Morning Musume. Concert Tour 2010 Spring - Pika Pika! -

I gave this concert a rave review on my blog, but in watching it again for this review, I'm beginning to question its replay value. Maybe it's because I've since learned that three of the members will be graduating this December--Eri, JunJun and LinLin. Which saddens me. And maybe it's because I really do miss Koharu after all. (She graduated in Dec. '09.) I think the girls perform seamlessly without her, a finely-tuned, well-oiled performing unit, yet I miss that element of unpredictability Koharu brought, that sense of being just a little out of sync with everybody else. Also, I've recently re-watched Berryz Kobo's Spring 2009 concert and C-ute's Spring 2010 concert, the two best concerts I've seen from those groups. Everyone's so distinct from each other there, just like Morning Musume used to be when Mari and 4th Gen were in it. There's a level of excitement in BK and C-ute that I don't get anymore from MM. There are some enjoyable songs here, including the handful of recent MM singles that I like ("Kimagure Princess," "Nanchatte Renai," "Shouganai Yume Oibito," "Mikan"), and a handful that were unfamiliar to me (e.g. "Genki Pikappika!") but, overall, few of the songs are really that distinguished. Where are "Sexy Boy," "Ambitious," and "Egao Yes Nude"? Berryz Kobo gets better songs these days. MM does a medley here that includes a song they should have done in its entirety, "Kanashimi Twilight." The medley offers such classic MM songs as "Love Machine," "The Peace," "Koi no Dance Site" and "Koko ni Iruzee," all of which only serve to remind me how much better they were done in MM's classic era. Also, this concert has been shot with that "film" look that I normally see in Avex concerts, as opposed to the video look that's a standard feature of Hello! Project concerts. The film look filters what we see, so that we don't get the immediacy of video and don't really see the girls that clearly. In video closeups you can practically see their skin pores. In "film" closeups, the faces are softened and, at least in this concert, considerably paler than usual. I don't like it. I like the sense of "being there" that we get from the video look. I like to see the sweat. There are no solos. The three separate generations (5th, 6th, 8th) each get their own number. The one DVD extra is a five-minute 6th Gen MC segment that's different from the one we see in the concert.