Word: aoshima
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...hottest movie directors in the country." Motohiro is back behind the camera for the sequel, as are all of the original film's screenwriters and producers. Also present for encores is the cast, including actor and singer Yuji Oda in the starring role as Aoshima, the boyishly handsome detective. With a bigger budget, a handful of new faces (including Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's son Kotaro playing a police-department surveillance expert) and the most extensive domestic movie-marketing campaign in history, Bayside Shakedown 2 has become the most widely anticipated, heavily hyped live-action Japanese movie to date...
...across the nation reported an increase in applications; some tourists arriving in Tokyo to this day are disappointed to discover that the film's mythical Wangan Police Station doesn't exist. "People collected Bayside-related goods," recalls Kawasaki City housewife Yoshimi Yamakawa. "It was like if you wore an Aoshima coat, you could be like him. There has never been a drama that made people go that far. It created maniacs...
...original movie, audiences were introduced to Aoshima, an idealistic but hotheaded homicide investigator posted to a backwater district where nothing much seemed to happen. Soon enough, however, he and his good-hearted pals at Wangan Police Station found themselves with two nasty crimes on their hands?a gruesome murder and the kidnapping of a police commissioner. Simultaneously, they had to fend off the arrogant and frequently sleazy meddlings of headquarters bigwigs who swooped in to oversee the politically sensitive investigations...
...usual cop-movie trappings. Rather than focus on the derring-do of cowboy police collaring bad guys, these movies look inward, exploring?often hilariously?the petty annoyances, political infighting and endless frustrations of paperwork, bureaucracy and tight budgets that come with being a public servant. Though hardly by choice, Aoshima and his colleagues spend more time tracking down stolen receipts for their expense reports, angling for better-subsidized lunches and ferrying their bosses to golf tournaments than catching crooks. Yet the Bayside movies aren't farces; they walk a tightrope between deadpan humor and serious drama. Aoshima and his gang...
...These themes play just as well in the sequel as in the original. This time around, Aoshima and the rest of the Wangan Police Station get thrown into an even larger, more tangled web of crime involving multiple murders and a terrorist plot to blow up Tokyo's landmark Rainbow Bridge. And before they can start sorting through the evidence themselves, the know-it-alls from headquarters invade again, certain that the Wangan police just aren't up to the job. Though slicker than the first movie, the seriocomic tone remains, and the crime-related plot lines are still secondary...