Word: shakedowns
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...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...
...This scene from Bayside Shakedown 2, a Japanese cop drama debuting on July 19, is a terrific movie moment precisely because it's so charming and modest. But are charm and modesty the stuff of a box-office blockbuster? Chihiro Kameyama, producer of some of Japan's most memorable TV and film hits over the past 15 years, is banking on it. In a conference room high atop Fuji TV's futuristic Tokyo office building, he seems positively serene just days before the highest-profile movie release of his career. Kameyama predicts that Bayside Shakedown 2 will...
...Given the film's modest (by Hollywood standards) $8.5 million budget, Kameyama's lighthearted sequel would seem woefully overmatched by the summertime competition. But he's betting on an underdog formula that has worked magic before. Based on an 11-part TV series, the original Bayside Shakedown?which cost just $3 million to produce?premiered in 1998 and went on to become the most popular live-action Japanese movie in more than a decade. It ran in theaters for six months (most movies in Japan last about a month) and posted a box-office take of $84 million, becoming...
...reach those kinds of milestones, a movie has to have something special going for it. For Bayside Shakedown, it was its tongue-in-cheek take on crime fighters caught in a web of bureaucratic and cultural red tape that struck a chord with Japanese and made the movie an instant social phenomenon. After its release, police academies 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...
...that's precisely the point. Bayside Shakedown?and its sequel?are cop movies without the 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...