FrothyMix

By your logic it wouldn't matter if they were stick figures, hand-drawn by first-graders, because "what they represent is what matters." Everything has to look super-realistic ever since computer programs became readily available by which things can be made to look super-realistic. It's not only that though: the DESIGN of the creatures is stupid. They really do look like the Incredible Hulk with sharp teetch. Why would creatures from Hell need bulging muscles or even be in a vaguely human shape of any kind?

"What things look like" is incredibly important in a visual medium such as film. I would have thought you already knew that

I drop shows fairly easily. There is so much content out there, and much of it is good-to-excellent, so I figure why am I wasting my time on shows that make me roll my eyes, laugh at inappropriate times or keep glancing at the clock? Life's too short. :)

oh. my. god.

Dropping at beginning of 3rd ep. A horrible mess. Why would Yoo Ah In take this role? Must have been paid very well.

Curious as to why you kept watching. I thought it was terrible.

Maybe it would have if almost everything about it wasn't so amateurish, beginning with the ridiculous charcoal-and-smoke Incredible Hulk avengers from Hell. Dropped at beginning of third ep.

I agree with everything you wrote, times ten. This is crap and I'm dropping it after the silly beginning of the third episode. The director and writers should be drummed out of the business. So many good actors in it too...the power of Netflix's over-stuffed wallet.

OMG. This is absoutely terrible.
I hope Netflix paid all these great actors handsomely because they each have a great big turd on their resume now. I hope the ratings are bad as I'd hate to see Netflix make more of this type of shite.
Seriously? GOD sends sharp-teethed Incredible Hulk knock-offs made out of charcoal and smoke to wreak vengeance on sinners?
Especially given the laughable premise of these creatures' physical traits, the CGI is mid-level at best, so the visits from Hell look extra silly. Yikes.
I bore with it for two eps, as I was intrigued by parts of the surrounding story, but having seen beginning of the third ep, I won't be wasting any more time on this garbage. I can't believe how much money gets spent to make something this ...lame. In the first scene of the first ep, I laughed out loud at the entrance of the avengers. Not a good start.
WHAT ON EARTH is my beloved Yoo Ah In doing in this piece of shit? He's probably my second-favorite Korean actor. Is it that hard to get well-paying roles these days? And Yang Ik Joon, who I just saw in the flawed but fascinating "Ah, Wilderness." His performance in that film was epic, an Oscar-level acting achievement. And here is is in THIS?
The story/plot is so lame too, with all kinds of wild coincident circumstances among the leading characters, just absurd. I am embarrassed for everyone who had anything to do with this awful thing. That said, no doubt it will make millions. wtf?

The repressed homosexual love in this flick is pretty much the core around which everything else is built, at least in the primary story of Kenji and Shinji. Journal. Sketches. Furtive, longing looks. Unrequited physical and emotional feelings of affection, which lead directly to the ridiculous ending in the ring.
A lot to like in these two films but a lot of nonsense too, like the artsy-fartsy suicide festival and the guru who masterminds it. That whole suicide thing should have been cut from this film. Silly.

To me, Kenji is IN LOVE with Shinji, just as the dude Kenji moved in with is in love with him. Repressed gay love is a huge part of this story, even though it is left pretty abstract for the most part. You don't write journals about another guy and draw countless images of him unless you are smitten to the core. So much interesting shit going on here. After shinji saw Kenji's journal and was initially taken aback, he quickly shrugged off any gay-panic and continued to value Kenji as his dearest friend and companion.

Which makes the ridiculous ending even more stupid. Shinji essentially murdered Kenji in the ring while the referee, other officials and coaches let it happen. Why would he want to KILL Kenji? Was he in some kind of auto-pilot, murderous rage? What was with the hike through the forest in Shinji's imagination during the fight, with the glowing seagull or dove and that skanky girlfriend standing naked in front of a watefall?

Love this, but must add to my comment below: The ending became absurd, surreal and completely implausible. There is no way that battle would have been allowed to continue long before things got as messy as they did. No freaking way. So we then were in the realm of fantasy and symbolism or something artsy-fartsy, I don't know, and I found myself left all of a sudden cold and disengaged. It's like the director wanted a thing to happen, so he just did, to hell with the plot, which to that point had been mostly realistic.

BTW, the fight/boxing choreography here is among the best I have ever seen. I haven't the words to express my admiration for the fight designer/choreographer and the actors, who put in months of training and rehearsals to make these fights as real and brutal as they appeared to be. I don't think I saw one false note during the fights.

Co-Academy Awards for Best Actor to Suda and Yang Ik. Wow.

Suda Musaki is really a remarkable actor. The physical transformation he underwent to make this film and his character completely convincing is stunning. The months of training and work outs he had to have undergone...absolute dedication to becoming the character he's portraying. I really never thought I'd see Suda, who has become my favorite Japanese actor anyway, turn from a string-bean into a sleek and muscular, athletic stud.

Likewise of course for Yang Ik Jun, who made Kenji Barikan utterly real as well. His character arc was perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the film for me. It's as though there are two main male leads here, Suda and Yang Ik. Perhaps Suda is a bit more the focus of the film but Yang Ik is the gigantic rock on which Suda's character rests. They are both just outstanding.

The second installment made up for the second half of the first, which actually began to bore me. Psychologically and emotionally, things got extremely layered and interesting in the concluding two and a half hours. However, I could have done completely without the protest/political thing, and Kenji's utterly revolting and disgusting pig of a father being brought back into the story toward the end. Why? What was that supposed to accomplish? Who cares if he thinks Kenji's cool now that he's an animal in a boxing ring. And the entire thing with getting his living corpse to the match at the end became slapstick comedy to me.

Generally liked it. Didn't need to be this long but I wasn't bored very often. Interesting mix of exposition/flashback/action scenes. So I guess Japanese men really do scream a lot in conversations when things get emotional or a topic becomes heated...? I see this over and over in Japanese movies, so as someone who has never been to Japan nor had a conversation with a Japanese male, I will take it as a given that this scream-speech is a real thing.

Hmmm...quite a different take on war, the fighting hero whose main priority is getting himself and his men back from a mission alive. I'm not clear on the movie's position regarding where one in such a situation draws the line between following orders to attack, and thus putting oneself in danger, and just punting on every mission and flying in circles, dumping your bombs and bullets and heading back home to save your life. He also trained his men to attack, yet held them back from doing their duty, and then mourned their loss. I suppose my confusion on this matter is the core of the film and what seemed to push Miyabe toward a sort of madness.

I just finished watching so perhaps the answer will come to me later, but right now I don't get why Miyabe chose to perform a "special attack" at the end. What happened to going home to his wife and daughter as his primary mission? Also, given that Miyabe is clearly a person who, despite being in the Imperial Japanese military, a generally ruthless killing machine that had been terrorizing China, Korea, the Phillippines and all of Asia for years, carried a deep, basic love for the value of each human life, why would he have no feeling the people he would kill on his last mission? That sort of crazy smirk that took over his face at the end was a weird way to end all of what had gone before. He looked like an American's propaganda-driven image of a brutal, death-loving "Jap" enemy.

Oh jesus. The Pornhub thing. Yes, you're right, I watch shitty shows like this because I want to see all the super-explicit, hard-core gay sex they include. Idiot.

This couple is anything but ordinary: They never touch, hug, kiss or have sex. It's hilarious and sad that you think that is "normal."

And oh gosh, yeah, you really got me with that "planet" slam. Now I remember: You live on Planet Sex-less, where everyone is afraid of sex and tries to disguise their prudery and sex-phobia as some kine of higher wish for material that tells its story without having the crudity to mention or indicate anything about the beautiful, wonderful thing that is sex in the human experience. Well...the human experience except for yours.

Most BLs, by the way, as I try to decipher what you think you are trying to say through all that self-contradictory babbling, are almost as sexless, in an actual sense, as this show. Young men are far hornier and ready to get down than any of these shows generally indicate. Most BLs are based on Manga that are FAR more explicitly sexual than the series or movies that are based on them, but that's not clean enough for you. You want a show stripped of all sexual references, even between mature gay men in a relationship as we have here. That is just plain sad. I don't know if you think ALL sex is dirty or just the gay kind, but you've def got issues.

As for "selling" a show with sex, all I can do, given how mild most BL sexual content is, is laugh. Try considering that the sexual content, slight as it is, might be an actual, valid part of the story, no more or less shocking than the food being endlessly cooked in this show. How many times do we have to see how carrots are sliced before we get it?

You get over it, Benny. Never mind I never wrote that your or anyone else's judgement is "faulty," Why don't you try arguing against things that people actually wrote?

The show is a horrendous justification of the fact that appraently gay people in Japan live like mice, hiding in the corners and pretending they don't have relationships because that's what their straight overlords will allow. You think that's cool. I think it sucks.

It is always valuable to be remindedhow many commenters think a mindlessly, slobbering post about how grand and glorious a show is is perfectly fine, but should someone just as aggressively comment that the show is a turd, it is somehow out of line. They are wrong. Over and over here people have claimed this was a "10," that it's wonderful, tender, blah, blah blah. HOW DARE THEY write such things just because they like it.

I think the 45 year-old is believable, the other not so much. Is Chris Evans in this show? What?

OK, you didn't say "realistic," you wrote "normal" in regard to the couple as though couples who never touch, hug, kiss or have sex are "normal."

NO idea what that last question is supposed to mean and don't care. I know, however, that YOU are on planet Sex-less.

Why is sexuality, sexual activity or any other aspect of sex not just as valid a plot point in a show featuring a romantic couple as any other aspect, like who cleans the kitchen or has what job? How is "intimacy" not just a regular, normal part of human relationships and why should a show that hides it away, like this show does, be judged somehow better because of it? That's bizarre.

Figures.

Wow, I hope you love to read your own bullshit writing, because I sure as hell am not going to read all of this. You're right: I think it's everyone's business how people die, especially if they're famous. I just told you it's a matter of public record here and not something people expect to be clouded in mystery. I don't care what you put in all-caps or how morally superior you think you are...people want to know as a matter of record the cause of death. On but not you, not you...you want it shushed for some reason, ESPECIALLY if it's a suicide so you can go on pretending that by shushing everyone you'll somehow tamp down the number of suicides.

Listen, genius medical person but not-so-smart otherwise person, I have a newsflash: the entertainment press, photographers, writers, reporters, the whole biz, has existed as long as there has been an entertainment industry, I don't care what country you live in. In between self-congratulatory paragraphs about how above-it-all you are when it comes to curiosity about the famous and their lives and deaths, you also keep letting us know what a liar you are. There never WAS some golden age when there was an entertainment industry in Korea or anywhere else but no entertainment press to report on them. You are full of shite.

BTW, I was focusing on ENTERTAINER AND CELEBRITY SUICIDES because that's ummm...what we were talking about: the death of a young woman entertainer in Korea. I know all about the other categories, despite your lame insults to the contrary, but gosh, are those the suicides this comment section was focused on? No...no, it wasn't.

Where did I say I CARE, really CARE about this young woman as an individual? Just another lie you made up so that you could turn something I never said around on me. However, I actually DO care about her suffering and her death, ESPECIALLY if it was by suicide. I know from first-hand experience the pain of severe depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation and I don't want to see anyone suffer and die from it. And I believe that through open discussion of these issues comes knowledge and learning that can lead to help for a lot of people. They don't HAVE to be depressed, anxioius or dead. But not you...you're all for SILENCE.

And Jesus, what decade are you in? Silence and shame about fucking CANCER? That went out with the 60s over here. Try to stay current.

Now...I'm not going to respond to anymore of your masturbatory, endless babbling above. You can provide your own responses. I don't care what you think, because you are exactly what's wrong with Korea and anyone else who thinks suicide, depression and all other mental health issues should be whispered about in darkened hallways.