Tokyo seven moments worth how to#
Tokyo seven moments worth movie#

His first few stories are either rewritten or spiked altogether, his less welcoming colleagues refer to him as gaijin (foreigner) or worse, “Mossad”, and his maverick refusal to go along with the accepted protocol – stick to the facts, which are what the police tell you they are – earns him regular dressings down. Before then, though, is the story of a cub reporter who must learn his trade the hard way.Īnd so Tokyo Vice proceeds, with a naive recklessness about tripping over cliche that is easy to find endearing, to run through Jake’s evolution from fizzing rookie to journalistic force.

Thanks to one of those opening flash-forwards that suggests the show isn’t totally confident it can hold our attention, we know where this will end up: Adelstein attends a meeting with high-ranking yakuza, is warned by a man in a knife-sharp suit that writing up the story he’s working on will bring death, and responds with a calm that says he feels he’s this kingpin’s equal. Jake, Samantha and Sato are all cleverer than the people around them but unsure of where to point their ambition Tokyo feels like it’s his and, when he passes a supposedly forbidding Japanese language test to get a job writing news for the biggest paper in town, young Jake has a chance to prove it. He practises aikido, teaches English charismatically to a room full of nervous housewives, knowledgeably orders “liver, leek and chicken thigh” at a cafe thronging with locals, loses himself dancing at a club and studies the capital’s organised crime activity by night, cross-legged on the floor in his flat above a shop.

Tokyo seven moments worth movie#

The Hollywood veteran brings the brooding noir shimmer of his 2004 movie Collateral to early scenes, which set Adelstein up as a pale tyro, driven and self-sufficient, with the cocky glint of an academic high-achiever still in his eye. The city is Tokyo at the end of the 1990s and Jake is based on a real person – Adelstein’s memoir is the basis for this series created by playwright JT Rogers, and directed, for the first episode at least, by Michael Mann.

Tokyo seven moments worth how to#

Here is a story of people in their 20s, alone in a big city, thrilled to be making their own way but with no real idea how to do it. “T he truth is,” says Ansel Elgort as journalist Jake Adelstein in an early episode of Tokyo Vice (Starzplay), “I don’t know what I’m doing.” Most people don’t know what it’s like to be the first American reporter to work the crime beat on a major Japanese newspaper, or indeed to end up entangled in a gang war as a consequence, but the feeling that sets this drama in motion is near-universal.