have the classic idol looks but he's cute in his own right. That Korean in him gives him a distinctive look that I really like. He can play tough guy or sweet guy...it works both ways for him. *muah!*
The main characters of "Searchin' for My Polestar" are 7 friends that met at college while in the astronomic observation club "Sagittarius." Being in the club was just an excuse for them to go to the beach in summer, and skiing in winter. Actually, the only time they ever observed any stars was at summer camp during their senior year.
Dreaming of a bright future, the seven exchange vows for eternal friendship. However, over the next several years, their busy schedules cause them to begin drifting apart.
It's been 3 years since that summer when they laughed together gazing at the stars. Will their friendship continue to drift farther and farther apart? Or will they manage to strengthen their friendship again? --Fuji TV
Okay, okay. I'm totally balling like a baby. Episodes 8-12....killer! I was not expecting this drama to catch me, hook, line and sinker. First of all, I started watching this because of my Joe-san. He's so kawaii! Well, I have to be upset with the wardrobe department....why do they dress him off like he is a hustler from the 70's? Drives me CRAZY!
This was an awesome drama. Actually, I really think the Japanese drama, Friends, is a knock-off of this drama. Okay, there is no wife beater in this drama but the husband of one of the main characters is distant and treats her like a servant. Totally a jerk. Then you have the friends all go through some rough patch in their lives and someone always trying to fix the others problems. Then the interlove triangle/quadrangle that never really was a love thing in the first place. That was totally confusing.
The end...well, suffice it to say.....just tore me to shreds. I'm still in tears. It was wonderful. My only beef was the very, very, very, very last scene.....when the main three characters walked in different directions. That just tore me up because they are ALL best friends....they should all be together to the very end. At that point, I wanted a best friend like all seven of them were. I want that sort of relationship. Something that is not gender bound and that special person in the group would always be there for me. *Okay the tears are really flowing again. My throat hurts from holding back the sobs. And the snot won't stop running out of my nose.......*
God, I really LOVED this drama.
Ito Hideaki
Koike Teppei Ummmm? He has abs....OMG!!! Too bad he's too young for my taste......So I know some other girls will likey this pic. LOL!
A young, good-hearted doctor Kenichi suffers from a rare syndrome whereby his feelings cannot be hidden => such people are known as "satorare" and their well-being come under special government protection.
As all the young doctor's thoughts/feelings are always heard by hospital colleagues, this creates much inconvenience to them and they try to drive him away. In steps a beautiful female doctor who tries to shield him from the cruel reality of his uniqueness. --primetime
OMG! I love, love, love, love, love this drama. Okay, it has Odagiri Joe. A definite eye-catcher to get the blood flowing. The story, the actors, the whole damn thing....rocked. I'm so glad I downloaded this from d-addicts. This is a definite keeeeeeeeeper. It's on my top 5 list of top dramas. It's not the drama but the comedy that is so funny to the drama itself. The situation is serious but damn if Joe-kun didn't do the best damn job EVER! I knew he had comedic talent but this was the best by freakin' far. If you have to see a drama but want something with a different tune......watch this! WATCH IT! OMG! I can't get how wonderful this show was. It'll make you laugh till you cry, you'll cry because it was endearing, you'll cry because it was sad, you'll cry because you will be so damn happy.....that it hurts! I'm just so happy. This drama just makes you smile from deep within!! Now I must get off of here and have sweet, wonderful thoughts of this show.....oh, and of Joe-kun. LOL!
For Masaya, the last happy memory with his parents together, is his hopelessly drunk Dad forcing him to eat yakitori chicken bars… and being hit by Mom… Masaya was 3 years old at that time. Mom andMasaya left Dad and started living in a town famous for coal mining.Mom worked in her sister’s small diner and raised Masaya by herself.The life was peaceful there, free from Dad.
After graduating from high school,Masaya successfully entered an Art University in Tokyo, the place he has always longed to be. However, life never really goes on as a person wishes. His life was rotten. Life was all about fooling around with his friends and killing time.He could not dare call Mom to tell her his situation.
It is now 1990, and Masaya is working just to return the debt, which were mounted while just living in Tokyo and doing nothing. He did whatever he was asked to do, and without really expecting, somehow earned his living as an illustrator/columnist. One day he gets a call from his aunt informing that his mom has cancer.Masaya makes up his mind and calls Mom, to invite her to live with him.
Mom arrives in Tokyo. After living apart for 15 years,Masaya and Mom start living together in Tokyo. Masaya's life seems to have finally started moving once again. Soon, people around him started to frequently gather at his house to eat her delicious food. The house is always filled with happy faces and laughter. However, nothing lasts forever.As they have feared,Mom’s cancer has relapsed.
“The day”Masaya is most afraid of draws close…
Omg! I am writing this now before all of the feelings and words escape me. Please, please, please....sit down with your mom and watch this. I don't care how old you are or young you are. This is a must see for all. I'm still crying. This was the most beautiful story ever shown. Did Joe-san get an award for this? I don't know. If he didn't, well screw all the academy for this. This movie is one of the most greatest movies I've ever freakin' seen. (Side note: Just looked it up and Joe-san DIDN'T win an award but the movie, director, screenplay, supporting actor did!) On a personal note, I was so related to Joe-san's character, Masaya. I'm not terribly close to my father either. My mother has tried to support my siblings and I for as long as we can remember and still does so. My mother hasn't died, yet. Thank God! But the feeling of bereavement and sadness made this steal heart of mine crack in places it would probably never have done so before. I can't wait to see my mother again to hug her and thank her! This movie moves slowly but every moment has a certain touch that all of us should or would understand growing up. Even if the roles are reversed and it was the father instead of the mother. Either way, you will be touched in some form or fashion. My Joe was, as usual, freakin' outstanding! I'm telling ya to watch that man cry......OMG! You will fall to your knees. This movie was a 10-star movie out of 4-stars!!!! This went way beyond exceptional...........
Starring: Joe Odagiri ... Takeru Hayakawa Teruyuki Kagawa ... Minoru Hayakawa Masato Ibu ... Isamu Hayakawa Hirofumi Arai ... Yohei Okajima Yoko Maki ... Chieko Kawabata Keizo Kanie ... Osamu Hayakawa Yuichi Kimura ... Akihito Maruo Tomorowo Taguchi ... Judge Pierre Taki ... Funaki From the director of Wild Berries and produced by Kore-eda Hirokazu (director of Nobody Knows, After Life and Maborosi) Sway is a tale of two contending brothers. Takeru is a successful photographer living the good life in Tokyo. Reluctantly, he sets off to visit his hometown on the first anniversary of his mother's death. Stopping in to see his older brother, Minoru, who has taken over the family gas station, he runs into a childhood friend, Chieko, now one of Minoru's employees. The three decide to take a drive to the ravine - a local beauty spot. Walking ahead on his own, Takeru crosses a bridge suspended high above the gorge to search for potential photos. Minoru and Chieko follow moments later but, as they cross, Chieko tumbles off the unsteady bridge into the ravine below. Following Chieko's funeral, Minoru is arrested. With only one witness, Minoru's defense hangs on his brother's testimony. As the trial progresses, it uncovers the gulf of jealousy and resentment that exists between the brothers and Takeru becomes unsure of what he actually saw that day.
Wow! Do I ever love Odagiri Joe? Let me count the ways......
Another incredible, incredible movie with him in it. This tale of brotherly love and rivalry will be recognized by some. For those of us with siblings, will probably think of the days when you wished you didn't have siblings at all. But yet, without those close to us, we really aren't who we are and don't really exist except to those who love us unconditionally. This is how I see this movie.
Takeru (Joe-san) is the younger brother. He has always looked up to his brother for everything. Where as, Minoru has always taken care of Takeru. Jealousy? Where did it begin? Why? This is what this story is about..........mainly.
I cried at the end. It's hard not to cry when the most gorgeous man alive (one of them anyway) is crying on screen. It really tears at your heart to see a man cry. I'm tellin' ya......
The script is awesome. The cast is awesome. The acting is awesome. This movie is now on my download list...........
Shingo is a frustrated clerk at a police station, Tetsu is stressed out over his mentally ill father and Saki has an inferiority complex over her artificial eye. Together they have the misfortune to be riding the same bus when a terrorist strikes. Shingo is frozen with fear as he helplessly watches Tetsu get shot and the gunman take aim at Saki. A few months later, Shingo is back to shuffling paper at his dead end desk job with no hopes of becoming a detective. He also still suffers guilt over the bus incident. One day, Shingo coincidentally runs into Tetsu and he pours out his suppressed feelings about the shooting. Together they fantasize about revenge, talk about retaliation and how they can make a business out of it. Their scheme is simple. A client must provide ID credentials. The request for revenge cannot be revealed to the third party. There is no second chance and nobody gets hurt. They scrawl graffiti to solicit customers and begin to get customers. Their first clients include a patient after a doctor for malpractice and a kid who wants to get back at his abusive mother. Tetsu and Shingo keep playing the revenge game walking the thin line to becoming full on criminals! Shingo starts to crave the feeling of power and omnipotence. He feels some debt to Saki after the bus attack but his efforts to help her always fail. Meanwhile Tetsu increasingly approaches the revenge game like childs play and hatches a plan to steal guns from police boxes. Eventually, the game goes too far and Tetsu and Shingo dangerously spin out of control.
OMG! It's official....Odagiri Joe....the best damn actor ever!! Damn, he's so freakin' cool and I loved him in this. Sheesh! I can't think of a movie that he didn't do an awesome job even if the movie sucked...he never did. *<3> Then there is Kase Ryo. First off, he's American....holy shnikeys! I didn't realize. I know I've seen him in other movies but this is the first one where he isn't supporting. He rocked my world. The first part of the movie I was laughing my ass off. Damn, it was funny. Don't we all wish we could pay back jerks who have done us wrong! I'd have hired them in a second! I know the reality of it all that "what goes around, comes around" could and should happen. But "what comes around" that being Shingo and Tetsu shouldn't "go around" again. They increased the bad karma upon themselves and it ended up coming back on them. I guess this could be a learning experience for most of us that "an eye for an eye" doesn't necessarily mean that's a good thing. Extremely well written for both Odagiri and Kase and their acting abilities. Definitely a keeper of a movie!! Odagiri Joe
Takemura begins the film as an 8th-year college student who has somehow managed to accumulate ¥840,000 in debt.
Abandoned by his parents in childhood, he has no one to turn to for the cash. One night a stranger with a grubby trenchcoat and grizzly beard, Fukuhara, bursts into his apartment, puts him in a chokehold and demands the dough, or else. Takemura agrees to scrape it up, but his feeble attempts, including a losing pachinko session, fail miserably. Then, the day before the debt comes due, Fukuhara comes to Takemura with an unusual offer: walk with him from Kichijoji to Kasumigaseki, for ¥1 million, paid on successful completion. Takemura has no choice but to go along.
On the first day of the walk, Fukuhara tells Takemura his reason for it: He killed his wife and intends to give himself up at the Sakuradamon police station. Takemura, a law student, urges Fukuhara to go to the nearest cop shop — if the police discover the body before he turns himself in, the hand of the law will be heavier, Takemura explains — but Fukuhara refuses to change his plan: It's Sakuradamon or nothing.
This was an amazing film. I will admit it's slooooooooow. But it's worth it. There is actually a story to tell. Fumiya who hasn't shown much emotion in 7-8 years starts to bear witness to what having a family could be like. Then his tears start to flow.................... There are a few questions left unanswered from the movie. I don't know if they left it open for a second film or not. The meter maid? She seemed like she knew Fumiya but it was only a minute in the movie. Fukahara's wife? So did anyone finally realize she was dead? Fumiya's parents? Where are they? His adopted parents? Where are they? Joe? What was with the 'fro? That has to go! *hehe, I rhymed* Odagiri Joe
Some time between the Meiji and Taisho period… A mother and son walk through heavy rain. The son, YOKI, sees strange, iridescent creatures float from the mountainside and then disappear. He does not yet know such creatures are called “Mushi” and can not be seen by ordinary men. Suddenly, there is a landslide and Yoki’s mother is swallowed by the flood. A Mushishi woman named NUI finds the child, who miraculously survived, and takes him home with her…
Some years later, we meet Yoki again as an adult. Having lost his memory in an incident he can not recall, he is now called “GINKO.” He is a “Mushishi,” one who studies the Mushi he could see as a child and protects ordinary men from the illnesses that they inflict. He travels alone through the thick mountain snow, looking for a night’s lodging. We see that his hair is white like the snow and one of his eyes is now missing...
Ginko makes his way to a house where a young woman named TANYU has fallen ill. Born to a family with a strong connection to Mushi, Tanyu records the ancient stories of the Mushi onto scrolls. She fell ill after she heard a tale from a blind Mushishi woman. The woman told her about how she had fought off a powerful Mushi called “Tokoyami,” which lived at the bottom of a pond, and about an eyeless fish which lived at the bottom of the Tokoyami called “Ginko.” Her extended exposure to the pond turned her hair white and took her eyes…
In the basement library of Tanyu’s house, Ginko reads the scroll containing the tale of the blind Mushishi woman. It sounds strangely familiar to him, as if he has heard the story before… the story of a boy named “Yoki,” the sole survivor of a landslide…
Wow! This movie isn't for everyone. To some this might be too boring. On the other hand, if you have read the manga or have seen the anime, you will come to realize how well done this movie was.
Using Joe Odagiri to play the part of Ginko, the bugmaster, was brilliant. You can never go wrong with Joe. He is such an awesome actor! He plays his parts so well that he is just too cool. He is your go-to-guy if you really need an actor. I really think it's time for him to head to Hollywood. He's beyond Japan's scope of vision.
Mushishi, to me, is really about a doctor of sorts. I'm not sure if many have heard the term, if they have ever had the flu or some virus/bacteria infection, "getting the bug". This was always used if I or my siblings had gotten sick...especially a stomach virus. Well, this movie kind of reminded me of that phrase.
The village people would encompass some kind of "mushi" that made them ill some way or the other (deaf, body change, paralysis, etc.). Ginko, the Mushishi (bugmaster), would lend his services and help these people rid their bodies of the "mushi" in the same way a doctor would.
This was a beautiful story with an engaging cinemagraphic background. And, well, Joe Odagiri was in it.....there was enough salivating to last me a lifetime. He's some hot eye-candy that is for sure!!!
Odagiri Joe Life just sucks then you die! Eeergh! I just read that he got married! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Say it isn't so Joe, say it isn't so! How am I to go on living? *cries buckets, heaves, sobs, sighs*
Azumi 2 Starring: Ueto Aya as Azumi Ishigaki Yuma as Nagara Kuriyama Chiaki as Kozue Oguri Shun as Ginkaku / Nachi Kitamura Kazuki as Kanbee Inoue Endo Kenichi as Kinkaku
Orphaned as a little girl, Azumi (Aya Ueto) is raised in the forest with a group of ten children by their master (Yoshio Harada), who trains them to be peerless assassins. Azumi and Nachi (Shun Oguri) are the strongest of the fighters. When the group comes of age, the master gives them one final test. He tells them to team up with the person to whom they feel closest. Then he tells them to kill that person, explaining that an assassin never gets to choose whom to kill. The teens reluctantly fight to the death. Then the survivors are brought out of the woods to begin their work, assassinating the corrupt warlords who are preventing peace in the land. The assassins, particularly Azumi, perform their missions with flair, but complications arise. One of the teens (Takatoshi Kaneko) is poisoned by a ninja's blade, one (Kenji Kohashi) falls in love with a circus performer (Aya Okamoto), and Azumi begins to question her desire to live the violent life of an assassin. Meanwhile, one warlord (Naoto Takenaka) cleverly escapes their blades, and together with his bodyguard Kenbei (Kazuki Kitamura) and a "monkey-faced" ninja, Saru (Minoru Matsumoto), they find Bijomaru (Jô Odagiri from Bright Future), a violent madman, release him from prison, and unleash him upon the young team of assassins. Azumi, based on the manga by Yu Koyama, is the first of cult director Ryuhei Kitamura's (Versus) films to be made within the Japanese studio system. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide
Aaaagh! I was going to review this last night but I watched both Azumi's back-to-back and it was late. Plus, I was not in the right mind to post this review. OMG! This movie, especially the first one, was AWESOME. What movie can make you cry in the first 10 minutes? This one did and I cried throughout this one and the second one. Why? Why? Why did the have to kill Nachi at the very beginning? It wasn't fair. And Eita? He is one of Japan's most popular actors! Did he even have a line. Killed right before Nachi! They killed off 2 of Japan's finest in less than 0 minutes. Sheesh!
The suffering Azumi went through. Uuuugh! No girl, woman, whatever should have to lose the man she loves...TWICE!! I was wanting a freakin' happy ending when I realized Oguri Shun was back in the second movie. Whyyyyyyyy!!!!!!!!!! So for almost 4 hours straight I was a blubbering idiot. Oh don't get me wrong the action was awesome. I started out watching these two movies all alone and gradually a member of my family would start asking questions or sitting next to me about what they heard or had seen. Next thing you know, I have both my sons and my husband sitting next to me. And I, of course, am the only one bawling like a baby. My only complaint with the movie was the second one. I felt the second one was put together toooooo fast to accomodate the first movie and Azumi fans. The quality wasn't as good and the script seemed rushed to fit what they needed into a 2 hour movie. Hell, there should have been more depth in Azumi's and Ginkaku's relationship. And why was Nagara in the second movie? He didn't do anything except get killed and make me cry even more. That was my only complaint. If you don't want to see Oguri Shun get killed again, don't watch the second one. Don't torture yourself like I did. The first Azumi movie was the best anyway. But if you feel you need some kind of completion then go ahead and watch the second one.
Odagiri Joe I have to make this comment about Joe. Damn! He is such a versatile actor. I'm looking forward to watching Mushi-shi! He can play good guys, bad guys, whatever-kind-of guys well. If you have to see him at his full potential then watch Shinobi. I saw the anime so I couldn't watch the movie only because well....I know the ending. LOL!
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