Dark, frank, and fairly brutal look at a very ugly bunch of people and a marriage in the midst of implosion. A day of heavy drinking brings out many ugly hidden secrets and exposes the insecurities, the anger, the hatred, the lust, the jealousies, the false pride, the envy this group of 'friends' kept hidden for too long. A facile ending and a bit melodramatic, but I was thankful for it. The violence was needed to break open the ugliness and cleanse these people. It's probably the only thing that would wake them up.
Spoiler Ahead so wait until you watch the movie. It's a tough movie to watch. No easy answers. Really no answers. None of the adults in this movie have any business thinking they are doing anything great. The foster parents are not cruel, per se, but it is obvious they pay lip service to the 'job' they are doing. There is no great love for these kids. The father in particular seems to be very jaded and full of mistrust. Of course, this could be from years of having kids betray him. Teenagers are never easy to deal with. But, with at risk kids like these, kids who already feel like life is betraying them, who live every moment on a tightrope of anxiety and lack of love, that kind of mistrust just breeds more fear and fear leads them to act out in ways unpredictable and damaging...to themselves mostly. I spent the entire movie feeling like I was walking the tightrope with Yongjae. To the bitter end his life seems to be bleak and gray with no sign of any future...and what little future he is grabbing at is slipping through his fingers right in front of his eyes. This child is fighting for his very existence and that existence seems very threatened at the end of the movie. It is never a good sign when an at risk person, who has threatened suicide previously, divests himself of his only possessions. I have a terrible feeling he just said goodbye to his brother for the last time. I want to think there is a chance for him at the new 'residence', but the fact remains they are probably sending him to a facility for troubled youths...which means he is heading into a cesspool of violence and intimidation and depression. Dear God the cruelty visited on the children! It literally breaks my heart every time I watch one of these and takes me days to recover. Why do I keep doing this to myself? It is very apparent why this film won Best Director for Kim Tae-Yong and Best NewActor for Choi Woo-Sik at the 2015 (35th) Korean Association of Film Critics Awards. 9/10 for me as an extremely well done slice of life movie.
DEFINITE SPOILERS IN THIS!!!! Don't read unless you don't care if you know the ending ahead of time. Not that you can't figure it out yourself in the first 5 minutes of the film!
All through this movie I kept thinking, I've seen this before. Yet I don't think I have. Still, in virtually every scene, including the ending, I knew what was coming, including the fire. It was all as if I had seen it before..it left an odd feeling and somewhat intruded on watching it.
KRW is definitely the shining star of this movie. The scenario is nothing new, bad guy trying to be good, failing, fighting a horrific fight against monumental odds and dying in the end. But with KRW behind the character, what could be mundane takes on a whole different level. His portrayal of Taesik is touching and heartfelt. You feel his struggle, his internal battle to reclaim a life and a future for himself and his made family. A life he has never had before. But. It's forewarned from the first that Taesik will fall at the end, forced to take up arms one last time to defeat the villains who refuse to let him live. What is it about those segments of society, the scum of the earth, who see one of their own crawling out of the gutter they live in that makes them grab them by the ankles and drag them back down into the depths with them? Like I said, definitely a scene replayed in many movies ...and without fail these movies end this way....that once you go bad, you are forever trapped in that world. It's a terrible message.
The movie itself is slow and not new in concept, but KRW's performance changes everything. The final segment's fight scene is bloody and riveting, guaranteed to make your heart pound. Even to the last moment you pray for it not to end the way you know it will...but it's not to be. Definitely worth the watch for the performance value.
SPOILER!!! It's a Good movie. Worth watching for an example of the genre of the time period. But...SPOLERS AHEAD!!: Suffers from its dated look and writing. The blurry camera during all the fights made me wonder what the director was trying to hide...actors who couldn't carry fight scenes or just trying to make the audience think it's too artsy for it's own good. Either way, it was grossly overused. Predictable ending. All the movies and dramas from this time period also suffer from an overload of this kind of ending...Tragedy with a capital T. Of course now everyone wins so there is no happy medium. :( I didn't really feel the ending where Min says that Tae soo was all he really had. That made no sense to me. Tae Soo was never there for him. He only wanted Min for what he could do for him. Min comes off as a tragic figure. Looking for love and friendship in all the wrong places and paying the price for it in the end. 7
A good movie. Certainly not up there with the greats (Broken, Bedevilled, I Saw the Devil, Man from NoWhere, and the Old Boy movies). But it was very nice to see Kim Sun-ah do such a good job of stretching herself as an actress. This was a difficult part and I thought she did it well. Oh Joo-wan was suitably menacing as the bad guy. He does a terrific bad guy, but his role in the Kdrama Punch this last year was a benchmark for him, I think. I liked the movie for what it was. The director/writer chose to concentrate the story on the efforts of the protagonist and her journey. Handled by a different director/writer we would have seen the story more from the antagonist's view and it would have been a much darker and more violent and depressing film. (like those above) Those have their place and I do enjoy the tension created by those kind of psychological thrillers. But this type of killer has been done before, so I can understand the decision to change the focus. Still, there were some developments that weren't fully fleshed out and we had to take on faith...like, how did the doctor get permission to do transplants on JUST those patients? What about others on the transplant list? They could hardly say "she said her organs were just going to these people!" Still, a good movie.
Just finished this drama and loved it. It may not be that way for everyone who watches it, but life experiences dictate a lot of our emotional responses to what goes on in many dramas. This one deals with cheating...but cheating by everyone, so we don't have the angst of any one person being the victim per se. Yet everyone is also a victim...but just as much, they are also guilty of being the perpetrators. So it removes a lot of the angst that a typical melo/makjang cheating drama displays. It's also a very adult drama...in other words, language and actions are much, much more realistic than typical kdrama. Sex is directly referred to without being salacious. It was a VERY refreshing change. These are older people with teenage children. They've been married for 17-18 years and grown to take each other for granted.
The script/story was so good. There was a Tim Burtonesque tone to the humor and behavior, in particular with Shin Eun Gyeong's role. She was great...and hilarious! Her facial expressions had me in stitches. The balance of humor against the very real crash and burn of these 2 marriages helped keep the tone of the drama from becoming too dark. I think they did a fantastic job of it. I loved all the characters. There wasn't a one I didn't enjoy the time I spent with them. Everyone's story arc fed into the overall movement of the drama.
Be patient and try not to judge the characters. Especially if you are young or young in your marriage, these things may not have happened to you, nor may ever happen to you. But for those of us who have been around the block for more than a few years, learned that blame runs on 2 tracks, learned that right and wrong have gray areas even when they shouldn't, know that secrets between a couple can be kept for many years and fester, this drama does a great job of trying to show how 2 couples, one in particular, learn how to get back on the right track and rebuild what was lost as well as correct those things that had been kept hidden for far too long.
I struggled between an 8 and a 9 on this one. I ended up with a 9 because it was so different and, like I said, touched on life experience of my own that I could relate to. I also liked the honesty of the portrayal...bad and good were shown equally. I leaned towards the 8 for the typical kdrama forgive and forget ending, but decided to not think about that and concentrate on the journey the drama took me on.
I'm not sure, but this seems to be a short film made as a safety first video. Perhaps by the company shown at the end of the credits??? It's a good one if so. It doesn't seem to have much point and seems oddly aimless through the first 4 of the 5 episodes. Then 5 comes to kick you in the gut. The link below posted by Sasu on 08/15/15 appears to be the only place that has English subs for episode 5,btw.
Loved it! This is an absolutely adorable older drama which just became available on VIKI. I fell in love with Lee Sung Jae in Warm and Cozy (where he playing the older brother who fell in love with the lady diver). He is cute and funny and sexy as all get out. He was all of that in this. I wouldn't normally give a 9 to a drama like this, but this one just hit me at the right time. Light, lovely, great balance of happy and angst, realistic dialogues, realistic situations. With the current drama trend of show after show after show following a standard pattern of which person is going to end up with who and the seeming rule written in stone that no marriage can be broken and they must always get back together, this was a big change. I guess I was just in the right mood for this. I marathoned it over 2 days and need to go get some sleep now. I'm exhausted...but very happy. I like the cast very much. All of them were very good in their parts.
Lovely, sweet romance. The movie is definitely unique in premise and, for its 2+ hour length, flies by. The cast was remarkable, the production beautiful to look at. It's purely a romantic story, and only lightly touches on any kind of reality as far as this kind of situation could create...but then, where is the reality? No such thing could happen! Still, it makes you wonder. What would the reality really be that this movie could not delve into? It's one thing for a woman to be sleeping with a different person every night, but there is also the fact that, in a hyper conservative, sexually repressed, ethnically closed culture like Korea, the fact that half those people are either the same sex or of a different race or religion would present even more difficulties with that audience. But I chose not to think about that. As long as you only look at it as a fairy tale love story, this is a wonderful, magical movie acted by a lot of lovely beautiful stars. Han Hyo-Joo was just beautiful in this. It was certainly 'convenient'? that her romantic moments were with the most lovely of those co-stars.
Dark twisted tale done in 5 acts, much like a play. Very 'script-like' in its presentation. The format makes the show somewhat jarring, but that also feeds into the whole atmosphere of it too. The first 4 acts were frustrating to me in that I could not understand the intentional damage inflicted on these young children by this mother. The final act explains that when it shows her as evil as the man who killed her child. Within seconds of that meeting, you know exactly what happened to her child and that both he and she will bear the full burden of it. A good character study. For me, there were some script and direction problems that were irritants, but some of that is probably more due to my lack of seeing where they were trying to go with the story in some places. Her prancing around on dirt roads in high heels and a skirt so tight she could barely walk, all the while supposedly planning to kill someone was idiotic looking as all get out. Definitely a very dark look at a lot of disgusting people. Each of those girls was irreparably damaged by the murder, which was then compounded by inattentive parents, a culture of not understanding the need for these children to have professional intervention and lots of love and attention from their family, and, most of all, the pressure from a sick, twisted woman who reaped what she sowed...all at the cost of an innocent life, brutally, sickly ended. Yes, a twisted ending...for 2 very twisted people.
Really well done. Much better than last season and much much darker too. I love the format of new cases every couple episodes. I hope, if they continue to up the quality like this, that we will see a season 3!
It takes great will power for me to watch these kind of films/dramas anymore. I applaud your strength of will to endure what you did getting through all of these. They will weigh on you long after you watch and that's why I limit them to extremely sparingly and eliminate dramas with their interminable angst from my list completely. The Crucible is one I am still trying to work up my courage to endure. One Day.
Sweet heartbreaking story of fated love. This is very short, 11 10 minute segments. They do a good job squeezing a lot of story and a lot of love into those short minutes. It was great to see John Hoon again and hear him singing the love song at the end.
All through this movie I kept thinking, I've seen this before. Yet I don't think I have. Still, in virtually every scene, including the ending, I knew what was coming, including the fire. It was all as if I had seen it before..it left an odd feeling and somewhat intruded on watching it.
KRW is definitely the shining star of this movie. The scenario is nothing new, bad guy trying to be good, failing, fighting a horrific fight against monumental odds and dying in the end. But with KRW behind the character, what could be mundane takes on a whole different level. His portrayal of Taesik is touching and heartfelt. You feel his struggle, his internal battle to reclaim a life and a future for himself and his made family. A life he has never had before. But. It's forewarned from the first that Taesik will fall at the end, forced to take up arms one last time to defeat the villains who refuse to let him live. What is it about those segments of society, the scum of the earth, who see one of their own crawling out of the gutter they live in that makes them grab them by the ankles and drag them back down into the depths with them? Like I said, definitely a scene replayed in many movies ...and without fail these movies end this way....that once you go bad, you are forever trapped in that world. It's a terrible message.
The movie itself is slow and not new in concept, but KRW's performance changes everything. The final segment's fight scene is bloody and riveting, guaranteed to make your heart pound. Even to the last moment you pray for it not to end the way you know it will...but it's not to be. Definitely worth the watch for the performance value.
The script/story was so good. There was a Tim Burtonesque tone to the humor and behavior, in particular with Shin Eun Gyeong's role. She was great...and hilarious! Her facial expressions had me in stitches. The balance of humor against the very real crash and burn of these 2 marriages helped keep the tone of the drama from becoming too dark. I think they did a fantastic job of it. I loved all the characters. There wasn't a one I didn't enjoy the time I spent with them. Everyone's story arc fed into the overall movement of the drama.
Be patient and try not to judge the characters. Especially if you are young or young in your marriage, these things may not have happened to you, nor may ever happen to you. But for those of us who have been around the block for more than a few years, learned that blame runs on 2 tracks, learned that right and wrong have gray areas even when they shouldn't, know that secrets between a couple can be kept for many years and fester, this drama does a great job of trying to show how 2 couples, one in particular, learn how to get back on the right track and rebuild what was lost as well as correct those things that had been kept hidden for far too long.
I struggled between an 8 and a 9 on this one. I ended up with a 9 because it was so different and, like I said, touched on life experience of my own that I could relate to. I also liked the honesty of the portrayal...bad and good were shown equally. I leaned towards the 8 for the typical kdrama forgive and forget ending, but decided to not think about that and concentrate on the journey the drama took me on.