Odoru record

[iyobe kiwa]

I just saw Odoru daisosasen 2 the other day and pretty much share your 
students' sentiments--fun but overwrought.  It's basically one long 
commercial for Fuji TV.  The Odaiba location speaks for itself, really.  
Actually, if I hadn't been entirely convinced I was watching television the 
whole time, I would have thought the "film" was intolerable and demanded my 
money back.  I didn't pay more than 1000yen for it and I don't think 
anybody really should.  It's a bad film, no doubt, but it's not the kind of 
bad film that makes you upset about it afterwards.  You get pretty much 
what you expect: television actors in television roles.  And that's 
probably why the film has been so successful.  When they lay on the 
made-for-TV cheese, they lay it on really thick.  As groan-inducing as it 
is to watch Oda Yuji's character plead to the camera for more blood donors 
to save his wounded partner, you have to admit it works within the overall 
TV drama framework.  In fact, I think it's exactly this lack of subtlety 
that makes this movie's "badness" excusable.  Had they attempted to be more 
cynical about it, they would surely have failed and produced something 
strangely inappropriate for both film and television.  This would have been 
a disaster considering Odoru 2's key asset seems to be the fact that you 
can't distinguish it from TV. (A foolproof way to bring millions of 
Japanese couch potatoes to the theater.) 

On a different note, Did anybody else find the portrayal of Odaiba in Odoru 
2 as the superclean, supermodern face of Tokyo to be a bit disturbing?  
There isn't a single scene shot outside of Odaiba and it seemed like the 
producers wanted to institute the soulless little artificial island as 
representative of how future Tokyo will/should look.  I wouldn't be 
surprised if the next blockbuster is shot entirely on location in Roppongi 
Hills...    


>From: Aaron Gerow <gerow at ynu.ac.jp>
>Reply-To: KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
>To: "KineJapan" <KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu>
>Subject: Odoru record
>Date: Thu, 21 Aug 03 17:41:38 +0900
>
>It was announced that Bayside Shakedown 2 (Odoru daisosasen 2: Reinbo
>Burijji o fusaseyo!) has become the largest grossing live action Japanese
>film in the domestic market, garnering 11.1 billion yen and surpassing
>Nankyoku monogatari (from 1983). The second film in the series, itself
>based on a Fuji TV show, enjoyed probably the largest media campaign for
>a Japanese movie ever, as the Fuji-Sankei conglomerate pulled out all
>stops to promote the film. (It seemed to me like every time I turned on
>Fuji, one of the cast members was appearing on one show or another.)
>
>Whether or not the film is any good is another matter. I still haven't
>seen it, but found the TV show and the first film enjoyable but extremely
>conventional and cliched. My students tend laugh at the wrong places when
>I show the first film in class, finding it fun but overwrought.
>
>Any comments on the film or on the increasing dominance of TV capital in
>the Japanese film industry?
>
>Aaron Gerow
>Yokohama National University
>KineJapan list owner
>For list commands: send "information kinejapan" to
>listserver at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
>Kinema Club: http://pears.lib.ohio-state.edu/Markus/Welcome.html
>

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