Tag: Kotaro Koizumi

Bayside Shakedown the Final: The New Hope (踊る大捜査線: THE FINAL 新たなる希望, Katsuyuki Motohiro, 2012)

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Is it really the end? Billed as the “final” instalment in the Bayside Shakedown series which began with a TV drama in 1997, Bayside Shakedown the Final: The New Hope (踊る大捜査線: THE FINAL 新たなる希望, Odoru Daisousasen the Final: Aratanaru Kibou) once again finds the gang contending with annoying red tape but also with a police force which is intrinsically corrupt and self-serving while questioning if they should remain in an occupation in which they are treated with such disdain. Continuing the familiar pattern from throughout the series, the gang find themselves coming up against a serial killer who may be a crazed vigilante only to discover that the whole thing may have been an extreme inside job designed with the intention of drawing attention to inadequacies in the justice system. 

The problem is that the body they’ve found appears to have been shot with a gun which was removed from the police evidence locker and is linked to a kidnapping case six years previously which just happens to have been handled by Mashita (Yusuke Santamaria) when he was a hostage negotiator. Mashita had ordered an end to the negotiations because of pressure from above to play by the rules with the consequence that the child later died while the prime suspect in the case was recently acquitted of the crime at trial (a staggeringly rare occurrence in Japan). When Mashita’s young son is kidnapped, all eyes are on a rogue policeman, Kuze (Shingo Katori), but it is obvious he is not acting alone. 

Toragai (Shun Oguri), the authoritarian detective from the previous film, has continued along a dark path which only intensifies when his paper on police reforms is rejected out of hand. He too thinks the police force needs structural reform but leans hard into the idea that too many people are getting away with crime rather than concentrating on removing the barriers which prevent police from doing their jobs as Muroi (Toshiro Yanagiba) and Aoshima (Yuji Oda) would probably suggest. Muroi’s lasting dream is of building a police force which trusts policemen to do the right thing and he frequently tells his subordinates that they should feel free to exercise their own judgment. 

Meanwhile, the local cops continue to suffer under the command of the elitist officers from HQ who not only look down on them but assign menial tasks, as does Mashita in finding himself short staffed while most are busy providing security for a local energy summit. While Aoshima had experienced a health crisis that turned out to be a false alarm in the previous film, so this time Sumire (Eri Fukatsu) finds herself struggling with ongoing effects from her shooting in Bayside Shakedown 2 eventually deciding that it might be better to leave the police force entirely while lamenting her unfinished business with Aoshima which remains unresolved even in this “final” instalment while he somewhat unsympathetically can only ask her not to leave rather than express his true feelings. 

Ironically enough, by the time of the final showdown neither of them are actually in possession of a police badge, Aoshima scapegoated by Toragai who still holds a grudge against him while inconvenienced by interference in his scheme to frame a local petty thief for the killings, presenting him with an invitation to resign following serious misconduct accusing him of beating up suspects and planting evidence. One again, the police chiefs sit around a large circular table issuing orders from afar but are mainly concerned how to bury the “scandal” of having a police officer steal a gun from evidence and then use it to commit a murder. In a bizarre twist of fate, it later turns out that the whole thing may be an elaborate, not to mention entirely amoral, plan to expose police shortcomings with a side dose of revenge against Mashita for contributing to the child’s death by insisting on following protocol while receiving heat from above. 

As such the apparently “final” instalment skews a little darker than the series norm while as the subtitle implies offering a new ray of hope in the reversal of Muroi’s fortunes allowing him to embark on the police reforms which have been his and Aoshima’s goal throughout the series. Meanwhile, the film pays tribute to its previous instalments with frequent words of wisdom from the late Waku read from his notebook by his nephew and the ironic return of the previous chiefs reinstated as volunteer mentors as part of a reinforcement programme while familiar faces such as the Captain Kirk cosplayer also make their customary appearances. What’s clear is that there will never really be a “final” outing for Aoshima who reaffirms himself as the last line of defence protecting the local population as he once again runs toward sunset and the next case waiting just behind. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

Bayside Shakedown 3: Set the Guys Loose (踊る大捜査線 THE MOVIE 3 ヤツらを解放せよ！, Katsuyuki Motohiro, 2010)

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It’s all change at Wangan police station in the third instalment in the Bayside Shakedown series, Let the Guys Loose (踊る大捜査線 THE MOVIE 3 ヤツらを解放せよ！Doru Daisousasen the Movie 3: Yatsura wo Kaihou seyo!). Seven years on from the previous film, many things have changed. Aoshima (Yuji Oda) is now in charge of his team and the precinct is set to move to new purpose-built premises boasting the latest high-tech security systems which will aid them in combating potential terrorism and safeguarding local dignitaries. Even so, the gang will have to deal with some unfinished business from the past before they can fully move on as the circular tale takes us right back to the original film’s villain. 

Following the familiar formula, Motohiro opens with a gag sequence in which Aoshima prepares to give a briefing only it’s not about a case it’s about the logistics of moving offices of which he is in charge and characteristically vowing to do the best job possible. Hindering his progress, however, are two bizarre crimes, the first a bank robbery investigated by his colleague/long-term love interest Sumire (Eri Fukatsu) in which no money is stolen, and a bus hijacking he investigates himself in which the hijackers simply left the scene again without stealing anything. Ironically enough a theft does take place during the move involving three pistols which happen to belong to Aoshima, Sumire, and a new recruit from China, Wang (Kenichi Takito). Soon enough a body turns up on a boat along with Aoshima’s gun sending the gang on the chase for the mysterious thieves. 

The thing we’re constantly told about the new building is how secure it’s going to be, which makes the theft even more ironic, but the truth is that in true franchise style pretty much anyone and everyone is walking in and out carrying moving boxes so nothing is ever really “secure” even in the police station, harking back to the minor villain in the first film who was able to sneak in because he was wearing a fake cosplay police uniform and no one noticed him. Inevitably, this invisible vulnerability eventually comes back to haunt them when the criminals are simply able to steal the manual for the security system and replace it with one of their own to render it unusable to the police later trapped inside the building. Meanwhile approaches to public safety become a matter for debate when it arises that the criminals’ demand is that all of the villains we’ve seen Aoshima arrest so far including psychopathic serial killer Manami (Kyoko Koizumi) who still has a sizeable following online should be released. Counter-intuitively, the police bigwigs are in favour of acquiescing with only Muroi (Toshiro Yanagiba), who has now been promoted to sit at the table himself, objecting on the grounds that it simply isn’t safe to release such dangerous criminals back into society. 

Rather than simply bureaucracy and funding concerns, Bayside Shakedown’s third instalment is more directly critical of the interplay between politics and justice as it becomes clear that the majority of police chiefs care more about public opinion than the law while also mindful of the upcoming general election. Meanwhile the same problem arises with the local police being sidelined by the elites from HQ, a smooth liaison officer Torikai (Shun Oguri) arriving to solve any disputes insisting that the locals be fully respected and allowed to turn their jobs only to turn dark and authoritarian after suffering a catastrophic injury on the job. Once again, Aoshima is forced to consider if his work has real value not only because of the way he’s treated by the cops from HQ but subjected to a healthcare crisis which leads him and many others to assume he’s not long to live. It’s later discovered that he’s been misdiagnosed during his annual checkup, but his boss unethically decides to keep that from him noticing he’s become depressed and lost his mojo, hoping that he’ll be easier to manager but quite the reverse turns out to be true. Again mimicking their previous heart-to-hearts throughout the series, Aoshima perks up after some encouraging words from Sumire in addition to some words of wisdom from the late Waku presented by his rookie nephew and decides to live as if there’s no tomorrow going flat out for justice while caring nothing for his safety. 

Even more than ten years on from the TV series and first big-screen outing, the romance between Aoshima and Sumire still hasn’t quite blossomed despite their respective brushes with death. Many things seem set to change for the Wangan police, the new building acting as a kind of reset while Muroi prepares to move into a more political role and a new, somewhat surprising, local police chief is selected to lead them into a new future just as dedicated to compassionate local policing defined by fairness and justice as they have ever been. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

Negotiator (交渉人 真下正義, Katsuyuki Motohiro, 2005)

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Beginning as a popular television drama, Bayside Shakedown developed into hugely successful franchise. Released two years after the second theatrical feature, 2005’s Negotiator (交渉人 真下正義, Koshonin: Mashita Masayoshi) is a self-contained spin-off revolving around Japan’s first specialist negotiator Mashita, whose name actually appears in the title. In Bayside Shakedown 2, he’d returned to the Wangan police department having left to pursue specialist training in the city. Though some of his former colleagues make cameo appearances and Motohiro maintains the lighthearted tone the series is known for, Negotiator essentially reverses the position of previous instalments, adopting the outsider’s perspective as Mashita finds himself implanted in the control room of the metropolitan mass transit system. 

For some reason in Japanese cinema, terrorist threats seem to arrive on Christmas Eve with alarming frequency, significantly upping the stakes for Mashita personally as he was planning to propose to fellow police officer Yukino (Miki Mizuno) after a romantic date the details of which he seems to be rather sketchy on. In any case, the crisis at hand is a rogue and unexpected train on the Tokyo subway. It quickly becomes apparent that someone has hijacked a remote-driven experimental “Spider” train designed to automatically switch gauges so that it can travel between differing lines on the complicated transit map. The hijacker will apparently only speak to Mashita, impressed or irritated by his accidental celebrity status following the Rainbow Bridge incident in Bayside Shakedown 2. One of the problems of that crisis had been the police discovering they do not actually have the power to unilaterally close a bridge because it requires the consent and co-operation of numerous other transportation officials (though actually in the end they just do it anyway). 

Something similar happens to Mashita when he fetches up in the control room to help. The official in charge, Kataoka (Jun Kunimura), directly tells him that they don’t require his assistance. He will just be in the way and should sit quietly in the corner while they get on with solving the crisis. In this scenario, Mashita is the outsider akin to the HQ guys descending on the Wangan police station and taking over, though as a trained negotiator he is more aware of the implications of his actions and temporarily agrees to take a back seat while his team set up shop in a meeting room only to be further embarrassed when it becomes apparent that the hijacker is intent on playing a game with him personally while thousands of ordinary passengers, not to mention railway and law enforcement officials, are placed in danger. 

Unlike previous instalments in the franchise, Negotiator is prepared to leave several questions unanswered such as the hijacker’s identity, purpose, and intentions focussing instead on the approach of the police and railways in response to the crisis. As in Bayside Shakedown 2, a solution is only possible once both sides have learned to trust each other letting go of any sense of division so that they can work together in total harmony. Meanwhile, there is also a minor criticism of institutional insularity as it becomes clear that part of Kataoka’s reluctance to cooperate is out of a sense of duty to the rail service in that he feels himself duty bound to withhold “secret” information that would help Mashita solve the case, that being the existence of tunnels and sidetracks not listed on the map because they are intended for use by the government and the military only in the event of an emergency fearing that revealing them would, ironically, present a security risk. Meanwhile, on the other side, Mashita and his team find their investigations hampered by the fact most of the data they need from HQ is stored on outdated media such as floppy disks, Jazz and Zip drives they do not immediately have the capability to open. 

Meanwhile, Mashita is engaged in a game of cat and mouse with a train obsessive who baits him with movie trivia and inevitably threatens his romance by targeting the oblivious Yukino who thinks she’s been stood up again and has no idea she’s actually in the middle of a terrorist incident. Like the previous films in the franchise, however, the central thesis is that in the end you just have to ignore all of the annoying bureaucracy and learn to work together for a common goal which is in essence what a negotiator is for, Mashita smoothing over conflict and differences of opinion with sympathetic politeness while unafraid to put on a show for the hijacker in order to get what he wants. A seasonal thriller, Negotiator is in an odd way about peace and harmony to all men and saving Christmas from the forces of disorder. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

Bayside Shakedown 2 (踊る大捜査線 THE MOVIE 2 レインボーブリッジを封鎖せよ！, Katsuyuki Motohiro, 2003)

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A big screen outing for a popular TV drama, Bayside Shakedown proved a runaway box office hit on its release in 1998. Five years later the team at Wangan Police Station are back and much seems to have changed even as the sequel cleverly mirrors the first instalment, but where the earlier film had satirically taken aim at chronic underfunding and excessive bureaucracy, Bayside Shakedown 2 (踊る大捜査線 THE MOVIE 2 レインボーブリッジを封鎖せよ！, Odoru Daisosasen the movie 2: Rainbow Bridge wo Fuusa seyo!) ultimately ends a defence of authority in the face of criminal anarchy. 

Five years on, the team are faced with yet another difficult serial killer case in which top CEOs are being bumped off and artfully posed in public places next to a rotten apple, once again necessitating the arrival of the guys from HQ. This time, however, Muroi (Toshiro Yanagiba), a friend of earnest detective Aoshima (Yûji Oda), has been pushed to the sidelines in favour of the big wigs’ latest favourite, Okita (Miki Maya), who has a much more authoritarian view of policing than many at Wangan are comfortable with. Meanwhile, Sumire (Eri Fukatsu) and Aoshima are busy with their own cases, a pickpocketing family and a “vampire” who bites high school girls’ hair and then runs off respectively, but all the office is a twitter over a love letter penned by their boss and accidentally emailed to everyone in the station because of a computer virus. 

Former Wangan guy Mashita (Yusuke Santamaria), who had transferred to the city, returns having trained as a negotiator but for some reason mostly doing profiling and eventually figuring out that their killers are likely disenfranchised salarymen made redundant by their companies amid the backdrop of a stagnant economy. With no hope for the future, they’ve turned against society and started an anarchist revolution as a collective without leaders. “No bosses, no workers. No ordering, no obeying. No firing, no being fired,” they explain of their principle of equality, adding, “when there’s a leader the individual means nothing”. On one level the film sympathises with them in recognising the pressures they’re facing and unfairness of the economic reality, while simultaneously condemning the idea of a horizontal society. “If the leader is good then the group is strong,” Aoshima explains to them though of course they don’t agree. 

Then again, he says this immediately Muroi has resumed command in the knowledge that he is a “good” leader precisely because he trusts those under him and gives them the freedom to exercise their own judgement in contrast to Okita whose authoritarian micromanaging is soon exposed as a cover for under confidence. A police officer is seriously injured during an operation because she hesitates to make a decision, while both Sumire and Aoshima are forced to let their suspects escape when Okita orders them to stay at their post trying to protect a woman she has effectively decided to use as bait. “Organisations don’t need emotion,” she insists, later irritated by the officers’ reluctance to follow her command when she simply instructs them to “replace” the critically injured officer as if their life were completely disposable. 

Just in the first film, Sumire and Aoshima are forced to question the value of local policing in the face of Okita’s elitism as she tells them that their individual cases can wait because the murder takes priority, describing them as “just local stuff”. “Punch ups and pickpockets, what a waste of police time,” she adds leaving each of them feeling as if their work has no meaning and is not useful to or valued by the community. Aoshima only gets his mojo back after remembering an act of kindness done to him by someone he’d helped in the past, realising that even small things have a positive effect on the society and are always worth doing. That said, he’s not especially sympathetic towards the teenage “vampire” victim largely because he only bit her hair but later gets on the case after more girls turn up with bite marks on their necks. 

In the end it is indeed the local which is good, Okita’s failure allowing Muroi to make good on his promise and allow the local police to do their jobs rather than being relegated to boring legwork such as traffic stops and trawling surveillance footage. Despite having rejected the leaderless anarchy of the villain’s horizontal society, Muroi’s first instruction is to “forget rank, forget class” and have everyone work together encouraging the local cops to help them identify the kinds of places only a local would know which might not be on the map and may be a good hideout for the assassins. There might be something uncomfortable in Aoshima’s insistence on the necessity of a leader in the implicit defence of the hierarchal society, but then Muroi is a good leader who can indeed be trusted wield his power well largely because he trusts those below him, while a weak leader like Okita who holds tight to power because they don’t have the confidence to wield it freely is worse than no leader at all. Once again ending on a note of ironic police accountability, Bayside Shakedown 2 takes aim at the inequalities of the modern society but ultimately makes the case for the value of compassionate local policing in which all crimes at least are treated equally.  

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Rude to Love (愛に乱暴, Yukihiro Morigaki, 2024)

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Momoko (Noriko Eguchi) can’t find her cat, Pi-chan. It hasn’t been home for days, and now there’s a stray prowling around near its water bowl. Her mother-in-law, Teruko (Jun Fubuki), can’t abide strays. They come into people’s homes and mess up their gardens. She shoos them away, making it clear they aren’t welcome here. It seems like Momoko’s not all that welcome either, and though her relationship with Teruko is civil enough, it’s clear Teruko has no great love for her and no desire to be any more friendly than she has to be to keep the familial peace.

In many ways, it’s Momoko herself that’s a stray cat and in trying to find Pi-chan she’s trying to reclaim her space within the domestic environment in which she fears she is imminently to be replaced, convinced that her husband, Mamoru (Kotaro Koizumi), is having an affair. At the core of Yukihiro Morigaki’s Rude to Love (愛に乱暴, Ai ni Ranbo) is a cry of despair from a middle-aged woman left with nowhere to turn. Someone in their quiet, residential district has been setting fire to the bins and it’s difficult to not think that the culprit is someone much like Momoko pushed to breaking point and desperate for some kind of release. For Momoko’s part, taking out Teruko’s rubbish has become a daily ritual and one of her key tasks as a dutiful daughter-in-law while she also goes out of her way to keep the place tidy, sweeping up the stray cigarette butts and tin cans that fall from other people’s loosely tied bags. But in other ways, we can see she wants things to change. She repeatedly approaches Mamoru with catalogues to talk about their plans for radically renovating their home, including the removal of a non-load-bearing pillar in the living room, but he generally ignores her.

In fact, Mamoru pays little attention to her at all and is frequently away on “business trips”. Momoko has a sideline in teaching other housewives how to make soap, but left her corporate job eight years previously when she married Mamoru. She tries approaching her old boss to expand the soap-making business and he suggests that she return to the office instead but almost certainly doesn’t really mean it and totally ignores her business proposal. Momoko knows that after so long out of the work force and as a middle-aged woman getting another corporate job is unlikely and the soap classes don’t pay enough to live on. If Mamoru leaves her, she’ll be left flat with nothing to fall back on. This is a key element of Mamoru’s betrayal and one of the reasons that Momoko holds fast to this domestic space to the point she would degrade herself by accepting Mamoru’s affair and begging him not to divorce her. 

Yet in other ways Momoko feels uneasy within it because she and Mamoru had no children. She looks on at other women with their babies and visits a doctor who tells her that her increasingly painful menstrual cramps are a symptom of ageing that she may have been able to ameliorate by giving birth to a child, but also that she is likely heading into the menopause so this maternal milestone is one that may already have passed her by. She can’t escape the feeling that she’s failed to make a success of her womanhood and channels all of her ambitions and desires into the remodelling project that her husband remains entirely uninterested in because he’s already decided to vacate this space. In the depths of her rage, Momoko finally takes a chainsaw to the foundations of her home in the hope of “freeing Pi-chan,” and ends up lying in a grave-like pit in the middle of her living room much like the deluded patriarch of The Crazy Family. 

The only person who seems to appreciate her efforts is the Chinese student, Li (Long Mizuma), who works at the local garden centre where he is treated poorly by some of the other customers. Mamoru never thanked her for anything, but Li expresses gratitude for her always keeping the rubbish drop tidy. Teruko resents her for something that is really a kind of misunderstanding, but has on some level some sympathy for her plight as a housewife. She idly remarks that she wishes she’d been widowed sooner, which sounds like a terrible thing to say, but also reflects the sense of doom a woman feels in her increasing age that a man does not. Men are never too old to start over but for a woman there are certain things for which is just “too late”, just as it was “too late” for Teruko to fulfil herself after her husband died. She tells Momoko that she still young enough to start over, but Momoko knows that in many ways she’s not. Still, at least the domestic space is hers to do with as she pleases no longer under the watchful eyes of her next-door neighbour and mother-in-law, stray cat no more but master of her own domain.

Rude to Love screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Based on the original novel Shuichi Yoshida “Rude to Love” published by Shinchosha

Images: ©2013 Shuichi Yoshida/Shinchosha ©2024 “Rude to Love” Film Production Committee

You’re Not Normal, Either! (まともじゃないのは君も一緒, Koji Maeda, 2021)

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What’s so great about being “normal” anyway? As the title of Koji Maeda’s quirky screwball comedy You’re Not Normal, Either! (まともじゃないのは君も一緒, Matomo Janai no wa Kimi mo Issho) suggests neither of its heroes is quite in tune with the world around them but then again, is there really such a thing as “normal” or is it more that most people are making themselves unhappy by settling for less simply because they think that’s just how things are and resistance only makes you seem awkward? 

Nerdy cram school maths teacher Yasuomi (Ryo Narita) thought he was OK with being a little different, but just recently he’s begun to feel lonely and fears the possibility of being alone for the rest of his life. Perhaps inappropriately, he looks to one of his students, forthright high schooler Kasumi (Kaya Kiyohara), for romantic and life advice hoping that she will teach him how to be, or at least present as, more “normal”. Unbeknownst to him, however, Kasumi is not quite “normal” herself and is in fact obsessed with a tech entrepreneur, Isao (Kotaro Koizumi), who is all about a new and freer future in which humanity is freed from the burden of labour. Finding out that her crush is already engaged to Minako (Rika Izumi) the daughter of a hotel magnate, Kasumi hatches a plan to break them up while training Yasuomi in the art of seduction. 

Kasumi’s insecurities seem to be down to her failure in her middle school exams, attracted to Isao’s philosophies because they offer a possibility of freedom outside the rigid demands of academic success in Japan. She tells Isao in a not quite by chance meeting that she wants to become a teacher in order to expand children’s minds rather than force them into a fixed perspective as the rather authoritarian, rote learning system of education often does. Yet she also feels out of place among her peers whom she sees as vacuous always gossiping about part-time jobs and boys. She frowns at Yasuomi when he accidentally cuts the conversation dead with an awkward comment while attempting to chat up a pair of bubbly office workers in a bar, but often does the same thing herself while sitting with her high school girl friends who fall silent and then change the subject after she injects a little realism into their mindless chatter. 

Yasuomi had viewed himself as “normal” and never understood why others didn’t, noticing that people often stopped associating with him but not knowing the reason why. Obsessed with pure mathematics, over literal, and overstimulated by the complications of life he takes refuge in the forest and the sensory overload of its nocturnal creatures speaking quite eloquently about the beauty of numbers and actually fairly emotionally intelligent in his understanding of the two women. Resolutely failing at Kasumi’s Cyrano act, he comes into himself only when speaking more honesty much to Kasumi’s annoyance actually hitting it off with Minako who is herself just as lonely and alienated but perhaps wilfully trapped. 

Predictably enough, Isao isn’t exactly “normal” either or perhaps he is but only in the most depressing of ways, his rosy vision of the future delivered with more than a little snake oil and just as much sleaze. Minako may know what sort of man Isao is, that her marriage is largely a dynastic affair set up by her overbearing, authoritarian father, but she too may think this is “normal” and might have preferred not to have to confront her sense of existential disappointment while attempting to fulfil the role of a “normal” woman content with creating a comfortable space in which her husband can thrive.  

Romantically naive, Kasumi wonders how people come to fall in love informed by two relatively mature classmates that for them at least falling in love is a gradual process of increasing intimacy generated through casual conversation. This turns out to be pretty much true for Kasumi too, though in ways she didn’t quite expect watching as Yasuomi opens up to Minako and finding herself unexpectedly jealous while reluctant to let go of the idealised vision she had of Isao as some kind of messiah for a better Japan. There is something a little uncomfortable in the potentially inappropriate relationship between a student and her teacher even as the roles are, on one level at least, reversed but there’s also a kind of innocence in their childish friendship and later determination to start small and let things grow while abandoning the idea of the “normal” altogether to embrace their true selves in a freer future of their own creation. 

You’re Not Normal, Either! screens in Chicago on Oct. 7 as part of the 13th season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema 

Original trailer (English subtitles)