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AudienceofOne
Circle is a rare Korean science fiction drama; a mind-bending, time-warping tale with the first half of each episode set in 2017 and the second half 20 years in the future. Events unfold simultaneously in both timelines, with 2017 and 2037 being inextricably intertwined.
Future cop Kim Joon-hyuk (Kim Kang-woo) in 2037 tries to uncover the mystery of what happened to a set of twins Kim Woo-jin (Yeo Jin-goo) and Kim Bum-gyun (An Woo-yeon) back in 2017, while in that time we see the two young men embark on their own investigation around the mystery of Han Jung-yeon (Gong Seung-yeon), whom Bum-gyun is convinced is an alien.
At a tight 12 episodes, the show wastes little time on filler and instead launches itself into action from frame one. It's a thrilling ride that barely allows you to draw breath in either time period as it races to a fascinating and at times unexpected conclusion.
The future envisaged by Circle includes memory-altering technology and the show's constant questioning of how our memories shape who we are is endlessly insightful and often poignant. The ambiguity the show retains even as it answers our questions is its best quality and it's that ambiguity that has led to hopes the show would have a second season.
Circle is a rare beast from Korea and its almost-universal acclaim may make it possible for the country to start producing more hard science fiction. We can only hope that happens soon.
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The plot becomes increasingly ridiculous to the point of makjang.. The directing, in particular the blocking, was noticeably bad on more than one occasion.
For those looking for romance, this is not your drama. Having said that, there was something compelling about the Adventures of Scrappy and the Giant that I tuned in for each week. No matter how silly it got, the actors really sold it and that carried me through to the end. I won't be rewatching it though
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This review may contain spoilers
About Time is the story of a woman who can see a person's life clock, including her own. She's also a scuba-diving actress and trained driver because this show never met a rom-com scenario it didn't try to shoehorn into a tired script acted by people who would rather be doing anything else but this. This show is worse than terrible because it's also boring. Even the actors look bored as they sleepwalk their way through 16 episodes of predictable plotting, pedestrian characters and cliched "twists" we see coming from miles away.
The female lead is noble and stoic and little more than a singing plank of wood with two facial expressions. The second female lead is ambitious and successful but of course obsessive and crazy because heaven forbid we should portray ambitious and successful women as anything but jealous and desperate for a man. The male lead looks like he'd rather romance his secretary than his girlfriend or at least that he'd rather be back filming Twenty Again.
I made the slog because I was promised I could watch these people get hit by a ToD near the end. But it took far too long to see them being smashed onto the pavement . So even that was not worth the time I put into this tiresome piece of nothing.
Watch anything else.
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This is the best drama ever.
There are few Korean dramas that have brought me and those around me such joy.
The story!
The acting!
The subs!
Lee Shi Young plays endocrinologist Joo In Ah. She works with bad-tempered surgeon Han Seung Joo (Ji Hyun Woo). Seung Joo has an hormonal imbalance that affects his behaviour and that eventually becomes life threatening. They never explain what kind of brain damage the female lead has, although her mental deficiencies are just as obvious.
Seung Joo blames Shi Young for the death of his friend. The real culprit is her awful, selfish adopted sister. But neither is the culprit really - this is just bog-standard misogynism where women get blamed for everything just for existing.
These two unlikely mental patients fall in love. They have a certain enjoyable level of cute but the real OTP is Seung Joo and his dongsaeng, Cha Jae Hwan. It's such a shame that even in this day and age they have to hide their love away.
Risky Romance is best watched and enjoyed with illegal subs hastily cobbled together from the Indonesian translation by a high school student in Jakarta. That's the only way to really appreciate the true comic brilliance of this show.
Anything else might make you realise the show is actually terrible.
But watching this train wreck unfold slowly week to week truly gave me joy. I hope it can bring you the same joy.
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The premise is pretty simple and very Korean: a Candy/Chaebol romance that happens to be between two men.
The poor Kang Gook is the best friend and bodyguard of Chaebol heir and wannabe teen playboy Han Tae-joo, for whom he has secret feelings. The two live together, go to school together, do martial arts together. They're basically inseparable in a dynamic that harks back to feudal Joseon bromances. It's a dynamic that didn't entirely work for me at first due to the disturbing power imbalance between the two boys, and I found the first few episodes very rough.
However, once the show settles into itself and stops finding excuses for them to grapple with each other, it begins to deal quite realistically and even movingly with the emotions of the situation. Gook is Tae-joo's servant and nothing - not their feelings or their friendship or anything else - can change that. Instead of using this power dynamic to set up the somewhat uncomfortable and unequal relationship I started to fear, the show instead treats it as a barrier, which in real life it would be.
The show also makes a few more quality decisions, especially around its second female lead who is textually treated in the same way as a traditional kdrama second male lead. It's a refreshing decision, not just from a kdrama perspective but from a BL perspective as well.
As a web drama, Where Your Eyes Linger is far far too short and as such the narrative is rushed. It would have benefited from longer episode lengths.
But despite a rough start and the use of some truly questionable music decisions, this is a classic kdrama romance scenario that happens to have two men in it. And that's the best thing about it. It means that some of its peculiarly Korean narrative decisions worked for me when I would have found them tiresome in a standard drama. I think it's great that they made a drama that treats homosexual romance in exactly the same way as it would have treated heterosexual romance.
That alone puts it heads and shoulders above every other BL released this year.
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This review may contain spoilers
Hey Korea! That Dark show was good, wasn't it? Really broke our minds and broke our hearts. The timey wimey of it all. The tragedy! The emotion! The incest! Let's try to remake it but in a way that's, you know, Korean.
So what would that look like?
Well, for a start our plot has to make no sense. Like absolutely no sense. Because for the plot to make sense and for time travel to be eliminated then our male lead would have never been born. We can't have that though! He's the male lead! He's supposed to beat the bad guys and win the girl! The girl is his mother but Dark told us incest was okay! (This is the opposite of what Dark told us by the way. All of Dark's incest was unintentional and tragic and doomed and what show did you watch?)
So our male lead's mother invents time travel and then travels through time not knowing she's pregnant. She raises him back in the 90s and he becomes a super special magic snowflake (well, he is a Korean man) and his mother raises him the very bestest she could despite the emotional problems caused by radiation damage (due to the aforementioned in utero time travel).
She's murdered when he's 19 and he becomes a cop to find out who did it and then a decade later he meets a woman who looks exactly like his mother. Because she is his mother. She is his mother from this timelime. But even if she wasn't, she looks exactly like her. As in a carbon copy of her.
There's a brief moment of powerful emotional resonance around this. His mother was the only one he had any semblance of emotion for due to his brain damage and her death affected him more deeply then he's capable of expressing. And suddenly this doppelganger is before him dredging up all that inadequately processed grief, loss and guilt.
But, hey, this is a kdrama. So what does it need? It needs romance! It needs a crazy second female lead! It needs cohabitation and hijinks! So what does the show do with this powerful emotional moment between a man and the doppelganger of his dead mother?
It turns it into an inexplicable, utterly gross cohabitation romcom. Sure, he knows this woman IS his mother from this timeline but the show still devotes episode after episode to the romcom version of incest. She walks in on him topless! She treats his wounds! She gets stuck in a store room with him and accidentally removes his shirt! All of this is of course misunderstand by the obligatory psycho second female lead. She knows this woman looks exactly like his mother but still freaks out over him spending time with her. Not despite her looking like his mother. BECAUSE of her looking like his mother. It's weird, it's creepy, it's gross. I have insufficient synonyms to express its awful.
And to get sidetracked for a moment by the second female lead, she's one of only four female characters in this show - the male lead's mother, her alt-version in this timeline, his best friend who's always liked him and an agent in 2050 who's in love with his father, (who still working for Alice). Written out like that, you can sense a theme here. Every single one of these female characters is defined solely by her relationship to a man. Mother, lover, spurned psycho. The writer can conceive of no other role for a woman: no aspirations, no second dimension, no real depth or character. She's either trying to get a man, in a relationship with a man or taking care of her children in a way that's utterly self-sacrificing. This show could have been written by Moffatt, it is that rife with embedded misogynism.
By the end, his mother's invention of time travel becomes some kind of offensive allegory for pregnancy, as though she gave birth to it when she gave birth to her son (everyone knows this is a woman's only real skill so even her amazing scientific achievements are framed as such). The woman invented fucking time travel but it's still used as a metaphor for life coming out of her womb. Does she kill this life or not? Well, of course she can't! She's a mother! So now the whole thing is merely an anti-abortion screed. It's offensive and sexist and misogynistic and it also makes no sense. She invented time travel, not her son. Killing him is irrelevant to its invention and to the establishment of Alice. So as well as being offensive it also doesn't make any sense.
Anyway this show is supposed to be about Alice. So what about Alice? Obviously our male lead's mother is Alice or maybe time travel is Alice. Or maybe he is Alice. Oh who knows. Alice is the name of an organisation based in 2050 that sends people back in time to help them resolve their emotional traumas - for money of course. The male lead's mother helped invent time travel but who set up Alice? Where did it come from? Who runs it? Where is it? None of these questions are answered. And since this show becomes about destroying Alice as some kind of proxy for destroying time travel then this matters. It matters a lot.
We find out early that there are other players in time travel. Rebels who let people travel outside of the network set up by Alice. A prophecy that predicts the end of time travel. A mysterious figure who seems to be trying to kill our male lead or his mother-girlfriend. (Oh at one point we discover that his mother was planning to adopt her alt-universe version and raise her as her own, which makes her also his adopted older sister - Yay for incest!).
None of this is brought together in any way that makes sense.
For those who haven't seen Dark, I don't want to spoil Dark. I'll just say that the outline of this plot is very obviously inspired by Dark. But those elements have been ripped from it thoughtlessly and without context so the whole thing comes off as glossy, nonsensical and shallow. There are some nice themes hiding in here and even some nice dramatic moments as well. The acting at certain points is absolutely top notch.
For a brief moment, the show's grasp of the multiverse theory of time travel isn't too bad either and you start to wonder if the show might pull this whole thing off (and you've fast forwarded all the bizarre romcom cohabitation tropes between him and his mother so you're just pretending that didn't happen). But as the show heads into its final two hours you soon realise it's not going to make any sense. And then - like almost every other time travel show coming out of Korea - it opts for utter nonsense in its pursuit of a 'happy ending'.
And since, in this case, the 'happy ending' involves a romance between a man and his mother, I wish I could burn the whole thing from my brain.
The shorter version of this review.
Just watch Dark.
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To be honest, this show is so real, so raw and often so on point in its portrayal of adolescent romance that parts of it were like an emotional suckerpunch; bringing back from the depths the confusion, insecurity, terror of rejection, that conflicting desire to find someone who is entirely yours without having to open yourself in return. All those floundering moments of our teenage years.
But since so much has already been said on how perfect this aspect of the show is, I'll instead take a detour to talk about how beautifully anchored in place I Told Sunset About You is. Unlike a lot of Thai BL that try to decontextualise the plot from the character's surroundings - creating a disjointed and often jarringly unrealistic fantasy (and often not a good one) - I Told Sunset About You is not just Thai, but Southern Thai. It's Phuket in all its melting pot glory. Who these characters are is inherently grounded in where they are and it's what makes the writing so fine and the characterisation so well-rounded.
While parts of I Told Sunset About You are difficult and uncomfortable to watch, the show truly is a wonderful exploration of falling in love but also embracing bravery in that love. And those lessons are as important for straight relationships as they are for gay ones. And in the end, that's what makes it such a great little show. Because we will all recognise ourselves, for better or for worse, in these characters. Even in those moments when we don't want to. And the universality is what turns this from a good show to a great show.
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Geun Young is the eponymous Antifan who signs up for a show called 'So I Married An Antifan' - as the Antifan - and then finds herself viciously betrayed by being portrayed as an Antifan.
*cue martyr face*
It's an expression you'll get familiar with as it's one of only two expressions she has. The other is a grimace she reserves for when nobody is looking so we can see just how much hard work she's putting into enduring all of the injustices the world has undeservedly thrown at her.
It hasn't of course, most of her victimhood is entirely a choice. In fact if anybody is married to anything in this show, it's the female lead to her victimhood. How dare the reality show she signed up for portray her as smart, fun and in control of the situation she's in? Don't they know she's a VICTIM?!
She becomes homeless for no clear reason I can see and the male lead, Hoo Joon, lets her stay in his house. Instead of taking a bed, she bunks down in the laundry room so we can see just how hard her life is despite living in a mansion, getting an agent, and starring in what could possibly be a hit TV show with a major celebrity.
As for Hoo Joon himself, he's a dick. A famous and rich one so of course he's just misunderstood or something. He's not a real person anyway, just a cardboard cutout of an Idol. The female lead seems outraged by the idea that most of his life is performative despite that being the literal job he has. Of course his life is performative, HE'S AN IDOL.
Apart from our main couple, we have an excruciatingly-boring second couple constituting Hoo Joon's limp, wet lettuce ex girlfriend and former best friend turned greatest nemesis. Like most second leads, these two desperately need to get a life or at least a personality other than 'future violent stalker and domestic abuser'.
The worst thing about this show - apart from the acting, which is at all times bland - is that the premise is excellent and could have been used to spark a fantastic enemies-to-lovers dynamic from this mismatched pair. Instead, from the minute she gets him to do the show by hunting him down and begging, we know exactly the dynamic the show is going for. She's the perpetual victim of injustice, long-suffering and noble. He's hot and rich and always in control.
Can't wait for the sequel - So I Married A Martyr.
I hear she endures that with fortitude as well.
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Apart from what remains of our lives.
What remains of our lives always meets us
In a way that is not at all remarkable.
Though you might not wish to believe it,
It is not at all remarkable.
At its core, this sweet little drama about physical therapists and other people who work at a hospital started as it ended – as a quietly-joyful slice of the ordinary.
Lee You-bi is truly delightful as Woo Bo-young; a contracted physical therapist who wants a full-time job and love in that order. Bo-young finds herself in the middle of a love triangle that launched a full-scale shipping war while the show aired: will she choose the urbane, professional Dr Ye or the childish first love Min Ho? But in the end this show is not about romantic attainment or who ends up with who - rather it's a beat in the lives of ordinary people. And it's in that beat that we find the poetry in the average human soul.
With an alternative - and preferable - title of You Who Forgot Poetry, this is a show about the compromises people make to make a living and the need for us to retain our original aspirations in our lives. As people who opted for a steady, safe income over their dreams, most of us can empathise with the underlying concept of poetry as a metaphor for romance in a petty, silly, vainglorious world.
The show has lots of quirky humour in the vein of a more-subdued Scrubs and elicits its fair share of laughs at the general absurdity of life. But it's in its overall message - that the ordinary can be poetic - that this show is quietly and subtly beautiful in a way that is as unexpected as it is joyful.
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One of the most stunning tour de forces of acting you will ever see
If you tune into Beyond Evil for no other reason, then do it for Shin Ha-kyun's Baeksang winning performance as small town cop, Lee Dong-sik. Beyond Evil is an excellent, finely-written crime thriller. But even if this isn't your genre, you won't regret watching this acting masterclass unfold.Accused of the murder of his sister and her friend while still a teenager, Lee Dong-sik has carved out a life for himself as a beat cop in his regional town. As Beyond Evil begins, this backwater is disrupted by the arrival of elite golden boy, Lieutenant Han Joo-won, who's been sent to the small town to avoid a scandal that could impact on the promotion of his high-profile father. Joo-won is convinced that Dong-sik is guilty: not just of the murder of Yoo-yeon and Joo-seon 20 years ago but of other, more recent, killings of illegal immigrants.
Yeo Jin-goo perfectly embodies an entitled member of a ruling class who’s long been led to believe he’s always the smartest person in the room and struggles to know how to act once he makes his first big mistake. And in any other drama, his performance would be considered exceptional. Unfortunately he's acting next to Shin Ha-kyun whose portrayal of this damaged and sometimes unhinged man is one of the most extraordinary I've ever seen.
There’s an air of Twin Peaks small town gothic to Beyond Evil; a sense of a facade of small town life hiding a darkness the denizens either ignore or deliberately plaster over in the name of community solidarity. And with the body parts piling up, it’s time for all those secrets to be dredged up too.
Beyond Evil is the whole package: the writing, acting, themes, music, production values are all top notch. But while it doesn't quite rival the true masterpieces in this genre - Forest of Secrets/Stranger for example - it is still worth every award it won this year. And Shin Ha-kyun has proven himself to be one of the best actors of his generation. And not just in Korea but anywhere.
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it's never too late to pursue your dreams
This beautiful tear jerker of a drama will break your heart then stitch you back together again. A wonderfully pitch perfect story about a 70 year old man who decides finally to pursue his dream of being a ballet dancer.And while you'll no doubt sob through the whole thing, it's a cathartic cry, a healing cry. One that will fill you up and let you leave the drama completely satiated.
This is a beautiful drama that is not even bittersweet but just an ordinary story about ordinary people learning to live their lives to the fullest and that it's never too late to pursue your dreams.
If you don't love the characters, the story, the cinematography and the themes, you will at least love the music, which completes the emotional journey perfectly.
Just perfect
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Im Soo Hyang is well cast as Mo Seok-hee; the badass chaebol heiress who returns to Korea after an exile in the United States to solve her mother's murder. She teams up with the genuine, sweet and down-to-earth lawyer, Heo Yoon-do (Lee Jang Woo) whose mother was framed for the same murder.
While Seok-hee returns home to wreak havoc within her entitled, dysfunctional family, Yeon-do becomes her personal lawyer and gets employed by TOP: the corporation's all-seeing, all-knowing, law firm run by the controlling and Machiavellian Han Je-kook (Bae Jong Ok).
It's almost impossible to pin down the appeal of a show like this. It's pure crack, full of deliciously over-the-top plot twists and revelations: scheming mothers-in-law, corporate shenanigans, birth secrets, and murders among many others. The OST does the work of 50 actors; leaving us in no doubt about just how melodramatically we are supposed to watch this insane show. The soundtrack is like distilled makjang rendered into musical form.
And yet the show does have themes - real ones. While most shows lose track of theirs somewhere along the way, Graceful Family somehow finds some, almost by accident. Still, the appeal is rarely in the plotting, which resembles too often the standard Corporation-as-Joseon-Kingdom shenanigans that kdrama is a tad too fond of. The appeal is in the characters, especially the clever, entitled, bitchy, manipulative, but warm hearted Seok-hee herself - no Candy here - and the delightfully beta Yoon-do.
Dubbed Kermit and Miss Piggy for her bold confidence and his supportive and nurturing response, these two are one of the most shippable couples in dramaland. And it's only a shame the show didn't spend more time on the romance, even if these two never lose sight of their buddy-cop partnership.
I'm not going to lie - the show made one big narrative misstep, one that nearly ruined it for a lot of viewers and that I won't spoil. But apart from that, this is a very watchable, very enjoyable and very cracky piece of television. So dive on in!
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It's up to you whether you buy the great timeless romance between the two leads or, like me, keep waiting unsuccessfully to *see* it rather than just be told it. It doesn't help that Bass' acting is very weak and I regularly had little idea what the character was thinking.
But then I'm not the target audience for those shows so you can take that with exactly the right amount of salt.
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Joo Ji Hoon and Kim Jae Wook gave great performances in the leads but Yoo Ah In shows why he ended up being one of Korea's most-respected and versatile actors.
But beyond the lovely acting and the sense of magical realism, this film is underpinned by strong friendships and the power of human connection. Everyone who walks into the Antique Bakery is damaged in some way but is slowly healed and not just by the really great cake.
I highly recommend this film.
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There are two distinct and competing parts of this show and therefore this review: the first is the production overall, from the cinematography and the music to the acting; and the second is the plotting.
For the first element, this show excels at being a beautiful, compelling, moody psychological thriller with outstanding performances from all the actors involved. The directing, music and acting all combine to effortlessly create a gripping and emotional show that draws you in and keeps you watching. This show is expertly made and that deft production shows in every frame.
Park Sung-woong is always a fantastic performer in everything he does and he brings out every layer of the complicated and conflicted Yoo Jin-gook, a detective and older brother of the female lead. Jung So-min is very good as female lead Yoo Jin-kang who is drawn to but also wary of Seo In-guk's complicated anti-hero Kim Moo-young.
But it's Seo In-guk who really shines in this. In fact, it is the performance of his career. Ziggy is well known by now not just for acting a part but for living it. He doesn't create a new person, he completely inhabits them down to his fingertips. But even knowing that about the actor, this is still a tour-de-force of a performance - one that propels him up above the regular pack of Korean actors and puts him into a class of his own. After this drama, there are few people who would argue that he is now on a different level - one inhabited by the likes of Yoo Ah-in and Bae Doona and even Park Sung-woong himself. If it is possible for an actor to have a new breakout role - one that doesn't launch his career but that finally takes it into orbit than this is it.
It's difficult to discuss the other elements of the show without spoilers - and this is one drama where the wrong word can potentially ruin it for any future viewers. However, beneath the fantastic production values and Ziggy's blazing acting triumph, this show struggles with its plotting and characterisation. In some respects, this is due to its source material - Japanese writers tend to create strange, almost surreal characters that only infrequently behave like normal people. This somewhat wars with the Korean sensibility in the back half and the plot falters as well. Combined with opaque character motivations this can make a lot of the episodes frustrating to watch.
Regardless of how poorly the back half was written and how dissatisfying the show was overall, the show is entirely worth watching for Ziggy's mesmerising extraordinary performance.
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