#ahjusshi fighter

[anemoiawithatouchofobsession]

I rarely post new kdramas here but it has come to my attention that Uncle Minsoo is in a new drama called "Motel California" and he's playing a nice friendly dad ahjusshi in a small town?? which is surprisingly accurate to his iRL personality. Im so thankful he's retired the "gangster"/"gangster boss"/"rich villain"/"poor guy"/"rough-n-tough fighter" image for a while. Also he's playing the dad to one of the veryy few succesful child-actress-to-adult-career-that-actually-made-it, so that's great. Lee Se Young is great.

I'm still not convinced I should check it out given the reactions I've seen online, but I might try and find if "Mother's Sea" is somewhere on the MBC Oldschool Drama Channel just so I can catch a glimpse of non-typecasted Choi Min Soo lmaooo

[consumeronionbulletin]

Healer (2014-15)

I completely enjoyed this show. The writers play with alot of tropes from both kdrama-land and comic books, but the show still kept my interest. Mainly because the writers made sure to ground everything in believable and interesting relationships. But most importantly—you get Kim Mi-kyung as a freakin hacker!!

She knits, she dispenses rough wisdom, makes lots of gimbap, and hacks just like the geeky guys in Hollywood! (That's to say, with lots of keyboard tapping and plot related antics that have no relation to reality!)

The OTP relationship between Ji Chang-wook's character and Park Min-young's character is the highlight, of course, but the show is packed with interesting character moments and relationships.

The American show this most reminds me of is Person of Interest which is amazing and I will always love. It's got the muscle, the grumpy hacker, and a ton of fun relationships that build over time.

The Performances

Ji Chang-wook as Seo Jung-hu (aka "Healer"). The show does a good job of setting up the badass fighter side of him. What makes the character interesting is the other roles he takes on as throughout the series. The writers pull a page from comics and give him a "Clark Kent" style alter-ego as Park Bong-soo. This could have been very silly, but Chang-wook makes it work and is just as entertaining when playing "Bong-soo" as he is as "Healer".

Park Min-young as Chae Young-shin. Min-young does an amazing job bringing this character to life. In a lesser show, the "plucky girlfriend" could feel stale and boring, but Young-shin is a character with many layers and a fair amount of trauma, and Park Min-young manages to do a good job with all of that, while still highlighting the fun and sunny side of the character. So good to watch in every scene.

Kim Mi-kyung as Hacker Ahjumma. I already love watching Kim Mi-kyung on screen. She makes every role she plays fun and interesting, but you could tell how much she enjoyed this role. We need more grumpy middle-aged women hackers in TV land!

Oh Kwang-rok as Ki Young-jae (aka fighter ahjusshi, aka "Healer 1.0"). He's not in every episode, but the character is so memorable you feel like he's there even when he's not. Another case where you could just tell the actor was having so much fun that he brings you along with him. Really fun to watch!

Everyone else. Look, they're pretty much all great. Even the big baddies are believable and interesting rather than being cartoon evvil. The tragic backstories are suitably sad. The colorful side characters are fun. Just watch it. Or don't, I'm not your ahjumma / ahjusshi.

TL; DR:

I liked this show alot and would recommend it to people who like Person of Interest or similar fun action / vigilante shows. The first two episodes are good, but fairly predictable for an action show. Episodes 3-4 are where you'll probably decide whether you're all in or not, but if you can stick with it, you'll enjoy the ride!

[swordsandparasols]

I watched the first 2 episodes of Mr. Sunshine (I see certain people sideeyeing me, but would like to point out that it’s a bit of a wasteland these days for sageuks and sageuk lovers, after the youth-fusion romance subgenre imploded due to oversaturation), first of TVN  new sageuks, set in pre-colonial Joseon.

It’s either dreaded or anticipated, depending on who you ask, for  a variety of reasons (mostly having to do with Kim Eun Sook, the casting of Lee Byung Hoon, and a lead romantic pairing with an age difference large enough that he could quite literally be her father, to the point that contextless scenes in trailers almost look like it could be just that.)  It...was actually pretty good?  Not perfect, and so far Lee Byung Hoon is, IMO, by far the weak link in the acting.  Admittedly, he didn’t feature much in the first 2 episodes, but the rest of the cast is putting everything into their portrayals, and he’s walking around like “yeah, lets see if this will make South Korean women forget about that little thing called my sex scandal about cheating on my wife with girls half my age, back to the movies if this doesn’t work.

So there was that.

Some stuff, in no real order:

1.On a technical, visual level, the show is borderline perfect.  Some of the CGI is so good that you can’t quite tell it’s CGI, even with parts you know perfectly well are CGI.  Unfortunately, that makes the bits where the CGI isn’t as good stand out more.  Being fully preproduced and having a huge budget (all that Netflix money is being used wisely so far) means it can do a lot more on-location stuff with a lot more locations than most sageuks with liveshoots can.  The end result is that the first 2 episodes look like a big budget movie.  We can only hope that it manages to maintain the quality.  (Imagine if Saimdang had had a similar budget and level of network faith.  I weep.)

2.  Kim Eun Sook is obviously very, very interested in this period of history, not that anyone can blame her.  The end of Joseon, the banning of slavery, and both Japan and America (and others, but mostly those 2 in the first 2 episodes) trying to get their  footholds so permanently solidified that they get the whole country (with the audience knowing that one ends up succeeding at that for a time) not to mention all the advances in technology and the visual contrast with that and the clothing,architecture and way of life that have remained relatively (as compared to western standards) unchanged to the casual eye for centuries.  If we’re lucky,  KES’s  history nerd side will win out over her tendency to get caught up in certain (very dated) romance tropes and generally fizzle out around mid-way through.  While the use of Goryeo in Goblin was almost incidental-window dressing history because it was the time period that fit into the story she wanted (to be fair “window dressing history to fit my plot” was something that could be applied to most sageuks around that time, even if the sageuk parts of Goblin were fairly sparse)  the plot and characters of Mr. Sunshine seem to be built up around the setting, and are very specifically products of that setting.  It’s probably futile, but I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

3.  CALM DOWN YOUR DRAMATIC WALKS KES. SHEESH.  DID WE REALLY NEED, LIKE, 8 SHOTS OF EUGENE WALKING IN FRONT OF THAT BRIDGE FROM DIFFERENT ANGLES?  And here I thought she got a bit carried away with that before...

4.  If Yoo Jin/Eugene were played by someone else, I’d be really into his arc.  A slave who escapes and eventually joins the American army returns in a position of authority after slavery ends?  So much potential there, and I’m sure KES does intend to follow through with it, but it’s with LBH.  (There’s also something to be said about his falling for a noblewoman who grew up as slavery was coming to an end, but that brings up back to the 20 year age difference and the unavoidable romance.)

5.  I preferred it when the previews made some of the contextless scenes look more like “secret daughter” than “future lover.”  I mean, it’s a kdrama by an author who loves her ahjusshi/young agasshi pairings, so I know better, but I feel that actually could have been more interesting if they could make the timeline work.

6.  Kim Tae Ri is...wow.  I’ve seen clips of her before so I knew she was good, but I haven’t seen any of her movies (No, I haven’t seen The Handmaiden yet.  Stop looking at me like that!  I will one day!) but I wasn’t prepared for HOW good.  The difference between Ae-Shin the rebellious intellectual and would be freedom fighter, and Ae-Shin, the haughty privileged noblewoman known to everyone is so much that it could almost be a different actress, and this is without any noticeable changes to makeup like dramatic character shifts usually get.  She acts circles around LBH so far.

7.  Between Kim Ji Won, Lee Shi Ah and Jin Goo, I feel my favorite cameos in the show have already come and gone as Tragically Dead parents in the first episode.  Well, aside from the little girl who played the tiniest Jeongmyung in Hwajung.  I understand she will be playing a younger Ae-Shin at some point, and it’ll be interesting to see how she’s progressed the last few years.  (The kid who played Gil Dong in Rebel improved enormously in the year between that and Lawless Lawyer.)

7a.  You cast Kim Ji Won and Jin Goo as marrieds because they played a popular couple in a previous drama by the writer, and then don’t even give them a scene together?  Hmph.

8.  We technically didn’t see Lee Shi Ah’s body.  I know better but am still going to be eyeing any 60+ year old lady who shows up in the main story.

And that’s pretty much it.  Will it stay good enough to overcome my reservations the whole 24 episodes?  Who knows.  (Ok, I have one friend who is very strongly of the opinion that it will crash and burn in the ways I fear pretty fast, but allow me to hold out some hope.)