Recently, Keigo Higashino's fans celebrated the New Year.
The finale of the "Kyoichiro Kaga" series, the movie "When the Prayer Ends", is being released, and the North Film Festival will also show "Masquerade Hotel" and "Sleeping Mermaid House".
Today, let's talk about the "Masquerade Hotel" that I watched a while ago.
The poster shows how star-studded the film is, except for the two main actors, Takuya Kimura, the great god, and Masami Nagasawa, the "goddess".
The supporting characters are also full of weight: Takako Matsu, Tachuro Watanabe, Atsuko Maeda, Fumiyoshi Kohito, Naesu, Ryo Katsuji, Katsuhisa Iwase, Ekushi Hamada...
Some of these acquaintances remind you of the 2001 classic Japanese drama "Legal Hero", which is also the masterpiece of the great god?
"Legal Hero" is the memory of the golden age of Japanese dramas, and the personal charm of the god cannot be ignored, after all, the "improper" prosecutor who looks like a hanger is too handsome to wear jeans to carry out justice.
But more importantly, for the depiction of the "group portrait", everyone in the west branch of the Tokyo District Inspection City is vivid and cute, whether it is a prosecutor, a clerk, or even a doorman, the audience loves them to gossip in the small office, or talk and laugh about the world.
The series also launched a sequel in 2014, and although some people have gone and some have stayed, the strong sense of humanity in the west branch of the city has always been the same.
The reason why "Legal Hero" is mentioned is because the director of "Masquerade Hotel" is Masayuki Suzuki, the director of the series.
And the hotel of the film as the main stage is also like an enlarged version of the City West Branch, in which all kinds of people and horses appear in the ink, and even the criminal police officer Nitta played by the god, as soon as he appears, the "unorthodox" appearance of the untrimmed edge also makes people think of Kurisei fairness for a second.
The story of "Masquerade Hotel" is actually very simple, a serial murder case, the scene will leave the next crime preview every time, in order to solve the case, the police decided to enter the place of the crime that was predicted - HOTEL CORTESIA TOKYO to carry out undercover operations.
Nitta, a criminal police officer played by Takuya Kimura, is assigned to the front desk, and Yamagishi, played by Masami Nagasawa, is in charge of teaching.
As a result, the police who treat everyone as "suspects" and the hoteliers who treat each customer as "God" are inevitably in conflict, but after the experience of one "strange" guest after another, the truth of the case gradually surfaces.
The "indoor group drama" with the hotel as the stage is easily reminiscent of another Japanese movie, "The Top Sky Hotel"," which also overlaps with "Masquerade Hotel" and has some overlap.
The film's director, Yuki Mitani, is a screenwriter who shined in the screenwriting world in the 1990s with his outstanding "indoor group dramas" in the Japanese drama "Furuhata Renzaburo" series.
The two films have many similarities: the relatively fixed space - the hotel; the limited time oppression - "Masquerade Hotel" ends with the preview of the case, and "The Top Sky Hotel" ends with the New Year's Eve countdown party;
A variety of characters – hotel staff, guests, and more.
But comparing the two, the biggest problem of "Masquerade Hotel" is also exposed: a mess of loose sand.
In "The Hotel with the Roof", many of the characters brought out by the multi-line narrative are chaotic and disorderly at first glance, but as the plot progresses, the interlocking delicacy reveals its true face.
So in the end, when all the elements are tightly combined, the audience has a kind of vivid invigorating.
But the characters in "Masquerade Hotel" are just you singing and I appear, there is no substantive stickiness between paragraphs and paragraphs, and the main line of finding the real culprit is ignored or even seems to be wandering in various hotel short stories.
In this special place of the hotel, everyone wears a mask, the police want to tear open the guest's mask to find the truth, the hotel people also wear a mask to protect the customer's mask, but unfortunately these drama conflicts do not really serve the plot, resulting in the audience finally can not figure out whether to watch a suspense film or hotel praise.
Of course, this pot can not be all left to the director, Higashino Keigo is also responsible, after all, his high production brings about the uneven quality of the work, and "Masquerade Hotel" is unfortunately a mediocre work.
To be honest, the original short story collection cloaked in a long story may be more suitable for being made into a Japanese drama, and a small story per word is definitely much better than the look and feel of the compressed Japanese drama of today's movies.
"Looking for the Murderer", as the biggest suspense of the film, is also broken because of Cass's choice - seeing the actors do not have to guess the series.
On the contrary, there are a few small stories that serve as side stories, including the bride played by Atsuko Maeda who encountered the "uninvited guest" resort of Ryo, which is a really funny setting, because the two actors married last July and gave birth to a son last month.
Of course, fans who are the main actors can still be quite satisfied, after all, the god is still heroic in uniform and appears with the aura of the protagonist.
And the goddess's smile is as sweet as ever.
The interaction between the two is also quite inky, so if you look at it as a romance film, you may be more satisfied.
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Masquerade Hotel is a film based on Keigo Higashino's novel of the same name. Directed by Masayuki Suzuki, written by Michiyoshi Okada, starring Takuya Kimura and Masami Nagasawa. It was released in Japan on January 18, 2019.
The film tells the story of everyone who comes to the hotel in this gorgeous high-end hotel, wearing a fake face, in order to get non-daily space and warm hospitality. Serial murderers also take advantage of this property of the hotel and mix it up. Criminal police officer Kosuke Nitta disguised as a waiter sneaks into the hotel and tracks down the story of the serial killings with naomi Yamagishi, the hotel's front desk.
When the Prayer Ends is a mystery film directed by Katsuo Fukuzawa, starring Hiroshi Abe and co-starring Naoko Matsushima, Junpei Mizobata, and Reina Tanaka, it was released in Japan on January 27, 2018, and in China in April 2019.