etoks21

ONLY on MDL is this film anything less than a 9.5/10.
7.8/10 my ass!
wth is wrong with this place?

This film is magnificent. I am not someone who seeks out financial thrillers. Numbers bore and frighten me in equal measure. I only watched it after stumbling across the title on a search for a different film and seeing Yoo Oh In's name in the cast. I will give anything he's in a chance. This is one of his finest performances, which is saying something. I would say it is his very best performance, but the roles he has played which I consider to be on the same level of excellence are all so different how does one compare them? YAI is in good health here, at the top of his game in every way and I was powerfully reminded why I consider him one of the finest actors in the world.

Kim Hye Soo...breath-taking! Holy shit, just spectacular in the subtlety and power with which she plays this part. Her character is sharp as a razor, tough as nails, but with an inner core of rich, empathetic feeling for her fellow human beings, rich or poor and in between. She is the heart of this film, which to a large degree is an ensemble piece.

JUST WATCH THIS FREAKING EXCELLENT FILM!

10/10 (and I never give out 10/10s).

Ha! Our tastes couldn't be more disaligned.

Minato's is a retread of itself.
Will probably drop it.

BMF is the usual tripe out of Thailand.
Dropped it after hanging on by my fingernails for three episodes.

SWM is the usual homophobic, gay-baiting, we-won't-go-gay-but-we'll-sure-take-your-money garbage out of China.
Dropped within the first 20 minutes.

Thailand and China keep churning out trash because too many BL viewers will eat anything put in front of them, no matter how stinky.

What show are you watching? I'd like to see it too.

Takamatsu Aloha's mile-wide shoulders are stunning.
The leads are extremely well-cast, both physically and demeanor-wise.
Not really down with a fairly brief BL becoming a women's Me-Too Movement drama. Focus the limited time on the MC please.
Otherwise, mostly good show.

Hilariously bad in every way except for a brief, committed make-out scene.

Who cheated on you and made you a seriously neurotic person? Seek therapy.

So they could go on a hysterical, self-righteous, naive rant in comments. And because they got a vicarious thrill out of watching the cheating they tell themselves they find so appalling. lol It's a common phenomenon on MDL.

Adore this film. I watched it a couple years ago but just now rewatched and I've no idea why it didn't make more of an impression the first time. I laughed my ass off for a while, then wept for the last 45 minutes, in a good way.

Lee Min Ki is powerfully charismatic and sexy, while Yeo Jin Goo is as soulful and innocent as he is beautiful. Acting from both is superb. The bromance between them is as close to a romance as I think you can get without going all the way there...

I liked the somewhat open ending. I like to think they're living together as a couple on a mountain somewhere, hang-gliding their lives away. :)

My only objection is to the unnecessary and false representation of Electro-Convulsive Therapy as a tortuous, horror-show. It is very much NOT that. It is a useful and effective treatment for depression that still gets a bad rap because of the American film "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," in which it was portrayed in an even more egregious manner. This flick didn't help.

Other than that, love it.
9/10

Yup.

BRAVO! lol Well-said, Jolly.
"Resplendent in the t-shirt." hahaha, snort.

At the big "spare key" moment I thought "well hell, that's probably the spare key to the old place grandma and grandpa are going to tear down..." This script is so lame I would not be surprised.

Along with the rest of this, it becomes less and less plausible that confident, accomplished Shin, who otherwise seems to have a very healthy self-image and sense of his own worth, would allow himself to be endlessly degraded in this way. I understand and get that sometimes quality people fall in love with damaged goods, but I don't believe the Shin we've come to know would put up with this for two years, no matter HOW much it hurts to let go.

Episode 2 and the silly cat and mouse game is wearing thin, as many here predicted it would. I've already gone from finding Akira's panicked reactions to any reference to love or intimacy hilarious in ep. 1 to eye-rollingly irritating in ep. 2. So i'm assuming/hoping these dumbass writers and director don't REALLY plan to milk this dynamic for 12 episodes. That would be insane.

There remains zero hint as to WHY Akira is so absurdly, freaking horrified at the thought of expressing his love for Shin, which he has already admitted to himself is what he feels. Is it some kind of past trauma? Is it intense, internalized homophobia? Is it a self-destructive impulse to sabotage relationships when people get too close? There has to be SOMETHING interesting going on, or this will just become more boring by the week.

It also already feels as if Akira is just torturing Shin and frankly, it's cruel. My preference would be for Shin to get sick of being treated like an old tin can when he is in fact a rare, gold-embossed porcelain teacup, and leave Akira in the dust for a while as he goes his own way. I'd love to see Shin aggressively pursued by some character yet to be introduced who would openly treasure the living doll that Shin is. Let Akira get a load of what THAT feels like and then come chasing after Shin. THAT would be entertaining.

But, oh god, there's probably more of that horrid, Funeral Director ex-teacher crush to come, blah blah blah. I'll keep tuning in but if this doesn't pick up steam and go somewhere I may drop. As much as I enjoy drinking in the sight of Akira's beautiful features, I can do that with online photos.

Needs more members.

🤣

And the fact you find it "upsetting" they ARE using 14 year-old teen actors, not "kids," to pretend to have sex and to kiss, just as many 14 year-old straight actors do, there may be something amiss with YOUR values and relationship with reality. I think there's some homophobia going on here in comments such as yours.

They are ACTORS. They are PRETENDING. They are not REALLY having sex. They are the same age. This is perfectly legal and moral. I'm sorry if it didn't happen for you, but by 14 many, maybe most kids have kissed someone.

Grow up. Oh, and stop watching this show that offends you so deeply. BTW, what are you doing here in comments on the page of a show you find morally reprehensible and presumably have dropped? Or have you really dropped it?

If you came to watch an "adult" show, and you if you are an emotionally MATURE adult, you wouldn't be obsessing over your horror at witnessing two 14 year-old actors pretending to have sex, like many 14 year-old gay boys IRL do. You are the one who needs to grow up,

BTW, I'm older than dirt. How old are you?

I've seen plenty of Asian funerals in Asian movies in which immediate families were devastated, caterwauling and incapable of doing much other than nodding their heads. I've seen Asian funerals in Asian films in which family physically attacked people they didn't want to be there, usually because they, fairly or not, somehow blamed that person for the death of their loved one. And now I've seen an Asian funeral in an Asian movie where the mother of an only child who died suddenly out of the blue is just as calm and collected as can be.

I did some quick online research. Weeping at funerals in Japan is completely acceptable, especially by family. However, there is no expectation that this will happen, nor is any disrespect inferred by attendees if family or friends do Not cry.

So...to me, the demeanor of the mother was like everything else in the flick, a CHOICE made by the writers/director. If we can agree on that, then where we differ is that I would like to know WHY she is so calm and collected. She didn't even tear up. We never saw her weep at home afterward either. Her voice on the phone trembled when she called to tell the BF, that was it.

Which is fine, I'm not saying this character HAD to cry at the funeral of her only child. But this specific character did NOT cry. Why? What made her so stoic. I'm not implying that she didn't love her son because she didn't cry but to see her clear-eyed and calm was notable.

Even if she believes in the journey of the spirit into another life, or in Heaven, or something else, she is still facing the sudden absence of the child she has raised and lived with since he was born. To me, the way she acted would make sense at the funeral of an extremely elderly parent who she knew was near death and the passing was expected.

If she's holding it together so she can acknowledge guests properly and doesn't want to make a spectacle, fine. Then show me she's exhausted and red-eyed from crying all night leading up to the funeral.

I am not trying convince you I'm "right," Maggi. Just explaining why her lack of emotion struck me as odd, or at least without any clear indication as to its source.

Finally, I've lost both parents, a very close cousin, and several aunts to whom I was very close and whom I adored. I felt differently at each one of those services. Sometimes I wept, sometimes not. Everyone reacts differently depending on their relationship to the deceased, whether or not the death was expected, as well as the time and place of the service.
My high school best friend's 21 year-old brother was shot to death in a tavern robbery the fall semester of his Senior year at KU here in Lawrence. His brother Scott and I were high school seniors. Todd and Scott's mother, who was an extremely stoic person who always had it together, was not hysterical but she fought tears through the entire service and burial and she looked like hell because she'd been weeping off and on for four or five days by then.

I would have thought Ryuto's mother had been weeping a lot too, though the Japanese hold their funerals almost immediately a day or two after the death. But nope.

OK, I rest my case. Quite a few things about this flick will just have to be some of the few things we disagree about overall in our Asian cinema adventures together.

You started this conversation when you chose to take offense where none was intended. Nobody would have known about your alleged depression except you if you hadn't made a dramatic announcement and complaint.

I like my basement with all the lights off.. Nice and cool.

Oh, about condoms...and again, perhaps this has to do with me being a gay man and observing the sex scenes from that perspective.
If, as a director, you are going to show sex scenes that are not explicit/porn but which leave nothing to the imagination as to what is going on, in sequence, from the first kiss to the climax, and your characters are using condoms, then you are going to HAVE to show that too. To me, it's silly to show lovely, well-acted simulated sex that looks entirely real but choose to leave out the condom part. Either they used them or they didn't, and there was never anything to indicate that they did.

This is especially true of the shower sex scene. Even gay men don't generally store condoms in their walk-in shower stall. Yet we see the characters go from scrubbing each other to kissing to fucking and cumming and there is no trip out to the bathroom cabinet or the bedroom to get a condom. So why would we assume they used one?

Finally, I have seen sex scenes with condoms in Asian films where it was well-staged and acted so that it did not seem like a condom-use PSA, which as you know, I loathe. As well-done as the Egoist sex scenes are, I see no way that condom use would credibly be excluded from our view if we were meant to infer it took place.

Hmmm...not for me.
After your reply above I realize that for me it failed as a romance AND as an exploration of coping with grief. oops.
The romance never felt whole to me. I was always suspicious Kosuke was up to something.
Kosuke had more screen time but Ryuto, as I've said, is the heart of the film and the most sympathetic character so when things went down as they did I was left with the half of the MC I cared less about.
Also felt the relationship development between Ryuto's mom and Kosuke was rushed.
Ryuto's mom's affect at his funeral and afterward was weird too. Why was she so unemotional? Her only child had just died without warning. She would have been devastated, but we see her cool as a cucumber. Kosuke's acting at the funeral was a highlight.
I don't dislike this film. I'll watch it again. But it could have been much better.

Thank you!