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Yamada Taro Monogatari [Excerpt from Televiews, Daily Yomiuri, By Wm. Penn, July 13, 2007]:Yamada Taro Monogatari (Fridays, 10 p.m., TBS network) and Hana-zakari no Kimi-tachi e (Tuesdays, 9 p.m., Fuji network) are both light comedies based on manga. They both feature idol singers from the 1980s and high school girls with crushes on the cutest guys in school. But that's where the comparison ends. Not even one very, very dim star for Hana-zakari no Kimi-tachi e, which suffers from a silliness overload that begins with Seiko Matsuda playing the principal of this all-guys high school. She does so in just the way one would imagine Seiko running a school, if one were zany enough to imagine that. The fashionable, glamorous "burikko kocho" rules the campus from her elegant penthouse office. Seldom does she plummet down to earth, where Maki Horikita plays a Japanese returnee from the United States, who disguises herself as a boy to be near the track star of her dreams (Shun Oguri) and even ends up sharing a dorm room with him. But the whole adventure is no fun. It's a dangerous undertaking moving through this male minefield where uttering one "watashi" instead of an "ore" or an "abunai" instead of a "yabe" could mean instant discovery. While the scenario might have had potential and Oguri certainly deserves better, with this cast and script it is just loud, grating silliness. And it lost me right in the beginning with a disgustingly gratuitous opening scene in which the boys hear an overseas student will be arriving and go wild speculating over whether he'll be blue-eyed or perhaps a "half." Nope, not even half a star for this one. STARRING:
Matsuda Seiko, Horikita Maki, Oguri Shun Copyright
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