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When the Camellia Blooms korean drama review
Completed
When the Camellia Blooms
9 people found this review helpful
by Sinasina
Nov 22, 2019
40 of 40 episodes seen
Completed
Overall 7.5
Story 7.0
Acting/Cast 10.0
Music 8.5
Rewatch Value 4.0
There were some amazing acting performances in this drama. I've always been a big fan of Gong Hyo Jin and she has been amazing here, she has shown (once again) that she has quite the acting range. The rest of the actors were great too, especially Hyangmi, but there are no -acting related- weak points really. It's worth noting that this is a very pretty show, the cinematography is just excellent.

Onto the bad stuff:
One of the biggest problems with this drama is that they've extended it to 20 episodes, all the filler stories that were used to fill up the additional 4 episodes were related to things I usually don't enjoy watching in a kdrama, namely Confucianism crap and an incredible amount of melo. I'm fine with watching melodramatic scenes in general, but this was just way too much, for way too long. There is also a shift in writing after XYZ's death, it's like all my favorite things in the show got dialed down to the bare minimum. Some characters got some personality & intelligence adjustments mid way and then in the finale everyone suddenly changed their world views for a super fast ending that was quite underwhelming. To sum it up the pacing is just off. The disadvantages of live filming were on a honking display here. Oh I almost forgot, the 30 million won thing, I have no words for how stupid that was..

So why do I still rate the show at 7.5?
Well, I enjoyed the first half (more like 2/3rds), there was quite a lot of "Monogatari style" dark moody, but funny dialog. The romance was great up to the point when Yongsik's mother started interfering with them. The balance was perfect between romance,comedy and mystery too up until XYZ died. Even though I'm not happy with the last 6~ episodes, I would feel bad to give a show this memorable a score any less than this.
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