Giri/Haji double-bill
Nov. 16th, 2019 06:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessThings I have discovered: Thursday 9pm is a good slot for me to watch Giri/Haji given how I wasn’t in the mood to catch up on it at various other times during the week. I finally caught up on Thursday evening, but there’s so much going on that a double-bill on the same night is too much. (I’m so not a binger of TV.)
So, Giri/Haji ep 4 (via catch-up)
Nice switch from the illustrated previously to the action, not that we stuck with it for long, before we got backstory for Yuto the yakuza (and I went AHA, Eiko is Fukuhara’s daughter and Yuto her baby’s daddy!) and Sarah. Gaps were filled in, although most of them were about what I had assumed had happened before we got to Bang Bang Bang. I wish they’d pulled back on making Kenzo’s partner a komedy kop. In fact, the cuts back to the gunfight in Tokyo were just confusing as the London one splintered.
The family drama hit home the most – Kenzo not liking (a totally not aged down) Taki’s hero-worship of Yuto, Yuto’s tensions with his big brother and his impact on his self-worth and the glimpses of early friction in Kenzo and Rei’s marriage. Then Sarah and Ian’s life just seemed claustrophobic. Of course she obsessed over him. I wonder if the freed Albanian bad guy was one of the Albanian mob guys, seeing as we had the EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED montage, which wasn’t straining for effect as much as the long stoned ramble from Sarah, mixed with Yuto’s dream and him not faking his own death as much as a natural event (an aftershock) doing it for him. No, Mr Writer, I don’t think of you as a mad conductor as much as a fairly talented storyteller who’s a bit up themselves.
But, as ever, it abounded with stylish moments. I enjoyed Justin Long’s performance as he enjoyed playing someone who didn’t know what to do with himself in a gunfight. And that was a gunfight where redshirts died mainly. I’d like to know about Yuto’s history with Donna and how that ties into his feelings for Eiko. We didn’t see him put the photo in the safe, but he must have. There’s a lot we still don’t know, actually.
Good work from Kelly Macdonals and Yusoke Kubozua (who plays Yuto).
Ep 5 (watched live)
Although I was a bit ‘fancy that’ at Rodney and Taki’s club being so close to where the gunfight was, they’d set it up with the previous ep’s ‘everything is connected’ montage, and it was nice for Taki to save Yuto.
It was on point for Vickers and Donna to have the ‘what happened there’ conversation, and even as I was wondering who they’d cast as Vickers’s father – BANG (it’s called a silencer, Donna). But I thought Mrs Vickers’s response was amazing. Never stay at the scene of the crime waiting for a dead American gangster’s wife. So, perhaps we’ll never know about what went on between Donna and Yuto (or perhaps we will, given the show’s love of doubling back on itself, and all Yuto’s focus was on his son, not Eiko…)
So, A LOT happened to the Moris. I mean other people got shot, Rodney was now being haunted and Sarah ‘s house was turned into a hospital/home for troubled Jappanes people (there was self-dismemberment last ep, now amateur surgery in a bedroom), but with all the fall-out of the gunfight, Yuto revealing Endo had okayed THE KILLING OF HIS NEPHEW (contrast with Fukuhara and the Moris’ family feeling?) that kicked it all off and, oh yeah, death of a marriage (so much manoeuvring for Kanzo/Sarah) and the death of a patriarch. The split scenes between Tokyo and London at various points worked well.
Ian claiming he wasn’t the one who’d thrown the brick in and seeing i. Kenzo and ii. YUTO may be interesting/dangerous for the compromised Sarah. Meanwhile there was a lot of drama between the brothers and no clear out of the situation.
I wouldn’t blame Rei if she walked away from the Mori clan, bar (oh, she’s a lesbian, how very 2019 you are, show) Taki, but it looks like she’s going to be become involved in an abduction from a yakuza safehouse. Because family.
!!!!!
So, Giri/Haji ep 4 (via catch-up)
Nice switch from the illustrated previously to the action, not that we stuck with it for long, before we got backstory for Yuto the yakuza (and I went AHA, Eiko is Fukuhara’s daughter and Yuto her baby’s daddy!) and Sarah. Gaps were filled in, although most of them were about what I had assumed had happened before we got to Bang Bang Bang. I wish they’d pulled back on making Kenzo’s partner a komedy kop. In fact, the cuts back to the gunfight in Tokyo were just confusing as the London one splintered.
The family drama hit home the most – Kenzo not liking (a totally not aged down) Taki’s hero-worship of Yuto, Yuto’s tensions with his big brother and his impact on his self-worth and the glimpses of early friction in Kenzo and Rei’s marriage. Then Sarah and Ian’s life just seemed claustrophobic. Of course she obsessed over him. I wonder if the freed Albanian bad guy was one of the Albanian mob guys, seeing as we had the EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED montage, which wasn’t straining for effect as much as the long stoned ramble from Sarah, mixed with Yuto’s dream and him not faking his own death as much as a natural event (an aftershock) doing it for him. No, Mr Writer, I don’t think of you as a mad conductor as much as a fairly talented storyteller who’s a bit up themselves.
But, as ever, it abounded with stylish moments. I enjoyed Justin Long’s performance as he enjoyed playing someone who didn’t know what to do with himself in a gunfight. And that was a gunfight where redshirts died mainly. I’d like to know about Yuto’s history with Donna and how that ties into his feelings for Eiko. We didn’t see him put the photo in the safe, but he must have. There’s a lot we still don’t know, actually.
Good work from Kelly Macdonals and Yusoke Kubozua (who plays Yuto).
Ep 5 (watched live)
Although I was a bit ‘fancy that’ at Rodney and Taki’s club being so close to where the gunfight was, they’d set it up with the previous ep’s ‘everything is connected’ montage, and it was nice for Taki to save Yuto.
It was on point for Vickers and Donna to have the ‘what happened there’ conversation, and even as I was wondering who they’d cast as Vickers’s father – BANG (it’s called a silencer, Donna). But I thought Mrs Vickers’s response was amazing. Never stay at the scene of the crime waiting for a dead American gangster’s wife. So, perhaps we’ll never know about what went on between Donna and Yuto (or perhaps we will, given the show’s love of doubling back on itself, and all Yuto’s focus was on his son, not Eiko…)
So, A LOT happened to the Moris. I mean other people got shot, Rodney was now being haunted and Sarah ‘s house was turned into a hospital/home for troubled Jappanes people (there was self-dismemberment last ep, now amateur surgery in a bedroom), but with all the fall-out of the gunfight, Yuto revealing Endo had okayed THE KILLING OF HIS NEPHEW (contrast with Fukuhara and the Moris’ family feeling?) that kicked it all off and, oh yeah, death of a marriage (so much manoeuvring for Kanzo/Sarah) and the death of a patriarch. The split scenes between Tokyo and London at various points worked well.
Ian claiming he wasn’t the one who’d thrown the brick in and seeing i. Kenzo and ii. YUTO may be interesting/dangerous for the compromised Sarah. Meanwhile there was a lot of drama between the brothers and no clear out of the situation.
I wouldn’t blame Rei if she walked away from the Mori clan, bar (oh, she’s a lesbian, how very 2019 you are, show) Taki, but it looks like she’s going to be become involved in an abduction from a yakuza safehouse. Because family.
!!!!!
