progressive, funny and tender -- watch for Jun Ho and Jung So Min.
A pretty, lively 2019 film with the progressive shadings of the year or two before Covid. It is well done and well acted, but the storytelling is a little disjointed. Perhaps worth watching more to see the young Jung So-Min and Lee Jun-Ho all fresh in their twenties. (Junho did this as a pre-enlistment piece)A man (Heo Saek) who grew up in a pleasure house and works as a revolutionary male gisaeng, falls for a poor noblewoman (Hae Won). The movie is framed as a tale of their love told to a servant girl who comes to visit the elderly HS who lives alone in his painting studio in the middle of beautiful yellow fields.
HS' experiences have left him sensitive to women's problems and their oppression. HW is stuck in a guilt trip over her mentally challenged brother, so she has put off her respectable suitor for years. The love between HS and HW, and the consequences of HS' sympathy for the his female clients, precipitate violent changes in the whole community.
The happiness of the lovers takes up much of the film but still feels rushed because the movie's action oddly has the leisurely pace of a drama. The narrative of their eventual fates is tightly compressed and spans a major time-jump in just a few minutes.
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Watch it for Chani in hanbok
Funny, sad, sweet and short. 2021, 8eps at 30mins ea. A timeslip and an entire tangled reincarnation grouping. I originally watched to see Lee Seung Hyub doing the idol actor again. while waiting for the next episode of Spring of Love.LSH is pretty sweet in this show but I was really blown away by Chani (the SF9 maknae, b. 2000). He has a grownup face, so he easily plays a very good older winsome nobleman. What is much harder to pull off, he does a completely convincing job playing a full-blown masculine ML true lover, despite being so young.
When in need of music, watch a show about musicians. When in need of true love, well, it shows up in unexpected places...
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This review may contain spoilers
"who you are [to me] is someone who leaves....to Arthur you're someone who stays"
I started crying at the point (1/2 way) when Teo Yoo's character, Hae Sung, enters the lobby of a NY hotel on a quixotic quest to meet his first love, Nora Moon. The soundtrack kicks into high gear with slowed chords and intense swelling volume. The flashbacks previous to this had simply the discreet continuous background hum of NY, Seoul and Toronto which is never bothersome. After abt 20 minutes points of music begin to well up through it , starting while HS is on his military service.Great movies have a series of carefully framed and placed lines which reverberate backwards reinterpreting the scenes beforehand, and forwards to color what is to come. To quote them is often to misinterpret or spoil a movie, so I use one to just point to the frame of the story, only a very mild spoiler.
The lines above are from the very first scene of the movie, but they are unheard until the scene is played out in realtime later. Hae Sung sits at a bar in NY with Nora and her husband Arthur Zaturansky, the night before HS returns home to Seoul. He and Nora chat casually in Korean, using references to drama plotlines to knit together their different understandings and feeling,s about their meetings and partings, now and in the past. Arthur can only vaguely follow their conversation, but he (graciously) trusts Nora and I think partially understands that a continuing friendship that includes him might exist.
Because both Nora and Arthur are writers, HS's interactions with them are both more and less perilous. More because imaginary scenarios have the emotional power to destabilize emotions, but less because a writer's curiousity confers a sort of double vision of recording and thinking about lived emotions while experiencing them, which slows reaction times. Teo Yoo's emotions (as HS) wash across his face but Greta Lee's face (as NM) catches light while she looks at him and we think -- is he flirting, does she resist it, what are these feelings? The movie is in English, and she is the POV, the way we see HS. As viewers of kdrama the juxtaposition of the felt lives of Korea and the US hurts to watch, just as within Nora Moon the collision of her past and present hurts.
Teo Yoo is an interesting actor in that he is fully bi/tri lingual, and intelligently so -- it makes him especially able to navigate these cross-cultural scripts. The soundtrack was composed by two members of a band called the Grizzly Bear -- why do I know this? Because I was sure the composer/sound editors had to be Korean, they were so dominantly in emotional control, so I looked them up and they werent. The cinematography is gorgeous. My favorites: a Staten Island Ferry ride, the bar scene and the flashbacks to childhood in Seoul where the mess of electrical lines above the streets reminds me of the innocence of 2006 Seoul in One Fine Day.
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Unique, edgy and brilliant
One of my top ten favourite kdramas from the past few years. Unforgettably sad, unforgettably funny. 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!
The Team Manager of the euphemistically named Risk Management Team of the Jumadeung Corporation is a parolee from Hell. Koo Ryeon (played by Kim Hee Sun) 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 that tactic fails, in other cases 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. An excellent compilation of 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.
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; it is exhilarating to watch Koo Ryeon stomping the bejeezus out of all the cruel and thoughtless people who torment others to make themselves feel better, and to appreciate Rowoon's unique ability to project sincere love, care and compassion. The 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.
The creators of the show, the writers and the directors deserve enormous credit. Hoping to see more of their work.
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Wang He Di's great comic timing, physical skills and now in his true voice!
Great watch for fans of adventure-fantasy. I liked it a lot without being totally on top of the plot all the time, but I was happy to tag along for the ride. Great cgi etc, wuxia/time-slip/superhero, with a well-balanced script (from a webnovel, so with pretty good structure) and cast.In the opening 21stC scenes, when I heard He Di as the ML clap back at his co-worker dissing his provincial accent, I was all in. I really loved the comic actors who make up The ML's family, and especially that his (We He Di/Dylan Wang's) performance with them was just right, not over the line of the heroic personality of his character but drawing on the actor's own innate skills: comic timing, excellent physical skills and now, his real voice! Which turns out to be a great comic instrument, a little hoarse, a little opinionated and down to earth.
And also, just romantic enough to feel honest.
One of the great duels, with a humongous semi-transparent Vajra avatar, ended up being partially conducted in the minds of the combatants where the ML drew on that voice and some truly annoying persistence to break through a 'negative mental formation'. It is very very very funny.
There are lots of other cool little scenes. And a motley band of martial arts master-allies to boot. One of the coolest things is that the hero does not become the king...metaphorically speaking. More I cannot say...
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magnificent
oh.....my.....god. A magnificent show. Villainy unfolded layer upon hidden layer and hidden heart-wrenching love. 30 eps at 45mins ea, and I was riveted to the screen for every single one. Shock and awe mixed with both pity and love may not be to your taste but this is the kind of show where even a few episodes will be worth it for the memory.Give it a try. I recommend it.
An FL who resorts to biting or murder when all else fails, Zhuang Han Yan, played by the actress Chen Du Ling, is a realistic character who has never been loved by anyone except a piratical female bodyguard and childhood friend. Abused from the beginning of her helpless infancy she does not trust, and given the family she meets when she comes back for revenge, she is right not to do so. She still yearns and quietly hopes for some form of love in some corner of her heart, but she is definitely psychotically possessed by a need for revenge.
She is a lonely goose poetically who flies back north to find a home. There is a great moment about exactly halfway through where she hangs an anonymous poem about herself on a festival tree where girls invite poems in response. Fu Yunxi finds it by sheer powerful instinct and writes a perfect reply, which then gets lost and one despairs of these two, even though fireworks rain down overhead.
An ML both stoic and vulnerable, Fu Yun Xi, played by Xin Yun Lai, is a shadowy personage, an criminal investigator for the imperial govt, who plans so far ahead into the future that he knows when he sees ZHY that she is the wife he needs. A man who is playing a dangerous game that is not easily guessed by the viewer, he is so calculating that he manages, thank goodness, to predict when his love is about to go off the rails in some murderous rampage. Unlike the usual romantic hero he doesnt so much as magically rescue her from danger as protect her from herself. How does he understand her so well? She is baffled by him, as are we. Xin Yun Lai is gorgeous, so it is a pleasure to wonder and watch him as he plays out his long-term strategies.
It is a character-driven story, written by a novelist who has had other works successfully adapted to the small screen. The scriptwriter and director however must still receive great credit for emphasizing the classically 'tragic' elements successfully. Pity, fear and awe (w/a bow to the Poetics), all are evoked.
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The XX Bar is a retro speakeasy, great territory for a workplace romance. Lovers meet after work on a terrace next to one of those coffee vending machines now disappeared entirely.
Classic performances:
Ahn Hee Yeon (aka Hani) and Hwang Seung Eon play best friends broken up by a cheating seducer of a boyfriend -- beautiful, vulnerable, angry and more resilient than they know.
Bae In Hyuk plays the caring careful romantic lead that you have been waiting to see him as, but he already did this five years ago!
Lee Jong Won, now doing ML roles, here does a pitch-perfect gay roomate parfumier, funny and sweet and just campy enough, just an edge.
The manipulative gaslighting behavior of those who cheat is on full display here, especially by several ex-boyfriends who keep coming back, dancing and flailing to maintain control of the situation by undermining the confidence of the women they hurt. A great little revenge drama with psychological victories instead of punches and slaps.
Have a good time -- watch this! Read less
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just right for a summer binge
Perfect in itself and unassuming. Fun, light and pretty with a twin complication and true love. The very best kind of an idol drama. 2021-22, 12 eps at 1hr ea.Just right for the weekend binge with ice cream (dreaming of summer). Or try a few weekend evenings in a row, it wont trouble your dreams, but work will be the better the next day.
An FL with loan sharks chasing her. Yay! Classic experienced romedy supporting cast outside the main leads; a nice time jump near the end. Good street scenes and rooftop views of Seoul -- maybe standard now but love of the city still shines thru them and it has resisted the tarnish of time.
The band really rocks. Jun (Lee Jun Young) almost overwhelms the acting mix with his already powerful expressive skills, but he 'harmonizes' tactfully. He is so good. Watch his micro-expressions.
Enjoy.
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really wonderful watch, part one
A story of mages and magic with both western and wuxia elements woven together. Recommended for fantasy lovers. Excellent world-building by the Hong Sisters ( their 13th script). Good CGI. An insanely cool soundtrack with a huge range, by the great Nam Hye Seung. Classy cinematography throughout never misses a beat -- a big budget production by Studio Dragon. 2022-3. Comical, thrilling and cute with a really epic romance, you can skip the intellectual understory or be amused by it. Classic Hong Sisters.In two parts, not seasons. Likewise two separate reviews here on mdl are as one. 30 eps at 1hr.20mins ea. = about 40hrs watch-time. Part One is 20 eps and Part Two is 10. Its all, both parts, worth it.
Lee Jae Wook. then 24, took the world by storm as the ML, Jang Uk. LJW is a meticulous, skilled, flexible and charismatic actor. Jung So Min plays one-half of the FL (I wont list all of their names); a powerful, intelligent and experienced actress, together with LJW she took the series to a higher level. The talented and gorgeous Go Yun Jung, the other half of the FL, begins and ends the series with great panache , matching LJW in romantic intensity and comic interludes throughout.
Out of many great performances in the main and supporting casts I would pick out three favourites. Shin Seung Ho, as the Crown Prince, actually carries the main plot through Part One, more so than the adorable lovers. Jo Jae Yoon, as the discontent Jin Mu, is the most wonderful creepy villain ever, a consistent scene-stealer. And Im Chul Soo as the hempen Master Lee, the Hong Sisters' "deus ex machina", stole everyone's hearts just a little.
How can there be two actresses and one FL? Easily. The body of the first actress is destroyed and via the 'alchemy of souls' the soul of the first actress (Go Yun Jung as Naksu) inhabits the body of the second (Jung So Min as Mudeok) for Part One. Or, to put it another way, Jung So Min portrays the soul of Naksu inside the body of Mudeok.
The 'alchemy of souls' goes beyond the standard body swap. Forbidden sorcery, the powerful use it to steal new bodies and they employ skilled assassins to dispose of the unfortunate souls trapped in their old bodies. At different points the FL and ML are employed to kill one end or the other of this devils bargain.
How is our identity connected to our souls or our bodies? The Hong sisters pose this question off and on again in their inimitable way through this whole series. Is who you are due to genetics? Is it due to your life experiences in this body? Is your soul, in this popular sense it means consciousness -- is your consciousness separate from your body? Do you have a destiny and does that pertain to your body or your soul/consciousness, or do you create that from the choices you make as you move forward? These questions are not limited to vague popular ideas of reincarnation throughout Asia or to the theological conundrums of body and soul that leak into horror and occult films in the West. Its all one.
So, therefore; the ML was conceived while his father's body was forcibly and temporarily occupied by the soul of a creepy king near death. Is Jang Uk the son of his father, a great skilled mage who crossed a line in his magical practice, or is Jang Uk the son of the previous king and since the childless king's brother acceded to the throne, thus a cousin (mentally/physically..which?) to the current Crown Prince ?
So, therefore; the FL, a skilled assassin, mortally wounded, performs the alchemy of souls on the nearest healthy woman she can find. She wakes up in the body of a blind woman named Mudeok being sold to a brothel/pleasure house for debts, temporarily disoriented and mildly amnesiac. The energy of her soul as Naksu can heal the blindness and her memories return slowly, but neither memory or soul can restore to her the lost athlete's body.
Fate brings our soulmates together not without a lot of noisy complaining by both. The merry flirtatious upper class Jang Uk, desperately seeking a master who will open his gate of energy, suddenly recognizes a girl attacking him with a crab leg as soul-shifter by the blue marks in her irises.
The rest is an enormously fun show. Enjoy. Since I am doing two reviews for two parts, hint hint, an absolutely enormous cliffhanger ending to part one, which cannot be revealed here, can be gently hinted at in the part two review.
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still one of the best romantic-fusion modern dramas ever
A story of healing true love in the aftermath of a national disaster. A quiet and delicate show, punctuated by the intrusive memories of the two leads of being buried alive as children in a shopping mall collapse. A fictional story which reflects a national trauma in '95; the show's accident happens in '05 and the action of the story is set over a decade later.Junho and Won Jin-ah are brilliant in the leading roles, magnetic personalities with a powerful and romantic attraction to each other. Their performances overshadow a second lead couple who hold an important place in the script. The two pairs demonstrate a contrast between families broken by the aftermath of the disaster and those from families who were responsible and who retained relative wealth. All are psychologically scarred by it. A third lead couple is one of my all-time favourites because they are fully developed characters and funny without being over-the-top sterotypes.
The soundtrack by Nam Hye Seung, is compelling but not overpowering. Memories contrast the pastels of the intact mall and the following billowing clouds of dust and glittering shards of class, with the grey dark scenes of the entrapment and rescue. The RL scenes are shot mostly in a clear daylight (out on the construction site etc.) or a well-lit office where the first couple end up employed by the second.
To begin with, neither of the pair recognizes each other from the event so long ago. The FL has traumatic amnesia but deals daily with her parents' pain; they are unable to move on from the death of her younger sister. The ML only has one family member, his younger sister, left and lives in poverty; his opportunities were destroyed by his severe injuries and by the corrupt blockage of his family's compensation package. Slowly all concerned shift away from their long-held coping mechanisms: anger, forgetting, sadness, guilt and regret.
The favorite quote of one of the more unique characters (a loan shark by day and a doctor at night for those who cannot afford healthcare) is from Im Chul Woo, whose books often deal with the aftermath of the bloody Gwangju uprising of '80. "..Suffering, resentment and regrets are your strengths. With these strengths, somehow survive [this] ugly and frightening life."
A Studio Dragon show with the composers Park Sang Hee and Nam Hye Seung. Writer -- Yoo Bo Ra.
posted simultaneously on viki
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This first kiss is both wonderful and hilarious
Thank you to Director Lim Hyun Hee and to Writer Lee Shin Won for this lovely, funny show. !Fighting!A cute little kdrama BL. My reactions: (E1-2) I am so happy! Laughing like a nutcase. This looks like it is going to be good. (E3-4) Great, great first kiss. Completely bananas long-haired lover! Nam Shi An bias. Main romance gets sunny cool house scenes, heart-wrenching-already second romance gets yellow streetlight in darkened backstreets. (E5-6) (holding myself back from spoilers) A lesbian bestie, smiles, tears, a seriously heart-fluttering hug and a heartbreaking embrace. Oh that ominous fitbit. (E7-8) Ouch, very very PG. Sweet as honey.
This is standard kdrama sequence in mini-mini form (8 eps at 30 mins ea.), all the best bits condensed. Several annoying loose ends/teasers for poss. sequel. Confession as the main issue, and its relation to personal growth. Some commentators seem puzzled -- I think because the show at the very last minute loses its surreal edge and comes down to earth (a very nice earth) with a tiny thud. I still go with 10stars for quality, cinematic intelligence, art, and for Nam Si An ripping up any official documents within reach (adorably).
If immature behavior is a topic I will grab the chance to say that I think the young guy/young girl/cute kid/charley-chaplin comedy characters work in Jungian terms, igniting psychological needs or functions in us, the spectators. In this comedy the childish terrors of our doll-like protagonist Jin Woo make us laugh as he ineffectually tries to stop the no-boundaries Id-representing Gi Seop from entering his house. [As Jade hinted] in BL these men will blossom quickly into true lovers, like flowers in a desert spring. They enable us to remember/compare/hope for our own spring and gain emotional strength.
Maybe that R rating is because there is a lesbian character. Ooh so scary.
first posted on viki april 30th 2024
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high quality, romantic.
Lovely, high quality, BL. Be sure to watch to the very very end. Dont cry too much on the way. Remember, the best revenge is to live a happy life.I recommend this. There are some really good reviews out there so I dont have much to say except, the actors are so good and sooo young. Oh yes, also one of the two directors is a cinematographer and the other a screenwriter so that may account for the overall high quality.
The plot makes sense and has a clear clean structure. As always the theme of art and artists is fun to watch. As life becomes homogenized and Disneyfied, creativity, coming-of-age stories, individuality and bravery continue to be psychologically important.
All of these actors bear watching in the future, I would advise following them now. It is hard to be outstanding in this cast, all are excellent and charmingly good-looking but I would pick out Zhang Xuan Wu (21) for sheer beauty and outstanding charisma, and Yao Xing Hao for acting skills beyond his years (26).
As always BL is ahead of the international pack in new and trending themes and structures. Due to its brilliant and faithful audience (us, a'course!), creators can be experimental on shoestring budgets. More power to them.
Of the two directors, Li Xi was the cinematographer for Rise of Phoenixes, and has 2 more out this year, Bank on me and 13 Years of Dust. Ning Yuan Yuan was the screenwriter and director of An Insignificant Affair and an actress in The Hotel and Little Flowers,
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Alchemy of Souls Season 2: Light and Shadow
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Great chemistry and brilliant acting by leads
Part 2 of the story of Jang Uk (JU) and Naksu/Mudeok (NM), not a second season, with a three year time-jump in between. Now I can say it, although Mudogi definitely killed Jang Uk, definitely and shockingly in part One's cliffhanger to end all cliffhangers....he is now nevertheless revived under the condition that he only use the icestone ability to hunt down soul-shifters.The lovers reverse roles in Pt2. How clever! The morose grumpy little master, NM, and her merry flirtatious student, JU, from Pt1, now become the morose grumpy husband, JU, and his merry flirtatious little contract-wife, Bu-Yeon (in name only) in forced cohabitation! Once again Naksu has lost her memories, and JU, now a killer of soul-shifters, does not recognize her.
The bad Lady Jin has convinced Master Lee to revive the petrified body of Mudeok/Jin Bu-Yeon (eldest Jin daughter). He warns her that the body will now really belong to Naksu's soul, that her actual daughter's soul is gone. She only wants the body to breed new heirs with divine powers so she doesnt care. Naksu's soul pervades the body and changes its appearance (probably more than originally intended as Jung So Min wasnt the first choice to precede Go Yun Jung).
Great chemistry. He had to persuade her to become his master, he needed her to open his gate of energy and become a true mage; now she has to persuade him to marry her in order to escape imprisonment by Lady Jin. Lots of fun.
The ice-stone storyline comes to a climax; 200 years ago the founder of Jinyowon, Jin Seol Ran, a powerful priestess, created it as a by product of a rain ritual during a period of extended drought. Her lover, the founder of Songrim, Jang Seo Gyeong, preserved the ice-stone in Jinyowon. Lady Jin begs JU's dad, Jang Gang, to use it to revive a dead baby in her womb which he does. That child became her eldest, the lost daughter Bu-Yeon. Jang Gang does not return the stone to Jinyowon, but hides it in Lake Daeho. Bu-Yeon later finds it for her father and Jin Mu. They promptly toss her in the lake, and Jin Mu goes on an extended production of an army of wealthy soul-shifters. During which time (i.e. the action of AoS 1 &2) our lovers meet. Fireworks!!
The ending is wonderful.
Oddly enough, these 40 hrs total would have equalled 53-ish Chinese-length episodes. There was some silly thought that somehow Korea was "plagiarizing" Chinese culture, for pitys sake. So wrong in so many ways that it cant bear discussion. As all artists do, the Hong Sisters mine the materials they use from a variety of sources, and I would say that the general settings are reminiscient of Cdrama historico-fantasy. Not xianxia. Obviously wuxia/magic/martial arts. like a thousand other settings from a thousand other movies/countries, ..are we really going to complain?
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