✒ ⛈Blue & True On Jeju ⛴ °8.5° °Excellent°
Jeju is Kcountry's Hawaii. It's where e'erbody wants to vacation. OB is an ensemble piece that is much like a vacation (or a series of daytrips, perhaps) with several of the characters. We visit them separately, but it all blends together.
Imagine growing up in touristy Hicksville. It's the sort of place where a poor kid might bring a piglet onto the bus, but there's a smattering of rich kids in the mix to mock the poor child. Surrounded by small-minded Hicksville, if one is smart, one might get to escape. We're describing Hansu. The kid with the piglet was his first gf. He went to the big city, attended a top university and landed a job in the financial industry. Things didn't stay afloat, though. They stalled, sputtered, and started to die out. After agonizing years on the skids he must crawl back home, where he learns that his uneducated, 🐷-loving, 🐟-monger ex is SWIMMING in money from slowly buying up small shops and collecting rent. Kids, none of you think you'll hit hard times. Most kids anticipate good things. Just treat everyone with respect and never get too cocky - just in case.
As the show starts, we drop in at the 🐟market on Jeju Island. A group of local women and two men go out on a boat for the day's catch. One of the women draws the ire of the others. 💭Should we fire her? 💭She flirts with everyone. 💭Everything she says is a lie, too! That's what the women are thinking. Cut to the men: ‘What would you think💭 if I went out with her?’ 🤣 One is asking the other. Does anyone else find the worldwide consistency of human nature reassuring? OB is a 2022 release that is rated 88 on AWiki. It is 1 season consisting of 20 55-minute episodes, and it's competent from the start.
It centers around the local fish industry, particularly the Haenyeo (female divers of Jeju Island). Per Wiki: Haenyeo (or haenyo - "sea women") “are female divers in the 🇰🇷 province of Jeju, whose livelihood consists of harvesting a variety of mollusks, seaweed, and other sea life from the ocean. Known for their independent spirit, iron will and determination, haenyeo are representative of the semi-matriarchal family structure of Jeju… Traditionally, girls started training as haenyeo when they were 11 years old. Beginning in shallow water, trainees worked their way up to more challenging depths. After about seven years of training, a girl was considered a "full-fledged" haenyeo. Today, the oldest haenyeo are over 80 years old, and have been diving for more than 66 years… Because so many families relied on the haenyeo for the majority of their income, a semi-matriarchal society developed on Jeju with the haenyeo at the head of the household. On the tiny islets off the coast of Jeju, such as Mara Island, where sea-diving was the sole source of income, this reversal of traditional gender roles was fully realized; men would look after the children and go shopping while the women would bring in money for the family. Other manifestations of Jeju's unique society include men paying a dowry to the family of the bride (a reversal of the custom on the 🇰🇷 mainland) and families celebrating the birth of girls over the birth of boys.” These are some baaaad broads.
The filming is competence all day long. Shots of the sun breaking through onto the water from a moving boat are gorgeous. Each episode’s intro reveals which couple it's covering. We rotate from the adults in the present to the kids of the past, showing the community's circle of life. They also cycle kids from the present into the rotation to create the feel that time will churn on. In one shot, a man doesn't merely remember his old self jumping in the ocean while in his street clothes, but he floats next to a vision of his former teenaged self. It's an exceptionally well done scene. A typhoon is coming. It coincides with the time a teen boy must tell his father that he got the daughter of dad's archenemy pregnant! There's adorable animation effects to represent a kid's dream. ‘Could I love a liar?’ A man wonders this as he writes those words on the glass. She calls him and asks if he misses her? We look at him, through the glass, through those words. “I do,” he says. The OST is VG. Once Again, by WINTER & NINGNING is a great song, as is Who am I, by Kim Ji Soo.
Here who we're dealing with:
Jung “Eun”-Hui & Choi Hansu: Cha Seung-Won is Hansu, a Jeju Island native who has to come crawling back from Seoul. When we meet him, we can see that he's a guy used to holding in pain. I've only seen him in Korean Odyssey-7.2, in which he plays Devil King, the consummate egotist. He commands that show. In OB, when his HS friend is complimenting him on growing up well, his look of ruffled discomfort along with deep sorrow is arresting. Seeing him as a defeated man in ep1 delights me because it showcases his range of talent. His acting only gets better. The great Lee Jung-Eun stars as Eun. She has, at times, taken my breath away with her skill. She plays a middle-aged spinster fishmonger who meets up with her first love again.
“Min” Seon-A & Lee “Dong”-Seok: To his mother: “What is your favorite memory?” “Right now,” she claims. She doesn't look particularly happy, though.🤔 He's played by Lee Byung-Hun, who is sort of a legend. It's strange to see Eugene Choi from Mr. Sunshine-9 or Squid Game's Front Man cutting loose and dancing, I must say. (And he can smile! Who knew?) The luminous Shin Min-A plays Min Seon-A, a Jeju native turned Seoul-cialite who must flee back to Jeju once in awhile. She improves every feature she appears in. She actually has carried some shows on those narrow shoulders. My favs are Oh My Venus-7.4, & Tomorrow with You-7 (despite its flaws), No Gain, No Love-7.4 is fun, and whoo don't luv some Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha-8.2? Whenever she returns, Dong is turned inside-out.
Park Jeong-Jun & Lee Yeong-”Ok”: Kim Woo-Bin is in the show as one of the fishermen, Jeong-Jun. He plays Choi Young Do in Heirs/The Inheritors. Not everyone loves that show but my vote is that it's worth watching for him alone. He steals it. He is fantastic in OB. He's simply got the goods. Ok (Han Ji-Min) is new in town and she's a gorgeous, flighty flirt. The women despise her, while the men don't seem to notice her deficiencies.
Bang Yeong-Ju & Jung Hyeon: Two HS students, whose fathers despise eachother. Each knows /exactly/ how to get back at dad. Bae Hyun-Sung & Roh Yoon-Seo are fabulous. She has a particularly strong presence. As is typical, all the kid actors are exceptional (especially Kim Jae-Won as the young Hansu - well - swoon on me! - and Ki So-Yu as Son Eun-Gi is outstanding). There's a superfluity of kids in the flashbacks, so we get a good look at the stars of tomorrow. There's also an epic teens' first kiss. “Epic” extends to the later fallout.
One couple talks about parents. She's fighting depression, and her father had committed suicide. Now, she's in the middle of a custody battle for her son. She talks about how she explained to her son, who is afraid of the dark, that her sickness makes her feel like she's in the dark even during the day. Even when there's other people around, she's always alone in the dark. As for the man, his relationship with his mother has stalled for years. "I wonder if my mother ever loved me as much as you love your son," he queries. The woman begins a poignant soliloquy. Did her dad love her? If so, how could he leave her? She realizes that life must have been incredibly difficult for him. Then she was flooded with resentment. Why didn't he tell me? I could have given him a hug! He should have told me he was struggling! I would have tried to make him smile. Soon, she starts to blame herself: She didn't /ask/ how he was. She never asked what was giving him such a hard time… She has regrets. {In the form of a PSA I'll say that unthinkable, absolutely unbearable pain is one cause of suicide, though it is not the right option. As another PSA, I'll say to always consider the potential effect of prescription medications on yourself or a loved one, because your doctors probably won't. Prescription drugs almost killed me and my doctors sat back and yawned as they observed. I don't think they are trained to even think about side effects, which are apt to worsen over time.}
Dong brings his mother to where he's staying and Min is there with her son. Mom, who was forced to be a man's mistress and put up with substandard treatment of her son in order to survive, looks at young Yeol and knows that her son, Dong, will do better. The full range of emotions displayed by actress Kim Hye-Ja (Mother-8.8), as she takes in woman and child, is magnificent. Everyone raves about Parasite-9, understandably so, but I like Mother-8.8, also by the legendary director Bong Joon Ho, even more.
Two old friends address a very old rift. ‘Had you been completely loyal you would have confronted me and said that you were hurt, just like you're doing right now. And if I didn't acknowledge my mistake and refused to apologize, you should have torn my hair out… That's what a loyal friend would have done… what kind of loyal friend holds a grudge like a stranger would?’
People are just a bunch of piranhas and peckerfish, afterall. Gossip (and, by extension, toxic pride) are themes, as is the weight of caring for someone with special needs. Caring for someone with special needs would be much easier without all the staring and nastiness. It's a human impulse to stare at something different - something extraordinarily beautiful, ugly, malformed, unique, short, tall, dark, light - something or someone unique. Maturity is learning to be unselfish, and to be unselfish, we must have empathy. We must be able to put ourselves in another's shoes and imagine what it would be like to have everyone stare all the time. What’s it like to be constantly asked about one's height, or a scar, skin color, disability, or beauty? Let people be. Don't be a peckerfish. Try being the one person who doesn't question a person's accent or some other thing they've had to deal with a dozen times a day.
A pair circles eachother tentatively. One of them has secrets. The other wants the truth. Ultimately, the truth will be about the one without the secrets, not the one who kept things close because of past heartbreak. They struggle because one is always waiting for a muddy shoe to drop and ruin everything: One of them has been conditioned to expect disappointment.
"I bet they even keep count of their neighbor's underwear." Small town gossip and general nosiness is on display. One of the old classmates who works at the fish market scolds Eun: “You shouldn't be hanging around with a married man!❗ …Have you eaten yet? Do you want to get some breakfast?" Of course, /he's/ married, too. The locals consider the wealthy Eun their own property. Anyone like Han-Su sniffing around could endanger her available funds. This leads into another theme···
"Just a Little Bit More." America's first billionaire, John Rockefeller, said that was how much money would be enough. The problem of money in relationships and the powerful temptation to suck-up to rich people is addressed. All of Eun's relationships are tarnished by the fact that she has money. It's part of her appeal. I've found myself acting differently around rich people over the years because I was horribly immature. Certainly, money is appealing, but rich people aren't necessarily so. Money is a hurdle that good character must overcome. Successful people tend to subconsciously believe they are intrinsically better, and thus more deserving of their good fortune. Wealth has a tendency to make people more self-focused and less generous as they turn their gazes inward. People have greater fear and pain from a loss than they have pleasure from a gain, and rich people see giving away money as a loss. Yet our subconscious prompts us to treat these types extra special in hopes that something will rub off. A friend of mine says that rich people will screw you over “because they can.” We get led away by what we want. The key is to not want much - be content. Take every person on their own character merits.
And dive into OB! It's that vacation you never want to end.
QUOTES📢
There's no way to satisfy everyone.
Don't say that with your beautiful mouth.
〰🖍 IMHO
📣8.5 📝8.2 🎭9 💓7 🦋5 🌞7 🎨6 ⚡4 🎵/🔊7 😅3 😭4.5 😱2 😯3 😖1 🤔4 💤2 🔚9
Age 14+ with the following cautions: R language F💣s, @$$hole × 2, B!+ch × 2, Sex, teen pregnancy, abortion. Rated: TV-MA: Mature Audience Only.
Re-📺? Likely
You May Also Like:
love to hate you 8.9
Touch your heart 8.2
Love Struck in the city 7.3
My Mister 9.5
I'll see you when the weather is fine 9
More than friends 8
A Witch's love 7.8
Romance is a bonus book 7.9
Hospital Playlist 9
It's okay not to be okay 9
Something in the Rain 9
Start-up 7.5
Her Private Life 8
My Sassy Girl / Yeopgijeogin Geunyeo 8.5
Live UpTo Your Name 7.6
My Only Love Song 8.7 (same FL)
Saimdang 8.5
Mr. Queen 8.5
Mr. Sunshine 9
The Kings's Affection 8.3
Rookie Historian 7.3
Try a Chinese historical romcom: The Romance of Tiger and Rose 9.8
Boys Over Flowers
My Secret Romance (too many flashbacks)
Mad For Each Other silly fun
Crash Landing On You
Imagine growing up in touristy Hicksville. It's the sort of place where a poor kid might bring a piglet onto the bus, but there's a smattering of rich kids in the mix to mock the poor child. Surrounded by small-minded Hicksville, if one is smart, one might get to escape. We're describing Hansu. The kid with the piglet was his first gf. He went to the big city, attended a top university and landed a job in the financial industry. Things didn't stay afloat, though. They stalled, sputtered, and started to die out. After agonizing years on the skids he must crawl back home, where he learns that his uneducated, 🐷-loving, 🐟-monger ex is SWIMMING in money from slowly buying up small shops and collecting rent. Kids, none of you think you'll hit hard times. Most kids anticipate good things. Just treat everyone with respect and never get too cocky - just in case.
As the show starts, we drop in at the 🐟market on Jeju Island. A group of local women and two men go out on a boat for the day's catch. One of the women draws the ire of the others. 💭Should we fire her? 💭She flirts with everyone. 💭Everything she says is a lie, too! That's what the women are thinking. Cut to the men: ‘What would you think💭 if I went out with her?’ 🤣 One is asking the other. Does anyone else find the worldwide consistency of human nature reassuring? OB is a 2022 release that is rated 88 on AWiki. It is 1 season consisting of 20 55-minute episodes, and it's competent from the start.
It centers around the local fish industry, particularly the Haenyeo (female divers of Jeju Island). Per Wiki: Haenyeo (or haenyo - "sea women") “are female divers in the 🇰🇷 province of Jeju, whose livelihood consists of harvesting a variety of mollusks, seaweed, and other sea life from the ocean. Known for their independent spirit, iron will and determination, haenyeo are representative of the semi-matriarchal family structure of Jeju… Traditionally, girls started training as haenyeo when they were 11 years old. Beginning in shallow water, trainees worked their way up to more challenging depths. After about seven years of training, a girl was considered a "full-fledged" haenyeo. Today, the oldest haenyeo are over 80 years old, and have been diving for more than 66 years… Because so many families relied on the haenyeo for the majority of their income, a semi-matriarchal society developed on Jeju with the haenyeo at the head of the household. On the tiny islets off the coast of Jeju, such as Mara Island, where sea-diving was the sole source of income, this reversal of traditional gender roles was fully realized; men would look after the children and go shopping while the women would bring in money for the family. Other manifestations of Jeju's unique society include men paying a dowry to the family of the bride (a reversal of the custom on the 🇰🇷 mainland) and families celebrating the birth of girls over the birth of boys.” These are some baaaad broads.
The filming is competence all day long. Shots of the sun breaking through onto the water from a moving boat are gorgeous. Each episode’s intro reveals which couple it's covering. We rotate from the adults in the present to the kids of the past, showing the community's circle of life. They also cycle kids from the present into the rotation to create the feel that time will churn on. In one shot, a man doesn't merely remember his old self jumping in the ocean while in his street clothes, but he floats next to a vision of his former teenaged self. It's an exceptionally well done scene. A typhoon is coming. It coincides with the time a teen boy must tell his father that he got the daughter of dad's archenemy pregnant! There's adorable animation effects to represent a kid's dream. ‘Could I love a liar?’ A man wonders this as he writes those words on the glass. She calls him and asks if he misses her? We look at him, through the glass, through those words. “I do,” he says. The OST is VG. Once Again, by WINTER & NINGNING is a great song, as is Who am I, by Kim Ji Soo.
Here who we're dealing with:
Jung “Eun”-Hui & Choi Hansu: Cha Seung-Won is Hansu, a Jeju Island native who has to come crawling back from Seoul. When we meet him, we can see that he's a guy used to holding in pain. I've only seen him in Korean Odyssey-7.2, in which he plays Devil King, the consummate egotist. He commands that show. In OB, when his HS friend is complimenting him on growing up well, his look of ruffled discomfort along with deep sorrow is arresting. Seeing him as a defeated man in ep1 delights me because it showcases his range of talent. His acting only gets better. The great Lee Jung-Eun stars as Eun. She has, at times, taken my breath away with her skill. She plays a middle-aged spinster fishmonger who meets up with her first love again.
“Min” Seon-A & Lee “Dong”-Seok: To his mother: “What is your favorite memory?” “Right now,” she claims. She doesn't look particularly happy, though.🤔 He's played by Lee Byung-Hun, who is sort of a legend. It's strange to see Eugene Choi from Mr. Sunshine-9 or Squid Game's Front Man cutting loose and dancing, I must say. (And he can smile! Who knew?) The luminous Shin Min-A plays Min Seon-A, a Jeju native turned Seoul-cialite who must flee back to Jeju once in awhile. She improves every feature she appears in. She actually has carried some shows on those narrow shoulders. My favs are Oh My Venus-7.4, & Tomorrow with You-7 (despite its flaws), No Gain, No Love-7.4 is fun, and whoo don't luv some Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha-8.2? Whenever she returns, Dong is turned inside-out.
Park Jeong-Jun & Lee Yeong-”Ok”: Kim Woo-Bin is in the show as one of the fishermen, Jeong-Jun. He plays Choi Young Do in Heirs/The Inheritors. Not everyone loves that show but my vote is that it's worth watching for him alone. He steals it. He is fantastic in OB. He's simply got the goods. Ok (Han Ji-Min) is new in town and she's a gorgeous, flighty flirt. The women despise her, while the men don't seem to notice her deficiencies.
Bang Yeong-Ju & Jung Hyeon: Two HS students, whose fathers despise eachother. Each knows /exactly/ how to get back at dad. Bae Hyun-Sung & Roh Yoon-Seo are fabulous. She has a particularly strong presence. As is typical, all the kid actors are exceptional (especially Kim Jae-Won as the young Hansu - well - swoon on me! - and Ki So-Yu as Son Eun-Gi is outstanding). There's a superfluity of kids in the flashbacks, so we get a good look at the stars of tomorrow. There's also an epic teens' first kiss. “Epic” extends to the later fallout.
One couple talks about parents. She's fighting depression, and her father had committed suicide. Now, she's in the middle of a custody battle for her son. She talks about how she explained to her son, who is afraid of the dark, that her sickness makes her feel like she's in the dark even during the day. Even when there's other people around, she's always alone in the dark. As for the man, his relationship with his mother has stalled for years. "I wonder if my mother ever loved me as much as you love your son," he queries. The woman begins a poignant soliloquy. Did her dad love her? If so, how could he leave her? She realizes that life must have been incredibly difficult for him. Then she was flooded with resentment. Why didn't he tell me? I could have given him a hug! He should have told me he was struggling! I would have tried to make him smile. Soon, she starts to blame herself: She didn't /ask/ how he was. She never asked what was giving him such a hard time… She has regrets. {In the form of a PSA I'll say that unthinkable, absolutely unbearable pain is one cause of suicide, though it is not the right option. As another PSA, I'll say to always consider the potential effect of prescription medications on yourself or a loved one, because your doctors probably won't. Prescription drugs almost killed me and my doctors sat back and yawned as they observed. I don't think they are trained to even think about side effects, which are apt to worsen over time.}
Dong brings his mother to where he's staying and Min is there with her son. Mom, who was forced to be a man's mistress and put up with substandard treatment of her son in order to survive, looks at young Yeol and knows that her son, Dong, will do better. The full range of emotions displayed by actress Kim Hye-Ja (Mother-8.8), as she takes in woman and child, is magnificent. Everyone raves about Parasite-9, understandably so, but I like Mother-8.8, also by the legendary director Bong Joon Ho, even more.
Two old friends address a very old rift. ‘Had you been completely loyal you would have confronted me and said that you were hurt, just like you're doing right now. And if I didn't acknowledge my mistake and refused to apologize, you should have torn my hair out… That's what a loyal friend would have done… what kind of loyal friend holds a grudge like a stranger would?’
People are just a bunch of piranhas and peckerfish, afterall. Gossip (and, by extension, toxic pride) are themes, as is the weight of caring for someone with special needs. Caring for someone with special needs would be much easier without all the staring and nastiness. It's a human impulse to stare at something different - something extraordinarily beautiful, ugly, malformed, unique, short, tall, dark, light - something or someone unique. Maturity is learning to be unselfish, and to be unselfish, we must have empathy. We must be able to put ourselves in another's shoes and imagine what it would be like to have everyone stare all the time. What’s it like to be constantly asked about one's height, or a scar, skin color, disability, or beauty? Let people be. Don't be a peckerfish. Try being the one person who doesn't question a person's accent or some other thing they've had to deal with a dozen times a day.
A pair circles eachother tentatively. One of them has secrets. The other wants the truth. Ultimately, the truth will be about the one without the secrets, not the one who kept things close because of past heartbreak. They struggle because one is always waiting for a muddy shoe to drop and ruin everything: One of them has been conditioned to expect disappointment.
"I bet they even keep count of their neighbor's underwear." Small town gossip and general nosiness is on display. One of the old classmates who works at the fish market scolds Eun: “You shouldn't be hanging around with a married man!❗ …Have you eaten yet? Do you want to get some breakfast?" Of course, /he's/ married, too. The locals consider the wealthy Eun their own property. Anyone like Han-Su sniffing around could endanger her available funds. This leads into another theme···
"Just a Little Bit More." America's first billionaire, John Rockefeller, said that was how much money would be enough. The problem of money in relationships and the powerful temptation to suck-up to rich people is addressed. All of Eun's relationships are tarnished by the fact that she has money. It's part of her appeal. I've found myself acting differently around rich people over the years because I was horribly immature. Certainly, money is appealing, but rich people aren't necessarily so. Money is a hurdle that good character must overcome. Successful people tend to subconsciously believe they are intrinsically better, and thus more deserving of their good fortune. Wealth has a tendency to make people more self-focused and less generous as they turn their gazes inward. People have greater fear and pain from a loss than they have pleasure from a gain, and rich people see giving away money as a loss. Yet our subconscious prompts us to treat these types extra special in hopes that something will rub off. A friend of mine says that rich people will screw you over “because they can.” We get led away by what we want. The key is to not want much - be content. Take every person on their own character merits.
And dive into OB! It's that vacation you never want to end.
QUOTES📢
There's no way to satisfy everyone.
Don't say that with your beautiful mouth.
〰🖍 IMHO
📣8.5 📝8.2 🎭9 💓7 🦋5 🌞7 🎨6 ⚡4 🎵/🔊7 😅3 😭4.5 😱2 😯3 😖1 🤔4 💤2 🔚9
Age 14+ with the following cautions: R language F💣s, @$$hole × 2, B!+ch × 2, Sex, teen pregnancy, abortion. Rated: TV-MA: Mature Audience Only.
Re-📺? Likely
You May Also Like:
love to hate you 8.9
Touch your heart 8.2
Love Struck in the city 7.3
My Mister 9.5
I'll see you when the weather is fine 9
More than friends 8
A Witch's love 7.8
Romance is a bonus book 7.9
Hospital Playlist 9
It's okay not to be okay 9
Something in the Rain 9
Start-up 7.5
Her Private Life 8
My Sassy Girl / Yeopgijeogin Geunyeo 8.5
Live UpTo Your Name 7.6
My Only Love Song 8.7 (same FL)
Saimdang 8.5
Mr. Queen 8.5
Mr. Sunshine 9
The Kings's Affection 8.3
Rookie Historian 7.3
Try a Chinese historical romcom: The Romance of Tiger and Rose 9.8
Boys Over Flowers
My Secret Romance (too many flashbacks)
Mad For Each Other silly fun
Crash Landing On You
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