toldie

Missed potential in beautiful package

I think that no drama this year gave me so mixed feelings than Vincenzo. I’ve changed my mind about it multiple times while watching it and I’m still not entirely sure what exactly to think about it. For me this drama was just so uneven that it’s hard to give it just one score. But I’ll go point by point with this and hopefully at the end I’ll have my mind set.

The goodies:

Production
A while ago I’ve said that It’s Okay to Not Be Okay was the most aesthetically pleasing drama that I’ve watched this year. But after a bit of thought, I think that it should be ex aequo with Vincenzo on the first spot. While in It’s Okay to Not Be Okay more care was put towards scenography and costumes, in Vincenzo production itself was top notch. Photography and the way some scenes were shot was just so good that I think it could easily compete with western hight budget series in this category. And let’s talk about scenes that took place in Italy. Because you know what? They weren’t actually shot in Italy or anywhere near Europe. All of them were actually shot on green screen and even some actors weren’t in the same place, but were put together in post production. Which makes those scenes even more impressive.
For those interested, here’s material published by Netflix on their YouTube channel, mind blown, am I right?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eQz7orIi8Q


Acting
I mean, with a cast like that I wouldn’t expect anything less than perfect. And I have to say, all actors deliver. Song Joong Ki had a particular hard job with his character talking a lot of Italian but it worked out better than I thought. I mean, I don’t speak Italian, I’ve watched some analysis of his language skills made by actual Italians and they had rather good opinions of it. And for my ear it actually sounds better than his English from Descendants of the Sun where it sounded like he just got the text written phonetically to memorise. This time it sounds more natural at least on the first glance.
Amongst others I’d have to highlight performances by Ok Taec Yeon (obviously, but I have to say that he’ve done a hell of a job with a character that could otherwise be absolutely ridiculous and exaggerated) and Kim Yeo Jin (the same as with character played by Ok Tae Yeon. I’d say that this drama served a bit too close to comical relief with it’s characters, but was saved by top acting).


Comic relief
About comic relief, but this time the intended one. At some point I was really confused of what this drama is trying to be. Because amongst all those pretty intense mafia scenes we have those little hidden gems of comic relief scenes and characters that actually, after some time, fit perfectly as a bit of pressure valve after some emotional or just simply intensive scenes. I’d say that my favourite comic relief were the tenants of Geumga Plaza, they’re such an amazing blend of personalities that comedic scenes with them were a pure gold for me.

Characters (esp. villain)
There’s a lot of them, which not always is a good thing (about it later) but I have to admit that all characters in this series are very well developed and thought through. There’s basically no weak link here.
And let’s talk about the villain, because that was hands down the best played character here. Ok Taec Yeon done such an amazing job portraying Jang Jun Woo that he basically saved this character that otherwise could be unintended comic relief here. But the way this character progressed being more and more psychopathic was a masterpiece. That ladies and gentlemen is how villains should be written. The way that we know what they could do without them showing it it’s just enough to make us shudder.
About Vincenzo himself. At first I’ve seen him as a bit exaggerated with the notion of him being basically more Italian than pizza itself. But it kind grew on me and the way the character was developed made him more believable with each episode. Finally we have what was promised, a cold blooded mafia guy who’s not afraid to use cruel methods on people who crossed the line, at the same time being composed lawyer choosing peaceful (or semi peaceful) methods first.

Baddies

Pacing
And here we have first problem and the thing that I was most angry about it because it spoiled my fun from watching this series. Pacing. It’s really bad in some episodes. Somewhere in the middle we have situation when in episode we have 90% of nothing happening and one really amazing scene that made me not drop this drama. I’m used to filler episodes, but here they were really bad, especially that there was no point in having them, since we were basically always in the middle of the action. Maybe it was because Vincenzo has 20 episodes, maybe with 16 it would be much better. Luckily, this 10%, this one really amazing scene kind of rewarded us for waiting remaining hour filled with monotonous dialogues.

Plot
Plot was the thing that I’m the most unsure about whether I liked it or not. I think it’s still linked to pacing of the show but at one point I felt that too many things are happening. We had so many side plots that it was hard to tell what’s happening with the main problem. It made the drama look pretty chaotic and watered down. Especially with this amount of characters. Even tough well written the abundance of them made it pretty hard to follow who’s who and what is he/she doing.


So to somehow bring it all together. For me Vincenzo was a bit of wasted potential of being really amazing series. A bit of it was lost because of really slow paced plot but the good things remain underneath it. So maybe it’s not for everyone, maybe you just need patience for it.

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Stockholm syndrome in a nutshell

WARNING this review may contain very slight spoilers, so if you're like me and you don't want to know anything about the drama before watching it, please reconsider reading it.

Watching this drama was truly a wild ride. For various reasons. For first five episodes I was questioning my life choices and wondering if it really is the drama recommended for me by a friend. For a moment there I was sure it was a cruel joke. Like twenty episodes of shaky cam kind of joke. Because getting through those first episodes was really difficult. I don’t know what happened there, who was to blame, but this drama really doesn’t start well. But for those who manage it, their patience will be rewarded. Kinda…

So first impressions. Camerawork is absolutely bizarre. And I’m not only talking about shaky on-hand camera. Using fish eye lenses and very weird angles in the most unexplainable scenes, it all adds up to very weird and sometimes hard to watch cinematography. Plus it makes the series look very outdated. Shaky cam may not be annoying all the time, but in a scene where two characters are running with cameras strapped to them and next on hand camera following them, I’ve honestly started feeling nauseous. The problem persist with the lighting, or lack thereof. We only have natural lightning, which really doesn't do it's job. Colours look very washed and a lot of unnecessary shadows appear. Sometimes it looks almost as those cheap para-documentary series.

Let’s talk about first impressions about the characters.
So we have couple of main characters. I’m not sure why does the trope of male lead being a total asshole at first even exist, but it does and needs to be talked about. I’ve seen it a couple of times already and male character making fun of female, being absolutely mean towards her of even openly ridicule her is just so bad. Why does it even exist when after scenes like that I never want leads to end up together? I understand character development reasons, I know that in couple of episodes those characters will fall in love with each other, but at this point it just seems so unrealistic, that even later on I had trouble coping with it. There are some things that just cannot be so early forgotten.
Villain in this series is absolutely exaggerated. Him and all his people is just such a weird bunch of characters that there’re mostly ridiculously funny rather than scary. It's really hard to treat seriously someone who's main character trait is eating chocolates in weird manner.
Overall characters sometimes seem so childish it just seem so unrealistic that their actions would be possible in the army.

So we get the main character, Lee Jae Ha, your average, everyday Korean prince. You know the type, right? I always assumed that being royalty means that from early childhood you’re being taught how to manage this life. Well I guess Jae Ha skipped some lessons, because his older brother was equally with me embarrassed with mostly all the things that he did. His greatest accomplishment in the early episodes was not being killed right away by the North Korean team and trust me, nobody would blame them. And I know that it was explained that he attended normal school to blen in with the plebs or something, but still it looks like the guy has no preservation instinct whatsoever.
Opposite him, we have Kim Hang Ah, lethal weapon of North Korean Army. Woman who can kill you with rolled newspaper or whatever there is. Her only weakness is that the moment she changes from her uniform, she becomes this annoying high school girl who only dreams of finding herself a boyfriend. I’m not kidding, the change was overwhelming and so comical that I just couldn’t believe it. At one point she’s this strong soldier and then she acts like a damsel in distress being absolutely childish. When she’s off duty she dresses and acts like a high schooler and it completely doesn’t fit her serious army demeanour.
One more thing about this character, or rather the actress portraying her. Ha Ji Won. I’ve already seen her in Secret Garden, and I don’t know what happened but here her acting in some moments was so off. Maybe it’s because of her North Korean accent. To be honest, I’ve heard genuine North Korean accent only couple of times, so I’m no expert, but for her it sounded so artificial that it was hard to watch some scenes. It looks more like she tried to make fun of the accent.

So after all of this, we finally get like eight episode and finally this drama can pass as watchable. I will try not to include any spoilers here, but beware. At this point we get some instant character development (like, you know, absolutely irresponsible child of a man suddenly decides that he can rule the country of something) and finally some minor intrigue (till this point the villain was mostly unintended comic relief). We’ve been served cliche amnesia and blackmail. But life seems back to normal and anthem is the biggest issue now. We discovered that casually listening to Flight of the Valkiries while chilling in the garden passes in Korea as something normal and news headline is absolutely valid piece of evidence in court. We’re being served harsh truth about life and some other weird ideas. Overall a lot is happening in this drama, but it’s mostly just a lot of minor events that barely influence anything since they’re rarely mentioned more than once.
Scenes related to politics and international relations were mostly ridiculous and thanks to English speaking actors exaggerated ad unintentionally comical.

And here’s a twist. After all that bickering, after pointing out all of those things and more, that I cannot write here, cause spoilers, I woke up one day and decided that I enjoyed this drama. I don’t know what kind of weird Stockholm syndrome that was, but at some point I’ve actually started liking the characters and the drama started to be even enjoyable. I still seen all those ridiculous motives, I still think that the villain here was one of the worst I’ve ever seen. But somehow after twentieth episode I decided that I’m going to miss this drama.

I’d say that this drama is like a pug. You know, this small, cross eyed, snoring dog. It’s a bit ugly, it’s somehow sad, but you still love it. It just grows on you.

And I want to explain the rating I'm going to give. 6.5/10 is for me hight for this drama. At first I was thinking about giving it 3, but second half of the series redeemed a bit the mistakes of poor writing and bad cinematography. This drama is not perfect, it's somehow good but only when it's not embarrassingly naive. Still, I'm glad that I made it to the end.

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Fantastically paced show, shame that only in the second half.

Honestly, if this series started on 6th episode or if the pace of the action was the same throughout the whole show rather than only during second half, I’d gladly gave it a ten point score. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. For the first half of the show we can observe festival of very poor CGI (honestly, couple of times I had to check when this series was made, because for a moment I assumed that in late nineties) and very two dimensional characters. I call them “one line characters” these are the ones, that you can describe only by one line. For example “This is John, he’s the drone guy”. And we have around five characters like this introduced in one scene. This is luckily corrected on the second half of the show (two dimensional characters, not the CGI, this is poor till the very end) but I felt that it was way too late for that. And shame, because on about 6th or 7th episode this show starts to be amazing. We finally get some depth to the characters, action gets on its track and motives are finally clear.
I’d get back to the beginning of the show once again. Let’s talk about how this show is made. Because for some time we have a plethora of singe scenes that seemed to be cut in half. And there’s like a hour long break between those halves, which results of situations like this:
In first half of the scene enigmatic character enters the restaurant. The owner is suprised, since she haven’t seen him for ten years. We don’t see the face of the character, he doesn’t say a word. Cut.
Second scene, about half of the episode later, we finally see the face of the character, he sits by the table and orders. Brother of the owner explains that this is that guy who haven’t beed visiting the restaurant for a couple of years. We get the name. How it’s relevant to the story? It really isn’t, we get a bit of more explanation at the end of the series, but it’s not so important to make viewer figure out who this guy is for half of episode.
Plus he have a lot of characters to follow, a lot of threads that happen simultaneously (or at least that’s how they’re shown), we have characters from the past and their present versions. I was watching it on Rakuten, where you can turn on comments from the viewers, and trust me, not only me had problems to follow what’s happening on the screen.
The problem is, that if I would have some more of social life or we wouldn’t be in the middle of the pandemic, I’d decide that my time is too precious for this. And that would be a big mistake, because last five episodes are amazing. At this point we finally have some character development (finally we can clearly see who’s who). Scattered pieces of the plot finally come together. All lines are connected. And even silly moments don’t hurt so much (I mean fighting using Samsung phone, because you know, product placement, we need to show how durable this thing is).
To finalise, I can say that it’s either great show with poor beginning or average show with very good ending. I guess it all depends of which perspective you’ll get.

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Happiness is the feeling you get when you know this drama is good

I don’t know why I haven’t heard much about this drama, but this is a terrible shame. Because what would we get from mix of High Rise and #Alive (pardon my limited library of zombie themed series)? Well, apparently something very very good.

Young couple Sae Bom and Yi Hyun moves into newly built apartment complex. We have a vast variety of characters and the higher we go the weirder they get. But the titular happiness doesn’t take long, soon the media report about new virus called Madman Rabies. People infected have very strong craving for human blood and being bitten means fast infection. Our main characters are already familiar with new virus but to save themselves from it they’ll first have to fight human stupidity.

The strong side of this drama are certainly characters. Without it, drama set mostly in closed off building wouldn’t be half as interesting. And we have very broad spectrum of the worst and most annoying characters you’ll meet. And even decent people that we meet at the beginning soon begin to be not so nice faced with greed and need of self preservation. They’ll do horrible things to end up on top (literally considering the building and figuratively).

The thing is that soon we’ll learn that zombies are not the biggest danger here. They’re easy to avoid and most of the times harmless. But normal people, completely aware of what’s going on, blinded by their own needs and flaws are the ones we should run away from.

Because apart from our main couple, Sae Bom who works in military and Yi Hyun who works in police, the rest of the tenants are completely unaware of the danger lurking outside the building and soon this would be first problem. Because try to explain something to the people so entitled that they value others by the number of the floor they’re living on.

Even though the drama is set in one place and there’s not really a lot to see here, it manages to keep the viewer interested all the time. A lot of things are going on here but on a small terrain so sometimes viewer might feel a bit detached. Add to it an eerie music that just seems to warn us that something can happen any moment and we have very unique feeling.

Somewhere in the middle of it I was sure I’ll just binge watch it till the very end. This is one of those dramas that viewer don’t feel the passage of time. The constant action is so entertaining that suddenly we reach the end of the episode. And it’s hard not to watch the next one right away.

I have two “buts” without which this drama would be one of the best I’ve watched recently.
One is a villain that emerges in the second half of the story. First, he’s not really needed here. We have enough bad characters here to fill another two seasons. Second, he’s in my opinion not developed enough. We don’t have him for long enough to know his motives. With all of the rest characters we can gradually get to know them and explore their personalities. He’s like a jack in the box. He jumps out of nowhere (well, not exactly, but in a sense, yes) and here he is, the evil one. We have a brief explanation but I feel that it wasn’t enough. His character just seemed rushed and without proper explanation of his actions.

Second issue here is with the montage. I don’t know what happen, but we have several situation that we have a sudden freeze frame before the cut. I think this could be a place where commercials would start, but this is a first time I see it done so sloppily. It was really noticeable and didn’t look good.

But overall, this is amazingly well pace, dynamic drama. With interesting characters and well written plot. From start to the finish it doesn’t let the viewer rest even for a bit. We feel like a part of the story being locked up in the building.

That was very enjoyable drama and great comeback of Park Hung Sik after his military enlistment. May his future projects be equally good.

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