Thursday, March 26, 2015

HERO




















Winter 2001

Hero is a drama about a young public prosecutor named Kohei Kuryu (Takuya Kimura) who is transferred to the Josai branch of the Tokyo district prosecutor's office. Kuryu has his own unique style of prosecuting suspects and dresses in a casual style that is frowned upon. He teams up Maiko Amamiya (Takako Matsu) who is an uptight paralegal that has dreams of one day becoming a prosecutor herself. She despises Kuryu at first, especially when she finds out that he only graduated from middle school, but as Kuryu's meticulous style of pursuing justice emanates throughout the office, her perceptions about him slowly begin to change.

Recommendation: Since the second season of Hero was recently completed, I re-watched the first season that came out 14 years ago. I vaguely remember that Kimura was at the top of his game and starring together again with Takako Matsu must have hyped this drama up. It's funny because I know how popular this drama was and how famous Kimura's orange down jacket became, but after watching it again, I couldn't for the life of me get excited about this drama. It has its funny moments, I like the supporting cast, and Kimura and Matsu are great but the drama as a whole is slow and often boring. Some episodes included cases that just weren't exciting. When I start to see a pattern and know that Kuryu is going to get to the bottom of every case and justice is gonna be served, the suspense is lost. I think when you have a unique character who is too good at what he does, it can make for a dull drama because there is no challenge. Of course he gets into a dilemma in the last episode, but I was hoping for something more exciting with a bit more character development from the supporting cast as well. Still, if you like feel good drama's with strong charismatic characters than this drama is for you.

Story: 0.5
Acting: 1.0
Directing: 0.5
Character Development: 0.5
Emotional Factor: 0.5

3.0 Out Of 5.0 Crowns

Friday, March 13, 2015

N NO TAMENI (Nのために)





















Fall 2014

N No Tame Ni is a drama based on a best selling novel by Kanae Minato. The story is based on four young adults, Nozomi Sugishita (Nana Eikura), Shinji Naruse (Masataka Kubota), Nozomi Ando (Kento Kaku) and Masato Nishizaki (Keisuke Koide) who are found at a crime scene with Naoko Noguchi (Manami Konishi) and her husband Takahiro Noguchi (Yoshimi Tokui) dead on the floor. Nishizaki is sentenced to a 10 year prison term for confessing that he committed the crime and that no else was involved. 10 years later, when Nishizaki is released from prison, a former police officer Shigeru Takano (Tomokazu Miura) who worked on an island in the Seto Inland Sea has doubts about the verdict in the case, especially because he was acquainted with Sugishita and Naruse 15 years ago when they both lived on the same island and were involved in an unsolved crime.

Recommendation: So it's been about a year since I posted on my blog and I do deeply apologize as I was busy with other hobbies of mine. Nevertheless, I am back and I watched this drama because a friend recommended to me. I usually try to avoid possibly dark, moody, creepy crime dramas but this one was actually not as heavy as other ones that I've seen. The acting is also very good and the chemistry between the actors/actresses were quite smooth in my opinion. It is a bit on the slow side, but it has its moments of suspense and the story keeps you on your toes as the crime unfolds, teetering back and forth 10 and 15 years ago and then back to the present day to offer clues of the crime that took place. If you like mystery crime dramas, this is one to watch. It's all about misunderstandings so I was caught off guard in terms of how it all played out.

Story: 1.0
Acting: 1.0
Directing: 1.0
Character Development: 1.0
Emotional Factor: 0.5

4.5 Out Of 5.0 Crowns