Due to an extended interlude of drinking champagne and eating potato chips down in the kitchen, I missed a fair bit of the evening's rebroadcast too. Bad Kouhaku reporter. I am left to wonder about the Holstein-patterned ballgown I glimpsed at the end of the morning broadcast.
NHK introduced a few new features to the production this year.
Swoopy camera angles: The person operating the camera crane at stage left had that thing swooping in and out and, while the camera was never upside-down relative to the center of the earth, it was everything but.
Giant screen used to migraine-inducing effect: Instead of the usual draperies, gelled lights, and projected stars, the backdrop was a giant screen which appeared to be made of giant LEDS. It seemed to be a light emitter, rather than a projection screen, but it was difficult to tell because the strobing, abstract patterns, particularly during the more techno numbers, were sort of hard to look at. Seizures! They're not just for epileptics anymore.
Sky-cam: Ever wondered what a skinny Japanese guy looks like from above? Basically, a dot. I think sky-cam is more effective for sumo. At least there's more of a horizontal component to the subject.
Drag queen smackdown: No actual smacking due to admirable levels of restraint on the part of the wannabe smacker. The Chinese-opera-esque stylings of the enka number turning into the big samba dance number actually caught us by surprise, though, so points for that.
Other than those things, not a lot of new stuff this year. Not even new songs. While the enka singers are expected to turn up and sing their big hits from years gone by, the Kouhaku is nominally a showcase for performances of hit songs of the current year. Well, we saw a lot of stuff from 2007, 2006, 2005 … Come on! "A thousand winds" again? "Zun-doko" again? What have you people done lately?
One new thing: Jero's Kouhaku debut! Jero, short for Jerome, is the new enka sensation of the year: an American kid from Pittsburgh who grew up singing enka with his Japanese grandma. Sadly, grandma passed away a few years back, so she didn't live to see her grandson appear on the Kouhaku (her portrait is airbrushed onto Jero's shirt), but his mom is in the audience and is appropriately weepy.
I missed the best moments when I looked away to type up notes. Like the moment when the pheasant-feathered, leopard print ballgown was ripped away (tearaway ballgowns!) to reveal a shiny black vinyl corset, pants, and stiletto-heeled boot ensemble. Tearaway ballgowns are not new, but they are usually torn away to reveal yet another layer of ballgown.
This year, the panel of judges had some entertainment value. The Kouhaku is set up like a contest: red team (ladies) vs. white team (gentlemen). (Gender-blurring people get to pick which team they want. Some of them who appear regularly on the program switch back and forth from year to year.)
A contest must have judges, and the Kouhaku is no exception. The panel is made up of judges, usually celebrity actors and athletes, a few other notables of the year, like Olympians. They sit there stiffly in their evening clothes with rictus smiles, except for the actors who are better at faking smiles. One notable this year was a guy who had the misfortune to write a bestselling novel. You could see the thought bubble over his head: "I'm. In. Hell." During the children's number (an amazingly child-appropriate tribute to Miyazaki Hayao), he failed to wave a puppet doll in time to the music like all the other judges (Thought bubble: "I'm going to kill my agent."). He must have grown inured to the situation, however, because 90 minutes into the ordeal, he managed some pleasantries with the emcees after a production number in which a giant crab and giant animatronic snack sellers appeared on the giant screen behind the giant stage and giant round staircase which formed the shell of the giant crab, while the entire cast danced around waving fans with hearts on. A picture would definitely be worth a thousand words here, because that description sounds pretty incoherent. I tried to find a video clip, but all I turned up was somebody else's liveblogging of the Kouhaku.
All in all, a pretty good Kouhaku, and I missed enough to leave me wanting more.
And wondering: Why the chicken dance choreography in all the production numbers? Why the animal print ballgowns? How did Thelma Aoyama get down that staircase alive in her super high-heeled boots?
773 words | January 2, 2009 11:51 AM | Lost in translation