The poor humor fails to hold up a very weak story with a very imbalanced message.

This drama wasn't trying to be too grand so it feels a little excessive to be too dramatic in denouncing it. I watched it for the humor, for a silly, bizarre story that didn't take itself too seriously. Which is largely what this was. The humor was humorous, even if sometimes it was quite cringey. The story was fairly cute, if love triangles don't bother you too much (they bother me, but whatever).

Stories like this, that do this deliberate switching around of gender roles, are always failures when they try to say too much. I've never seen such a drama that didn't get a worrying amount of basic stuff wrong.

The general idea here is that the Do women are the strong ones in their families, both in terms of physical strength and personality. To borrow an old expression, they wear the pants. In that sense I really appreciated that Do Bong Soon was actually more meek and submissive than her forebears. The contrast was more compelling and it allowed for growth as her character, presumably, would learn that physical strength isn't the only or even the most important kind of strength. And that was a bit what they were doing.

The difference in how the two male leads treated her was also interesting. They both still had an instinct to protect the woman they cared about (which is good and fine), but one did so because she was weak (he assumed) while the other was doing so because no one should have to endure dangers and hardship no matter how strong they are.

That was pretty much the only thing they did right. The rest of the drama was deeply weird in its depiction of "strong" women. I'm not sure I agree with viewers who say that Do Bong Soon's mother was trying to get her to basically rape the main guy. I only watched till episode 10 so maybe that occurred after that. What I saw was a wildly overbearing mother who insisted that her daughter make the first move with a guy who would definitely reciprocate because he's a hot-blooded male. Tasteless and vulgar, yes, but not rape. Somewhat funny at first given how inappropriate it was and how much Do Bong Soon hated it. But it dragged on way too long.

I'm also not sure I agree with other reviewers who say she was abusing her power the entire drama. The fact is that yes, the way she was slapping people around who were much, much weaker than her was pretty excessive. But that's where the tone and message of this drama fails. According to its own rules, the Do women can be physically abusive with their strength if it helps other, weaker people, or at least doesn't serve their own interests. Which seems fine, but it implies that smacking people around because you can is generally acceptable as long as the person getting smacked around is "bad." Too, Bong Soon almost always beat up men who were hurting women, children or the elderly. Which, again, is fine within the environment of the drama. But her beatings were BRUTAL. By anyone's standards. And this enormous imbalance of power is never addressed. It's all okay, according to the writers, because she's a small woman who has been underestimated. And therefore deserves to be brutal? Or has the right to be cruel enough to make her a villain in any other story? According to the writers this is all fine because it's funny.

All the Do women in the drama (Do Bong Soon being only somewhat of an exception) are terrible. If this drama were described without specifying the genders of any characters, Bong Soon's mother would be assumed to be a hated villain and the rest to be backwards and sexist. Funny how that assumption is reversed when you find out they're women. I have no problem with women being depicted as overbearing and prickly. I have no problem with women being depicted as too domineering and somewhat cruel in a relationship, especially if they experience growth along the story. But domestic violence is never funny. The rest, sure. A person could make a kind of comedy out of it. But things like domestic violence are not funny. If the gender roles were reversed and the man was bruising the body of the woman, it would never be depicted as funny. So why is it funny for the woman to do so?

I found that alone disturbing and off-putting enough to make it impossible to continue watching. The thing is, this drama's story is not great. Its success relies entirely on the quality of the romance and the quality of the comedy.

The romance was a long drawn-out love triangle. I hate love triangles so I'm a bit biased when I say it was therefore unwatchable. Strange, though, because there was some mature dialogue about how childish and selfish love triangles can be and how acting only on one's emotions always hurts people. And then the entire romance is a love triangle? Actually more of a love... octagon? I lost track.

The comedy was, at first, wonderful. Silly and absurd and nonsensical but with just enough heart. But then it lost its footing. The gangsters in the hospital, especially the one who lost his teeth, were more gross than funny. Humor suitable for a five-year-old maybe. The mother's abusive nature was never funny, despite countless scenes that made us believe that the writers seemed to think so. Their attempt to redeem her was set against the backdrop of kindergarten humor so it lacked both logic and drama.

The humorous interplay between Bong Soon and her boss was genuinely funny. Her ineptitude as a bodyguard was logically acceptable because how the hell would she know the first thing about being a bodyguard? And the absurdity of hiring her was another nonsensical illogical piece of comedy that could survive the environment of a drama that doesn't make any other kind of sense. But her almost mercenary motives painted her character in a selfish light that was never remedied with growth. And then the humorous interplay was taken over by semi-serious, semi-humorous love triangle antics so it lost all its charm.

The general idea of great physical power making a person able to dominate any relationship was never really addressed even though they set it up repeatedly. The dominant mother was never called out for abusing her own power -- physical or emotional -- as a strong woman hurting weak people with her strength. Meanwhile Do Bong Soon was expressing sorrow that the serial kidnapper was using his strength to hurt weak women. Is using one's strength to hurt people only bad if you're male? The writers of this drama definitely thought so. Thus you get humor that fits this world view and it never sits right.

Ultimately the humor fails to hold up a very weak story with a very imbalanced message. Eventually the humor becomes as much of a drag as the rest. I wouldn't recommend this drama to anyone.

Read More

An Almost Perfect Drama That Survives A Nearly Ruinous Misstep

For the first several episodes of Taxi Driver, I was completely hooked. A fun take on the revenge story that was both playfully irreverent and deeply, brutally serious. The theme and tone of the episodes managed to balance this perfectly. Our various characters reveled in their ruthless undertaking with, initially, little thought for the broader moral complexities.

Naturally, as the series progressed, these moral complexities worked their way to the surface. Mature and nuanced debates about justice versus revenge, vigilantism versus an established justice system, etc. etc. became more prevalent without ever damaging the pacing or feel of the story.

Mostly, this is a drama that doesn't really need a review. You get what's on the tin. It's done exceptionally well. Enough is left unresolved to leave room for personal consideration. The action sequences were wonderful. The characters were wonderfully developed and the whole cast had lovely chemistry. I also enjoyed the pronounced lack of romance.

HOWEVER.

About halfway through, a storyline was begun that damn near ruined the whole thing. I'm not one to jump up and down about how women should or should not be portrayed. I'm of the mind that women, like all human beings, exist in limitless variety and so there really is no "wrong" portrayal, strictly speaking. But this went far enough to offend my intelligence. A case was introduced that had a personal connection to the woman on the team. Many cases arose throughout the series that had personal connections to the various main characters. And all of them struggled to deal with their own emotional baggage as they worked on the case. However when hers came about, she didn't struggle. She ran away to her house where she locked herself in her bedroom and hid under her bed (literally) for days. She was an adult whose irrationally and unnaturally childish behavior was being depicted as normal and unsurprising. No one could reach her. They ended up having to cope with her absence as they tried to handle the case without her essential skills. It came across like she, being a woman, was literally incapable of dealing with the emotional weight of it. This particular case, too, dragged on MUCH longer than the previous ones had, which made this situation feel like it would never end. I almost dropped the drama because of it. An absurd decision that someone ought to be punished for.

And it wasn't like the men were depicted as having an easy time with their personal issues. One had a panic disorder that actually landed him in the hospital. They all struggled, but the men were, apparently, able to at least maintain lucidity and uprightness (and adulthood?). Whereas the woman, being female, actually fully shut down under the pressure of ~~trauma~~ and reverted back to a seven-year-old child. It was like this was the only way the writers could think to portray a woman having a hard time with something. Like they thought it was somehow unrealistic for her to at least be able to attempt to struggle through it. And that it was far more realistic for the woman to respond to difficulty exactly the same way a child would. Because a woman and child are more or less the same thing, right?

If you fast forward through all that garbage, this series is really wonderful. Though I'm hesitant to watch Season 2 on the chance there might be more of that.

Read More

A character study in espionage, honor, and brotherhood

This is the kind of drama I search high and low to find. This was perfect, in my opinion. Beautiful story, complex and rich. Intricate to the point that If you miss one line of dialogue you might be confused for the rest of the drama. I love the dramas that are almost exclusively people whispering anxiously in dimly lit rooms. I love the agony of impossible decisions, the cruelty of duty and the enduring and thankless masochism of blood-deep bonds of friendship in times of war. I love endings that make you feel hollow but satisfied.

The atmosphere of this was beyond perfect. The warm shadows of the sparsely-lit interiors were offset by the stark gray daylight of midwinter shining through open doorways and windows in the background; often the characters were mere silhouettes huddled tightly in their heavy clothes, hands tucked in sleeves, clouds of white steam as they talked. The pristine official and palace settings were harshened by frozen mud and a palate of earth tones. Everywhere you look you'll find layer upon layer of rich textures... It will make you feel the cold, feel the difficult and uncertain calm that settled tensely between wars and battles and political upheavals. And because the palate is so muted and the settings so restrained, the characters' movements and faces become a matter of fixation.

The story here is impeccable. Impossibly high stakes handled almost blindly in the dark, muddy alleyways behind the palace walls by people without names and without monuments. Espionage stories must necessarily be intricate. But they must also matter in a way that cannot ignore nation or individual. To do this well is difficult, to say the least. This story does such an amazing job with this that I fear future espionage stories I watch/read will pale in comparison.

As impressive as everyone's acting was (everyone), Chen Kun as Chen Gong was a standout. This was a difficult, tricky role that succeeded or failed on the actor's interpretation and delivery and Chen Kun walked that highwire like a true artist. From the prolonged monologue at the end of the first episode until his final moment on screen he maintained a relentless level of intensity and complexity that withstood any amount of scrutiny or analysis. A flicker of his eyebrow could be found to hold depth of unspoken information. Which is to say that literally every muscle movement on screen was deliberate. I haven't seen acting like his in a very, very long time. Too, this character could have been played as pitiful or even as some kind of victim (in the sense that spies tend always to get treated like pieces on a board), but you never get that from Chen Kun. It's hard to describe the type of strength he portrays. You see it especially in that first episode when it's so clear how terrified he is, blinding, all-consuming fear, yet we do not pity him.

Bai Yu met and answered the exemplary performance of Chen Kun quite well. A less complicated character, his was nonetheless fully realized, flawed, likable, and essential to the story. He experienced a kind of development through the story that I don't often see writers allow, a kind of accumulation of damage that created an almost blissful numbness by which he was able to maintain his integrity and still do his job. A really unique take on such a character.

I'm unfamiliar with Angelababy as an actress, but she delivered a really nuanced take on what could have been a very same 'ol same 'ol character. She's largely inscrutable, which contributes volumes to how interesting her character is to watch. And I can't commend the writers enough for steering away from a) that predictable romance storyline or worse b) a love triangle. Either would have cheapened her character.

This story will stay with me for a long time. I look forward to rewatching it. I'm working on learning Mandarin, so I'm also looking forward to reading the novel one of these days.

(I took off half a star for those early episodes with the horrendous cutesy explains at the end and also because occasionally the sweeping score seemed poorly timed with what was on the screen. But these are matters that are of very little importance to me, honestly.)

Read More

Man alive, what an absolute train wreck of wasted potential.

I'll start without spoilers and provide a warning when the spoilers start.

This drama could have been a very successful average thriller or it could have been an extraordinary revenge story. But instead horrible writing, outrageous plotting and some, frankly, troubling moral backlighting led to the only drama I've ever watched in my life that actually kept me awake because of how angry I was.

And it is hard not to focus on the troubling moral themes when I think about this drama. However the reality is that these troubling moral themes are directly responsible for the otherwise inexplicably bad storytelling decisions. I can't read the writer's mind, but choices were made that were supported by blatant moralizing to the point that one assumes the writer had an Opinion.

When Blind began you already knew that one of those battered boys from the hellish orphanage was involved somehow in what was going on. In the first episode we're introduced to very heavy material and a seemingly delicate approach to its attendant issues.

However, as the story progressed I came to realize that the writer didn't seem to view the adult survivors who endured that hell as actual people. Not in the sense that the other characters were. This is never stated explicitly. But more often than not these adult survivors were half-wrought caricature villains or, rarely, caricature victims who had lost most personhood in their embodiment of their trauma. And even when they were portrayed as human, time and again I felt a divide between them and the characters who were "normal." Like a black uncrossable chasm of wrongness would forever separate normal society from the survivors of unspeakable abuse so much so that those survivors simply couldn't be part of society. Not that they shouldn't, or ought to barred from it, but that they were so broken that they were incapable and it was frankly burdensome to society for them to try. This wasn't some megaphone message or anything, but the omnipresence of this mentality shone through the writing like a sizzling neon sign on a foggy hillside.

An argument could be made that these adult survivors were all depicted as irreparably damaged by their time at the orphanage to really convey how brutal the abuse was, or abuse in general. And I might even agree with that if it weren't for all the other things I had begun to notice. Too, I might not even have cared had the writer not deleted the final episode in place of a flaccid PSA about how murder is bad.

Here begin spoilers:

There were times when this was almost really good. The backstory of the abusive orphanage and the way every single juror was connected was very cool. The tiny pieces of information we received made us desperate for more, the relentlessly gloomy atmosphere just built and built...

The boys in the orphanage were organized by number. In the flashbacks we can identify them by the numbers on their shirts. Boy Number 11 is calm, paternal, self-sacrificing and noble. Boy Number 13 is characterized early on as somewhat off, perhaps a bit sociopathic, perhaps just angry and broken. Regardless, he's definitely unhinged and worrisome. When we originally suspected that Taec Yeon's character Song Joon was Boy Number 13 and thus possibly the serial killer, his brother and many others all suspected him as well. Though not for that reason, as no one else knew that he was possibly number 13. They suspected him because he already had a history of being generally violent and unhinged.

I feel like I should add a sidebar here that none of the characters, from about the last quarter of the drama onward, behaved with even a modicum of logical consistency. But I'll get to that in detail later.

When we first got the twist that Song Joon's adoptive brother Song Hoon was actually one of the survivors of that hellish orphanage, the kind and warm Boy Number 11, and not Song Joon, (who was just the biological son of terrible parents) it was a great twist. At that time I figured the plot was going to progress as follows (please indulge my creative liberties for a moment): Song Hoon, aka Boy Number 11, knows that his orphanage brother, the worrisome Boy Number 13, is the real serial killer out there wreaking havoc and getting his pound of flesh in murderous, gleeful bulk. However Boy 13's chaotic rampage is ruining Sung Hoon's (Boy 11) carefully planned scheme to expose the orphanage and get justice, given that he was a judge and, for about eighty percent of the drama, portrayed as an unwavering crusader for justice. However he had vowed to protect Number 13 when they were children so now he finds himself in this troubling situation where he feels obliged to continue doing so. And also is sort of forced to "use" Number 13's wonton murders in his plan. A thing that seemed to be torturing him. This made logical sense. It fit the events, it fit his character, it fit what hints we were seeing on the screen, I felt it had even been foreshadowed a bit. And in the end, I thought, the big issue for him was going to be which brother he would choose to protect, the murderous and unhinged Number 13 whom he had vowed to protect when they were children, or his adoptive brother Song Joon who worshipped and admired him. Which would he choose? Could he choose? That's where I thought we were going. But no. This is very much not what happens.

For one thing, every plot twist except the revelation about Sung Hoon was not a plot twist. It was the writer changing his mind mid way and then failing to rewrite previous episodes before they were filmed. So the twists contradict previous narrative and then clumsily try to make up for it. The absurd planted memories thing is the best example. We were given Sung Joon struggling with vivid memories of his time in that orphanage and then later the writing tried to convince us that not only had these been planted memories (???) but that this somehow served Sung Hoon's plan. (It didn't, trust me. According to this writer Sung Hoon only did that to mess with Sung Joon because of who his parents were.) That confused me. How could a person who treated other children with uncompromising compassion choose to treat another child with cruelty? To punish that child's parents? Perhaps I could believe that. But how could the same boy who protected other vulnerable children in the same breath mistreat a vulnerable child? It would have made more sense according to his character up to that point for him to view little tiny Sung Joon as another vulnerable victim. After all, the monsters who had been abusing the orphans were Sung Joon's biological parents. And they hadn't exactly been treating Sung Joon well.

What's more interesting is that prior to the revelation that he was not Number 13, the idea presented was that Sung Joon was violent and unhinged BECAUSE he was Number 13 and all those bad things had happened to him. When they revealed that all those memories had been planted it became this bizarre thing where, at first, it attempted to the prove the fallacy by saying, look: even when the memories are false it still makes a person unfit for society and inherently dangerous. But then later they just forgot about it entirely. Like the fact that he found out that the memories were false just deleted his violent tendencies.

Let's talk about Sung Hoon for a moment. This was one of the clumsiest and most absurd attempts I have ever seen at a complex and nuanced character. And the actor cannot be blamed. He did a remarkable job despite the horrific writing. This whole thing was honestly a criminal waste of a very talented actor's time and energy. This wasn't complexity. It was a writer who couldn't figure out who this character was from one episode to the next. A writer who couldn't comprehend the psychological damage and emotional trauma of profound abuse beyond "abused = broken and deranged, right?" Is he a staunch and unyielding defender of justice? Does he want to stop Number 13 from hurting people because hurting people is bad? Or does he agree that those people needed to be hurt? Is he conflicted about how much he loves his brother Sung Joon because it makes Number 13 feel abandoned? Or does he revel in the pain he causes the innocent relatives of his abusers? Is he trying to help people, like the troubled girl he seemed interested in sponsoring, or does he have a psychopathic lack of feeling for all life as we were meant to believe when he signed off on the cold-blooded murder of those two women? Was all of this a game to him, or was it justice for which he would gladly bleed or give his life? These weren't questions that were meant to be ambiguous. The writer emphatically stated that each of the above was the one single truth at various phases of the final act. This could have been layered and possibly, possibly interesting and even believable but instead it was so contradictory that it seriously destroyed my suspension of disbelief more than once. And Sung Hoon was the ONE character they had to get absolutely right. But they bungled so much that it was, frankly, embarrassing to watch.

Morally speaking, Sung Hoon represents a significant part of my biggest issue with this drama. Aside from the writer's inability to manage the writing of a killer's motives, it also seemed that they were relying on the viewer's understanding that he was too ruined to be good. The fact that they ineptly tried to make him conflicted while also embodying this idea made him an incomprehensible knot of confused contradictions. The writer wanted him to be sympathetic, but, you see, murder is bad and so he also had to be the epitome of evil. The nuance attempted in the writing of Sung Hoon had the delicacy of a sledge hammer. One gets the impression that the writer couldn't understand why someone would want to murder. Anyone who wants to murder is pure pitch black evil, plain and simple. Which idea was beaten into the narrative like an evangelical preacher pounding on his pulpit.

The writer bent the narrative into outrageous contortionist positions to really drive home the idea that Sung Hoon was a sadistic, inhuman monster. But after his arrest there was very, very little time spent getting into the crimes of those who looked the other way when things were happening at that orphanage. Almost no time was spent examining (or condemning) the deep, insidious and pervasive evil of that level of indifference. And the reality that every female orphan was sent to the "vacation home" never to be seen or heard from again was just not really a huge issue to the characters or writer. Sure, there was a montage where lots of people connected with the orphanage were rounded up by the police, but this felt like an afterthought. Their crimes certainly didn't seem like much of anything compared to an adult survivor committing murder. These were all just a bunch of average lowlifes. Sung Hoon was, apparently, Satan incarnate. Best exemplified in the social worker's bizarre moral contradictions by which she, without hesitation, completely washed her hands of Sung Hoon, dropping him like he was on fire, but could still socialize comfortably with a person who had done nothing all those years ago while watching young boys scream for help as they were being dragged through the forest by grown men. What's more, this person had "foreseen" that those boys would become murderers and had advised the evil guards to kill them there and then. And the social worker knew this.... It's hard to decide if her character is morally bankrupt or the writer.

Towards the end, the writer began the Campaign Against Murder™, and thus we were served the inane, scoldy moral superiority of the social worker (a likable character prior to this) who took it upon herself to carry out some of the most empty and imperious exhibitions of moralistic canting that the writer could think of. So egregiously meaningless and self-congratulatory as to feel like they meant for her to look absurd. I kept waiting for someone to tap her on the shoulder and say "hey, you're being both naïve and arrogant." Given my heightened level of annoyance at this point, it had begun to feel like the mere fact that she hadn't been one of the abused orphans was enough to gold plate any effort she made.

According to the moral landscape of this drama, the absurd measures she took to "help the victims" were going to be more effective in raising awareness than Sung Hoon's revenge plan. By the way, placing those two things on the table as the only two possible solutions for a problem that ugly and complex made me want to dropkick my computer into high earth orbit. For one thing, half-wrought moralizing has no place in a bleak revenge drama. You can't hold up a violently abused child and a horrendous murder and pronounce "one does not justify the other and that is the end of this conversation you can all go home I've fixed society." Unless a writer has the chops to extract the really uncomfortable layers of moral, ethical and social nuance in a story like that, they have no business touching it with a ten-foot pole.

Too, the core premise of the title, that evil can survive when people simply turn a blind eye to bad things, was never properly explored. The people who did that, who looked away or who got scared or who were paid to keep silent were ultimately treated by the narrative as victims themselves, with perhaps a little shame on their heads but nothing, nothing compared to Boy Number 11, obviously. Those other people didn't do anything bad, they just watched as little children were chained up in their underwear, beaten half to death, sexually abused, starved, passed around like candy and sometimes deliberately murdered and all they did was, you know, nothing. I mean, that's completely understandable, right? Lots of regular people would probably do nothing, right? Right? It's unnatural and unreasonable to be so angry about that you want to murder. Right?

On top of that, when Sung Hoon was revealed to have endured a long history of self harm, his brother, the "hero" of the story called him an evil coward. And said that not even this (or a suicide attempt) was enough to make up for what he had done. Which heavily suggested that people who self harm are not suffering from crippling emotional pain but are actually overwhelmed by guilt for real crimes. And thus self harm, too, can be seen as another indicator that the person is unfit for society.

The writer did convey that the monsters who ran the orphanage treated their own children like angels but the orphans like dogs because to them orphans were dogs. Which is, incidentally, another facet of the same problem that created such a clunky plot as this. This idea that those orphans were so removed from society that "good" people could treat them in ways too unspeakable to recount without, somehow, it having any effect on their humanity, again, strains credulity. But there's something ugly there that I can't be bothered to explore. Something about when the orphan survivors misbehaved innocent lives were lost, but when the regular people misbehaved they only actually caused harm to the lives of the nameless orphans...

There was something in there about the cycle of violence, but the credibility of such a message was lost in the noise of garbage.

I liked all three characters for most of the drama. But when Sung Hoon was revealed to be the killer, the way the other two treated him and the mentality behind that treatment was so inhumane and contradictory to their previous selves that not only could I not take it seriously from a storytelling standpoint but I no longer respected them as human beings. As far as I was concerned they could both go walk off a cliff and I wouldn't care.

Maybe now that I've got all that out of my system I can actually move on with my life.

Read More

Perhaps I'm Not the Target Audience Here

I don't love romance stories. I've really enjoyed them in the past, for example: Crash Landing on You and The Imperial Coroner. Romance or not I'll watch anything if the premise seems interesting enough. That was the case here. The polar opposite characters, the vast room for growth that was possible, and, if I'm being honest, the humorous potential when they swapped bodies. China has a way of taking a story I'd otherwise care little for and making it pleasant.

I'm going to drop this one though. Let me explain why:

Firstly, I don't think Esther Yu has the range to be more than the silly orchid fairy. I enjoy the sweet innocence of her starting point, an almost dumb person with a fairy tale understanding of the world who gets forcibly launched into enormously complex situations. However, her cartoon character depiction (and writing) had her refusing any and all development along the way. She was like this bubble bouncing along the plot with no actual interaction with it. As dumb as she was, her persistent stupidity could only be explained by "we need tension here, so she needs to not figure this out" which I hate. I understood her being like that for a while in the beginning, but no matter how the plot developed, she remained like this. Don't get me wrong, she could absolutely maintain her sweetness and her innocence, but that's not what was happening here. Every time I thought she'd take one step forward, her refusal to budge was effectively taking a step back. In terms of character development, it felt like the demon lord had to do all the moving. As if, it seemed, her oblivious, idiotic, self-absorbed beginning state was somehow an ideal perfection she had no need to adjust. I didn't understand how someone so obsessed with her own problems could ever think enough to help with the various situations in which her contribution was crucial. And yet, like a rubber band, after she'd display the maturity needed for these situations, she'd immediately bounce back to being a self-absorbed airhead. And airhead who wasn't particularly unlikable, but still. I wasn't sure if this was bad writing or Esther Yu's acting, or some combination, but it was damaging the story in a big way.

Moreover, and here's where I'm not the target audience, one of my biggest pet peeves is the love triangle. I loathe them. Nothing ruins a story for me faster. Not to mention, here at least, the idea that the two most powerful bachelors in all the realms were somehow in love with her strained credulity strictly in terms of probability. But the way this shoved itself into the story and wrenched it into its own shape was unforgivable. Once the love triangle became more prominent I couldn't tolerate it any more. When I watched the Rebel Princess I was pleasantly surprised by the mature and realistic way in which the writers handled what attempted to be an intolerable love triangle. The main female character had evolved and matured, her husband allowed her the space to make her own choice, accepting that it might not be him (and aware that he had other, larger things to deal with anyway), and the other man was depicted as appropriately childish and petty and selfish. It's hard to view actual love triangles any other way. I lose respect for respectable characters who maintain their pursuit of people who are already with someone else. That isn't romantic to me, it's petty. Maybe it would go away eventually, and maybe I could have powered through had the rest not been so lacking, but as it was it seemed to take over the story.

Additionally, the thing that really bothered me about that was that every choice made by Cheng Heng (the other man, here) was because he was randomly and uncontrollably in love with the orchid fairy. Does he want his brother to stop publicly torturing someone? Yes he does. Is it because public torture of an obviously innocent person is extremely cruel? Nope. It's because he's in love with her. Does he want to risk his life to save someone? Must be because he's a good prince who wants to stop his enemy from kidnapping one of his own subjects. No, actually, it's because he's in love with her. His entire character was cheapened by this. How much more interesting would he have been if he was actually just trying to do the right thing considering the situation and his status. Instead all of his actions, which could have been noble and impressive, were instead petty and childish.

Dylan Wang's acting was excellent. His depiction of the demon lord was at once over the top and completely believable. His development was subtle and well-paced and ultimately more profound than the fairy's. When he was acting as the fairy in the demon lord's body, it was perfectly done. Much, much better than Esther Yu's terrible wooden attempts at severity and seriousness when she was depicting the demon lord in the fairy's body.

Ultimately, I stopped watching once it seemed clear to me that this was another one of those romance dramas where the woman is perfect and the man has to bend to her. There are fewer and fewer romance stories these days in which the writers dare to depict the female as lacking or flawed in any way. What's worse is when she is lacking or flawed but this is depicted as not a problem. And the man has to do all the heavy lifting to make himself worthy of her, to change to suit her, to completely accept her, to renounce himself in order to be satisfactory to her. I'm sick of it. It's terrible storytelling. It's nauseating and embarrassing to watch.

I don't understand why this drama is so popular. But there's my two cents.

Read More

Solid Cop Drama Elevated by Exceptional Acting

The title really says it all.

The story was good. Not terribly new or original. As someone who was in high school when 24 was originally airing, this made me remember the season when Jack Bauer accidentally got addicted when he was undercover in a cartel. That aside, some aspects of the drug world and drug addiction felt very off to me. Like something between an overwrought after school special and a simple lack of factual information. It sounds strange to say that I felt like the drama was sometimes forgoing story for an attempt at educating civilians on the damaging nature of drug addiction. But it missed the mark a little because some aspects of drug addiction and the world of drug dealers felt a little inaccurate.

That said, most of the time I could dismiss all that with a "this is a fictional drug, mostly, and thus they can make it do whatever they want" and that's fine, too.

The real highlight here was Ji Sung, who is incapable of underperforming, it seems. Watching him in The Devil Judge finally made me understand what they mean when they talk able having "presence." That's not a large man, but he fills the entire room.

His depiction of a forcibly drug addicted cop was, frankly, incredible. In this regard, the drama was spot on. His constant, intense struggle was very true to the nature of addiction. The expression on his face when he was held down and given a hit said it all; combined anger, relief, sorrow, guilt, and finally pleasure.

This is somewhat of a mixed bag for me. The story was good, but not incredible. The premise lacked the backing of realism, thus its drama and impact were kind of diminished. But the characters and the actors were really, really great. I'd rewatch this just for the characters. In truth, I'd rewatch this just for Ji Sung's performance.

Read More

A gorgeously-shot slow burn that missed the mark one too many times

I prefer my horror subtle and restrained. I prefer building dread to jump scares and 80s gore. Chime purports to be exactly that on paper. The story of a man who, supposedly, is pushed to the edge by a kind of tell-tale chime.

The length of this short film isn't really the problem. The building dread is accomplished wonderfully. But the plot itself, the characters' identities and traits are such carefully guarded secrets that the ending was more of a "hang on, what?" than "oh, wow, I get it." Which latter clearly was the goal. I'd like to think that I can think fairly abstractly, but the way everything was cloaked made the ambiguity a little too ambiguous. It didn't feel like artful, skilled ambiguity. It felt accidentally too unclear, as if the way in which the director was trying to artistically guide us to the reveal was a little... off. Like a picture that's accidentally a little out of focus. I get it. I get the ending. But it was like we tripped and fell on it accidentally. As such it lacked all the emotional impact that the film was building up to that point. Like someone's telling you a joke and few seconds before the punchline they answer a phone call and by the time they come back to tell you the punch line you've already figured it out.

The other slightly off thing about this film was that a lot of the psychological dread and alarming events felt like horror for the sake of horror. I couldn't see how any of it served to push the plot forward. Looking back on it all as the credits rolled I kind of understood how it fit together, but I was giving the writer a little too much credit, I think. Why the main character was doing the things he was doing made no sense at the time, and thus was very shocking. But even when the credits rolled, even though I could kind of more or less guess why he did those things and behaved that way, there was never enough portrayed on the screen to back up the assumptions I was having to make. I feel like I, the viewer, did seventy percent of the storytelling work.

The final issue is the name itself. The chime figures prominently in the first act, but not for the main character. After that it's only suggested that he even hears it maybe once. We the audience only hear it three times and those times have only loose thematic connections to each other.

The general idea, the story -- insofar as I understood it -- was quite good. The director (about whom I know nothing) is obviously very skilled at this kind of theme. The dread and the discomfort was perfectly constructed.

Ultimately, even though the acting, directing, cinematography, etc, was so excellent and carried out with deft skill, the story was never presented well enough to do any of that -- nor even the story itself -- enough justice.

Read More

A review for those of us who didn't do the manga/anime/90s 00s frenzy

Listen, I don't really go here. I love Japanese cinema. I have read one or two mangas and I would consider watching an anime at some point. I never read Death Note. Never saw the anime. Never even knew what it was about until like 2019. I didn't just have no expectations going into the film, I also had no prior knowledge. (I always wondered why pictures of the notebook always had an apple...)

My guess is, the manga/anime is better in certain key ways. The film had one huge glaring problem: Light's character development occurred in so many huge jolts that it repeatedly defied logic and believability. I've watched the first episode of the drama series and that one seems to be taking a smoother route. Basically, I can see how he could potentially get to where he got at the end, but the path was not A, B, C... It wasn't even A,C, E... It was like A,V,Z... And we lose so much skipping those essential parts of his arc.

The other issue I had with this film was the character L. Again, my guess is that if Death Note was a part of my cultural consciousness then I would already, like, KNOW. But it isn't. So I don't. As such, his unnecessarily aggressive antagonism made no sense because no time was ever spent addressing the nuances of his character beyond an obsession with sweets.

Anyway. I really like Fujiwara Tatsuya. He was excellent in Memoirs of a Murderer. He made a convincing Light. I would have enjoyed watching him really dig his teeth into the many layers of that character. And I prefer the subtler acting of the guy who plays L in this film to the almost silly behavior of the guy in the live action drama series. But I guess we can't have our cake and eat it too.

Probably better to skip this one. As an adaptation of the source material, my guess is it's not very satisfactory. As a stand alone film, it's not very good, unfortunately.

Read More

I would have given this an 8/10. But...

I'm not one to stomp my feet when an ending doesn't go exactly the way I had hoped/expected. I actually like being surprised or shocked. However, most movies of the thriller/horror/suspense genres tend to do this absurd thing where they have an initial "false" ending. And then they have the "real" ending that suggests that everything might not ACTUALLY be resolved. Like the thing at the end of all the Jumanji movies when you hear the drums and some random new kids go "hey, do you hear that?"

I don't know. About 1 out of every 10 instances this works. This movie is not one of them. I don't want to spoil it in case you end up watching it, but putting aside any conversation about "good" endings or "bad" endings, I at least expect the ending to make sense. Or, if nothing else, not to make the rest of the movie effectively pointless.

This was one of the most impressive suspense films I've ever seen....

Until

that thing after the credits started. The movie ends, the first cast credit appears on the screen and then randomly several more minutes of film get shoehorned in. In a way, by the way, that made it seem like even the filmmakers didn't think it belonged. Basically, just watch until the first credit pops up on a black screen and then IMMEDIATELY turn the movie off. Then it will be a perfect film.

Every time I see a false ending + second ending horror or suspense film I feel like the writers didn't actually want us to take the story seriously after all. It was all just for scary funzies. And selling popcorn. Or whatever.

Read More

An outstanding film that is just as good as -- if very different from -- Dream of Eternity

I watched Dream of Eternity (the other Netflix Yin Yang Master film) and this one back to back in the same week. I know nothing about the source material but was attracted by excellent trailers and intriguing summaries. Coming from someone who has barely a passing awareness of the Onmyoji universe and no particular preference in terms of actors, I can tell you that the two were on equal footing as far as quality and watchability.

It does confuse me just a little that this one isn't as well-loved as Dream of Eternity, but for anyone wondering what the major differences are between the two -- and whether or not those differences amount to one or the other being better -- let me help a little.

Dream of Eternity (the other Yin Yang Master film with Deng Lun), is a very quintessentially Chinese story. The feel of the magic, the harsh golden chill of the capital, the Chinese humor and the almost obtuse but elegant storytelling that includes metaphysical and even existential themes, are all more familiar to someone who is accustomed to heavy Chinese fantasy. As such, the story can't help but feel a little richer. Too, the development of the relationship between Qingming and Boya is a major part of the what moves the plot forward.

This one, the Yin Yang Master, had a similar feel to an American blockbuster as far as pacing and storytelling. The story feels more approachable to someone who is unaccustomed to (or not particularly a fan of) those very particular Chinese types of fantasy. Nevertheless, it still has a rich, unique fantasy feel, made even more immersive by a broader bit of world-building. (Dream of Eternity has an almost claustrophobic sense of isolation as the heroes worked in close quarters and in a limited amount of time to solve the problem). It feels more like an adventure and less like an urgent detective mystery.

The story for this one focused more on Qingming's relationships with human beings in general and the people who used to be his friends in particular. Boya is a major character, but his interaction with Qingming is limited, but important. Boya, in a sense, develops independently. And this development affects his opinion of Qingming and his decision to help him or not.

In Dream of Eternity, the demons (not a very accurate translation, I'm afraid, but probably no better English word exists) feel more like human weapons, like the allies you can choose in complex rpgs. They are well-developed, fully-fleshed and wonderful.

In Yin Yang Master the demons exist in many varieties. The more human but powerful, the truly grotesque monsters, and the very cute little creatures, of whom Qingming has adopted several. This variety lends a kind of comic book feel to the story that was lovely. And the cute little creatures really were a very wonderful bonus -- their urgent pantomiming to Qingming when they were trying to deliver information was so delightful.

In both films you have outstanding special effects, wildly impressive fight scenes with a cool Chinese sorcerer's flair, and very good acting from all involved. Dream of Eternity also had that heady, moody Chinese storytelling feel to it. While Yin Yang Master accomplished broad worldbuilding and an epic sense of adventure.

Dream of Eternity sometimes felt too melodramatic (a trait I actually liked, so not an issue for me), while there was a candy sweetness to the overall feel of Yin Yang Master. But Chen Kun, with his characteristic dangerous severity, cut the sugar enough to balance the whole thing.

The takeaway here is that they were equally good films. But they were quite different. It's better to go into both without expecting anything in particular and then let the film be what it is.

As far as this one in particular: the story was very good -- if quite straightforward -- the monsters were unique, the sweet little creatures were too cute for words, and the interplay and development between the wide assortment of characters was very satisfying, if not as deep as it could have been. But the film had no apparent aim for depth, which made it work so well. The over-the-top visuals and almost absurd cute creature antics would have made a profoundly deep and heavy story feel a little odd. As it was, the balance was just right.

All in all, an excellent film. A less challenging watch than Dream of Eternity, but in a good way. I highly recommend them both. But I feel like this one needs more champions.

Read More

More of a Character Study Than Anything Else

I should mention that this is one of my favorite genres. For lack of a name I'll just call it Suspense With A Supernatural Twist. I watch every one of these that I can get my hands on and they almost always delight me. Which is to say I am a little biased.

The suspense and mystery elements of this drama are not anything too unique, which is absolutely not an issue. It was done well enough that it felt fresh.
The supernatural twist, the monkey wrench in the villains' plans and the heroes lives, was also not terribly unique. But the way the characters moved through the story and interacted with the unbelievable was what really made this drama shine.

However, the really golden arc of this story started, in my opinion, a little late. When the main characters, whose interactions and fully-dimensioned identities were already so wonderful on their own, finally started to gel as a cohesive cast we were already well over the halfway point. What followed was some of the most exceptional character-driven storytelling I've seen in a while, I just wish the writers had chosen to get us there sooner. This drama would have worked better with another four episodes. As it is the last episode, while very satisfying, did feel rushed and also felt like several large explanatory pieces has been cut out for economy.
So much time was spent with our cast getting their bearings in a really confused and disjointed situation that we actually didn't get that long to really break down the characters besides the two main "brothers." I would have really liked to get as deep into the mind of Oh Man Suk's character, for example. He was fascinating and delicately written but ended as still almost a stranger.

Among the points I'd like to gush about: Jung Woo as Yook Dong Joo. What a performance. This character was one of those types of people who could have easily been very unlikable even if the writers had attempted to write him as likable. Yet both Jung Woo's interpretation and the meticulously written character development made him not just likable but admirable. He was pleasant to watch and behaved constantly in a way that stunned me. One of those really rare people with genuinely unpretentious integrity. I have a deep appreciation for characters who take responsibility for their actions. This is something you see done often and very deliberately in Korean and Chinese television and I love it. But the nuanced care that was taken in the way Yook Dong Joo owned his actions and their consequences was really impressive to watch. It is not easy to make a character who made the choices Dong Joo made genuinely likeable, but they did it. Moreover, his development in this regard was woven into the development of the plot. That was done really well and for that reason I understand why they let it take so long. And why I think this drama was too short. A few more episodes would have made it one of my favorites.

Examining the painful realities of their situation was one the things this story did really well. And again, they spent a lot of time on it. So much so that I felt they were hurried in the end to get the actual plot wrapped up. A lot of details were explored that are often overlooked in plots like this. I appreciated and enjoyed every minute of it. Every actor really did a great job.

As it is, I highly recommend this drama. You might find some parts of the first half a little frustrating, but the second half will more than make up for it.

Read More

Come for a darker wuxia story, stay for Bai Choufei.

Small mid-plot spoilers sprinkled here, nothing too major. Nothing you wouldn't find out from watching the trailers.

This was a bit of a gotcha, for me. Which might be why it left such a profound impact. I absolutely believed I was tucking in for a fairly ordinary but entertaining wuxia drama, with a light feel and colorful costumes and a bit of intrigue, for flavor. I was deeply, woefully, violently unprepared for what this drama had in store for me.

There were multiple overarching stories present here and to be honest they weren't all as interesting as these characters deserved.

That said, these characters were so exceptional that despite the story's shortcomings, Heroes will forever remain among my all-time favorite dramas.

Very few people will ever speak positively about this drama without mentioning Bai Choufei. And, by extension, Liu Yuning. The impressiveness of Bai Choufei, frankly, cannot be overstated. This was a dangerous, uncomfortable character to watch. Liu Yuning condensed an entire personality into a needle-fine point of unrelenting tension. If Bai Choufei was on screen, the viewer was nervous. This character's persistent internal battle was conveyed in every sentence he spoke, every sigh, every cringe, every difficult smile. From the moment we meet him we want him to be good, we can't help but root for him even though there's a thread of something there that makes us anxious. Liu Yuning made sure we were always aware that Bai Choufei was holding some part of himself in check through great and constant effort. Curiously, this feeling of tension and held breath is lessened when he pulls out his blades, which was telling... In his portrayal of Bai Choufei, Liu Yuning showed us a type of hero that could exist only by tightly gripping the leash of his own hostile sense of justice. This self-control was worsened by a bloody awareness of his own abilities; a kind of might-makes-right mentality. He wanted to be good but knew deep down that even if he wasn't good, he likely couldn't be challenged. His unwillingness to ruthlessly use his talents for his own ambitious desires could arguably have been the influence of his sworn brothers or it could have been an innate sense of morality he was never actually willing to compromise. When his character developed into a darkness from which there seemed no escape, he could have easily portrayed a Bai Choufei who was plainly and flatly villainous. You could say that he could have portrayed him as having given up, or given in.  But he chose a different interpretation. It was like he wanted to make sure we could still see the leash around his wrist as he was being dragged across jagged stone by the sheer relentless momentum of his own broken mind. We could still hope that he or someone else would arrest that momentum... Don't misunderstand, Bai Choufei went down a horrific path. He did many, many things that were hard to watch, that horrified me, even. What made him exceptional, however, was that he was also horrified. What could have been a simple shift into villainy was instead a heartbreaking descent for a would-be hero, and there's such a fine line between these two depictions. The character depth of Bai Choufei reminded me in some ways of Joaquin Phoenix's Commodus in Gladiator. Except there was arguably more of an arc, more evolution for Bai Choufei, but the layers upon layers of nuance were definitely similar.

Depending on the reasons you watch dramas it's possible Bai Choufei could wholly overshadow a stellar cast of wonderful characters. And it needs to be said that there was a host of really wonderful characters present here. Baron Chen's Su Mengzhen, for instance, was the original reason I decided to watch this drama. His character, the grimly elegant and vividly impressive young master of a powerful martial sect, was more or less fully realized from the moment we met him. He is noble, cold and untouchable, like a statue of marble behind a wall of glass. He is also deathly ill. The distance he keeps even from his sworn brothers is a fascinating bit of character that could be interpreted as a fatal flaw. His own awareness of his impending doom acted as a kind of imposed fatalism that he accidentally projected outward, forgetting that not everyone else in his world would see death as a kind of freedom.

Wang Xiaoshi was portrayed with a sense of innocence that managed to sidestep naivete somehow. Instead we see a boy who is walking the path to manhood along a road of broken glass. He was in no way prepared for the tribulations of his lot, nor for the pain he was doomed to endure and it could have made him intolerably self-righteous or bitter or indignant. But that innocence of his seemed very hard to kill, despite everyone's insistence that it was a weakness. Maybe it was weakness. Maybe it was his chief strength. At times it even seemed like impenetrable armor.  Whatever victories he experienced were pyrrhic. And it's hard to determine how he truly fared, even for those of us who've seen the end.

There are several other characters of note. Di Fei Jing was wonderfully unique. I could watch a hundred episodes about him alone.

The female characters left a little to be desired in this drama. The unfortunate reality of romance-heavy writing is that the presence of any woman seems to necessitate a coupling with one or more of the men. (A Jane Austen quote comes to mind...) And in your typical romance such a plot works well alongside the romantic coupling arc. But when a romance is shoehorned into a story like this it will feel forced and out of place if it isn't done with background restraint.  Either of the two main women would have had a more interesting storyline if it hadn't been so hinged on a romance. Particularly Lei Chun, who had a more than capable actress and a wonderfully tragic arc with a lot of available space for fascinating exploration. I feel they lost track of her character threads and ended up with a knot of motivations and traumas any one of which would have been better on its own. Too, I believe her character, Bai Choufei's, and Su Mengzhen's would have all benefitted from avoiding the very forced love triangle. Although, admittedly, it was done in a way that had less to do with love and more to do with madness and hate. But that, too, muddled otherwise crisply-drawn characters. Which is what I mean when I say that the story for this drama was not the best. It could have been; they had all the pieces. But things got a bit too jostled. They stuck the landing, though, in my opinion.

The bottom line here is that if you crave expertly wrought characters with bold, risky developments deftly handled by skilled actors then even with the disappointing story this drama will satisfy you. If, however, you're looking for romance-centric plots with a lighter, sweeter feel and generally happy endings, this one is decidedly not for you. Too, if a good strong story is more important to you than the characters, then this one will probably be a bit disappointing.

I enjoyed Heroes, if "enjoy" is even the right word. Given that I was so unprepared for the devastation that was to come, it left a deeper mark in me than something with a poster like that has any right to do. But I really, really enjoyed the characters, and characters are, to me, by far the most important part of any story of any medium.

Read More

The Ultimate Mary Sue

According to my dictionary, a "Mary Sue" is a female character who is unrealistically lacking in flaws or weaknesses. There's little else to add to this when using it to describe Changge. I don't mind (and rather like) a hero who does less than acceptable things and even terrible things, and then slowly grows and evolves. I'm not sure how many episodes I made it through, ten or so. Changge most emphatically had no weaknesses. What was so much worse, however, was that her many (many) flaws were depicted as not her fault. Within those episodes that I watched, she did so many truly selfish, selfish things and every time she, and other characters, shrugged it off as somehow her right given her situation. And again and again she was treated like a godlike entity of ultimate, singular, isolated perfection. I felt like I was reading a Nancy Drew book.

I simply couldn't tolerate her. Enormously unlikable character completely wrapped in Mary Sue-level armor to a point that created a plot comprised exclusively of deus ex machinas. Her storyline is predictable, flat and made dull by her general unlikability. I have no interest in her sorrows or sufferings given her scoldy moralizing and petty, immature self-righteousness. Her anger and pain are robbed of their weight by her need to place herself – as victim – in a place of greater importance than anyone else in existence. I can't abide a hero who uses their own pain to justify causing pain to others. Nor can I abide a story that refuses to acknowledge such behavior as selfish to the point of iniquity, but rather portrays it as if it's some vindicable complexity. And I can't tolerate a character who is treated like a hero despite the fact that they do not behave like one. If she's meant to grow, perhaps that will make up for this, but from what I can glean from the reviews, what growth occurs doesn't happen till late. I'm uninterested in sitting through dozens more episodes of her current behavior when there are too many other things on my list.

I would consider watching only the parts with Hao Du, as he is arguably the most interesting character, but I'm not sure it's worth it. And as it stands right now, the thought of watching one more frame of Changge makes me want to chew glass.

If the story had been worthwhile I might not have even minded those truly, truly dreadful cuts to animation at the moments of big action scenes. But that was really the horrible icing on the pain cake. What a terrible decision.

Read More

A Beautiful Nothing

I cannot describe to you how much I wanted to like this drama. Truly, like, hinged my whole month on it. I remember thinking, after watching Wuliang, that I hoped Edward Guo would direct a whole series someday. Maybe I was wrong.

Espionage and plotting/scheming political stories are my favorite, especially if they're more serious and mature. I don't mind romance, as long as it's not the main plotline and doesn't force itself into the main plotline. It can even add something, done right. So really, this should have been perfect for me.

To preface I should say, I really enjoyed Edward Guo's Wuliang and his Yin Yang Master. However it's my belief that his visuals, while stunning, are often used as a kind of gauzy filler-type decoration for a simple, straightforward plot that doesn't really need actual exposition. By which I mean that he uses beautiful cinematography to tell the substantive "details" of the story but this leaves actual facts and details unclarified in even the vaguest sense and forces the viewers to fill in the gaps with the emotional aftertaste of the offered imagery. If the plot is simple, as in Wuliang, this is fine. If it's more complex it really only works if you're going for that heady mythological fever dream kind of atmosphere, as in Yin Yang Master. A complex warring sects political and espionage drama can't really take this kind of approach. The end result will be too sumptuous without a definable foundation. Like cotton candy wrapped around a sugar framework, it will dissolve on contact with water. Or, in this case, if you try to think about it at all. I like Edward Guo. I just think his style doesn't work with the complex type of story this was meant to be. You'd need a more crisp directing style that focused on relaying facts as concisely as possible.

The idea of a completely insular clan that was heavily structured and full of its own politics was already fascinating. Couple that with an antagonistic sinister enemy clan that was gobbling up the rest of the world one sect at a time and you have the makings of something excellent. Throw in the opening situation of "assassin among the brides" and you've got yourself a good story.

However, right out of the gate the story's logic was taking critical damage. Sinister clan sends an assassin (or two) to their enemy within a group of brides. A fantastic trojan horse strategy. But then they deliberately let slip that an assassin is among the brides. In order to conceal the identity of another assassin among the brides? How does the sinister clan not foresee that their enemy's only logical response to learning that an assassin is among these random ladies is to, at best, refuse them entrance? Thus foiling their own trojan horse plan?

I'm imagining a random Greek sailor walking up to Priam while he examines the giant wooden horse on the shore and saying "there's definitely one Greek guy inside that thing." Number one: like he'd believe there's just one. That's just psychology: if you are told there's one, you'll suspect there are more. If you discover for yourself that there's one, you'll be so satisfied with your own cleverness that you'll believe it was the only one. Thus, I doubt Priam would've cared about angering the gods at that point. Burn it or leave it. No sane person does otherwise. So what sane Greek would tell him there's a soldier in the horse? You're creating a problem you then have to come up with a brilliant plan to fix. But you've now wasted all this time and energy on that brilliant plan, so what about the main plan? Actually managing to plant a spy among the women who are on their way inside the impenetrable compound of their enemy is so, so valuable. And the risk that revealing this strategically creates is so huge that it completely negates the value of their rare opportunity. It makes no logical sense that the Wufeng clan would do it. I could understand sending two instead of one because then even if the Gongs are suspicious and one spy is discovered (by the rogue plotting of the other, perhaps), the core plan is safe. It doesn't make any sense for them to reveal it before the women are even let through the gate. This felt like a weird attempt to outsmart the audience that looped back around and smacked the story in the face. This is such an illogical plan. And the sinister clan's explanation was muddy and unclear. That they had some other motive? Okay, but you still have to get through the door, do you not?

I only watched a few episodes, so really banging on about this issue with logic isn't quite fair. A few efforts were made to "explain" the illogical behavior of certain characters. But this created an atmosphere of wildly unnecessary complexities. A byzantine level of complexity that ends up being so inefficient it cancels itself out. I was expecting to be confused as to people's motives and allegiances. I was disappointed to find that I was more confused by the absurd actions taken by the characters which could only be explained by "this scene would look really cool." And not "oh I wonder what the aim is here, I can't wait to find out." Or something.

Example: the prolonged conversation between the two spy brides that moved in and out of the hanging screen: that should have been amazing. I love those long, tricky conversations where you're hanging on every careful word. But it ended up being actually quite boring. Partly because their analysis of each other's actions didn't quite hold up to that level of scrutiny, by which I mean that the characters were attributing a lot of thought to actions that had not been portrayed carefully enough to withstand even the possibility that something else might've been going on. This partly because the other actress (not Esther Yu) had to carry the scene and didn't have the space, writing, or acting skills to do so. And Esther Yu basically just looked surly and confused the whole time. It takes an enormous amount of subtle skill to pull off those intricate conversation scenes. There were much better versions in the overlooked gem The Ingenious One between the male and female main characters in which more was communicated with the movements of their eyes than every combined line of dialogue between these two spy-brides.

I would allow the naïveté of the male lead. His impulsive insistence on bringing the Trojan horse into the city instead of burning it on the beach was completely believable. His general impulsive dumbness was fine. The way he leapt without looking or thinking was what I would expect.

But his behavior later when he suddenly had all this responsibility was way too diametrically different from who he was initially. He seemed to have become... not MUCH smarter, but so much of his dumbness had vanished, to the point that I was wrenched out of the rhythm of the story. He seemed to be dumb when the story needed him to make mistakes and then to be smart when the story needed him to figure things out.

I get that he's the throwaway son, the drunken playboy, but we were never really shown that at first. In fact, it was a little jarring to see everyone treat him so poorly given that the first time the audience saw him, he was waxing poetic about the snow, behaving with gentility and displaying a tremendous amount of intelligence and foresight. But everyone treated him like an idiot they would cross the street to avoid. We didn't find out till later that he normally behaved like an unlikable loser. Sure, it was explained, but it shouldn't have been necessary. This was poor storytelling. It would have been better to portray the drunken nobody and then gradually reveal the intelligent nobility. As it was, I found his characterization uneven and odd. Later, when he was shoved into a position of power, the self-doubt and hiding-away attitude seemed to vanish. Perhaps if I'd watched more I would have seen more about it. But gaining power shouldn't have made his doubts and fears disappear or even just diminish, it should have made them larger. It was hard to care about him because things that should have been clearly understood were unnecessarily muddy and uncertain.

His acting was fine. I feel that he would've done good work if the writing of his character had been properly mapped. I really like that type of character. The failure who has unwanted power thrust upon him and has to somehow grow into it before he loses everything. That's why I tried to watch this. But they jumbled his development in those crucial early episodes, so I didn't really trust them to get any of the rest of it right.

I don't particularly like Esther Yu when she's acting seriously. If I'm being honest, this was a bit of a problem for me with Love Between Fairy and Devil. I found her serious, darker acting to be stiff, overwrought, and unwatchable. She was the same here in the three episodes I watched. Her other bride-agent counterpart was portrayed with more nuance and more agility, in my opinion, and even she left much to be desired. (I can't help but be reminded of the restrained complexity of Angelababy in Wind Blows From Longxi who did more with her stone smile and stiff eyebrows than both of these actresses combined, and with less screen time in the entire series than these two actresses in the first handful of episodes) Esther Yu wasn't inscrutable, she was a block of wood. She was beautiful and elegant and moved through fight choreography like a dancer, but even though her character was written extremely layered and complicated, her portrayal flattened it like an 80s perm in high humidity.

Not to mention that she's a woman who was supposedly trained for years to infiltrate, deceive, etc. and in one of the most critical moments immediately begins acting in a way that makes her stand out? If I'm to believe that this woman is an even somewhat competent spy then she should be going out of her way to behave in a way that makes her disappear in the crowd of brides. She needs to do what they do, be frightened when they're frightened, angry when they're angry. Her training should have made her allergic to standing out. Blending in should be second nature to her. It's her whole point. She would be trained to read people. She would have immediately picked up on the younger brother's sympathetic desire to save the women, spy and all, and played into it. Instead of randomly launching her own half-assed escape attempt? From one of the most heavily fortified mountains in the world? And the speculation that she did this to stand out deliberately doesn't hold water because her specific behavior didn't say "delicate bride in need of saving," it screamed "sneaky enemy agent."

The badass female spy is a nifty idea in the twenty-first century I guess. But in any society in any time the best spy isn't the best fighter. They aren't the prettiest, handsomest, tallest, strongest, etc. They are the ones that no one sees. The ones you forget after you talk to them. A female assassin who can't rely on guns and is necessarily going to be smaller and less strong than most of her targets would probably be heavily trained in poisons, which I guess they did get mostly right. And if you just want to write a story with a cool badass female fighter, that's great. But to be believable she has to have spent at least as much time learning tea ceremonies and the zither and how to invisibly guide conversations as she did learning how to elbow people in the teeth. And I mean years, not days. Walking in a circle for a week and a half with her hands held just so is not enough to learn how to blend in as a noblewoman. It just isn't. Pretending it is does a disservice to the female spy, the female noblewoman, the integrity of the story and the intelligence of the audience. And if I'm being completely honest, it's unlikely a man would be able to teach her even a quarter of what she'd need to know to pass as a noblewoman. But that's okay, see, because he at least covered what she'd need in the bedroom. Which is all a woman really needs to know, right? What are we doing here, Edward?

Which doesn't even make sense, honestly, because while a noblewoman would know about the birds and bees, in those days a typical noblewoman wouldn't have a comprehensive working knowledge of "erotica" unless she was in the trade. And if she did that would be suspicious. Either because it would call into question her reputation or her entire identity. Did nobody in the writing room have their coffee for this one or what?

I'm reminded of the scene in The Secret of the Three Kingdoms when the emperor thinks he knows how to eat grapes until the empress shows him how the wealthy do so and he realizes that this might have given him away.

I'm reminded of Maggie Q's Nikita series in which that one teacher would train the girls exclusively in ways to disarm men with their mere company, how they carried themselves, what color their clothes were, etc. This training took years and years.

I'm reminded of the completely overblown and kind of ridiculous scene in Inglorious Basterds which nevertheless had the right idea. You know the one I mean, when he asked for three drinks the wrong way and then everyone died.

Furthermore, presumably all these women were from martial clans which is why, I'm assuming, no one was too suspicious when Esther Yu's character could hold her own in a fight with the young Gong princeling. But if they were so capable of fighting, why didn't they attempt any such fighting when their lives were in danger? Either they could fight or they couldn't. But again it seemed that the plot choices were made based on what would look best on the screen. And that elegant fight on the riverbank was lovely, but made no sense to me. And if they all could fight on that level I feel like more precautions would have been taken? Especially if such skills were so expected as to be unsurprising.

If I were the Wufeng clan, I'd have a spy stationed in the brothel the younger brother frequents. If she could become his go-to, I'd have an invaluable source of information about the interior of the compound. I would know when there was tension within the main family by the mood of the younger brother, I'd be able to glean details about the politics of the whole clan based on little specifics that he'd let slip without even realizing it. In that sense, the youngest brother would be the one the Wufeng clan would know the most about as he was by far the easiest to access for information. Because most men, even good and noble men, of that type of society would naturally let their guard down around serving women. That's not as stylish or cool as the slick, trained ninja assassin, but it makes more sense and is therefore more fun to watch. For me at least. For all I know, if I kept watching I might find out that they do have a spy there. But I doubt our man Edward had time to think of that what with all prolonged sequences of young, shirtless, sweaty men sparring and the slow motion mud pit fights...

Maybe I'm not the target audience here. I don't mind when a guy is shirtless in a way that makes narrative sense or when a women has to strip to change her clothes or something. But I am not a fan of deliberate, excessive, full-eye contact physical objectification of either gender. Like that long sequence introducing the King in The Forbidden Marriage. It was like an early 00's music video the way they slowly panned over closeup shots of his bare body in candlelight. Compare that to the scene in Lovers of the Red Sky when he was working out shirtless. That made narrative sense, we were being shown his surprising physical power and fighting ability which came into play shortly thereafter. If you insist on putting a person's body on display for your personal enjoyment, at least make sure the plot benefits, for god's sake.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to stand on some soapbox and shout about the poor treatment of women in a random ancient society. I know what I'm getting into when I fire up an historical drama. It's fine, it's a story, let's all calm down. However, why are we having literal mud wrestling for no narrative purpose whatsoever? This is the problem with this drama. A great story could have been put here but all the narrative space was filled with meaningless visuals like an artistic slow motion sequence of women trainees in the period equivalent of underwear fighting in a mud pit while their male handlers looked on. I mean, Edward, what's the aim here?

The atmosphere was dark and moody and gothic, the cinematography was unbelievably gorgeous, the costumes were stunning, and everyone was very beautiful, if that kind of thing is important to you. And there were some undeniably cool scenes (that guy going up the stairs on horseback gets the 2023 award for Best Entrance). But all of that was so heavily weighted in production that the story, which is hidden behind all those smoke and mirrors, is full of holes, built on flimsy framework, and barely withstands any close examination before collapsing in on itself. Which is a shame, because a good story paired with the stunning production design would have made this an actual masterpiece.

Maybe it would improve if I continued. But I doubt it. And I don't trust it enough at this point to waste my time.

I will say: the actual instrumental background soundtrack was SO good. I desperately need to find that.

Read More