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AudienceofOne
Kim So Hyun and her character Song Geu Rim were by far the best part of this otherwise mediocre show that had hints of a much better drama wanting to get out. It had some bright spots in the acting and the use of anti-climax to defuse conflict but other than that it was beset by tired cliches, one-dimensional antagonists and inconsistent characterisation of some characters.
It's very sweet and a lot of people will love it anyway but if you want your drama with a bit more meat on its bones this is not for you.
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Like Snowpiercer before it, Train To Busan deals with societal issues in a tight and claustrophobic environment of a train. But unlike Snowpiercer, which was complex, metaphorical and somewhat inaccessible, Train to Busan has a pared-back plot, effective in its simplicity. It's emotional and even heart-rending at times, with the emphasis on the human aspect of the story. The moral messages and social commentary are there but subtle enough that you can just enjoy this as a film about zombies if you so choose.
Gong Yoo gives his usual stellar performance, Ma Dong-seok is excellent as well and Kim Su-an demonstrates why she's a child star to watch.
If you're tired of your zombie films being thinly-veiled xenophobia and NRA propaganda, you'll enjoy this one set in a country where no one has guns so the protagonists have to survive using their wits instead.
For action and horror - and probably quite a few tears - in a film paced as fast as the train in which it's set, watch Train to Busan.
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They think they're being logical, original and profound but they are most definitely not.
A mess of bad writing and romcom cliches, this show is nothing but a shallow cohabitation romcom. But instead of embracing its own trashiness, it instead delivers the whole thing with an air of earnest profundity that comes across as pretentious.
SIG and PBY are good, especially considering their characters (all the characters) are nothing but chalk outlines. But as well as the rudimentary characterisation and non-existent plotting, the dialogue is ridiculous and unintentionally hilarious. Nobody has actual conversations, they just intone non-sequiturs at each other.
Doom himself (played by a SIG who is always mesmerising somehow no matter what he's doing) is nothing but a walking one-dimensional metaphor signifying the bad things that happen in the world. Kind of the chaos in chaos theory, the randomness of an ultimately ordered system. He is rebelling against Order, known as the deity: an annoying child, terminally ill as this cycle comes to an end and the new one begins. He makes a deal with the terminally ill Tak Dong-kyung to doom the world in exchange for... something. The terms of this contract change in every second episode and even when you think you understand it, you realise it still doesn't make any sense.
The two fall in love or something, although the basis of this love appears to be "he's hot and all about her" and "she's literally the only human he's ever spoken to". Which is to say, they're not in love at all. In fact, for a show obsessed with romantic love, nobody in it seems to know what love is nor is there any believable love relationship in it. It's as shallow as the connection between our leads, which consists of a bit of hand holding, weird nonsensical conversations consisting entirely of allegory and metaphor, and the odd kiss.
The plot structure is like being stuck on a carousel, you look like you're moving but in the end you're back where you're started and the ride just keeps on going. Each week the two episodes bring our two leads back to where they were before the episodes aired. As an emotional journey, it's glacial. As a plot, it's mind numbing.
With the thin shell of bright glossy surface and hollow innards, this show is a Christmas tree ornament. It's super pretty, stylised and somehow antiseptic, doing nothing but decorate. Lacking any real warmth or heart but having a slick and polished exterior.
With this nonsense, Korean romcoms have finally reached peak derp.
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I don't know.
Overall Story - 9
Acting/Cast - 10
Music - 10
Ending - Minus 17,000
Rewatch Value - 0 to the power of 0, which is exactly the one time you should watch it. I may cancel my Netflix subscription just so I don't have to see its name mentioned again in passing as I'm scrolling through.
Puzzle that one out.
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And like the best of science fiction, its job is to make us think and make us feel - even if those feelings are uncomfortable and make us question everything.
In a future where medicine is keeping people alive long after they would normally have passed, caregiver robots have been created that look like the patients' loved ones. As nursing hospitals replace schools and people go into debt to buy the expensive caregivers, the show examines the lives of two families each able to provide only palliative care to an ill member of their family.
Like most robot stories, The Prayer isn't about futuristic palliative care or even about robotics. It is instead about the nature of humanity. Grounded in the story of Cain and Abel and the question, "Am I my brother's keeper?", it asks some big questions about what it means to care for somebody and the limits and boundaries of that responsibility.
Lee Yoo-young is transcendent here playing dual roles as Yeon Jung-in and her robot double Gan Ho-jung. Jung-in is struggling with middle age questions of failure and purpose as her mother lies in a vegetative state with her doppelganger Ho-jung looking over her. But Ho-jung has also been programmed to care forJung-in and after a possible system error she decides that looking after the daughter requires the death of the mother.
Is Ho-jung suffering from a logic failure or an emotional awakening? Is she malfunctioning or gaining sapience? Can she feel and if she can are those feelings something she should act on? Is her desire to care for Jung-in a selfless act of consideration or has she developed the ability to lie even to herself?
Like the best of science fiction, The Prayer never answers these questions. Dark, off-kilter, often out of focus and kaleidoscopic, The Prayer simply asks. It is up to us to decide if we can answer.
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Having said that, there's a lot to like in this show. It's one of the few Thai BLs with strong and well-developed female characters and with a solid grounding of family. Bank and Golf's lives are messy and this mess gives it a sense of realism that a lot of similar shows lack.
Spread over two different timelines 8 years apart, we soon learn that Bank and Golf are stepbrothers who were in love while in high school but separated by their parents when their relationship was discovered. Bank has made a successful and stable life for himself in the US but Golf is a mess; cut off from his family and bouncing through south-east Asia and the Pacific working as a diver. In this, the characterisation is superior especially as it portrays Bank. Portrayed in the film as being fragile to the point of being infantilised, this Bank is a definite improvement being strong, smart and utterly comfortable in who he is and with his homosexuality.
As the couple fall in love in the past, they attempt to navigate their relationship with each other and with their family in the present. Bank is engaged to another man but is instantly torn when faced with his past love. Golf is so unhappy he's determined to recreate the past rather than try to live in the present. It's a new and interesting path for a BL to tread and gives us some lovely and intelligent moments between two adults rather than the confused children BLs are usually concerned with.
Unfortunately, given 12 episodes to really explore why these two men fell in love and why they're drawn to each other again, the show instead gets distracted by other plotlines and other characters. Perhaps one day we'll get the season 2 that wraps up the plotlines and resolves the somewhat unsatisfactory ending. But until that day, this is it.
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There could not be a more-brilliantly insightful opening to this evocative, powerful, visceral, offbeat and oftentimes brilliant drama about a woman who disguises herself as a highschool student to help her daughter: a traumatised victim of school violence. As Kang-ja begins to peel off the layers of the incident that hurt her daughter, she discovers that the issues leading up to that bullying are more pervasive and more systemic than she could have bargained for.
Once one suspends their disbelief enough to accept that this middle-aged woman could pass for an 18-year-old highschool student, Angry Mum delivers an impressive 16 episodes of television filled with complex, fun, and often quirky characters and a surprising sense of joy for a show dealing with such serious issues.
As well as Kim Hee-sun's fierce, blunt, fiery and fiercely-loyal Jo Kang-ja, the show also has standout performances from Jisoo as troubled student Go Bok-dong, Ji Hyun-woo as idealistic schoolteacher Park No-ah and even the often-bland Kim Yoo-jung as Oh Ah-ran. But it's Go See-hee who steals the show as the badass, overweight, tattooed gangster Princess, Han Gong-joo, the second titular Angry Mum of the series.
Angry Mum works at meshing broad, often crazy physical comedy with much-more serious themes and messages. One can be laughing along one minute at the antics of Han Gong-joo and the next minute be stunned by a dark turn in events. Unlike other shows that attempted this and failed - Strong Woman Do Bong Soon comes to mind - Angry Mum makes it work in a way that makes the show a cohesive fun-tragic whole that has you laughing despite the darkness.
Kdramas often pretend that sexual assault and harassment and predation don’t exist. This show does not do that and it benefits from being more honest about the world we live in. It also frequently overturns tropes, clichés and stereotypes in a way that allows you to be surprised (and often horrified) at the way the plot progresses.
More importantly, it has a truly powerful message about problems being solved with love rather than violence. Not in a trite “love conquers all” way but in a “people need to feel somebody is on their side” way. And if the wrong person gives that love, then terrible things can happen.
Like many 16 episode kdramas, Angry Mum is not perfect. I have quibbles and that's why this didn't get a full 10/10. Once the plot shifts to politics, it becomes less compelling and the show struggled to maintain its pace through the whole run. But while those quibbles are there, they don't detract from this drama as a whole. I highly recommend it.
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Park Hae Jin in workplace thriller romance, Ji Chang Wook in an action spy film and Taecyeon in a truly-hilarious Makjang were just three of the seven. And while the latter may not be able to act, he's certainly not afraid to poke fun at himself and the genre.
If you don't expect much, you may not be disappointed by the ending but I personally was. As I said, you shouldn't expect much from an advertisement but this really does go nowhere and leaves you wondering what happened in the end. But if you go in with low expectations and don't expect any actual kisses and you'll be fine.
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The Korean highschool Breaking Bad you didn’t think was possible and never knew you needed
When Extracurricular starts, it's hard to work out what you're watching. A highschool kdrama? A gritty American teen soap? Some weird amalgam of both?Weirdly, it works in the same way that Parasite worked. And it's the success of Parasite combined with the distribution power of Netflix that probably sparked the production of a show that is basically Breaking Bad but with highschool student pimps set in Korea. These are words I never thought I'd write.
Anyway, everything about this production is good. The acting, the music, the cinematography. The script is fast-paced and disturbing and violent and full of expletives and if you're like me you won't be able to stop watching. Show is pure crack. And as an indictment of the destructiveness of capitalism, it's brutal in the same way that Parasite was brutal. And brutal in a way that few Korean dramas have had the courage to be until now.
Kim Dong-hee is mesmerising as the quiet, repressed straight-A student, Oh Ji-soo, who runs an online security service for prostitutes from his phone to pay for his tuition. Park Joo-hyun proves that her recent role in A Piece of Your Mind barely scraped the surface of her talent. Her Bae Gyu-ri is a complex but nonetheless entitled bored rich kid itching for some self-destructive behaviour to make herself feel alive. She discovers Ji-soo's secret and the world unravels from there.
Extracurricular never allows the viewer a moment for complacency but it does tease optimism frequently. Despite the borderline-sociopathic nature of our two leads, the actors give them both a perfect air of lost adolescence that makes us want to see them succeed. One is impoverished, neglected, and isolated. The other wealthy, over-parented, and popular. And yet they are somehow the same. And that sameness comes probably from the way that society has failed them.
Extracurricular is an addictive drama born from a marriage between a culture that brought us Makjang and a dramatic heritage that includes Breaking Bad. It's a narrative child that works somehow, even when it shouldn't.
With a lot of swearing, violence, adult themes and references to things like sex trafficking of minors, it won't be for everybody. But for this viewer it worked. Can't wait for the inevitable Season 2.
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It's Agent. Royal Secret Agent.
I went through the gamut of bad male-centred western media (It's Joseon Marvel! Joseon Batman!) before realising that ROYAL SECRET AGENT (this has to be capitalised because of how often L intoned it at people, in a repeated meme that honestly never stopped being hilarious) is actually Joseon Bond.The idol and all-round bad actor, L, plays the eponymous ROYAL SECRET AGENT in a performance that plays to his strengths: that of showing up to set and just being aggressively pleasant in various outfits.
To be honest, after finishing this show I have to conclude that it is so genuinely awful I think I have to put it in 'so bad it's good' territory.
With a juvenile, shallow script that may have been written by highschool students who watched too many American movies, terrible acting, and a musical score with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, it starts out bad, veers into unwatchable and then kind of keels over sideways into gleefully terrible.
L is flat out bad, of course, but so is everyone else so he fits in at least. The script at first feels like it's been chopped out of the middle of a standard fusion Saguek and then someone has done a find and replace to add the words ROYAL SECRET AGENT to various cliched sentences. All of these are intoned as if the actor is so used to saying them they're mostly just surprised that the words ROYAL SECRET AGENT have been added to them.
"Who will stand between the people and the corruption of the powerful families?"
*checks notes* "Oh, it's 'Royal Secret Agents' this time. Okay."
"The ROYAL SECRET AGENTS."
As the show progresses it starts to feel instead like a mashed up Best Of of past Sageuks, most of which were unfortunately superior and with no self-awareness or feel of deliberation to the references. The ROYAL SECRET AGENT'S rebel brother being basically Hong Gil-dong was like Robin Hood showing up in a Bond movie. His increasingly useless Gisaeng turned cop turned Princess girlfriend was a homage to previous leads in several fusion Sageuks involving cross dressing. In this case ,they don't bother hiding she's a woman. She just puts on male clothes while being obviously female and walks around while our two male leads run through the streets bellowing AGASSI at her as though the act of wearing of gat is sufficient to hide her identity.
Instead of character development, the writer has the actors explain their background, motivations and actions in exposition while the bad guys yell their evil plans in public and say things like, "The Rule of Law does not apply to me! Let's hunt people!"
The male lead is an entitled, borderline-skeevy arse but since this is a kdrama you know that this will be a result of his Great Secret Trauma that will cause everyone to forgive him once they Understand Him. And if they use any more soft filters and lens flare on the female lead due to her vast beauty they might use up the sun.
And then there's the Boar Rule. Once there's a boar, you know it's bad. Really bad.
So bad it may even be good.
So pour yourself a drink and get watching.
You have been both enticed and warned.
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Those feelings are deep and overwhelming and maybe one day I'll come back here and fill in this review properly with coherence. For now I'll just say - this is a dark and disturbing but powerful and compelling piece of television that you should absolutely watch. It's extraordinarily well crafted: the script, production and acting working together to create a grim tapestry that examines the hierarchical bullying and endemic violence of Korean society and how it has been given brutal form in its nation's military.
As young men are fed into the machine like grist to an unnecessarily violent mill, they do their best to survive in whatever way they can. Whether perpetrators, victims, or bystanders, no one is innocent and no one comes through unscathed.
D.P. is an unflinching look at the perpetuation and normalisation of violence and about what happens when people think they have no way out.
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The acting, writing, direction and cinematography are top notch. Its use in particular of visual metaphor is beautiful. One the surface, this is a delightful rom-com with one of dramaland's best OTPs. But underneath that, it is an intelligent and thoughtful discussion of the commodification and treatment of women in society and four women's attempts to attain self-determination. All of the female characters are intelligent, three-dimensional women (although one of them is a robot).
It's not new to have a kdrama examine our need for human connections but I feel like this is the quintessential show for exploring that theme.
I can't remember another show that I enjoyed so much on so many levels and that gave me so much joy while it was on.
I have quibbles but for the purposes of recommending a show they don't really matter. There's a perfect version of this show with a slightly-stronger final two episodes but it's rare to find perfection on television. 99% of it was perfect and that's what's important.
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At this stage, Thailand produces BL just to produce BL. It's cheap, it's easy, it makes quick cash. And this environment of cash over content was inevitably going to produce a show like Love By Chance 2.
The fact is, everyone involved with this lucrative and popular franchise simply does not care about their story or their characters. And it shows.
We're all aware - generally if not specifically - about the behind-the-scenes issues that meant Saint would not be returning for this sequel. And since Love By Chance as a vehicle was underpinned by Pete and Ae's relationship, the writers had to decide what to do with Pete's character without the actor. They had two choices: recast or find a reason for Pete to not be around. But whatever you do with a sequel based on a romance you don't kill that character off screen and you definitely don't have them break up off screen. Otherwise - why did people sit through the first season if it had no point?
It's not just that the writers took the cheap route of breaking Pete and Ae up - off screen. They then took the rather bizarre route of not progressing Tin and Can's relationship but instead circling it back to the beginning and simply repeating the plot points from season 1. This not only removes those relationship beats from all their context rendering them mostly meaningless. It creates a confusing situation whereby Pete, Ae, Techno and the other characters are living in a universe where Season 1 happened but TinCan isn't. I'm all for particle physics but I don't need some kind of Schrodinger's season where I'm never sure at any point if it did or did not exist.
If we made a list of everything that you can do wrong with a sequel, then Love By Chance has blithely decided to do all of them. Not because of necessity but because of laziness: because nobody involved actually cares about this story or its characters. And as a consequence I don't care either.
Love By Chance is an utterly pointless addition to the universe, one that exists merely to milk an audience that is genuinely invested in this series of shows and deserves better. It's about time Thailand stop pumping out third-rate BL for the sake of it and began to invest time and energy in development.
PS Perth is a genuinely fine actor who should be doing much much better projects than this. He steals every scene he's in just by walking into it and while Ae's plotline is pretty pointless and used only to help TinCan learn a Very Important Lesson About Love, Perth brings to it genuine gravitas. I really want to see him do something better but for that Thailand is going to have to get out of this current rut.
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Heartwarming dramedy that sometimes loses the mix between comedy and horror
A heartwarming and healing show about loss, grief and obsession, Here Comes Trouble is a mix of comedy, horror and drama that sometimes loses the right balance between its various elements. But this early tonal confusion shouldn't stop viewers from persisting with a thoroughly enjoyable drama full of great performances and genuine pathos.Pu Yiyong is a kind but somewhat aimless young man who experiences a terrible tragedy and wakes up to find he can perceive spirits: creations of human emotions that have been poured into objects and have developed their own desires. These spirits - grown by obsessive human emotions such as grief, loneliness and jealousy - come to him for help.
He teams up with cop ,Chen Yuying and former classmate, Cao Guangyan to help resolve the situations that have kept the spirits trapped.
As a Western viewer, the show is seeped in a mythology I don't know and do not entirely understand. But it's no barrier to watching a genuinely heartfelt exploration of the destructive power of obsession and the healing power of kindness.
Here Comes Trouble with make you laugh, make you cry and possibly even scare you depending on your appetite for horror. But as with the best of the genre, the problem is never the dead but the living. Humans are the monsters here. Malevolence is ultimately natural rather than supernatural. And kindness is our greatest weapon.
Tseng Jing Hua brings out all Yiyong's immaturity, uncertainty, grief, guilt and desire to help. He is heroic in his lack of desire for heroism, making him an inherently likeable and appealing character. It is this - the complex, multi-layered and three dimensional aspect to all the characters, even the villains - that makes the show shine.
Here Comes Trouble has something profound to say about the human experience but never preaches nor detours into saccharine fantasy. And while its tonal shifts between comedy and gruesomeness can be a bit much, in the end it ultimately works.
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The female lead in this drama is basically that cat. And while it's adorable and amusing behaviour in a pet, it's unbelievably frustrating in a grown ass woman. Especially one whose situation is not just of her own making but her outright choice.
The most annoying thing is that this drama had a fantastic first episode. When Xu Youxi's fiancee dies she goes back in time to save him by making sure they never fall in love. In exchange, her ballet career is destroyed by an injury. Now five years later 'fate' (where has fate been for five years btw, did it take a vacation because it knew it was about to get a workout?) has thrown Youxi and her boyfriend back together as her boss and sister's fiancee. Because it's DESTINY my friends. DESTINY.
Except - it isn't? Youxi could leave the situation at any time and, in fact, declares her intention to multiple times. But always in a way that makes her look like that cat and gives him time to come up with a reason for her to stay. She follows her former fiancee around with big eyes and quivering lips while martyring herself for him over and over, always staying a discreet distance but just close enough that he can see her suffering. And all of this is supposed to be noble or something but as it went on I was increasingly sympathetic of her batshit insane half-sister for seeing the behaviour as manipulative. Because it is.
Suddenly this drama is a workplace romance between a lowly Candy and her boss complete with an insane second female lead and a second male lead whose behaviour borders on deranged. The female lead comes off as manipulative, the male lead as wishy washy and inconstant, the second female lead as a raging lunatic and the second male lead has a different personality every scene.
Instead of enduring it, I should have just gotten myself another cat.
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