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AudienceofOne
This review may contain spoilers
Those who know, know.Those who don't know, should just watch.
Some performances steal a scene. Some an episode. Some an entire show.
Without it, this would be yet another mediocre highschool musical.
It is worth watching for that alone.
I have no other words.
Just press play.
You won't regret it.
They're making me type 500 words. I guess I should say something else.
I like that the music really sounds like something a group of talented highschool kids would belt out in their garage. I like the way it explores how rock clashes with the over-produced, cookie-cutter nature of the Korean music industry. I also like how the writers never lost track of their characters, even if some of them aren't particularly well-defined.
I wish the show had better female characters, and not so many pretty pot plants.
I still think Boys Over Flowers has a lot to answer for but this is head and shoulders above its predecessor, the woeful Flower Boy Ramen Shop.
This is my review.
The end.
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Shin Se-kyung (Oh Choi-rim/Choi Eun-seol) puts in an enjoyable performances in this show about a woman who can see smells. Unfortunately she's paired up with rapist, Yoo-chun and so you should probably avoid it for that alone. His character has some kind of traumatic narcolepsy.
Even in the romance scenes, this drama is paint-by-numbers. It consists of a succession of kdrama cliches, jarring tonal shifts and the obligatory serial killer. All of this could be forgiven if the plot wasn't almost entirely driven by people being excruciatingly stupid.
Even the male lead - who starts the show as the Best Detective Ever by virtue of not being a blistering idiot - gets quickly infected with Stupid once he's finally accepted by the crack team of morons in the Investigative Unit. These detectives are played almost entirely for comic relief by a number of quality Korean actors who really deserve better.
The central conceit of the show - the female lead's synesthesia - is treated more as a supernatural power than a medical condition and her emotional journey is regularly jettisoned in favour of the male lead's. This is a common problem with kdramas and this show is one of the worst examples of it.
Show gives us a generic and poorly-drawn antagonist whose genius is regularly achieved by the other characters being exceptionally dumb. We're supposed to think this antagonist is playing Chess with the police, but really it's more like a drunken game of snakes and ladders.
In the end, show is dumb and everyone is stupid. Oh and Yoo-chun is a rapist so you probably don't want to watch this anyway.
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This review may contain spoilers
There was a lot to like about the first season of this Chinese show about vampire Li Shi Ya (Zhang Yu Xi) and her love affair with tasty human Jiang Zhi Hao (Xing Zhao Lin) - despite the wooden acting, awful dubbing and overall cheapness.Season 2, however, throws most of this goodwill away with a terminal case of noble idiocy from which it never recovers.
I have never read the Manwha Untouchable so don't know how much of this plotline is based on the source text. A lot of the developments in Season 2 felt like retcons - and poorly thought-out ones at that. But in the end, it's the noble idiocy that stakes this through what was left of its heart.
R.I.P.
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The vampirism of the female lead Li Shi Ya (Zhang Yu Xi) is not particularly well-mythologised but is of a peculiarly no-muss, no-fuss kind. She feeds off energy through physical contact so is thrown for a loop when she gets a taste of the life force of the seemingly-delicious Jiang Zhi Hao ( Xing Zhao Lin), who is an extreme germaphobe that avoids all physical contact.
The acting of both leads is particularly woeful and the atrocious dubbing did not help. The budget is so obviously tiny that even the set dressing looks cheap and the leads seems to wear the same outfits for days on end - a particularly bizarre decision for a female lead who's supposedly a supermodel.
There is, however, a certain charm to the male lead's earnestness that makes you understand why this vampire model falls for him. The show also regularly subverts the standard romance tropes of Chinese dramas in a way that's refreshing. Shiya is rarely coy about her desire to touch her "prey" and his consistently-mature response to this seemingly-sex-crazed stalker in his life is extremely appealing.
I could have rated this lower but it was slightly better than the sum of its parts.
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It’s like sunshine on my soul and rainbow skies with fluffy bunny clouds.
If a television show could be a child on a rainy day playing with a dollhouse and making up a story in their imaginative, marshmallow head while drinking hot chocolate and getting hugs from their puppy then this would be that show.
I could devote part of this review to its pacing problems, its thin plot, its treatment of its minor characters, and some of the questionable decisions the writers made in the name of a humour that was at times a little broad. But when you smile for 16 episodes straight and a chicken regularly wanders through, who cares?
The music is wonderful, the cinematography is at times spectacular and the writers have fun - loads of fun - recreating visual odes to films, especially horror films. Show is fun and show has heart and that's really all you need from a rom-com in the end.
Shin Hye-sun is delightful as Woo Seo-ri, the 17-year-old girl who comes out of a 13-year coma to find she's suddenly 30. Yang Se-jong is delightful as Gong Woo-jin, the man who hides his guilt over the accident with a misanthropic grumpiness. And Ahn Hyo-seop is delightful as Yoo Chan, Woo-jin's nephew who is 19 and just on the verge of adulthood. In fact, I'd love to think of another synonym for 'delightful' right now but that describes almost every character in this show - major or minor.
The main trio is rounded out by the robotic, classics-quoting housekeeper, Jennifer (Ye Ji-won) whose rote delivery and deadpan randomness is... delightful.
Every one of these characters is delightful but what I really love is the show’s underlying message about control and our ultimate lack thereof. It's not actually about trauma so much as the fact that growing up means reconciling your dreams with the reality of life and your own limitations. You can't control your physical limits any more than you can control whether a bus crashes.
As you grow older, doors in your life close. But if you have the patience to wait through the intermission, a window will open and the amazing second act can begin.
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This review may contain spoilers
How would you change if you found out you were going to die soon? Cheon Soo-Ho (Kim Jung-Hyun) is the son of a chaebol; entitled, arrogant and bored. Raised by a psychopathic father and an abusive stepmother he is, despite his wealth, someone who has no purpose in life. Diagnosed with a terminal illness and given only six months to live, he dedicates his remaining time to helping Seol Ji-Hyun (Seohyun), a woman he wronged.
The first half of this drama is dark and bleak but somehow compelling despite the numbingly-depressing tone. KJH shed his school uniform with ease and his acting improved in leaps and bounds to the end of the first half. Seohyun also put in a strong performance, especially when she had scenes with KJH, whose presence elevated her acting considerably.
The controversy behind the scenes of this show is well documented. Kim Jung-Hyun's health problems may have forced him to leave the show early but if there was any vehicle where the writers could have worked without a male lead, this was it. Cheon Soo-Ho's death was inevitable and the show had two strong, complex female leads to work with - even if they didn't have the same level of acting experience.
Unfortunately, the writers seemed to falter at KJH's exit. Maybe the writing fell away, maybe the writing was always this poor. We'll never know what the show should have been, but we do know what it could have been if they'd successfully shifted the narrative to the female lead.
The episodes after his departure highlighted how much of this was held together by KJH's gravitas. Without that, the show digressed into standard - substandard - melo: meaningful looks, shallow. smirking antagonists and people running around without purpose.
In the end, Time became a melo mess: thematically weak and even boring. Without KJH's performance, one is left wondering if the show was always that bad and we just didn't notice. Despite that, the first 12 episodes were relatively strong and so it deserves the higher rating,
And KJH deserves to be flooded with offers once his health improves. Because he quite literally stole this show.
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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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I saw a movie recently where a character said "You like somebody because of things but you love them despite things” and I think that applies to this show. This is a messy, gleeful and heartwarming tale about a chef, a gangster and an heiress who lose everything but then come together to reclaim it. Chinese masterchef Poong (Joon Ho), reformed gangster Chil-sung (Jang Hyuk) and lonely socialite Sae-woo (Jung Ryeo Won) have nothing in common but their shared calamities: all three hit rock bottom in the first few episodes.
These three characters with different backgrounds and temperaments are the disparate ingredients this show promises to turn into jjajangmyeon - the signature Korean/Chinese fusion dish that Poong is an expert at and that Chil-sung and Sae-woo are perpetually hungry for. While the first few episodes are almost unhinged in the seeming-randomness of their elements, the show makes it clear that Poong is the cook that's going to bring them together in one perfect dish.
For the fist half of its run, this was a show that was about jjajangmyeon but was also jjajangmyeon itself: televisual fusion cuisine. That’s why the show was originally so messy and it’s why I loved that the show was so messy. Because it seemed to be saying that people, relationships and life are a huge mashup of disparate things and it’s not about one being ‘good’ and the other ‘bad’ but about the proportions of each ingredient. Throughout the first half, all our characters were floundering because their life recipes weren’t right yet. If life is a recipe you're constantly refining, then all our characters were still deciding on the menu.
From the beginning, the show was extremely clever - but sometimes too clever. Its brilliant use of metaphors and imagery is a device I personally love but even I thought it was a bit overdone in the beginning. There were episodes where I was so busy tracking its use of hot and cold and the black and white that I missed plot. Nietzsche was thrown in there, first to intrigue us and then to confuse us. Poong was either a Nietzscheism superman or its antithesis; the writers never seemed to be sure. I know a lot of viewers simply couldn't cope with the chaos and dropped out. I stayed in, loving every minute and waiting for the writers to bring it all together in one glorious dish of fusion cuisine.
It's probably not surprising that this did not happen although it's not entirely clear what went wrong. Originally slated for 20 episodes (40) and then cut to 19 (38), maybe the show suffered from losing an episode, maybe it was three episodes too long. The show went on hiatus for two weeks and when it came back it was seemingly a shell of its former self. Characters disappeared, plots were dropped, major plot points were resolved quickly and anti-climactically, and others were dragged down with standard, almost pedestrian, kdrama plotlines. It was almost as though the writer had been instructed to play it more safe and the quirky, surreal magical realism was replaced with the plotline of a standard romcom.
The minor characters often detracted rather than added to the show in the end. The antagonists, which started off suitably hateful and conniving, became one-dimensional villains of little import, if they didn't disappear completely. The Giant Hotel may have loomed over the Hungry Wok like a corporate Goliath but David didn't defeat it so much as replace it and the little restaurant seemed more beset by disloyalty and ingratitude from its employees than by external threats.
Poong and Sae-woo remained adorable and sexy and wonderful and Chil-sung held a kitten every episode so the show is worth watching till the end. No matter how many plots got dropped or how many characters disappeared, the relationship between the three leads was the show's saving grace. The romance between Poong and Sae-woo is passionate and sweet - just the like sweet-and-sour pork that is his other signature dish. The bromance between the two men is loving and supportive. And while there is technically a love triangle here, it's handled with maturity and without unnecessary angst. These three people love each other and watching them come together is the show's best element.
In fact, show ends well. It's just not the affordable gourmet meal we were promised but more like a rushed lunchtime bowl of noodles while we're trying to get back to work.
In the end, I love Greasy Melo despite its flaws and I guess that means my Love Is True. I can dream of a more perfect version of this show where the writers were able to use all the ingredients they prepared to make the perfect meal instead of leaving half of them on the chopping board. But if lasting love is based on acceptance, then I accept. This is the show it is.
9/10
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However, four episodes in (this show suffers from the annoying episode break-up they use to slip ads into kdramas), I've had to drop it. The plotting is pedestrian and the characterisation slapdash, which is really unusual for a kdrama. I started watching Episode 4 (7-8), wandered away and realised I wasn’t even watching it anymore. I was that bored.
The show is basically the standard ‘corporation as saeguk royal family’ thing with the overbearing King, the scheming Prime Minister, the arranged marriage, the spoiled Princess and the impoverished female lead interloper caught up in their schemes. The robot almost seems incidental as though it’s their ‘hook’ for making the same show they always make.
Everyone is raving about Seo Kang-joon’s performance as the Chaebol Prince/Android double but to me it’s all over the place (although a lot of that may be the writing). They’ve also given him this infuriating tic of winking when he’s being a human lie detector, which just comes off as stupid. Gong Seung-yeon is also uninspiring in her role as a disenchanted former fighter and current bodyguard but again this is due to the writing and I feel the actor can't be blamed for doing the best in such a poorly-constructed role.
It does not help that season 3 of the far-superior Humans has started in the UK and it’s actually exploring the themes this show is glossing over.
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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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So it seems strange to write a review about his latest work and say that, while it no less beautiful or artful or well-framed, it's use of music is ear-screechingly bad and its portrayal of women's lives depressing. In fact, this is the most depressing Korean drama I've seen since Misty told us a woman can only have success if she destroys men - and she won't be happy anyway when she does it.
Which is not to say that there is anything wrong with the writing, acting or cinematography of this show. It is, in fact, a warm and often-visually beautiful representation of the ordinary life of a very ordinary noona and her very ordinary romance with her friend's dongsaeng. But it is in the show's realism that it fails.
Jin-ah (Son Ye-jin) is the most everywoman portrayed on TV: told her job is to compromise, to keep the peace, to slide through without conflict. Basically raised to be this way and then simultaneously judged for being this way. Forced to be a participant, essentially, in her own mistreatment. In the end, Jin-ah will only be happy, and the people around her will only be happy, if she stops trying to make everyone happy. She's such an everywoman that I don't know why the writers and the PD told the story at all - unless it's to completely depress us as to the current state of feminism.
For those who want a fluffy, happy romance this is the wrong show, even if there's a lot of that in the first half. Love it seems can survive in a bubble but can't survive the real world, even if the two people in the romance are not doing anything wrong.
In the end, this show gets a seven because it was a very good piece of television despite the depressing overall theme. The one true flaw was the OST, which was so awful it had me muting the soundtrack throughout. If you told me a few weeks ago that I'd be muting the soundtrack in a PD Ahn drama, I wouldn't have believed you. But here I am. And if I have to hear 'Stand By Your Man' one more time, it will be one time too many.
Sometimes it is hard to be a woman. But only if you are brought up to embrace noble martyrdom as a woman's main role. It is ironic perhaps that the people who will truly hate this show are the ones who love shows that promote woman's noble martyrdom as a virtue to be rewarded - like Mischievous Kiss. And while there is a lesson in that for women, it's not a particularly uplifting one.
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While some viewers may be thrilled to watch yet another clueless, awkward Candy bumbling her way to the love of a Chaebol, this is not one of those viewers. And while Korean writers are obsessed with the humour that comes from emotionally-stunted man-boys learning how to human, in this case the show is made even more tedious by the fact the male lead is an actual highschool-uniform-wearing boy. Albeit one who dresses like Gu Jun-pyo and has hair like Yoon Ji-hoo.
While the material in Biscuit Teacher and Star Candy was at least handled by exceptional actors, the acting in this is pretty sub-par - although I doubt anyone could have elevated the material these actors were given.
Regressive, reactionary and poorly-shot, with lacklustre direction and dated cinematography, this show is more of a televisual anthropology lesson than anything else.
As the first in the Oh! Boy Flower Boys series, I doubt it is necessary to watch it before moving to the more superior shows made later on.
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Han Seung-joo, played by Uee, is not just single - she's alone. Her family are judgemental, abusive parasites and her friends have their own lives. She inherits a mountain from her Aunt that her family is intent on developing into a resort. But when she feels threatened in her own home, she decides to hire a man to be her husband. Oh Jak-doo (Kim Kang-woo) is seemingly a lowly herb-gatherer from the mountain she now owns and he accepts the role in exchange for her leaving his mountain home undeveloped.
At the beginning, this drama had an intelligent script that seemed to be at war with the Makjang direction. It doesn't matter how strong or independent you are, it was saying, you still need somebody to be on your side. In essence, everybody needs a mountain. Seung-joo's mountain was both figurative and literal: when things got too difficult for her, she now had somewhere solid and unchanging to rest.
From the start, the Makjang direction was extremely jarring. Full of intense close-ups, overwrought - almost screeching - line deliveries, and long scenes devoted to the bumbling slapstick antics of three mountain Halmeonis, the direction was a sour note in a otherwise enjoyable show.
Unfortunately, by about episode 14 it became obvious the director knew something we didn't. The show veered sharply into Makjang and never recovered. At a daunting 24 episodes, this meant almost half the drama was full of contrived conflict, opaque character motivations and general audience confusion. And screeching. There's a lot of screeching.
While Kim Kang-woo's Oh Jak-doo is often swoonworthy, the show is stolen repeatedly by the affectatious and pretentious Eric Cho as a second male lead, played with a lot of heart and self-awareness by Jung Sang-hoon. Uee also gives her character a lot of strength and vulnerability but both she and Kim Kong-woo struggle with their characters once their motivations get murky.
The performances are not enough to save what is, in the end, a poorly-written and badly-paced soap opera that has little overall point to make about anything.
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Lee Sun-kyun plays Park Dong-hoon, a numb middle-aged engineer in a tired marriage who finds himself entangled with Lee Ji-an, a very young, almost unsocialised woman played with an extraordinary subtlety and quiet intensity by IU. Ji-an has been tasked to help get rid of Dong-hoon by the CEO of his company, Do Joon-young (Park Young-min) who is having an affair with Dong-hoon's wife. Ji-an wiretaps Dong-hoon's phone and finds herself identifying with his unhappiness, even as she is drawn to his inherent kindness.
Surrounded by a cast of unhappy and dissatisfied people, this is a show about middle age and about failure but in the end about how our lives are enriched by kindness and community. Ji-an is a damaged young woman who has endured almost unimaginable tragedy but through her relationship with Dong-hoon they are both able to heal and to finally pursue happiness.
The performances of the entire cast are extraordinary but it's the sparse script, off-kilter cinematography and haunting pensive OST that give the show a sensibility that's hypnotic, almost mesmerising. It’s melancholic and a little weird – but in the kind of way that people are a little weird. It’s grim and there’s very little joy in it but the tone and lack of joy is presented in a way that makes it analogous to the disappointments and mindless drudgery of middle-age.
But beyond the themes of failure and the cold darkness of winter as a metaphor for dissatisfaction, this is a show about the triumph of kindness. Portrayed so often as a weakness, it is instead Dong-hoon's kindness that is his greatest strength. It is kindness, community and love that is celebrated and through that celebration this show finds a beauty that transcends mere television.
It is, for now, the best show of 2018.
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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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