JustMeMike’s New Also on Video

Yoko Matsugane - Hojo (2007)
Line Communications : I-One Series
Catalogue # LCDV-40286 - Region 2 Disc

The Skinny: I’m sorry to say I was disappointed! As a beautiful woman who was more than willing to show off her luscious figure, Yoko Matsugane deserved a better game plan from her director, Atsusi Nagaoka, in Hojo, her newest release from Line Communications I-One Series. We, as her fans, and the buyers of this DVD also deserved better. But this is still a DVD that you can own and not regret buying.

Oh, it’s not terrible by any means - think more along the lines of wasted opportunities, misguided camera angles or distances from the subject, or a plethora of inexplicable directorial choices.

Got all that? OK, let’s break it down. The montage is superb. At this point, you’ll be congratulating yourself for having made the purchase of the DVD. As we begin this chapter called Twin Bomber, we get a brief view of Yoko’s tush just before the upward angle catches all the sun and goes to white out. It seems Yoko is waiting somewhere which might be a bus station as in park & ride. Sure enough a bus backs up into view. Cut to Yoko. Cut back to bus which is empty. Yoko boards the empty bus, and works her way through the bus posing in various legs up shots. But the scene is rather unexceptional aside from Yoko wearing an amazing outfit in electric blue. In fact, right away you see see that Yoko is working much harder to change her facial expressions to play to the audience. It seems studied, or false.

Beach is next. Yoko sports a red bikini. Most of the shots are up close, in fact you see so little of the beach, you’re almost stunned when the beach - you know - beach, sea and boats pop into view.

Next a scene by a shoreline rock formation. Yoko wears an interesting bikini. Unlike the previous scene, we get some wonderful views of Yoko. Most of the time she’s lying in one spot on the beach and the camera pans over her body, again and again.

Basketball is next. You’re going to say, Wow! Look at Yoko handle that ball. Truly she can dribble with both hands, between her legs, and look good doing so. Only we don’t get to see that much of it, as we are too close. Close is good if the model is reclining by the pool, on a chaise lounge. Close is not good if it results in us being able hear the basketball, but not being able to see it.

They do a sequence as if we had the ball, with Yoko guarding us. Only there’s no ball in sight. Give Yoko good marks for a few excellent cleavage shots and a few seconds of her dribbling with her back to us, and the camera is just below her ass.

Six has Yoko in a short ruffled skirt. As she begins to climb up a stony path straight off she admonished the camera person [us] to NOT shoot video looking under her skirt. So naturally that’s exactly what comes next. At the top of the hill, Yoko climbs into a van, the reclining seat reclines, and Yoko unbuttons her blouse, then raises her skirt. There’s a lengthy pan shot with Yoko in a seat, her legs are raised and her feet are against the roof inside the van. Feet, ankles, calves, thighs are not that interesting as subjects so we didn’t really need a long slow tracking shot.

Aside from those there is a lengthy segment in this chapter where Yoko is up close to the camera just jiggling her boobs, and that was well done. The last scene is an extreme facial close up. There’s no musical track either. We hear the hum of the van’s air-conditioning.

Bath Room is next, and for the second time in this video, a scene begins with a tracking shot up the back of Yoko’s legs to focus on her butt. Yoko does look sensational in this scene, and while the confined space limits what they can ask Yoko to do, the white tiles, and Yoko’s white costume do make the scene very overly bright and light, the only real contrast is Yoko’s hair. I also didn’t care for the trickle of water sounds throughout which is what we heard instead of a musical track. The scene ends with a long tracking shot which goes deeply into that awesome cleavage before fading to black.

Yoko’s kitchen scene follows. I might also call this the kitten scene as Yoko wears a very brief costume complete with cat ears.

Mostly the intent of this scene is for us to get a real good view of Yoko’s bust.

And on that level it is successful.

This scene also has a overly bright sunny look to it.

Another bathroom scene follows. This time Yoko wears a zippered front one piece bathing suit. Again, like the bath room scene earlier, there’s no music, just a low level sound of water. You’d be correct if thought the zipper would get lowered. It does.

She’ll do a lot of nice things with her boobs, and she does other things with her hands, only we don’t see them because we are too close. Yoko has chosen ‘playful’ as her style for this scene. And the boobs on camera make this scene very good. As do her smiles.

But as the scene progresses, what we begin to see represents an altogether different Yoko than we’ve ever seen before. I think there’s no mistaking the intent - it is as if we are beneath Yoko and we are lying on the floor of the shower, and Yoko is on top of us, and we are fucking her. Her bathing suit is still on, the zipper lowered enough to show us the maximum amount of cleavage, and still be considered a gravure DVD, and she’s going up and down.

Ten is called Sweater. Yoko wears a sleeveless pink turtle neck sweater and panties. We are in bed. Once again, Yoko is going to be above us. It looks like her breasts are bra-less beneath the sweater.

Yoko will remove all doubts or question about that by pulling up the sweater so we can see the bottom halves of her tits. There’s a lengthy tracking shot which proceeds from the opened leg spread shot, up to the bottoms of her boobs. On a side note, Yoko looks more beautiful in this scene than in any other in the DVD.

In the garage we find a red convertible and Yoko wrapped in a shinny red ribbon. Surprisingly there’s a strong breeze inside of this garage. The spotlight is kind of harsh, and poor Yoko’s bust is compressed and flattened to a degree by the tight wrap.

This accentuates the cleavage as well as enabling views of the bottom of those boobs. The music was weak, and the shadows were distracting. So you had to work a bit harder to enjoy this scene called Scarlet. To me it was fire engine red, but hey, it’s only the name of a color.

Chapter 12 has Yoko in the water. The scene opens with Yoko in a light airy sun dress, or wrapper. The sky is blue, the natural sunlight should have been enough but they employed a reflector. Soon she’s lying in the water right at the shore. Too bad it wasn’t a sandy beach. This was nothing but stones. She couldn’t have been comfortable. And though there were a few good shots in this scene, this was the scene where Yoko did her world famous look that we’ve called smoldering. The Okinawa coast is beautiful in places, but a stone filled shallow shoreline pool was definitely not the best place to ask a model
to do smoldering.

This scene ends and the credits role.

As a I-One production, you do get a nice assortment of extras like behind the scenes, the thank you and and bye-bye scene where Yoko autographs a tee-shirt, some Polaroid autographed images, and a lengthy preview of Yoko’s companion release called Kindam (cover below).

Summary: As you can tell from the review I had gripes and complaints about a lot of things. That’s just me telling you that this is far from a masterpiece. But don’t let that stop you. After all this is Yoko! And she’s still the best. After all these years, she’s been at it since 2002, she can still charm the hell out of you. Her body is simply stunning, and her look still divine. I think Nagaoke the director is to blame for the problems this DVD has. Not Yoko.

She works hard, looks sexy and sensational, and I am willing to state that I recommend the DVD, with reservations. But again I remind you - it’s Yoko. If you’re going to spend an hour in front of your Hi-Def TV, and if you’re going to spend your yen or dollars on a gravure model, then by all means, you can get this one. Three point five zero is the rating, and that might be the lowest score I’ve ever given a Yoko Matsugane DVD.

You can look forward to Zatoichi’s review of Hojo in the near future. We agreed to let my review be published before his. Zatoichi’s website is:
http://www.gijo.org/main/index

http://www.cdjapan.co.jp/detailview.html?KEY=LCDV-40286
http://www.play-asia.com/paOS-13-71-ts-49-en-70-2cv9.html

This entry was posted on Friday, November 30th, 2007 at 8:37 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.