Junho's baritone will shake your boots

A good watch, a romantic historical drama from 2021. Junho's baritone will shake your boots and the FL, Lee Se Young, always refuses to be a doormat (no midway sudden caving into passivity). A very very excellent script properly restrained by historical facts, which imagines real people struggling in a real world with love, responsibility and agency.

On a cautious search for oldies but goodies I found this and recommend it for 3 reasons. 1/ It makes really good use of the idol-actor Junho. 2/ It is the very best kind of pleasant sageuk -- real content, real problems, best outcomes possible within limits. 3/ A great example of 2 of the best features of asian dramas in general: the use of dramatic problematics (underlying social issues) and the humanization of villains -- especially in formulaic romantic and comic dramas.

1. Junho was brilliant in Just Between Lovers/Rain or Shine (2017), but for just a second or two I warily watched him here for King the Land signs of blandness; decided it is how the script and director use his talents that matters. As an ML who hesitates to be vulnerable Junho's stolidity works. As Crown Prince Yi San/King Jeonjo he is at his most masculine and charismatic -- that voice! The underlying problematic of the show is issues of consent, and without Junho this would skirt ugliness. With him it is a swoon a minute.

2. Sageuk is an unexportable Korean miracle due to the unique continuous history of Korea -- C-drama is similarly so. I absolutely adore the rationality/ethical concerns of Cdrama and I equally love the emotional royal family contretemps of sageuk. The soundtrack has a hopeful sweet lilt, factions at court and within the royal family are clear (no confusing three or four old ministers dressed the same with similar facial hair). True love eventually sort of wins but real social problems are not glossed over.

3. In historical or history-fantasy dramas, the dramatic use of modern problematics does not feel anachronistic; rather, it is used to deepen or heighten the surface emotional response of viewers to the basic plot. By problematics I mean underlying issues which are treated as recurring dramatic notes or nexus, not for exposition or persuasion. The issue of consent deepens our understanding of the sadness of the situation of the court ladies who are prisoners for life within the palace.

So many of the supporting characters in Red Sleeve have little perfect moments of lived life in the show, but especially the villains are treated as flawed human beings in an inhumane world. The old King, paranoid, ruthless and beloved by his grandson the ML, is developing dementia. Lee Deokhwa as the King is amazing, watch the good and the bad of his character unfold through the show.

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Style, emotion and amazing stunt choreography

An amazing binge for martial arts lovers. Always in my top ten or twenty best ever thriller/action dramas and good for a rewatch any time. Ji Chang Wook's excellent interpretation of a damaged ex-mercenary with PTSD and a murdered lover in his past, who falls for an emotionally disturbed woman imprisoned by her abusive political family, is classic international noir stuff. It is Korea, so this ML instinctively protects the elderly and seeks emotional refuge with them when wounded. He can break tempered glass with just a chisel and his work boots.

The K2 has the intense emotions and atmospherics and great editing of most k-drama thrillers. The usual brilliant kdrama humanization of villains is complete genius in this show.As always, great supporting characters with enough comic strengths to divert the intensity momentarily. It is a romance, too, but given the genre one expects some twisted perspective and it arrives with a vengeance.

On my third watch I realized how much I utterly love the villains of the piece, almost more than the sweet leads. Their ever-evolving plots involve the explosion and recreation of changing alliances like the huge schools of fish who revolve, collide and coalesce endlessly in the sea.

One of the all time worst (or do I mean best) product placement involves the lovers eating at Subways in a dream sequence within the ML's coma. There is also a marginally more tasteful and very funny naked male group battle scene in the corporate showers.

Mainly the K2 is a piece of masterful stunt artwork played out to 'Dies Irae' while black-suited corporate 'security guards' ballet about with 'body guards' from the opposing faction of an extremely corrupt Presidential election campaign. Ex army members are in cahoots with corrupt ex administration officials.

Watching JCW attack from an aerial 45 degree angle is priceless fun and for me, it doesnt ever get stale. So I call this a show perfect in itself. 2018, 16 eps of std. length. A sophisticated and classy production from Studio Dragon with the composer Kim Se Jin. Writer -- Jang Hyuk Rin.

On my top ten best ever kdramas list as of 12/24: Goblin, Hwayugi, Because This Is My First Life, Just between Lovers; the K2, Run On, Doom at Your Service; Tomorrow, Alchemy of Souls (earliest to latest) and Mr. Plankton .

ps. I salute the heroic efforts of women in kdrama and film industry to obtain more varied roles in order to develop themselves as artists, to seek better funding for those roles and more directorial support -- all in an atmosphere where part of the audience seems to need to see a lot of damaged or infantile FLs, and where creators therefore indulge them with female characters who are more symbolic than real, embodying the 'soul' psychic energy of the plot.

simultaneously posted on viki

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Unique, edgy and brilliant

One of my top ten favourite kdramas from the past few years. Unforgettably sad, unforgettably funny. Also, an excellent introduction to the pressures of life in Korea, some of which are universal but some of which are unique to the history and sociological culture of the peninsula.

A fusion fantasy/scifi/healing drama about an understaffed, experimental and not very gentle team of Grim Reapers tasked with easing the pressure that Korea's high suicide rate is putting on an overcrowded Hell. A Korean Hell just for Koreans, by the way -- one of my favourite scenes has the head of the Grim Reaper Escort Team, Park Joong Gil (played by Lee Soo Hyuk), rescuing a group of Korean souls during WWII who were being stolen off to a Japanese Hell by a pair of Japanese Reapers!

Euphemistically named the Risk Management Team of the Jumadeung Corporation, the Team Manager is a parolee from Hell, Koo Ryeon (played by Kim Hee Sun), who has a tough love approach to her work. For example scaring silly a van full of would-be suicides using online instructions, by driving the wrong way through traffic until they beg to be allowed to live. When this fails she uses her supernatural powers.

Her only employee is Lim Ryung Gu (played by Yun Ji On) who refuses to work more than his 8 hr shift (so rebellious in SK context!). The Jade Emperor(ess), the CEO of the squeakily antiseptic white-walled corporate Jumadeung skyscraper, decides to add a recently comatose soul wandering freely as a temporary worker to the team. Choi Jun Woong (played by Kim Seok Woo a.k.a. Rowoon) had just begged the heavens to give him an employee ID card by any means, when he fell off a Han River bridge trying to stop a suicide jumper.

The Team is alerted to each case by a 'negative energy' alert monitor app and they use a variety of scifi methods to investigate each one: entering the subject's dreams or their memories (with very Matrix-like FX), observations of their work environments along with persuasion on a personal level.

Jun Woong slowly transforms Koo Ryeon's approach to suicide prevention as he matures from a bumbling and irrepressible newbie into a hugely compassionate and effective intervention agent. The absolute and pure warmth of Rowoon's performance elevates what would have been a grittily comic Reaper story into something only Korea could have produced, a full length (16 eps at 1hr ea.) clear-eyed depiction of the cascade of forces which drive a person to fear tomorrow more than death.

I stopped at over two dozen listing all of the misfortunes woven into the stories of the dozen or so individual cases the Team handles, Each crisis is developed in original ways, often with an interesting point of view.

One woman feels so guilty over not believing the stories of the suffering of the Korean 'comfort women' enslaved into prostitution by the Japanese Army of WWII because her best friend was taken by them, that she contemplates taking her life. The Team asks her to meet with another sufferer who wanted to see someone who had known their mutual friend before she passed away, and so their pain is sweetly dissolved through tears.

The IMF crisis which deprived so many families of their livelihoods is seen through the eyes of a little child who only remembers a miraculous birthday, and the fried chicken event staged by the team helps to save him as an adult struggling with exam failure. The threads connecting the past with the present have seldom been so delicately indicated,

The show balances the unchanged penalty for suicide in the afterworld as a crime with deeply moving episodes portraying individual suffering which elicit compassion from the viewer. The joy of Tomorrow is two-fold; to watch Koo Ryeon stomping the bejeezus out of all the cruel and thoughtless people who torment others to make themselves feel better is exhilarating, and Rowoon's unique ability to project sincere love, care and compassion is the one true message of this beautiful show.

A StudioN/MBC show, with the composers Jo Seung Woo and Won Ho Kyung. Writers -- Park Ran, Park Ja Kyung and Kim Yu Jin.

On my top ten best ever kdramas list as of 12/24: Goblin, Hwayugi, Because This Is My First Life, Just between Lovers; the K2, Run On, Doom at Your Service; Tomorrow, Alchemy of Souls (earliest to latest) and Mr. Plankton .

The creators of the show, the writers and the directors deserve enormous credit. Hoping to see more of their work.

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You wont be able to stop watching Kele/Sun Ze Yuan.

Fluff. Utter fluff, but addicting Cdrama fluff. You wont be able to stop watching Kele/Sun Ze Yuan. A 10star for the pleasure of watching him, altho this drama is about a 8/9 w/o him. Ke Le has that camera charisma which cannot be learned and when onscreen for 16 hours is so charming you cant get it out of yr head.

24 eps at 40 mins ea. New Cdrama structure? A good one for a lighter work. Possibly an innovation but for which audience? Internal, over seas chinese speakers, or the international one? this is a review I'll take down in a few months, a long one, more abt the genre than the show.

Standard idol drama -- young petty romance actor inexperienced in love (for good reason, who would want this guy) accidentally cohabits with smart pretty woman-- ooh it must be cdrama, she is the smart one of the pair and from a good family that's not even a chaebol -- but oh its kdrama formula, she has psychological problems.

The secondary characters are fun and goodlooking, but somewhat sterotyped. However the entertainment industry frame is always so pleasant: the managers, the investors, the rival actors who will stop at nothing to destroy each other, the problems of the internet age and fame, it's all good.

I enjoy a modern Cdrama for five reasons -- literary skills are desirable and respectable in characterization, there is more skinship in romances, modern financial fictional circumstances, less predictability than a stylized kdrama, and overall it is a nice break from the same.

This one is predictable, and there are better versions out there with a similiar plot. Yet I adored this to the end. Confession time -- I am a kdrama fan, totally used to formulaic work, who enjoys over-the-top weirdness, surrealistic framing and absurd moments...so for me this was mild fare; a little too much in the middle between a K and a Cdrama. Too silly for a cdrama, too rational for a kdrama. But let not sentimentality hold us back, right now creators are working like crazy for international recipes and lets celebrate what we get on the way!

first posted on viki sept 20th 2024

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Underground resistance fighters battle the occupiers, moral ambiguity and romance complicate things

A good watch, 2hrs and 20mins, a spy thriller from 2015, very successful at the box office in SK. Good costumes and sets, very cool acting.

Do not watch on a whim late at night as I did, only to realize 15 minutes in that I had completely lost track of events. The first scenes are set in 1911, in the 6th year of the 40-year long Japanese Occupation of Korea, and the main assassination plot takes place in 1933 in the 28th year of the Occupation. If you prefer to prepare with a complete spoiler the Wikipedia article on the show itself is very clear. I dont do spoilers but I offer two pointers, one to plot and one to perspective.

1. The premise is set up clearly in the first few scenes but do not be kdrama lazy and assume all will be made clear, this is a spy thriller and you have to keep on your toes. Pay attention to Yem and to Kang later on, respectively the resistance fighter captured after the weird attack on the rich collaborator, which results in the killing of Kang's wife, and the loss of one of his twin baby girls (spirited away by a chinese midwife).

2. Try this rough imagination hack to understand the twisted lines of loyalty and love in 1933 Korea. So, if Germany, France and the British Isles correspond to Japan, Korea and China imagine:

-Germany had successfully invaded France in 1940 and set up a puppet govt which was only ousted after a gigantic international war in 1975-1980 (cruelty, torture, massacres, the suppression of the French language in schools and all civil institutions).

-Meanwhile Germany used France as a base to wage a protracted war from 1968 to 1980 against a distracted UK riven by an internal civil war (coastal British cities sacked and occupied, war crimes galore).

-An assassination plot targeting a 1968 wedding in Paris of a German general's son to a rich Frenchman's daughter falls into chaos like Casablanca on steroids due to the usual divided alliances and survival needs of the people involved and the way romance and family have a tendency to transcend allegiances. Love espionage, nothing like it.

simultaneously posted on viki

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Great watch but Pt2 may not be for everyone

Great watch but Pt2 may not be for everyone -- geek scifi and early modern history fans will perk up and smile. Qi-problems sideline our bold brassy boy from any martial action for much of Pt2; Fan Xian gets one truly spectacular, mistaken and vertiginous duel. The grandmaster system starts to become a subject for thought.

Much thinner, FX steadfastly makes his way forward now as a true insider in the capital city, once Dad-the-Emperor sort of acknowledges him. Exeunt the std hero plots, enter a sci-fi steam punk search for Mom's identity, while DtE uses FX to claw back control of Mom's seed projects: the Overwatch Council (and associ.ated govt agencies) and the Imperial Treasury. FX fights public corruption and sweet chubby-cheeks Fan Sizhe invents economic theory (I knew he could do it. Fangirl here).

The Dad-cabal still manages to fascinate -- adoptive-Dad, Dad-in-law, super-mentor-"dad", and somebody-else's-Dad (Yan Bing Yun has a future ahead) all joust with Bio-DtE over how their retirements will play out. Poor dears, always upended by some long involved strategy of DtE which is only recognizable via its final result.

FX begins to self-define as a grownup -- feelings are more important to him than they are or were to either parent, justice is his Mom's gift to him and he has clearly inherited his Dad's skillful, calculating and often violent strategic action. But will he ever get to settle down with his Wan-er? I hope so. However as an historian I can smell reform of the armed forces coming on ....

Most of Pt1 actors/charcters return and develop further. The irrepressible Elder Princess and the Second Prince (I feel a sneaking fondness for his little cat face and his pretty bare feet ) return but do not change. Most of the horrific violence occurs offstage to the suffering People, in the imperial family violence is a constant threat only rarely carried out.

Random thought: the constant shots of main characters' footwear seem not to have any poetic logic, and surely they arent ppl...

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Espionage done right, a balance of style, grit and gore.

Wonderful show. Espionage done right, a balance of style, grit and gore. Murky office politics, alliances that break and are reformed and just enough of the lone wolf, Nam Koong Min, stubbornly struggling to understand himself and to find the perfect mole. Very nice plays on the genre. Lots of fights. I like them but you may not. My favorite things: 3 fully characterized female colleagues sharing the screen time, none of them all good or all bad. NM, as a stoic muscular handsome beast, both puzzled and pugnacious.
My warning, requires as much intellectual fortitude as much shorter novels or movies but for 12 hours. You Must Take Breaks, or you risk breaking your mind. Eps 13-14 are a prequel set in the 20teens.

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Gong Yoo and Namkoong Min in the same frame, but bellowing all over the place

Total soap opera ca 2006. Good character-driven script, broken and blended family theme with an obsessed incestuous stepbrother/half brother tormenting the FL. 2 surviving families, 5 siblings. The ML, adopted, is without a blood tie.

Reasons to watch: Namkoong Min, Gong Yoo, the streets of Seoul still modest and fresh in '06, a great escapist ocean theme -- deep saturated blues and greens, an aquarium workplace, mostly shot on sunny days in Seoul and partly in Sydney. NKM and GY are in their 20s, fluffy-haired, with widelegged pants draped over the arches of their shoes.

Reason not to watch: Korean male-bellowing to obtain control of a conversation is omnipresent, not confined as now to peripheral characters in dramas, but even between the leads(!), and no one seems to notice. The wrist-grabbing and dragging is pretty awful too.

I have read that My Girl in 2005 was a watershed in the depiction of strong independent FLs. I think that in MG the Hong sisters also reduced the amount of corrosive manipulation by the MLs as well, at least that is what I infer when I watch this show in which the MLs are not so restrained.

The so-called post '05 "stronger" FL still struggles, from 2006 through now in 2024, to find a space in which she can actually have agency and where her efforts are recognized and respected.

So often what a script represents is a space in which what the FL wants to say is completely delegitimized, so much so that she subsides in tearful confusion over and over again, silently. Her only freedom is to say no, or to refuse to make choices which are forced upon her.

In this show and in My Girl the FLs actually speak in a reflective manner, and they freeze only in order to have time to think. How did it become ok for so many heroines after this to suffer silently? or to talk incessantly as a form of avoiding having to speak sincerely?

first posted on viki sept 19th 2024

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a ghost story in a shopping mall -- what's not to like?

The Hong Sisters' 9th script, standard length -- 16 eps at +- 1hr ea.

A good drama from an emotional standpoint if you can hang in there for the first few episodes. A proper Chaebol/CEO story combined with ghosts in a shopping mall (sounds good doesn't it?) and a disheveled psychic who is utterly terrorized by said ghosts. Gong Hyo Jin is creepier than the ghosts to start off with, and the CEO constantly saves her even though he wants nothing to do with her. Do not watch this just after watching The Greatest Love -- this pairing only superficially resembles those fabulous characters.

The script and soundtrack are more powerfully romantically affecting than Gong Hyo Jin's admitted acting skill and the charm of Jo Si Seob (he went onto success as a romantic lead after this). The revelations of their slow and prickly romance are fueled by another of those complicated structures of allusion and jokes which the HS can produce, and which are frustrating to guess at from the subtitles.

A total guess on my part, but most of the subtitles of MSappear to be so literal (i.e.close to the meanings of individual words in Korean) that I think the translators decided to try to give a taste of the verbal humor and play in that way, throwing caution and pronouns to the winds.

Physical touch/sexual attraction and the psychic invisible phenomena are the concepts which are constantly played with (the two words are"sound-alikes" in Korean, hehe). The pair discusses invisibility as part of selfishness -- she was so needy she couldn't "see" him...he is stuck in a mirroring past experience and couldnt see her real self.

The title Masters Sun and her name Tae (means sun) refer to another set of metaphors -- she is a shining light (sun) to ghosts in their world, so they flock to her like moths, but in the outer world she fears she is a darker light.

This attraction of total opposites is compared to a children's fable or book about a wolf and a goat. It sounds like when in Aesop the lamb tries to escape through fancy talk but the wolf cuts in with realpolitick and eats her/him, enough so that the viewer is quite worried about how it will all end.

ps. The CEO calls Seo inguk charater "Candy Kang" with great relish. It looks like a loosely attached Korean POV reference to Seo In Guk's rap stylistics at the beginning of his career. I cant read whether the HS wanted to characterize the CEO as sophisticated (or ignorant as it would be from a US POV). It may just have made cinematic sense to joke around about a truly terrifying young male black ghost trope common in a certain subgenre of hiphop, an image derived from a film/novel of the 80s/90s (look at yourself in the mirror and call the CANDYMAN 5x and he will appear!

first posted on Viki Sept. 23rd 2024

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imaginary history but still tugs at yr heartstrings

I cried tears of happiness at the ending -- one through-line from pansori to kdrama! The drums, some poetry, flashbacks, magical events, a family reunites and right on cue, we weep!

A great watch, imaginary history of course with a nice back-and-forth between the "invention" of the second great pansori tale, the Simcheongga, which involves a dragon-king under the sea and a noble self-sacrificing maiden with a blind father, and the plot of this movie, involving a blind daughter, a mother kidnapped to be used as slave labor and a poet-singer father. Not to mention a gosu drummer, a very shabby monk, an aristocrat in disguise as a drunk and many good pansori village audiences. Eolsigu! (yippee!) Jalhanda! (well done!)

simultaneously posted on viki

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famous cult show, Hong sisters' 5th

Recommended for sheer joy. 2009, 16 eps at 1hr ea. The Hong sisters 5th show, not a big hit on local tv, blew up in popularity on contemporaneous Japanese tv and thereafter online. It is has been a cult show for years. Smooth as silk kdrama, laughter and tears regularly provided. Essentially a teen love story about a teen band, mostly situated in their "dorm", an utter pop 60's fantasy piece of architecture, but all organic curves (what is this building??).

First hook-- a separated-twin story and a twin-masquerade story (in the West, 12th Night and The Menaechmi likewise floated to the frothy top of their respective cultural scenes).)

The opening scenes have a mediterranean feel, is it the "technicoloring", the nun costumes , the naked marble statues or the scooter jokes? Thereafter the show is about the emotional interactions of a small cast. So deceptively simple.

Second hook -- missing parents and other relatives provide the nec. structural mystery, and they and the antagonists swoop in and out of the 2 main sets as if they are making stage entrances.

In an HS script, look for what the HS do better, those places where their absolute bravura breaks through; not essentially in original plots or characters , but in how well they do them.

1. In this production, the use of what is essentially a chorus in ancient classical comedy/tragedy is wonderful. The fangirls who camp outside the company (afterschool?) wail and beat their breasts astoundingly and comment upon the action in silly ways. In the countryside visit the three old women are incredible, not only does their performance have perfect comic rhythm, but HS weaves in references to trot singers and specialized tv shows where the other half of Korea gets its impressions of entertainment. A quick meta to the history of music in SK, in an idol drama!!!

2. The recognition-of-the-lovers section comes a little later than expected, but when it does the carefully built-up system of metaphors and puns explodes as the characters deploy them in the service of conversations practically in code. The light of the "star" (and awfully, the moon as reflector of it/the sun) versus the light of the sun which blots out the recognition of others, darkness and light, hiding and paying attention, seeing and not seeing, showing and not showing. The ML has night-blindness, oh yes he does. The pleasure of the final tensions being resolved in poetic language is so intensely the HS' territory.

it is not useful to trace influence in a hectic renaissance time like this one where dramas run only for 2 months, performers and writers work for cheap for companies which have state monies to spend, and where many of the behind the scenes creatives have one of the excellent university degrees in theatre and film available in SK. The consequence of the hurly-burly is that any successful show is instantly imitated piecemeal by competitors looking for that secret sauce. Only those on the scene have any memories of what went into that creative process.

You're Beautiful is a show on par with Hwayugi in characters who are almost instantly recognizable after just the 1st episode. I loved Lee Hong Ki there as the unforgettable PK (and Lee se Young as his zombie friend Richie!) and I love him here as Jeremy, a character who reflects a prototype love-is-love theme. Jang Geun Suk rises from the ashes of HGD as a Heathcliff-ian ML. Yonghwa of the band cnblue is the 2ml in semi-love triangle!

Park Shin Hye is one of those heroic kdrama actresses who started working at the age of 13 and is still going strong 33 dramas later. Although her trippy little dove-of-christ characterization made my teeth grind, I can believe that that sort of naivete existed somewhere before my own era--nowadays most nuns and novitiates after Vatican II are amazingly truehearted, practical and energetic persons. And of course, PSH's performance is a perfect, absolutely perfect, foil to the comedy (the term 'straight man' in reference to comic pairs is now unusable or I would use it).

Here is a question, are the Hong sisters basically insanely lucky in casting and directors so that their intelligent, flippant and tightly constructed scripts are thus given that HS stratospheric oomph?

first posted aug 12th, 2024 on Viki

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Gong Yoo shines brilliantly in the dark

A melodramatic thriller centred on 2 leads and the collision of the utter snakepits each of their lives have become individually. Psychologically claustrophobic plot. Gong Yoo (as Han Jeong Won) and Seo Hyun Jin (as Noh In Ji) work brilliantly together as 2 anti-heroes who yearn for happiness but are trapped not just by manipulative and abusive friends and family, but by their own numbed and stilled psyches. Gong Yoo, suffocated and angry, as always emotes with every careful move of his body and gaze. Seo Hyun Jin's character uses her beautiful closed face to survive so the actress clearly indicates her thought processes by her timing and her movements. When Inji loses control and starts in on the usual FL idiocy (taking all the blame on herself etc.) it doesn't last long.

The main set, the home of Jeong Won's dead parents is one of those architectural excesses symbolically perfect for the hermit-crab existence of JW in the grandiose ruins of his horrible family history. The central element is a modern chandelier of grotesque Versailles proportions hanging over a two story central space off which open all the living areas. In Ji is inserted into this cave-like structure by a semi-sinister version of a matchmaking bureau which specializes in discreet temporary contract-marriages for transactional reasons. JW's ex, a malevolent architect herself, also fits into this set as an absent presence, since she herself actually engineered the whole premise of the show, the dual contract-marriages. The strengths of the performances of Jung Yun Ha and Lee Woo (as her own temporary husband) are central to the plot and to the success of the show overall.

This is a good watch for fans of kdrama for whom plot doesn't matter as much as camerawork, soundtrack and the play of formulaic expectations. A great watch for Gong Yoo fans who always knew he would be smoking hot in bed. But it is a show which bends the rules for the OTP so far that it will be up to you to decide whether or not you have been emotionally deceived and how cynically this was done.

At 8 episodes of 1hr ea. we are looking at one of the new lengths for a kdrama. At this point writers and directors have to decide which standard elements to keep, how much time to allot to them etc. In my timid opinion (timid bec the extremely distinguished director, Kim Kyu Tae is obviously fully intentional in his choices) this type of story needed a 10 ep. structure in order to more firmly establish a key anchor for kdrama, the relationships of family and friends over time as context. At 8 eps, the show was way intense, and the standard time-jump later on in the show felt more jarring than usual. I didnt feel ready for it.

My advice for getting around this is not to binge the whole show at once and go to sleep unhappy, as I did, because I woke up the next day with a completely different perspective and decided I loved the Trunk. The next day I disliked it, the next day...I needed time to appreciate it, and in a classic 16 ep form that appreciation would have been done in tandem with the usual chorus of observers (families, friends and village idiots) within the drama itself. Those characters were in the story but I literally felt they needed their own small corners (time, musical themes etc) to thrive in. Therefore the discussion and perspective has to be internal to the spectator, as in a movie....



The kdrama phenomenon is built on 3 pillars. 1/ Technical power of the soundtrack combined with careful editing to produce a range of emotions swiftly and exactly. 2/Extremely sophisticated comic sensibility combined with essential theatrical structures and astoundingly skilled camerawork to produce real aesthetic satisfaction, 3/The imaginary reintegration of a positive and hopeful society via the love of family and friends and communal meals and other rituals. I think that 3/ is not satisfied here. The fans love the weird romantic formulas but they occur ontop of the engine for producing those feelings.

On sex. love and formulas: Kdrama love is built on an exchange of symbolic promises of care and support. These include bandaiding, tentative and sometimes complicated handholding, sleeping together without sex mainly so that love can be awoken by watching the partner's childlike and vulnerable face, gift-giving, and feeding. Near-death experiences of one of the pair are often necessary. The actual protestation of love is couched in terms of care and protection - I will always be by your side, etc. Sex has to occur very near the culmination of most of this. The weakness of this show is the placement of these elements out of sequence, when one of the basic pillars of kdrama is a little weak. Modernizing kdrama is always perilous but necessary, so kudos for the effort.

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Yah! A Woman Blows Her Top

Park Bo Young plays one of the great funny heroines, Tak Dong Kyung (DK), who, liberated by a prognosis of brain cancer doom, blows her top at her horrible boss. "Yah!" , best described a a pragmatic expression of extreme annoyance on steroids, effectively freezes the recipient in his/her tracks. Love it. And she keeps on breaking out of her good-girl place.

Really really great script. Phooey to the critics. Huge themes, huge reversals, very tight very funny dialogue. Four main sets, the office of the editing co, the cafe at ground floor, a huge man's living room in gray and stone which MM attaches to one wall of DK's yellow and pink (with red accents) rooftop apartment and the hospital.

Seo In Guk as Myung Mal/Kim Sa Ram/Doom (MM) and the adorable Dawon as DK's younger brother, are the foils to Bo Young''s performance. MM is an embodiment of a word like doom used to describe a person's allotted (i.e. semi-ordained) lifespan and fate combined. He is not a helpful Grim Reaper guiding souls, but more like a fail-safe for death's prerogatives (similarly to the Greco-Roman Nemesis).

He is DK's "doom" and she is his fate. A 6 ft. tall black-clad wish-granting boyfriend with a bad temper and a webtoon editor fall in love, perfect. She ends up facing a choice between the entire world being destroyed or her boyfriend ceasing to exist, but NB. this choice is governed by a contract which MM/Doom made with her while in a self-destructive mood.

DK also gets to meet God, or at least the god of this world, who describes herself as the gardener of the Garden and MM as a butterfly. The metaphor is shifty, but the hospital is the scene of much of the action, the lovers meet there, the family unites aroung DK's illness, and god in her current incarnation is a child with a heart condition.

Dk does go into the noble self-sacrificing mode (its all my fault blah blah blah) for an episode but it doesnt last too long. Luckily the 2couple-plus-a-spare are the actors Lee Soo Hyuk, Kang Tae Oh and Shin Do Hyun, who all should get respect and better roles than they have had so far. They are brilliant here.

A Studio Dragon show with the composer Lim Ha Young. The writer is Im Me Ah Ri (beauty Inside).

On my top ten best ever kdramas list as of 12/24: Goblin, Hwayugi, Because This Is My First Life, Just between Lovers; the K2, Run On, Doom at Your Service; Tomorrow, Alchemy of Souls (earliest to latest) and Mr. Plankton .

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Clever cute, funny and sweet

Clever, cute, funny and sweet. Every fan has a favorite light romedy and Run On is mine, my 'Paris' drama -- the romantic and sentimentalized view of Paris in light midcentury comedy is so like the image of Seoul now, a city made solely for lovers....4 lovers wander in and out of one of those great cafe settings where artists could meet patrons and lovers can eavesdrop jealously; no one suddenly develops a fatal illness and lovers' misunderstandings are honest mistakes, not willful blundering.

All 4 have intense and very different professional lives -- when love calls them out into each other's worlds, all four are clueless for awhile. Bridges have to be built, concepts have to be translated, lovers struggle to understand. A grown-ups' world where lovers can be childish with each other and men weep when they are sad instead of going all morose. Wonderful and fully developed supporting characters fill out the main leads' narratives.

Siwan's character, Ki Seon Gyeom (SG) at first seems very slow on the uptake. A sprinter on the national team, a compliant child of an actress mother and an awful hypocrite of a father, we see him through the eyes of Shin Se Kyung's xcharacter, Oh MiJoo (MJ). MJ is the heart of this piece, the real POV, a film translator and subtitler who sometimes does some live interpreting. Shin Se Kyung's voice is so wonderful, both warm and sarcastic with a wide range of emotional expression, and her portrayal of MJ is of an active, hardworking intelligent woman. She always keeps on running metaphorically forward towards a life she has chosen, with a great mane of auburn hair rippling like a flag behind her.

MJ's changing descriptions of SG inform our own view of him, at first 'odd' (seen. even by his teamates as distant/arrogant), then bafflingly restricted verbally, (she of course is very verbal with her friends). Suddenly in civilian clothes a real beauty, and slowly more expressive as bit by bit as he and she work their way to understanding the close tie they feel almost from the beginning. She and the viewer finally see him as adorable and his constant steady attention to her as the faithfulness of a true romantic lead.

Luckily so, because the second couple generates enough steam and smoke for a whole other drama. Written in classic point/counter point with the more realistic and careful OTP, Kang Tae Oh as Yonghwa (YW) and Choi Soo Young as Seo Danah (DA) are nearly equal to them in screen time, action and arc. This is a deliberate move because the underlying theme is an exploration of the poisonous remnants of a once rigid, systematic ,and highly detailed mostly male social hierarchy.

The longest arc in the story are the individual results of a scandal involving really violent bullying in the national team, where one member turns his anger and jealousy of SG upon a more vulnerable teammate. SG's life is changed by his solid moral compass and refusal to hide the scandal. MJ serves as interpreter for an interview the victim gives to the international press and she translates the subsequent English article for online publication. SG embarks on a journey of self-discovery with MJ, while his real personal strengths and abilities become clearer to the viewer.

The script contains many funny gender reversals and commentaries on the concept of hierarchy and power, some subtle, some played more broadly for laughs. A JTBC show with Kim Se Jin as composer. Writer -- Park Shi Hyun.

On a first watch I recommend looking forward to a real debacle of a birthday party, SG and NJ's first two meetings, and Dan-ah's and Younghwa's last fight.

Hope y'all enjoy Run On as much as I do!

On my top ten best ever kdramas list as of 12/24: Goblin, Hwayugi, Because This Is My First Life, Just between Lovers; the K2, Run On, Doom at Your Service; Tomorrow, Alchemy of Souls (earliest to latest) and Mr. Plankton .

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