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theromanamputee
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Heartwarming story of personal growth
This worked really well for me as a chronicle of the ML's personal growth. He was such a lovable guy that my heart ached to see him suffering so much, and I was so invested in watching him work on overcoming his anxiety and self esteem issues. The show did a good job balancing its comedic and dramatic moments. I also liked how the drama focused primarily on him changing his mindset rather than his circumstances and that his happy ending didn't come from making lots of money of getting a super fancy career. I'm not sure I 100% buy into the leads as having some great love story (it didn't help that time that could have been spent developing their relationship was wasted on an engagement misdirect between the FL and the second ML near the end) but I did enjoy watching them bond as they worked to solve his ED together and I was convinced the FL had also engaged in some much needed personal growth over the course of the series.Was this review helpful to you?
Smart, funny, a pleasure to watch
This show is an absolute blast. What impressed me most is how it managed to work so well as a spoof/meta commentary on kdrama conventions without diminishing the stakes and power of its story. It's so consistently funny and and creative and exciting while also still having emotional heft during the moments when it goes for earnest sincerity. A drama Anthony himself would have been proud to produce. I'll never look at orange juice the same way again.Was this review helpful to you?
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My spoon is too big
This was a fresh and exciting spin on the monkey's paw concept. It was full of clever plot twists, intense personal and familial drama, and of course lots of social commentary on how being poor and being obscenely wealthy can both wreck your life in certain ways. It was interesting to see what did and didn't change about the various golden spoon swappers' personalities after they assumed their new identities. I appreciated the moral complexity of their choices and circumstances. I do think the show struggled at times to handle the ramifications of big time jump that kicked off the second half of the drama. The characters didn't always feel like 10 years had actually transpired in their lives. The love lines and potential love triangles were conceptually interesting but fell flat in execution, there was not one ounce of chemistry between any of the potential romantic pairings.Was this review helpful to you?
129 episodes of delightful chaos
This one is a real trip. It's impressive how entertaining this show is given most of it is just watching people yell at each other in tackily decorated living rooms. Sometimes to mix it up they yell at each other in their offices, in the street, or at the hospital. There's also plenty of slapping, hair pulling, and water to the face because sometimes words just aren't enough for all the big feelings and big drama every character is consumed by all the time. There is some filler and repetitiveness, particularly in the beginning (we get it, Eun Jae is saintly and downtrodden) but on the whole this show was good at keeping me entertained and invested in its flamboyant ridiculousness. The guy who played Gun Woo was underwhelming but every other actor seemed to have a keen understanding of how best to play this type of material and they delivered appropriately...enthusiastic performances that were always fun to watch.Was this review helpful to you?
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Good trash
A solid trash panda watch. I appreciated the brisk pace, the flashy action, and all the debauched rich person family drama. Give me some infidelity, some shame babies, some embezzlement, some murder and other assorted mayhem and I'm a happy camper. The show's tone was enjoyably campy. It is too bad both the leads were dull characters and their barely there "romance" was dry as hell because everything going on around them was really fun.Was this review helpful to you?
What does it mean to love someone?
My favorite thing about this show was how it managed to provide a lot of ridiculous soapy excess while also wrestling intelligently with its central thematic concern: the importance of timing in determining whether a relationship succeeds or fails. Successful romances aren't just built on who you love, but when and how you love. Early on Phoenix sells the audience on the powerful attraction between the leads as well as the significance of the internal and external obstacles that drive them apart and keep them estranged for so long. I was so emotionally engaged by these characters and their tortured circumstances even though I wanted to wring their necks a lot of the time. I thought this show also did a job making the typical plot obstacle second leads interesting characters in their own right because they're just so messy and weird. The second FL in particular was such a great baddie. There was some dragginess and repetition in the second half of the drama, as well as a minor and totally unnecessary "comic relief" subplot between a few useless supporting characters that could have easily hit the cutting room floor, but I was still captivated enough to binge 26 episodes in 4 days.Was this review helpful to you?
Incredible Jang Na Ra performance
What an acting master class from Jang Na Ra. She was so impressive in this role, and I was so emotionally invested in her character from the outset. This was so intense and unpredictable, it did a great job of making me feel unsettled about what was going to happen next in the same way our unreliable narrator protagonist was. I thought the treatment of the FL's mental illness and childhood trauma was tender and sensitive and really moved me. The plot does get messy in the final episodes, it was overly convoluted and contrived in some respects, and there's one prominent supporting character I completely lost track of his motivations as the show progressed. However, they got the most important thing right, which was the FL's character arc.Was this review helpful to you?
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Weak leads, fun supporting characters, entertaining enough plot
This is good trashy fun whenever we're focusing on the villains, mom's revenge, or the large and colorful supporting cast. Oh Wol in particular had a really satisfying arc. Both the supposed leads are very stupid, surprisingly irrelevant to the story, and have one of the worst "romances" I've ever seen put to the screen. Props to the show for not having them end up together, they really did seem better off as "siblings."Was this review helpful to you?
Uneven but good enough
This was at its best when it was soapy and silly. The two villains were great and I had fun with just how hard they went with orphan angst/birth secret drama. When the show was at its most overheated and ridiculous it really was a treat. When the show tried to be earnest and heartfelt I found it to be less successful. The main love line was totally unconvincing and while I can't deny how cute the young actors were the found family scenes with them just felt like filler to me.Was this review helpful to you?
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So many feelings
As I watched this I thought repeatedly of Roger Ebert's quote about movies being "machines that generate empathy" because that's exactly what this show was. The two leads, who are drawn into each other's lives during a period of adversity, love each other and take care of each other in such a selfless way. The warmth and tenderness of their conversations, their easy physical intimacy (there's only one quick, chaste kiss scene in the whole drama but I didn't feel deprived because of how swoony the hugging/cuddling scenes were), and their deep compatibility with each other moved me greatly. I got emotionally invested in the supporting characters as well, particularly the landlady of the FL's boarding house and the landlady's childhood friend who is also grieving a severe loss. This packs such a wallop emotionally and is so tender and thoughtful in how it treats its characters and relationships I was able to forgive the occasional bits of sloppy writing (like how the A.I. tech no sense if you think about it, or how Soon Ho was willing to betray her "uncle" to protect a sullen jerk she had known for 5 minutes). A beautiful, alternately heart wrenching and heart warming work.Was this review helpful to you?
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Kim So Yeon I love you so
Watched this solely for Kim So Yeon and she did not disappoint. What a fantastic performance she gave, she was only 19 years old in this and already a master of her craft. I was always captivated the range of expressions on her face, the changes in her voice as she switched between steely and simpering, the flashes of vulnerability and relatability amidst all the awful behavior. Young Mi was such a well written character as well, someone who became deeply manipulative and resentful and cruelly ambitious, who uses other people to compensate for a neediness born of neglect and abuse. I couldn't get enough of her on my screen. My whole review is about her because nothing else about this drama is particularly interesting (the other characters are bland, the other performances are competent but unremarkable) but this one character and performance are good enough to make the show a worthwhile watch. It was also funny to see the Truck of Doom up to its old tricks as far back as 2000.Was this review helpful to you?
Sometimes you have to go on a journey...a blade journey
What a journey this show was. 2+ years ago I started watching this, thought it was terrible and dropped it during the third episode. However I decided to give it another shot because I was in the mood for a wacky show and I wanted to feed my perpetual Lee Dong Wook brainrot. The second time around I enjoyed the show a lot even though much of it is terribly written. The loud, over the top cartoony humor which I found obnoxious back then amused me this time, the show had surprisingly good production values, and despite how dumb it got I was strangely emotionally invested in the story and couldn't stop watching it. The relationship between the ML and his devoted secretary was the highlight. The romance/love triangle of sorts was deeply annoying because it was driven by truckloads of noble idiocy and constant miscommunication. The leads mainly sulk and squabble, there are few actually cute or romantic moments. Watching the last several episodes of this show was like tonguing a canker sore, painful yet irresistible. Don't look for any kind of consistent treatment of the fantasy element either. I'm giving this a much higher rating than it deserves by any objective metric but I have to live my truth, I was transfixed by this train wreck. It was just so weird and its mixture of sincerity and incompetence cast some kind of spell of me.Was this review helpful to you?
Will You Be a Dog or a Pig?
An intense, gut wrenching look at what trauma does to a person and how some wounds are just too severe to ever heal. All the childhood flashback scenes are harrowing, every scene is thick with dread and suffering and the violence has such an unsettling visceral power. As dark as this gets the brutality never feels forced or like gratuitous misery porn, we get a good sense of the how and why the bullies are allowed to run rampant. I also appreciated this show's nuanced take on justice and revenge. Kim Dong Wook and Kim Sung Gyu both gave excellent performances playing compelling characters, though I was frustrated by Dong Wook's lack of screen time. He absolutely killed it (pun intended?) in every single scene so I wanted more time with him. I think the show should have spent more time following him and less time following the cops investigating him.Was this review helpful to you?
Not enough meat on the bone
This was an enjoyable watch for a while. It had a warmth and heart to it I responded positively to and I was curious to see how the story and the characters were going to develop. However, I eventually became bored with it. The story is thin and cliched and the characters are two dimensional at best. The actors playing the boys in the band had an appealing natural chemistry with each other but that wasn't enough to compensate for how uninteresting they ultimately turned out to be as individuals and how rote their personal journeys were. This probably would have been a perfectly pleasant movie or miniseries but it was too shallow to sustain itself as a 16 episode drama.Was this review helpful to you?
