Star: Radiant Love (2012)

Would work as a drama but skip the movie

Not sure how a movie felt longer than most dramas.
There was no character development scratch that...no real characters.
Its nothing at all is the trailer the FL is barely on screen and has very few lines.
And things just happen for no reason.
There’s also a lot of telling but not showing...or frankly not even telling.
Spoiler...
the main couple go on one date (have met maybe 3-4 times) and the FL doesn’t even realize it’s a date...and he’s gonna profess his undying long in song at a press conference as a duet with his rival?
I think this scenario would work as a drama but as a movie it doesn’t work at all.

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This drama movie was fine. Not great, not terrible - it had all the elements of an easy-to-watch drama. I was looking for something easy and cheesy with a dash of insta-love and it met my expectations.

It was a story about a young girl named Ara, who had been in the States studying fashion and design and decides to come back to Seoul after 15 years to help one of her good friends, Min Jung, design her stage outfits for a season as she is an up and coming kpop idol. During one of her first concerts, which Min Jung is co-hosting with kpop superstar Romi, Ara gets lost and stumbles into Romi's dressingroom. After that, the two keep meeting one another as Min Jung tries to unsuccessfully seduce Romi. Romi falls in love with Ara instantly as she is a "breath of fresh air" while Ara seems to be just be going with the flow.

The only thing I didn't like about this drama movie was that I felt that we were missing some scenes that might have been cut to connect idea a to idea b. It almost made the audience try to connect the dots and come up with our own connectors. I also felt that there was a lot of setup to build this world and introduce characters and how they were connected and related, but as soon as the world was built, the climax happened and then it was solved quickly and the movie was over. Such that, I thought that the mysterious character Muse that Ara has been obsessed with, would have played more into the story. The description made it sound like Muse was going to be a love rival and Romi would have to fight for Ara's heart, but that wasn't the case.

It also seemed that everyone was some kind of evil and poor Romi and Ara were stuck in the middle and got run over every time someone wanted to make a move to tear someone else down. We did get a classic "misunderstanding" trope, which honestly made me mad how everyone could go against this one character who was the most innocent puppy dog and had no evil bone in their body, BUT EVERYONE didn't question if these pieces of information could have been false. But this drama was fine, and the ending was very classic and the song was actually really good.

I wish there was more romance building, but when they said let's do insta-love, Romi literally saw Ara and was like.."yup, that's my wife." But, I was a bit lost as they maybe spent less than 25% of this movie focus ed on any kind of romance.

If you have the time to watch this, and just want a relaxing easy-going drama movie, this one is good.

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