Big

Big is a show that has all the ingredients that make a really awesome romantic comedy- absolutely great actors, body swapping, awkward situations, and humorous dialogue– but it totally messes up the ending.  That means the whole series, which is tons of fun up right up until the last half of the final episode, ultimately falls flat.

The show stars two of my favorite Korean actors– Lee Min Jung as Gil Da Ran, a young substitute teacher trying to pass the civil service exam, and Gong Yoo as her fiance, Seo Yoon Jae, who’s a doctor at a hospital.  Their life gets horribly complicated when Yoon Jae appears to get cold feet right before their wedding.  He keeps breaking his dates with Da Ran and standing her up at the last minute.

A new, smart-alecky transfer student from America, Kang Kyung Joon, played by Shin Wan Ho, accidentally sees Da Ran telling Yoon Jae over the phone that if he doesn’t love her, then they don’t need to get married after all.  She immediately regrets it, and starts to call Yoon Jae back.  Kyung Joon’s already seen her get stood up by this guy several times, and takes her phone away.  In an attempt to make her feel better, Kyung Joon takes her out to a quiet, remote lake in the boondocks.  Yoon Jae calls and apologizes, and says he really has some things he needs to talk about with Da Ran.

Immediately forgotten, Kyung Joon heads back to town.  But in a stroke of bad luck, he gets in a wreck with Yoon Jae on the twisty country road back into town.  The two are brought into the hospital together, and when Kyung Joon wakes up, he’s in Yoon Jae’s body.  He assumes Yoon Jae must be in his body, but it’s hard to tell, because his body is just lying there unconscious.  Hijinks, of course, ensue as he tries to convince Da Ran that he isn’t Yoon Jae, and somehow get through Yoon Jae’s life without getting himself fired or worse.

So how can a bad final scene wreck the whole series?  I’ll explain it by borrowing an experience I once accidentally gave my husband:

You’ve been eating powdered-sugar donuts, and they’re delicious.  You keep eating donuts out of the box, but you aren’t really paying attention to the box, because well, it just has donuts in it.  Your wife comes by eating baby-gouda wheels.  She puts one of her cheese wheels in your donut box because, well, sticking it on the desk would be gross, and she wants to share.  You don’t notice.  You continue eating donuts.

You pick up something round and white out of the box that you expect to be a sugary donut, and end up spitting it half way across the room, because it is not, in fact, donut.  It’s cheese.  Your taste buds were expecting something completely different, and so the only thing you could think while you had it in your mouth was: Donuts aren’t supposed to be salty.  This must be one really rank donut.  

Obviously the cheese is edible, in another context it may have even been delicious, but the anticipation of something else made it taste horrible. Even after you realize it was cheese, and not a gross donut, it still kind of wrecks that experience for a while, and you don’t feel like eating donuts or cheese for a while.

That’s kind of what the final scene of Big is like.  If you want the climactic end of the series (that one episode that all of the rest of the episodes have been slowly building toward) to between the main actress, and a shoulder in a flannel shirt, with past footage of Gong Yoo spliced in, then you may be ok with the ending. If you were expecting some kind of great romantic reunion scene between two people who have come to love and rely on each other, you won’t get it.  That’s what I wanted, that’s what I expected, and I didn’t get it. Now, I’m not advocating that they had to have some giant makeout scene at the end of the series.  But it would have been nice to actually see the other actor’s face at least.  I don’t know if they weren’t able to get the him back at the last moment, or if it was somehow deemed too scandalous to show, but whatever it was, the ending totally failed to deliver on everything that had been set up in the rest of the series.

So yeah.  This is a rather disappointing show, with amazing actors, that should have been great, but isn’t.   Actually, if you skip the last part of the final episode, you’d probably be better off, and the show might be back to being OK.  The show would just feel leave you feeling like it was a little unfinished rather than a huge waste of time.  If you decide to watch it through to the end though,  you’ve now been warned.

If you’re still going to watch this one, please support the Korean cast and crew by watching Big at official sites. You can find it here:

Dramafever

Hulu

Big originally aired on KBS.

I Hear Your Voice

 

Ok, I Hear Your Voice is a show where you should totally ignore the english series description.  I don’t know who wrote it, or what they were thinking, but this show has absolutely nothing to do with special private investigators or working to free people who are “guilty until proven innocent.”  That description made me think this show was going to be about the Korean equivalent of the Innocence Project.  It’s not.

This show is about two public defenders, a prosecutor, and a boy who can read minds.   The prosecutor of course, wants to prove people committed a crime and put them behind bars, and the public defenders’ job is to make the prosecutor carry the burden of proof, and keep the defendant from being convicted if there’s any chance that person didn’t commit the crime they’re charged with.

In this respect, it’s a pretty standard procedural show– a person is accused of a crime, the prosecutor charges it, the public defenders try to blow holes in the prosecutor’s case and get a not-guilty verdict for the defendant.  All of the court room stuff I’ve seen in the show so far, the defendants are innocent until proven guilty, just like you’d expect.  I have yet to see them do any kind of special appeal for anyone who’s already been convicted a crime before stepping into the courtroom.  Now, there are times when all of the evidence seems to point toward the defendant being guilty, and the public defenders have to show it’s all circumstantial evidence, but that’s not actually the same thing as being presumed guilty until proven innocent.   The defendants on this show are still presumed innocent until the prosecutor can prove they’re guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

None of that is what makes this show really interesting though, and believe me, it is delicious.    When the story opens, public defender Jang Hye Sung, played by Lee Bo Young, and prosecutor Seo Do Yun, played by Lee Da Hee, already have a long and turbulent history with each other.  When they were teens, Do Yun (young version Jung Min Ah) got Hye Sung (young version Kim So Hyun) evicted and expelled from school for something she didn’t actually do.  Then when the two girls heard a car crash and went to investigate, they witnessed the blatant murder of Park Soo Ha (Lee Jong Suk, young version Goo Seung Hyun)’s father at the hand of Min Jung Gook (Jung Woong In).  Hye Sung snaps a picture with her cell phone, catching Jung Gook’s attention before he can kill Park Soo Ha.

Jung Gook chases after the girls but is unable to find where they’ve hidden.  He threatens them, saying they should hide from him for the rest of their lives, and if he ever sees or hears a peep from them, he will enjoy killing them both too.  Even after this, the two girls continue their feud with each other; the one who doesn’t come forward as a witness has to admit they’re a liar and a coward.

Nine year old Park Soo Ha tries to tell everyone that his father was murdered, but the trauma has affected him in two ways.  His voice has gone missing, and he’s hearing people’s thoughts–whether he wants to or not.  Based on his written testimony, the prosecutor does charge Jung Gook with murder, but there’s no direct proof.  It’s likely to be ruled an accident.

Do Yun and Hye Sung show up after the trial has started, but neither one can bring themselves to open the doors and just walk in.  They decide to open the doors on the count of three, so neither of them is facing Jung Gook alone.  But the only one who actually steps into the courtroom is Hye Sung.  Do Yun runs away.   Hye Sung testifies against Jung Gook, offering her cell phone picture as evidence.   Jung Gook tries to choke her out right there in the court room before she can testify, and promises that as soon as he gets back out of jail, he’s coming for her first.

I don’t know why the judge doesn’t preemptively do anything about Jung Gook’s death threats really (possibly because he’s Do Yun’s father?), but the show picks the story back up just before Jung Gook is due to get out of jail.  Park Soo Ha is determined not to let anything happen to Hye Sung, but he has to find her first.   He’s been in and out of orphanages since his father’s death, and has no idea where she is, or what she’s doing.  It turns out she’s just landed one of the public defender positions we talked about above, along with Cha Kwang Woo, played by Yoon Sang Hyun.

The show is extremely well crafted and engrossing. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed all of the episodes and plots twists so far, along with the mysteries still to be solved– like what exactly was going on with Seo Do Yun all those years ago?  And why did Jung Gook kill Soo Ha’s father in the first place?  There are a few spots where I saw some twists coming, but all in all, this is still a great story line, with a really fun cast.   It’s totally worth watching, and nothing like the rather blah English description. Highly recommended.

Please support the Korean cast and crew by watching I Hear Your Voice at official sites. You can find it here:

DramaFever

Hulu

I Hear Your Voice airs in Korea on SBS, and is scheduled to run for 20 episodes.

Goong

Today I’m reviewing Goong, which is another K-drama classic, also known as Princess Hours or Palace.  Goong is set in an alternate reality where modern-day Korea is a constitutional monarchy instead of a constitutional republic.  In other words, in this reality, they still have royalty (not a president), but most of the governing power has actually been turned over to a governing body.  The main duties of the royal family are ceremonial–  to preserve cultural awareness, go on diplomatic missions, and provide inspiration to their citizens– rather than actual day-to-day rule of the country.

Because one of the royal family’s main duties is the preservation of tradition and culture, the status and honor of the Royal Family is still considered very important, and the Palace regulations are very strict.  The Crown Prince Lee Shin, played by Joo Ji Hoon has grown up isolated and alone, and has a reputation for being coldly aloof.  His only true friend is classmate Min Hyo-rin played by Song Ji Hyo, who’s a dance major in the same grade.

As the series opens, the royal family has just learned that the Emperor, played by Park Chan Hwan has a serious health issue.   This causes a huge panic, because if he were to die, it would throw the succession into question.  The current Emperor had an older brother who would have inherited the throne if he’d lived just a few years more.   However, he died unexpectedly, leaving behind a son and a widow.  The current Emperor was elevated to Crown Prince in his place.  Palace regulations state that only the crown prince’s family can live inside the Palace while all other princes must live outside.  The widow took her son and moved all the way to England, cutting off all communication with the royal family afterwards. No one’s heard from her for fourteen years, even though her son would now be 19, just like Lee Shin.  If the worst happens, and the Emperor does die, no one knows anything about this dark-horse prince who would be next in line for the throne.  Rather than try to find him on short notice and possibly alert the public of the King’s questionable health (especially since no one knows what kind of person he’s turned out to be), the decision is made to marry off the 19-year-old Lee Shin early.

Enter Shin Chae Kyung, played by Yoon Eun Hye whose family is just barely managing to scrape enough money to pay her tuition fees and keep their house.  Chae Kyung’s Dad’s business failed a while ago, and he’s on the hook to loan sharks for the money his partner took out to try and keep the business afloat.   He’s unemployed  on top of everything else, and seems perfectly content to be the “house husband” while Chae Kyung’s mom sells insurance policies to make ends meet.  Chae Kyung and her brother have grown up very cheerful in spite of this, and the whole family is loud, rambunctious and stubbornly optimistic.

For reasons that probably have a lot to do with plot convenience, Chae Kyung goes to the same school as the Prince and Hyo-Rin, but she is an art and design major, so she’s doesn’t have the same classes.  Shin meets Chae Kyung when she accidentally dumps a bucket of dirty paint rinse on his shoes.  Obviously, not the best first impression.  That awkwardness gets compounded when Chae Kyung accidentally eavesdrops on the Shin proposing to Hyo-rin.   He’s decided if he has to get married now, he’d prefer it’s with someone he already knows and likes.  Not really believing the Royal Family is really going to marry him off already, she turns him down flat.    Hyo-rin already has plans for what she wants to do in near future, and being a wife is not one of those things.  Chae Kyung’s cell phone goes off giving her eavesdropping away, and the Prince ends up trying to chase her down and make sure that she isn’t about to go blabbing all over school that the Crown Prince just got rejected.

Shin rather resentfully resigns himself to finding out who the royal family has already selected as his wife.  It turns out Shin’s grandfather had already promised “the prince set to inherit the throne,” would marry the granddaughter of an old friend years ago. When Shin sees the picture of his proposed bride-to-be, he thinks this might actually be a great joke to play on the adults, because it is none other than the clumsy, awkward, and inopportune Chae Kyung.  With an attitude caught somewhere between Schadenfreude and, “Ah, hell, at least I won’t be bored,” he agrees to the marriage.

Chae Kyung, on the other hand, pretty much thinks Shin’s the devil by this point, even if she does feel a little sorry for him.   She absolutely refuses to even consider it.  She is going to the Palace to tell the royal family so in person, since they are insisting she at least meet with them.  At least that’s the plan, until thugs show up at her house right before she’s supposed to leave, slapping around her mother and father, and getting ready to repossess all their furniture and appliances.

She decides since it’s Shin, it probably doesn’t matter if she marries him for money, because he’s already a jerk to her anyway. And well, her family really needs help.  She’ll accept, and he’ll turn her down. Nothing will happen, and she can feel good about trying to save her family. It should be all good, right?

Except, of course, Shin has already said yes, so it doesn’t turn out quite the way she expects.   They end up really engaged, and the missing Prince Lee Yul, played Kim Jeong Hoon, hears the wedding announcement and mysteriously re-appears in Korea as well.  He may or may not have shady ulterior motives for helping the hopelessly out-of-her-depth Chae Kyung.  To make matters worse, soon after the wedding Hyo-rin admits it was a mistake to reject Shin. Chae Kyung feels like she really screwed up, because if she had just said no to this whole fiasco, Shin and Hyo-rin would be together.

The show follows the slowly developing and often shaky relationship between Shin and Chae Kyung as they try to adjust to this bizarre new reality where they’re stuck with each other. And of course Chae Kyung must learn to navigate all of the strictly-held court regulations and politics.

The show is a fluffy, rags-to-riches Cinderella story, but it’s also an exploration of whether having all of those riches is actually better than the strong bonds between your average family, and what happens when family bonds fall apart.   One of Chae Kyung’s families is rich in spirit, but poor in worldly goods, and the the other has all of the prestige and resources your heart could desire, with none of the actual warmth.  Not because the Royal family is bad, or mean-spirited, but because so much emphasis is placed on rules, appearance, and procedure within the palace that something like spontaneously showing your affection isn’t possible.

It also deals with the ramifications of having married someone for absolutely cold reasons like money.  It’s hard to build a warm relationship from that starting point, because neither person has a whole lot of illusion or excess goodwill toward the other.  Neither person is starting from a position of trust, like you would expect in a normal marriage. It makes sense that the personality clashes and crises that are inevitable in any relationship become even harder to deal with in that situation– because you can’t assume that the other person is at least going to try to meet you in the middle, or find some other solution to the problem simply because they wish for each other’s happiness.  A normal marriage is all about this partnership between two people who trust and love each other.

It’s been years since I watched this show the first time, but it’s still a solid story on the re-watch. It’s also interesting how my perspective has shifted since the last time I watched many years ago, because I distinctly remember Prince Yul being my favorite prince, and being rather disappointed that the show didn’t throw the cold and often arrogant Shin over the side.  I just re-watched the series, (specifically because I wanted to include it in these reviews), and I have to admit that the Crown Prince comes in solidly above Prince Yul now that I’m older.  Yul, while more honest than Shin, is too wrapped up in the heady idea of love to see anything else clearly– including the person he’s throwing his love at.  Shin, while not able to express emotion well, is genuinely trying to do his best to live up to all of his responsibilities, even if he sometimes completely screws it up.

Shin gradually comes to accept some of the warmth that Chae Kyung unconsciously embodies, which helps him thaw out his cold demeanor and be a little more open. Chae Kyung in turn gradually learns about the dangers, unintended consequences, and responsibilities of being in a position of influence and power.

Please support the Korean cast and crew by watching Goong at official sites. You can find it here:

DramaFever

Hulu

Crunchyroll

Goong aired in Korea on MBC.

Mischievous Kiss: Love In Tokyo

I’m going to admit up front here, that I usually wouldn’t have watched this series.  It’s based off of a hugely popular manga, but one I didn’t particularly like.  It’s a little too syrupy-sweet for me, and the protagonist is a bit of a doormat.  I haven’t watched the Korean or the Taiwanese version.  However, this series is one of the first J-drama licenses my favorite drama-streaming site got its hands on.   And since I try not to dabble in the gray waters of fan-subbing, I really wanted to show my support  by watching it.  I’d really like them to start getting the licenses to show more J-dramas.

Just as a little background on my take on fan-subs: As an author, I try to support other people’s creative projects as well, since I know how hard it is to make a living with those projects.   And whether it’s with your art or something else, you have to make a living somehow, if you want to create more things.  No matter what arguments you give for fansubs being beneficial, a fansub isn’t going to pay the writer’s electric bill or for any of the other expenses from actually making that show.  I’d prefer the creators, cast and crew to make money off the show I like, so I get more shows from them and faster.

Anyhow, on to the review part of this post.

Mischievous Kiss is about Aihara Kotoko played by Miki Honoka.  Kotoko is a bit slow and clueless, but she’s had a crush on the smartest boy in her grade, Irie Naoki played by Furukawa Yuki, since the first day of school. Not that he’s in the same class as her.  He’s an elite, in a class filled with only the most gifted students, and she’s just scraping by in a class of some of the worst test-takers in the whole school. Still, she gathers together her courage and writes him a letter confessing how much he’s an inspiration to her, and how much she likes him.

She tries to give to him in front of the school, but he won’t even accept it.  To make matters worse, he coldly calls her a nuisance in front of a crowd of people before walking off.  Rumor spreads fast, and by lunchtime everyone knows she’s the girl that got rejected by Irie Naoki-kun.

She spouts some lip service to her friends about being really angry that he’s made her the school pariah, and that he’s ruined her good image of him. But then, she almost immediately does an about-face and is right back to sighing over him, even if she tries to hide it from her friends.

This type of wishy-washy girl just irritates me. I really want to yell at them to make up their mind and go find some self-esteem.  And it’s not only because I’m old now. I had the same reaction when I was in high school, too.  So I’m really not the target audience for this show.

In a freak accident, the house Kotoko and her father live in gets hit by a meteor and destroyed.  It’s huge news, and after seeing the broadcast, an old, lost friend of her Dad’s calls to tell them to come stay with him.  They decide to accept, rather than staying in a hotel for the whole time. They have to wait for the insurance payout and for the house to be rebuilt.

Of course it turns out that Dad’s old friend is Irie-kun’s father.  Now Kotoko’s living with the guy who humiliated her, and his even snobbier younger brother Yuki, played by Aizawa Yuga.

Because no high school romantic comedy is complete without a love triangle, Kotoko’s childhood-friend Ikezawa Kinnoske (played by Yamada Yuki) is always trying to get her to agree to go on a date with him instead.  She thinks he’s not serious, since he’s usually a big goof. No matter what he does to try to confess, she still thinks he’s joking.

Not my cup of tea, but obviously pretty true to the source manga.  It has a lot of fans out there, so evidently not as many people have the hang ups about the main character like me.   If you like super-sweet, awkward love stories, and can put up with the heroine being a complete ditz most of the time (and kind of proud of it), I’m told that it’s a lot of fun.  I find it to be watchable, but not something that I”d go out of my way to see again.  However, I appear to be in the minority. 🙂

Please support the Japanese cast and crew by watching Mischievous Kiss: Love in Tokyo at official sites. You can find it here:

DramaFever

Hulu

Mischievous Kiss: Love in Tokyo airs in Japan on CS Fuji, and is scheduled to run for 16 episodes.

Monstar

Monstar is, at heart, a musical with an ensemble cast.  It has an absolutely wonderful soundtrack.

The story line so far is pretty intriguing, but honestly it’s worth watching just for the music.   This is not one of the shows where they play the same one song over and over again every episode until you could sing it in your sleep– unlike many other pop star “musical” shows the world over.  I admit there are times when continuous song repetition can be done well, but frequently it’s done really poorly. Those shows drive me up the wall, and I end up skipping the “signature song” after episode three…

Now there are still a few songs in the show that get more air time than others, but overall it’s a pretty balanced selection. None of the songs are repeated to the point of being obnoxious.  Or at least not so far, since the show’s still airing.  Given the show’s high musical quality to date, though, I’d be really surprised if that happened.

The story starts with a teenage bad-boy k-pop artist named Yoon Sul Chan (played by Yong Joon Hyung) who can’t seem to resist making trouble.  Not that he means to really, but somehow it always happens.  All he has to do is stand somewhere, and something outrageous will happen, whether he actively tried to do anything or not.    After he causes two different scandals in the same week, his company president decides to send him back to high school for a cooling off period.  The idea is to show him being a conscientious and community minded student, rather than a troublemaker.   Of course he immediately gets caught in the middle of more trouble and is essentially put in detention with a group of his classmates who are all social outcasts in one way or another.  He has to go along with it unless he wants more bad news getting out to his fans.

His life is further complicated by the fact that the class president, Jun Sun Woo (played by Kang Ha Neul) is a childhood friend who he’s had an unexplained falling-out with, and his seat-mate in class is a transfer student from New Zealand named Min Se Yi  (played by Ha Yeon Soo) who couldn’t care less about him– or whether he’s famous.  Se Yi is, however, really musically gifted and off in her own version of reality alot. Sometimes not in a good way.   As much as he tries to match her apathy, he still find himself concerned about her and going out of his way to make sure she’s ok.  The rest of the band of misfits is a gangster thug (?) played by Kim Da Hee, a frustrated bully played by Park Kyu Sun (If you think he looks familiar it’s because he’s also in King of Dramas!), an awkward fangirl played by Kim Min Young, and the class outcast played by Kang Ui Sik.

I have high expectations for the rest of this drama, since they have set up a really interesting cast of characters who all have troubled backgrounds with mysteries to be solved, and hints of more revelations to come.  It does occasionally lapse into over-the-top-fantasy-dance-routines (a la Glee or other high school musicals), but the rest of the show and the soundtrack more than make up for any disconnect those scenes cause in the original narrative.

Monstar is scheduled to have a total of 12 episodes.

Please support the Korean cast and crew by watching Monstar at official sites. You can find it here:

DramaFever

Hulu

Monstar airs in Korea on MNET.

EDITED 7/9/2013 to fix an error.  Min Se Yi transferred from New Zealand not Australia.