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Posts tagged with "tv"

Chance!

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Recently I watched the two part dorama Chance! starring Maki Horikita after someone recommended it. It was really good. It's a feel-good story about a girl, Tamaki Kawamura, who after applying for 23 jobs scrapes into getting a job with a tour operator, answering the phones, only to be catapulted to the rank of a high flyer by a series of pleasantly plausible chance events, the climactic one being when she collides with company high flyer Saori Tamaki and they pick up each other's phone in error. These are company phones, which all look identical, so when it rings and she gets a message from the CEO addressing her as Tamaki-kun, Tamaki doesn't realise there has been a mistake and diligently tries to accomplish the mission he gives her.
I'm sure girls would like this story too, since not only is Tamaki drop dead gorgeous but the two men in her life—her oniisan and a sempai figure—are pretty cool too. The senpai is a dashing tour guide who is a sage, full of wisdom in his quieter moments, whilst her brother is a really sweet biker (a police motorcyclist) who likes to tease her by making incredibly cute bentos for her which attract embarrassing amounts of attention whenever she opens them.

Just watching the first scene, where her brother is opening her job confirmation/rejection letters for her because she can't bear to look at them herself, totally sold me on downloading the whole thing, it was just handled so well and naturalistically, you really felt a "kindly big brother" vibe emanating from him: this guy is the perfect oniisan.

Although focussing mainly on the dramatic plot, the story has undercurrents of romance and starcrossed love which leave you with a sort of yearning feeling, thinking "if only...."

Chance! has been fansubbed really nicely by TimeLesSub.

Newsnight degenerates

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I used to really love BBC2’s Late Review, now called Newsnight Review, a cosy discussion chaired by Mark Lawson in which an eclectic bunch of critics slagged off various books, TV programmes, films, etc. But since his departure and the muscling in of Newsnight’s Kirsty Walk, it has degenerated from the polite and intellectual savaging of people's work into little more than a brawl of dissenting opinions, with little or no attempt to keep order. Often I find myself simply pressing the "off" switch when the cacophony becomes literally incomprehensible as the constantly changing panel of guests disagree with one another. Despite my distaste for establishment concensus, it was so much better in the days when they had a relatively fixed panel of guests who all had their entrenched positions and could respectfully disagree with one another in a sort of cosy anti-concensus without trying to drown each other out by raising their voices.
December 2009
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