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AudienceofOne
Pharm and Dean are MEANT TO BE so end up together despite the fact that Pharm does little but cook, cry and look incredibly conflicted for someone who's supposedly in love. Ohm is a plank of wood as Dean and Earth's acting, as usual, makes me want to punch him.
I mostly enjoy the show's tone of anti-climax in terms of its conflict. The reincarnation is the only point of conflict and, honestly, that is somewhat refreshing. But there comes a point at which the whole thing is just spinning its wheels. They could have spent that time establishing Pharm and Dean's relationship in the present but instead it's just shallow INSTA!love that quickly wears thin.
As the show progresses, Pharm's response to his so-called epic destined love gets more and more weird, until the whole thing starts to come off as non-consensual. It's deeply uncomfortable and doesn't get better but worse over time.
With the extension, the show got even slower and had to jettison screentime for several characters who were no doubt contracted only for the original run. This served to make the whole thing even more boring and forced the writers to take the show in a direction that completely undercut what was left of its own themes.
With the pacing off and an OTP you struggle to ship, this is not the show it could have been and is overall a boring disappointment.
As usual, this comment comes with a disclaimer that I am not the audience shows like this are aimed at.
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So with a title of 'Amensalism' and an intriguing premise involving death dreams, I decided to overlook the terrible acting of Prince and tune in. It started off okay with a kind of dreamy and ambiguous tone. Prince was... actually even worse than usual, which I didn't think was possible... but it was interesting enough to get me through the first few episodes.
Unfortunately, overall, the show is a thematic mess and the plot is even worse. Having watched to the end, I honestly couldn't tell you what it was even about. A huge part of the plot was taken up with a conspiracy completely unrelated to the male lead's dreams or his near death experience. I squinted and cocked my head sideways but still couldn't see how 'Amensalism' factored into any of the relationships depicted.
Worse than that, the show undermined its own mythology more than once for head-scratching "twists" that the show could have done without. It also assassinated one character very badly and then expected both the other characters and the audience to forgive her the next episode. In the end, it came down squarely on the side of a standard predestined romance with a crime thriller complication.
Overall, Amensalism was an unfocused mess and I don't recommend it.
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Circle is a rare Korean science fiction drama; a mind-bending, time-warping tale with the first half of each episode set in 2017 and the second half 20 years in the future. Events unfold simultaneously in both timelines, with 2017 and 2037 being inextricably intertwined.
Future cop Kim Joon-hyuk (Kim Kang-woo) in 2037 tries to uncover the mystery of what happened to a set of twins Kim Woo-jin (Yeo Jin-goo) and Kim Bum-gyun (An Woo-yeon) back in 2017, while in that time we see the two young men embark on their own investigation around the mystery of Han Jung-yeon (Gong Seung-yeon), whom Bum-gyun is convinced is an alien.
At a tight 12 episodes, the show wastes little time on filler and instead launches itself into action from frame one. It's a thrilling ride that barely allows you to draw breath in either time period as it races to a fascinating and at times unexpected conclusion.
The future envisaged by Circle includes memory-altering technology and the show's constant questioning of how our memories shape who we are is endlessly insightful and often poignant. The ambiguity the show retains even as it answers our questions is its best quality and it's that ambiguity that has led to hopes the show would have a second season.
Circle is a rare beast from Korea and its almost-universal acclaim may make it possible for the country to start producing more hard science fiction. We can only hope that happens soon.
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The plot becomes increasingly ridiculous to the point of makjang.. The directing, in particular the blocking, was noticeably bad on more than one occasion.
For those looking for romance, this is not your drama. Having said that, there was something compelling about the Adventures of Scrappy and the Giant that I tuned in for each week. No matter how silly it got, the actors really sold it and that carried me through to the end. I won't be rewatching it though
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This is the best drama ever.
There are few Korean dramas that have brought me and those around me such joy.
The story!
The acting!
The subs!
Lee Shi Young plays endocrinologist Joo In Ah. She works with bad-tempered surgeon Han Seung Joo (Ji Hyun Woo). Seung Joo has an hormonal imbalance that affects his behaviour and that eventually becomes life threatening. They never explain what kind of brain damage the female lead has, although her mental deficiencies are just as obvious.
Seung Joo blames Shi Young for the death of his friend. The real culprit is her awful, selfish adopted sister. But neither is the culprit really - this is just bog-standard misogynism where women get blamed for everything just for existing.
These two unlikely mental patients fall in love. They have a certain enjoyable level of cute but the real OTP is Seung Joo and his dongsaeng, Cha Jae Hwan. It's such a shame that even in this day and age they have to hide their love away.
Risky Romance is best watched and enjoyed with illegal subs hastily cobbled together from the Indonesian translation by a high school student in Jakarta. That's the only way to really appreciate the true comic brilliance of this show.
Anything else might make you realise the show is actually terrible.
But watching this train wreck unfold slowly week to week truly gave me joy. I hope it can bring you the same joy.
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This review may contain spoilers
About Time is the story of a woman who can see a person's life clock, including her own. She's also a scuba-diving actress and trained driver because this show never met a rom-com scenario it didn't try to shoehorn into a tired script acted by people who would rather be doing anything else but this. This show is worse than terrible because it's also boring. Even the actors look bored as they sleepwalk their way through 16 episodes of predictable plotting, pedestrian characters and cliched "twists" we see coming from miles away.
The female lead is noble and stoic and little more than a singing plank of wood with two facial expressions. The second female lead is ambitious and successful but of course obsessive and crazy because heaven forbid we should portray ambitious and successful women as anything but jealous and desperate for a man. The male lead looks like he'd rather romance his secretary than his girlfriend or at least that he'd rather be back filming Twenty Again.
I made the slog because I was promised I could watch these people get hit by a ToD near the end. But it took far too long to see them being smashed onto the pavement . So even that was not worth the time I put into this tiresome piece of nothing.
Watch anything else.
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The premise is pretty simple and very Korean: a Candy/Chaebol romance that happens to be between two men.
The poor Kang Gook is the best friend and bodyguard of Chaebol heir and wannabe teen playboy Han Tae-joo, for whom he has secret feelings. The two live together, go to school together, do martial arts together. They're basically inseparable in a dynamic that harks back to feudal Joseon bromances. It's a dynamic that didn't entirely work for me at first due to the disturbing power imbalance between the two boys, and I found the first few episodes very rough.
However, once the show settles into itself and stops finding excuses for them to grapple with each other, it begins to deal quite realistically and even movingly with the emotions of the situation. Gook is Tae-joo's servant and nothing - not their feelings or their friendship or anything else - can change that. Instead of using this power dynamic to set up the somewhat uncomfortable and unequal relationship I started to fear, the show instead treats it as a barrier, which in real life it would be.
The show also makes a few more quality decisions, especially around its second female lead who is textually treated in the same way as a traditional kdrama second male lead. It's a refreshing decision, not just from a kdrama perspective but from a BL perspective as well.
As a web drama, Where Your Eyes Linger is far far too short and as such the narrative is rushed. It would have benefited from longer episode lengths.
But despite a rough start and the use of some truly questionable music decisions, this is a classic kdrama romance scenario that happens to have two men in it. And that's the best thing about it. It means that some of its peculiarly Korean narrative decisions worked for me when I would have found them tiresome in a standard drama. I think it's great that they made a drama that treats homosexual romance in exactly the same way as it would have treated heterosexual romance.
That alone puts it heads and shoulders above every other BL released this year.
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To be honest, this show is so real, so raw and often so on point in its portrayal of adolescent romance that parts of it were like an emotional suckerpunch; bringing back from the depths the confusion, insecurity, terror of rejection, that conflicting desire to find someone who is entirely yours without having to open yourself in return. All those floundering moments of our teenage years.
But since so much has already been said on how perfect this aspect of the show is, I'll instead take a detour to talk about how beautifully anchored in place I Told Sunset About You is. Unlike a lot of Thai BL that try to decontextualise the plot from the character's surroundings - creating a disjointed and often jarringly unrealistic fantasy (and often not a good one) - I Told Sunset About You is not just Thai, but Southern Thai. It's Phuket in all its melting pot glory. Who these characters are is inherently grounded in where they are and it's what makes the writing so fine and the characterisation so well-rounded.
While parts of I Told Sunset About You are difficult and uncomfortable to watch, the show truly is a wonderful exploration of falling in love but also embracing bravery in that love. And those lessons are as important for straight relationships as they are for gay ones. And in the end, that's what makes it such a great little show. Because we will all recognise ourselves, for better or for worse, in these characters. Even in those moments when we don't want to. And the universality is what turns this from a good show to a great show.
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Apart from what remains of our lives.
What remains of our lives always meets us
In a way that is not at all remarkable.
Though you might not wish to believe it,
It is not at all remarkable.
At its core, this sweet little drama about physical therapists and other people who work at a hospital started as it ended – as a quietly-joyful slice of the ordinary.
Lee You-bi is truly delightful as Woo Bo-young; a contracted physical therapist who wants a full-time job and love in that order. Bo-young finds herself in the middle of a love triangle that launched a full-scale shipping war while the show aired: will she choose the urbane, professional Dr Ye or the childish first love Min Ho? But in the end this show is not about romantic attainment or who ends up with who - rather it's a beat in the lives of ordinary people. And it's in that beat that we find the poetry in the average human soul.
With an alternative - and preferable - title of You Who Forgot Poetry, this is a show about the compromises people make to make a living and the need for us to retain our original aspirations in our lives. As people who opted for a steady, safe income over their dreams, most of us can empathise with the underlying concept of poetry as a metaphor for romance in a petty, silly, vainglorious world.
The show has lots of quirky humour in the vein of a more-subdued Scrubs and elicits its fair share of laughs at the general absurdity of life. But it's in its overall message - that the ordinary can be poetic - that this show is quietly and subtly beautiful in a way that is as unexpected as it is joyful.
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One of the most stunning tour de forces of acting you will ever see
If you tune into Beyond Evil for no other reason, then do it for Shin Ha-kyun's Baeksang winning performance as small town cop, Lee Dong-sik. Beyond Evil is an excellent, finely-written crime thriller. But even if this isn't your genre, you won't regret watching this acting masterclass unfold.Accused of the murder of his sister and her friend while still a teenager, Lee Dong-sik has carved out a life for himself as a beat cop in his regional town. As Beyond Evil begins, this backwater is disrupted by the arrival of elite golden boy, Lieutenant Han Joo-won, who's been sent to the small town to avoid a scandal that could impact on the promotion of his high-profile father. Joo-won is convinced that Dong-sik is guilty: not just of the murder of Yoo-yeon and Joo-seon 20 years ago but of other, more recent, killings of illegal immigrants.
Yeo Jin-goo perfectly embodies an entitled member of a ruling class who’s long been led to believe he’s always the smartest person in the room and struggles to know how to act once he makes his first big mistake. And in any other drama, his performance would be considered exceptional. Unfortunately he's acting next to Shin Ha-kyun whose portrayal of this damaged and sometimes unhinged man is one of the most extraordinary I've ever seen.
There’s an air of Twin Peaks small town gothic to Beyond Evil; a sense of a facade of small town life hiding a darkness the denizens either ignore or deliberately plaster over in the name of community solidarity. And with the body parts piling up, it’s time for all those secrets to be dredged up too.
Beyond Evil is the whole package: the writing, acting, themes, music, production values are all top notch. But while it doesn't quite rival the true masterpieces in this genre - Forest of Secrets/Stranger for example - it is still worth every award it won this year. And Shin Ha-kyun has proven himself to be one of the best actors of his generation. And not just in Korea but anywhere.
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it's never too late to pursue your dreams
This beautiful tear jerker of a drama will break your heart then stitch you back together again. A wonderfully pitch perfect story about a 70 year old man who decides finally to pursue his dream of being a ballet dancer.And while you'll no doubt sob through the whole thing, it's a cathartic cry, a healing cry. One that will fill you up and let you leave the drama completely satiated.
This is a beautiful drama that is not even bittersweet but just an ordinary story about ordinary people learning to live their lives to the fullest and that it's never too late to pursue your dreams.
If you don't love the characters, the story, the cinematography and the themes, you will at least love the music, which completes the emotional journey perfectly.
Just perfect
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Im Soo Hyang is well cast as Mo Seok-hee; the badass chaebol heiress who returns to Korea after an exile in the United States to solve her mother's murder. She teams up with the genuine, sweet and down-to-earth lawyer, Heo Yoon-do (Lee Jang Woo) whose mother was framed for the same murder.
While Seok-hee returns home to wreak havoc within her entitled, dysfunctional family, Yeon-do becomes her personal lawyer and gets employed by TOP: the corporation's all-seeing, all-knowing, law firm run by the controlling and Machiavellian Han Je-kook (Bae Jong Ok).
It's almost impossible to pin down the appeal of a show like this. It's pure crack, full of deliciously over-the-top plot twists and revelations: scheming mothers-in-law, corporate shenanigans, birth secrets, and murders among many others. The OST does the work of 50 actors; leaving us in no doubt about just how melodramatically we are supposed to watch this insane show. The soundtrack is like distilled makjang rendered into musical form.
And yet the show does have themes - real ones. While most shows lose track of theirs somewhere along the way, Graceful Family somehow finds some, almost by accident. Still, the appeal is rarely in the plotting, which resembles too often the standard Corporation-as-Joseon-Kingdom shenanigans that kdrama is a tad too fond of. The appeal is in the characters, especially the clever, entitled, bitchy, manipulative, but warm hearted Seok-hee herself - no Candy here - and the delightfully beta Yoon-do.
Dubbed Kermit and Miss Piggy for her bold confidence and his supportive and nurturing response, these two are one of the most shippable couples in dramaland. And it's only a shame the show didn't spend more time on the romance, even if these two never lose sight of their buddy-cop partnership.
I'm not going to lie - the show made one big narrative misstep, one that nearly ruined it for a lot of viewers and that I won't spoil. But apart from that, this is a very watchable, very enjoyable and very cracky piece of television. So dive on in!
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Joo Ji Hoon and Kim Jae Wook gave great performances in the leads but Yoo Ah In shows why he ended up being one of Korea's most-respected and versatile actors.
But beyond the lovely acting and the sense of magical realism, this film is underpinned by strong friendships and the power of human connection. Everyone who walks into the Antique Bakery is damaged in some way but is slowly healed and not just by the really great cake.
I highly recommend this film.
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There are two distinct and competing parts of this show and therefore this review: the first is the production overall, from the cinematography and the music to the acting; and the second is the plotting.
For the first element, this show excels at being a beautiful, compelling, moody psychological thriller with outstanding performances from all the actors involved. The directing, music and acting all combine to effortlessly create a gripping and emotional show that draws you in and keeps you watching. This show is expertly made and that deft production shows in every frame.
Park Sung-woong is always a fantastic performer in everything he does and he brings out every layer of the complicated and conflicted Yoo Jin-gook, a detective and older brother of the female lead. Jung So-min is very good as female lead Yoo Jin-kang who is drawn to but also wary of Seo In-guk's complicated anti-hero Kim Moo-young.
But it's Seo In-guk who really shines in this. In fact, it is the performance of his career. Ziggy is well known by now not just for acting a part but for living it. He doesn't create a new person, he completely inhabits them down to his fingertips. But even knowing that about the actor, this is still a tour-de-force of a performance - one that propels him up above the regular pack of Korean actors and puts him into a class of his own. After this drama, there are few people who would argue that he is now on a different level - one inhabited by the likes of Yoo Ah-in and Bae Doona and even Park Sung-woong himself. If it is possible for an actor to have a new breakout role - one that doesn't launch his career but that finally takes it into orbit than this is it.
It's difficult to discuss the other elements of the show without spoilers - and this is one drama where the wrong word can potentially ruin it for any future viewers. However, beneath the fantastic production values and Ziggy's blazing acting triumph, this show struggles with its plotting and characterisation. In some respects, this is due to its source material - Japanese writers tend to create strange, almost surreal characters that only infrequently behave like normal people. This somewhat wars with the Korean sensibility in the back half and the plot falters as well. Combined with opaque character motivations this can make a lot of the episodes frustrating to watch.
Regardless of how poorly the back half was written and how dissatisfying the show was overall, the show is entirely worth watching for Ziggy's mesmerising extraordinary performance.
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Kim So Hyun and her character Song Geu Rim were by far the best part of this otherwise mediocre show that had hints of a much better drama wanting to get out. It had some bright spots in the acting and the use of anti-climax to defuse conflict but other than that it was beset by tired cliches, one-dimensional antagonists and inconsistent characterisation of some characters.
It's very sweet and a lot of people will love it anyway but if you want your drama with a bit more meat on its bones this is not for you.
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