Mami and I just finished another dorama this week. We watched Hoshi no kinka 1 aka Heaven's Coins. This is the second hospital drama Mami has brought home. I didn't care for the first one much but this one started out strong. Well, strong until the first accident. To me its interesting to see how potential is assassinated by the expected. I understand that to make a good story the main characters need to be in unusual circumstances of some sort. A movie about a non-eventful ordinary day would be an art film. Anyhow I digress.
I need to come up with some sort of rating system for Dorama.
Predictability 10 stars = unpredictable
Plot 10 stars = excellent plot
Plot advancement 10 stars = Good pacing. You wait to go get a drink.
Characters 10 stars = Excellent, well rounded characters. Believable
Ending 10 stars = Good ending. No deus ex machina required.
This will give an overall perfect score of 50 and if you like percentages just double my score.
Aight that being said I'd give this Dorama a 33.
It is fairly easy to follow this Dorama. They make sure to pepper it with flashbacks which are a common tool considering these Dorama are spread over a season of TV. There was a lot of filler towards the end and with one character being a mute you have to have some mechanism to deal with that, and in this case it was showing her writing and someone else reading aloud what she had written. Unfortunately this ate up time that could have been used to flesh out some of the directing choices made for the three main characters. While watching the Dorama I did find myself wanting to FF some parts and pausing others so I could go for a water break. Once again we see a director not being able to coax actors into a believable "angry" but instead allow them to emote angry. Many connected monologues between characters instead of dialogue, and remember I'm reading subtitles here. I have to give credit to the lead actress Noriko Sakai who did a great job of being deaf. I was disappointed with Yutaka Takenouchi after first seeing him in Long Vacation which is my favorite Dorama. Takao Osawa did a great job unless they were letting him be angry. I have to pause a moment to explain why I'm dwelling on the bad angry in this Dorama. I hate it when actors grab someone by the collar and holler in their face for three minutes while the other person listens and doesn’t struggle. Someone grabs my collar and yells in my face and I'm going to emote my desire to be away from them. People don't interact like that in real life. Directors want to show you angry so much and it is so difficult to do well. I'm going to do some research here and see if I can come up with another blog to talk about bad "angry". The ending was well done enough for me to look for season 2 and 3. I hope they don't do what GTO did with its OVAs. NEVER WATCH THE GTO MOVIES.
I'm going to try to make my reviews as spoiler free as possible. Please leave me some comments on how I can better review these without spoiling. I'm new at this and writing isn't my forte. Hopefully through these reviews I can improve my writing and critical review of things.