Feardorcha

It annoyed me what they tried to do with her character. It's like they had a Harpy Ex-girlfriend Trope leftover from some retro BL and trotted it out for Manufactured Drama.

They had exactly two capable, sensible women on the show and made one a bitchy skank and zombiefied the other. Just ridiculous.

I actually said aloud "Stupid manly-man shite" right before she said that, lol. She was 100% correct about it all. There are zombies eating people and these dudes are going to get folks killed because they can't put their dicks...erm, egos aside and use their words.

And Prao was very good with words. She read each and every one of them for filth.

I swear, the Thai cinemedia industry absolutely hates women. The boys made some silly choices, yes, but the girls were legitimately (and, in one case, quite literally) too stupid to live. Which bled over to the effeminate members of the Cheerleader Group too (trying to cure zombieism with the power of loud friendship, good grief...).

And this show tried very hard to make you detest Prao but, you know what—she was a stone-cold bitch but she wasn't wrong. As unpleasant as she was, she was more focused and clear-headed than 90% of the rest of those idiots. Her character makes zero sense in context but it was still nice to have at least one lady calling bullshite on proceedings and not getting herself or others munched to (un)death.

I felt bad for the PE Group. They seemed like they were doing just fine surviving the onset of the apocalypse before throwing in their lot with the stupid twats of the Core Group. Watching that lot bicker and snipe and get other people killed was infuriating. I kept waiting for Phu to shout "Bitches, zombies!" every time those numbskulls started squabbling over unimportant/irrelevant drama.

For a Thai production, it's mostly watchable. The gore is pretty good, there are a couple truly satisfying deaths, but it mostly just made me want to go rewatch "Duty After School"; maybe I was too harsh on that series.

As a movie, it's a bit of an incoherent mess with zero resolution. As a boy band's intro to an anticipated series of concept songs/albums, it might well work, but I couldn't say because I have no idea who this group is & had no clue that's what was happening until the K-pop Cinematic Universe music video jumpscared me at the credits.

There are engaging if well-trodden & tropey ideas in here but it's not actually a "movie"; it's a series of persona introductions & foundational worldbuilding to underpin a boy band's narrative-based debut. Still, I don't feel I wasted my time watching. It kept me interested, even if I did FFW here & there, & Jo Jae Yun gave a wonderfully affecting performance in his short appearance. That being said, I'm not interested enough to seek out the band's catalogue in order to explore further or have my questions answered. Did kind of make me wish I could reexperience "Interstellar 5555" again, though.

The violence is beautifully brutal, they didn't waste our time with a tedious romance, & Rain's villain is a sociopathic force of nature. No, season two doesn't have the heart, humour, or nuances of the first, & these idiots once again underestimate their opponent & save basically no one they promise to protect, but it did seem by the end they were finally learning a lesson about what is truly required to fight wealthy, omnipotent monsters (& it's more than the power of friendship).

If we get a season three, I hope it takes these characters to a darker place, & maybe gives the sweet simpletons a strategist & tactition to help them fight these wars. They weren't quite as infuriatingly borderline incompetent as last season but, still, they get laughably, predictably outmaneuvered when they really ought to anticipate better. Hong Min-Beom seems to have found his inner Subutai; I'd love to see him bringing his own resources to bear in full on the next über-equipped villain group to crop up.

All in all, an entertaining watch.

I watch this film at least three times a year; it is thrilling every single time.

I honestly would've preferred an ending where they both died in that shed, gunned down in a father-daughter embrace amidst the ruins of a beautiful but ultimately hopeless yearning for a future that was never possible, rather than the typical saccharine ending that we got (and all saw coming). However, I recognize this is meant to be a rather lightweight, feel-good comedy about parental devotion and the power of love, and for what it is, it does its job well enough.

That being said: whew, would I love to watch a movie about grief-stricken, sword-wielding, unstable, zombie-hunting badass Sin Yeon Hwa. While I was pleased that one asshat was essentially tag-teamed to death by two people who had a pretty righteous claim to vengeance, I was kind of hoping Yeon Hwa would spawn out of a tree and lop the bastard's head off. He was such a vile piece of garbage.

The fundamental problem with this series is that the central pairing is neither emotionally compelling nor narratively complex. The leads are simultaneously irritating and boring.

I don’t object to "toxic" ships; I object to poorly constructed ones.

"Toxic" ships like MingJoe, VegasPete, KhaiThird, KnockKorn, DayItt, TopMew, and so forth work because the characters and their conflicts are multifaceted and intentionally layered. Their flaws are blatantly written psychological architecture as opposed to audience members making ish up wholesale to justify their own projections onto their favoured cardboard cutouts. Truly quality characters are ones you can hate and love in equal measure, but even if you don't think a HEA is deserved, the HEA at least makes contextual sense within the story's universe.

"Love Alert" is not managing to construct any of that.

I can't bring myself to hate Jimmy because he's not hateable in any interesting way. He's a known fuckboi doing what fuckbois do. But, outside of him being a fuckboi, he has no other personality or characteristics. He's not a self-actualized manipulator like Ming, nor a sensually violent sociopath with demoralizing daddy issues like Vegas, nor a charmingly stunted idiot like Khai. Jimmy has no charisma, no wit, no danger, no vulnerability. He is not strategically cruel, seductively broken, or emotionally repressed. He is a libido with legs, and because he lacks true dimension, he doesn't generate compelling tension.

Meanwhile, Toh's entire obsession with Jimmy merely compounds the issue. Toh's central conflict is knowingly, agreeingly falling for a skunk and then repeatedly whinging about getting sprayed. Conflict only sustains engagement when it contains friction between desire and uncertainty. Toh is not uncertain; he knows exactly who Jimmy is, and yet keeps trying to build a reality in which what exists between them is authentic potential rather than just Toh being dickmatized by his first lay. Toh's milquetoast "conflict" is entirely self-inflicted and static, and it's frustrating to watch.

And all of that brings me to this question: why should Jimmy change for Toh?

What differentiates Toh from Jimmy's previous conquests? What makes Toh so singular that he destabilizes Jimmy's manwhore worldview? What does Toh offer that would make a fuckboi like Jimmy hang up his cock and settle down?

The script says "because". And that is just dramatically insufficient and wholly unsatisfying.

A toxic romance is, inherently, messy, problematic, and infuriating, but it must also be narratively charged and combustibly complex. Without that, even toxicity is eye-rollingly dull.

While watching the killer Looney Tunes his way through the end of the third act, I kept thinking: "If you'd just done nothing, you wouldn't be having all of these problems, my guy".

A mostly watchable but often frustrating movie. The "evacuation" scene is going to piss you right off with how spectacularly stupid it is. The attempts at pathos also fall short; the story is so focused on the "big reveal" that it undermines character development in the first two-thirds, and by the final act, it's tough to be invested in whatever happens to the ML. By the end, all I felt was the same relief as the passengers: thank goodness this train has stopped, I am ready to get off.

But, again, mostly watchable, if you're just looking to pass some time.

But...why, though?

People like Toh are just irritating. If you want to let a garbage man treat you like trash, that's your prerogative, but stop crying about it. You aren't a hapless victim; you're in there with your eyes wide open, either because you're dickmatized or because you're in "love", but either way, you know the game and you're getting played by choice. It's all right if you want to get used but, good grief, suck it up, buttercup, and come to terms with it.

Watching this was a perfectly serviceable way to spend two hours. I likely wouldn't watch it again but I might check out a sequel, if one were ever made.

Feels like there's a whole other movie you were supposed to watch first.

I hope someone enlisted a "stranger danger" expert to give a lecture at that orphanage. I mean, kid, if a random man materializes from the shadows, calculatingly strokes your cheek, and promises he can alleviate all your woes, the correct response is to run screaming in the opposite direction toward a recognized Responsible Adult. I don't care if that random man looks like Woo Do Hwan, that nonsense is how you become a mass text alert.

At any rate, the movie didn't deliver. Punching demons back to Hell is a fun premise but this was a lot less that and a lot more pensive gazing and sudden pyrokinesis skill-levelling. Probably this would've worked better as a series, with multiple episodes to explore the characters, the conflict, the stakes, and the lore. The best aspect is the acting; everyone delivered. I wish we'd had at least one more scene with the Shaman Niece.

A slow, frustrating slog to an astonishingly unsatisfying ending. Seriously, it felt personal, like I had directly done something to piss off the series and that ending was my punishment.

Well, on the plus side, it's quite well-acted and there is no romance. Worth one watch, though you'll likely find yourself skipping liberally through the second half.

Well, Toh, if you're going to act like a doormat, then you deserve to get walked all over.

Rewatched this for a sixth time, raised my rating a bit. It's a truly satisfying genre work, a series you could fit seamlessly into a binging marathon that might include "The Raid", "I Saw the Devil", "The Night Comes for Us", "Mirzapur", "My Name", "Ichi the Killer", "Warrior", maybe even "Lady Snowblood", depending on your aesthetics. Basically, if you're looking to have a good time watching characters skilled in martial arts absolutely, unapologetically bloodily body other characters skilled in martial arts, this is the series for you.

Again, the only real letdown is in the second half, where the series shifts focus from hyperfocused, brutally fatal vengeance to the dramatic power machinations of a supporting character. It's a bit like watching half a movie then watching half a series; in some ways, they are two separate narratives that perhaps should've been served up thusly. The supporting character's motivations, methods, and moral conflicts were intriguing; I just didn't care all that much because I'm here to watch a different dude crush tracheas and shiv bastards. Once that wasn't happening as often or as viscerally, my interest waned.

Still, definitely well worth at least one full watch, and revisits later, particularly once you know what/when/where to skip.

Does the lipstick have an opening credit, a closing sponsor tag, something along those lines? I can't read Thai, but I feel like an application that heavy has to be a brand presence thing. Surely, they don't have a qualified make-up artist on set who thought, "Yep, let's just apply this with a trowel"?

I'm already getting "Playboyy" comment section vibes, and I gave that one 10/10, would read again. Hope I'm not disappointed.

Hear, hear!

I swear, the only subset of a group worse than "those types" of vegans are those of the nondrinkers. And the comments here reinforce that by seemingly missing that Kang Tae Oh barely commented on it, whereas Lily (M)Alice's typically crappy article writing made it seem like "nondrinker" was his whole personality.

Even in an environment like South Korea, where social drinking is integral to a sense of collectivism, there are nondrinkers who get along just fine, one way or another, and that seems to be the crux of Kang Tae Oh's commentary: he's got other methods of social engagement & community that are more comfortable for him as an individual.

In addition to that, I completely agree with you: it's difficult to assess any celebrity commentary on any subject in South Korea given the ridiculousness of their society's expectations/treatment of celebrities. Personally, I'd be terrified to be seen having a single cocktail in a bar, full stop.