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Sinasina
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Watching the first 3 double episodes I was thinking that this show was hugely underrated, it was insanely fun. However as the story progressed I started to feel bored & by the time I reached the end there were more negatives than positives. The love triangle isn't good, the leads did not really have a good chemistry, once they started a more cordial and friendly relationship. Also the writers kind of given up on the timeloops quite early on and instead we delved into office politics & corporate in fighting. I'm yet to enjoy office politics in a kdrama and the focus shifted onto this way too much. The last few episodes were a clichefest with a lot of "noble" intention. Even though there is a happy ending, it's the rushed 10 minutes long unsatisfying kind.Thumbs up for it being a time travel drama that does not feature any Joseon hats.
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Put Your Head on My Shoulder
16 mensen vonden deze beoordeling nuttig
The cinematography is very good and even though the OST is a bit repetitive at times, it's still above average.
All the actors are extremely pretty too, although that's no surprise considering how large a pool China has when it comes to selecting actors.
For comparison's sake, this one is much better than O2O. Comparing it with "A Love so Beautiful" is a bit harder, but I would say that this one wins, because a.) There is no Wu Busong b.) There is no stupid separation plot.
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edit: Today, nearly a year after writing this review I have learned that there is a special followup episode that every fan should watch. On MDL it can be found as the "Put Your Head On My Shoulder Special Episode".
edit2: The webnovel has been recommended to me, so I have read that today in 2022. I was told that it's completely different from the drama etc. It was actually quite a surreal reading experience for me, I think "Put Your Head on My Smug Shoulder" would be a fine title for the webnovel :-). Largely the same events happen to people that have the same professions, interests & names, but have COMPLETELY different personalities. The drama is basically a cute fluff, with the leads having really mild personalities. Not in the novel though, the leads are basically cats & dogs quarreling all the time, it's actually quite funny and the novel becomes rather raunchy reaching the later chapters. The only thing that I disliked about the novel is how much worse Fu Pei's character is than in the drama. I don't know which one I like more, probably the drama, because of Fu Pei & the studying abroad thing was handled worse in the novel. Still it's an apples and oranges comparison, it's quite fascinating, how much of a difference the dialog can make, even if the plot is the same.
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Yawn.
I tend to love conflict free cdrama romcoms. This show however is not a comedy at all, but as it happens I also like slow-burn melodramatic shows, as long as they are low on the makjang & that certainly applies to this one. So why is it that my rating stopped at 5.5? Well, in my opinion this is a fairly boring show overall, I fell asleep multiple times watching it. The romance is basically a Hallmark tier love story. Yes the actors had pretty good chemistry & looked great together in the second half of the show, though I do think they took their sweet time to get comfortable around each other, thus the early episodes were far worse than the later episodes because of that reason. I've been told repeatedly that me finding the romance boring in this one is because I wanted more conflicts & love triangles and whatnot. I assure you all that is not the case, this drama is just really mediocre compared to some of the better recent and similarly conflict free cdrama romance stories. (for example "Meet Yourself" or "Hi Venus")If I look at things outside of the OTP romance, the drama is really really annoying on multiple levels. It feels like it was funded by the police/government to help find partners for officers and perhaps just to aid with recruitment, as such there is all kinds of social engineering in the show.
Also the amount of patriotism presented is on another level. My tolerance is very high in this regard, because American shows tend to have a lot as well and I grew up watching those, but good grief, there is really an immense amount here..
One other thing I hated how the writers dealt with the -toxic- fathers. Basically both of them decided to just suddenly stop being toxic & that's it. (this makes literally 0 sense based on the plot up to that point)
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It's kind of bad, but not the worst.
The only overwhelmingly positive part of this drama is the FL's fun characterization, which Park Shin Hye clearly had a blast bringing to life. In the early episodes this was enough to carry the show, but as the episodes went by the increasingly declining plot with all the asspulls & absolutely insane sequence of events made it very difficult for me to keep enjoying the drama.Boredom is also a problem, I for one did not enjoy that every other episode had 10 minutes worth of torture scenes/fillers. All the procedural parts were on the boring side as well.
There is not that much romance in this show, but what there is it's really not working for me, the chemistry is not there & the whole romantic plot feels incredibly forced.
As I said before the plot is crazy, but it's not like they suddenly piss off the viewers with something really annoying, it's more of a perpetual eye rolling situation.
As for why is a show that's just barely hitting mediocre so successful? I think similar to Squid Game the audience that is normally watching regular kdramas found all the action scenes & bloodletting a new-ish experience that's still different -in my mind far worse- than now aging American shows of this type. -\_(ツ)_/¯
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it's the best slice of life cdrama I've seen, but with some heavy political undertones.
The Good⌲ The overall top tier acting
⌲ The excellent OTP romance
⌲ The outstanding side characters
⌲ The out of this world good cat actors!
⌲ The fantastic OST
⌲ The incredible mood
⌲ The incredible visuals
⌲ The Fantastic sismances
⌲ Li Xian is far more authentic here than in anything else I've seen him in before.
⌲ There is a lot of peace, healing and wholesome in this drama.
⌲ The outstanding child actors
⌲ The dialog is rather incredible at times.
The Average
⌲ While the village looks incredible, it feels very artificial.
⌲ Nana's unreasonable netizen backstory
⌲ Hong Dou's homestay has some weird plot issues. (it's admittedly not too important)
⌲ The plot itself is very simple and predictable. (also not that important)
⌲ I'm being nitpicky here, but I think that plum? harvest episode was a bit poorly done.
The Bad
⌲ There is a lot of political content in the drama. (the cdramas I typically watch are better in this regard)
⌲ This relates to the previous point, but there is abundant cleverly done & some rather blatant social engineering in the show (and this bothered me quite a bit at times)
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When the Camellia Blooms
9 mensen vonden deze beoordeling nuttig
Onto the bad stuff:
One of the biggest problems with this drama is that they've extended it to 20 episodes, all the filler stories that were used to fill up the additional 4 episodes were related to things I usually don't enjoy watching in a kdrama, namely Confucianism crap and an incredible amount of melo. I'm fine with watching melodramatic scenes in general, but this was just way too much, for way too long. There is also a shift in writing after XYZ's death, it's like all my favorite things in the show got dialed down to the bare minimum. Some characters got some personality & intelligence adjustments mid way and then in the finale everyone suddenly changed their world views for a super fast ending that was quite underwhelming. To sum it up the pacing is just off. The disadvantages of live filming were on a honking display here. Oh I almost forgot, the 30 million won thing, I have no words for how stupid that was..
So why do I still rate the show at 7.5?
Well, I enjoyed the first half (more like 2/3rds), there was quite a lot of "Monogatari style" dark moody, but funny dialog. The romance was great up to the point when Yongsik's mother started interfering with them. The balance was perfect between romance,comedy and mystery too up until XYZ died. Even though I'm not happy with the last 6~ episodes, I would feel bad to give a show this memorable a score any less than this.
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I feel that I wasted my time!
The Good⌲ The main romance is alright, though there is not a whole lot of it.
⌲ The friendships
⌲ Muscular Teacher Watermelonface
⌲ No love triangles (though as I said, there is not that much romance to begin with)
⌲ Chae Soo Bin did not disappoint.
The Average
⌲ FL's family (heavy character adjustments here)
⌲ Tak's backstory
⌲ The underutilized Min Do Hee
⌲ Kang Daniel was bad, but I expected worse for his first appearance as an actor, he is not totally hopeless like Lee Minho.
⌲ The cleaning lady
The Bad
⌲ The crime/procedural part of the story is full of intelligence insulting plots. (Windows password 4 digits, copy protected video, lack of food during boot camp & countless others)
⌲ Corruption in kdramas is always portrayed in a really weird way, here it's worse than usual.
⌲ The first three episodes are about abuse by older students, this is no fun to watch, should not have wasted more than 30 minutes on that.
⌲ Assault is a crime, even in South Korea, Uhm Hyuk should be in prison not training cadets.
⌲ There is no satisfying conclusion, the ending is just whelming.
⌲ Dae Il's random romance with Hana
⌲ *'s meaningless death, I did not even feel sad, just confused.
⌲ The cadets investigating stuff.
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Relatively well written thiller, sponsored by RAZER©. (only minor spoilers below)
Okay so 8/10, objectively this should probably be worse, but for a CHINESE crime/thriller drama this is quite incredible, the best that I've seen thus far. Most of the plot is cleverly written and the acting ensemble is up there with the very best cdramas. Also it's extremely laudable that they did not try to explain the magic, how the time travel/loop aspect works, that always leads to unsolvable plotholes that they've nicely sidestepped here.Speaking of plotholes there are quite a few non time travel related ones though. For instance, it's established that ML's parents exists & also that FL has a "home" to call. Does it make any sense that the police would not rally those people, not even once in any of the loops? Also why was the innocent truck driver held responsible?
The young hot headed police officer really behaved out of character in the last episodes.
Another nitpicky point is related to how the police attempts to stop the bus with cars pushing up against it with their tires spinning so fast that smoke is generated, that's not how physics works in real life :P
I could also talk about how incredibly competent the Chinese police is in this drama. L, L2 & their old master is nothing compared to the reaction time & intellect some of these policemen have. Normally I don't particularly care if Chinese nationalism, or some sort of political agenda shows up in a cdrama, but this was way too much for poor old me.
Besides the nitpicky problems I've highlighted above, I have three major problems why this is not 10/10 amazing.
The first is that in the first 5-6 episodes the police interrogations are way too draggy & it's annoying how the leads willingly walk into them without a plan. (We dutiful citizens must inform the police!)
The second is that the perpetrator backstory is utter garbage, in a bad kdrama-like fashion and not only is it garbage, but also an entire episode is wasted on it.
The third and final thing is that there is no peace for the leads, there is not much intermission. They had the option to chill, to mentally recover between more active, traumatizing loops, at least before they have become aware of a certain issue & they've not taken it once. In other timeloop stories those intermissions are often the best parts. (for example Jack kissing Carter in Stargate SG1 and many other intermission scenes in that episode)
As silly as the ending is & as much as it's not exactly the ending I've wanted, I enjoyed it very much despite how juvenile I felt it being. (I wanted the leads to produce some 40 minute long fluff after everything's over)
Based on reading other reviews before starting this show, I thought that this would barely have any romance. The reality defied my expectations, the romance is actually quite excellent here. Not only is it great how the OTP is bonding during literal life and death situations, but also their progress felt really natural. There was no silly courting & silly confessions, they have just become each other's everything after all that they've gone through. (It goes without saying that there is no time for a love triangle)
Some of the supporting characters were pretty mundane, borderline boring, but "Lu Apostle of Cat, Conqueror of Asthma, Chosen One of the Light, Di" is the absolute best drama side character in the history of dramas.
Then again it would have been way more unrealistic to have 8 super interesting individuals randomly show up on a random (or not so random!?) bus ride.
The rewatch value is low, because there is not all that much fun to be had after completely knowing the plot.
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Even though the -extremely pretty- actors are okay in terms of acting skill, overall the characterization in the drama is just terribly bad. Most characters couldn't be any more 2 dimensional, I mean sure this is a fluff cdrama so I did not expect too much depth, however the writing is beyond terrible. Each storyline outside of the main romance and perhaps the hacker girl's stuff is dull, boring and uninspiring. The entire drama feels incredibly sloppy. It's like every second scene should have been reshot, but the director decided that it was "good enough" let's go home early today, which is a pretty big shame, considering that the production quality otherwise is quite good, they used high quality camera gear, hired a skilled cinematographer & the 2-3 original soundstracks were also up to standard.
There is also the issue of subtitles. The machine translated subs are enough to understand the story, but there are many fine nuances lost and there were times, when I couldn't make a sense of it.
I'm a bit baffled by some of the other reviews, perhaps ppl are just a bit too mesmerized by beauty? ^
If you are interested in watching a fluffy Chinese romcom look elsewhere. A Love So Beautiful, O2O, Put Your Head on My Shoulder are all infinitely better in almost every way.
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Romantic Doctor, Teacher Kim
7 mensen vonden deze beoordeling nuttig
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it's not in the same league with Hospital Playlist.
The Good:-Seo Hyun Jin
-The show has charm.
-There is no love triangle.
-The head nurse and her ?ex-husband?
The Neutral:
-The romance is alright, but there is very little of it.
-It's not a very well researched medical drama
-The overdramatized surgeries
-I could just not warm up to Teacher Kim.
-Hospital Playlist is just a thousand times better in almost every way.
The Bad:
-There is not much plot beyond going from emergency to another emergency, but what plot there is, it is just pretty bad.
-The hospital politics
-In Bum is a somewhat poorly written character
-Surgeons do crazy non surgery related med things.
-The silly main villain
-There were way too many unreasonable BS characters.
-Yoo Yeon Seok's acting (It's crazy how much he has improved since this drama finished airing)
-The big cheating/drunk driving reveal never really happened.
-Seo Jung's PTSD faded into nothing. "It's alright, the audience won't remember!"
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Although I Am Not a Hero
8 mensen vonden deze beoordeling nuttig
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It's a rather strong & quirky healing drama.
The Good⌲ The acting is amazing across the board.
⌲ The leads had fantastic chemistry.
⌲ I'm just repeating myself at this point, but OMG the FL actress is just amazing. (11/10 pretty, 11/10 chic, 11/10 acting ability, similar to Jeon Jong Seo in Wedding Impossible)
⌲ In my mind the romance is 10/10.
⌲ There is a lot of wholesomeness & wholesome healing content in this drama.
⌲ The main plot is rather interesting.
⌲ The 12 episode format works well for this show. (though I would've preferred 13.. **)
The Average
⌲ The drama had some really cool superpowers, but using them in a cool way only happened like once. (Lois & Superman scene)
⌲ Adding to the previous point: The least fun use of mind reading I have ever seen
⌲ The fake fat was not great, though not horrible either.
⌲ The sister's boyfriend/marriage plot really overstayed its welcome.
⌲ I'm not entirely comfortable with the backstory about swindling/scamming, especially thinking about FL's relationship history, basically whoring herself out at the call of her "stepmother". (This leads to fun writing, but they could have made the background story less offensive without anything else degrading in quality I think.)
⌲ While 12 years old Park So Yi did an amazing job, she is completely miscast for the the high school adolescent role, she's way too young compared to her classmates, it's just jarring.
The Bad
⌲** I'm displeased about the 5 second happy ending & how it happened. (though considering where e11 was on the emotional roller coaster, I totally expected something like this to follow.)
⌲ The drama had some slow & boring moments. (admittedly not in a huge abundance)
⌲ I'm not happy about the redemption arc the stepmom has gotten. I for one don't think what she did to a child etc. is forgivable so easily.
⌲ I feel the writers pushed the chicken and egg paradox way too far.
⌲ In this drama the characters talk a lot about how abusing precognition to get lottery payouts is stealing. While technically true, I find this sentiment really silly.
⌲ ML driving his family members around with his car = awful.
⌲ Electric stovetops exist..
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40% sports, 60% romance
The Good⌲ The top tier noona romance
⌲ The nice romantic plot in general
⌲ The chemistry between the leads
⌲ The lack of breakups
⌲ The high jumps were filmed very well, they looked very authentic to my eyes.
⌲ Jumping was more interesting than I thought it would be.
⌲ There is a lot off fluff.
⌲ The realistic progress of their relationship
⌲ ML is acting immature even for his age, but it's refreshing that Lou Na just likes younger clingy guys, it's not the usual 30 year old noona with the personality of a high school junior formula..
The Average
⌲ The love triangle (it's not bad, but the sML had a few rather annoying scenes)
⌲ Chinese sports dramas tend to be borderline unwatchable for me, this one may be better than usual, but the sports aspect is at best average. (training and coaching are rather strange..)
⌲ The supporting cast is rather numerous, but most of them faded into the background.
⌲ ML's mom (She is bad, but has so little screen time that I found her character tolerable)
⌲ Shi Yin (token -pointless- love interest for ML that just gave up without wasting too much screen time)
⌲ This may be a romantic comedy, but the comedy is not exactly fantastic.
The Bad
⌲ The party with the childhood photos
⌲ Li Ge (the drama could've been 4 episodes shorter & I would've rated it at 9 without this character existing)
⌲ The discipline switching, twice
⌲ Stealing a kiss from a sleeping woman..
⌲ Episode 24 is horribly bad. (rushed scandal BS to chase away the talented athlete, I'm surprised this passed the censors tbh)
⌲ The ending is less than whelming. (rushed happy ending following a senseless long distance thing)
⌲ The cinematography is fine, but the editing is horrid. (brightness, contrast, color grading)
⌲ Some things about sports & athleticism were extremely poorly researched, or just forcefully adjusted to fit the frame of the story.
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Frightening Cohabitation
4 mensen vonden deze beoordeling nuttig
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It's decent, but perhaps somewhat overrated!
Obviously this is a very decent romcom, but it fell a bit short of my expectations already early on. Took me a while to figure out what is the biggest factor limiting my enjoyment and that is the ML, Jang Ki Yong. I've seen him before performing great in Seach: WwW, but in My Roommate Is a Gumiho he just doesn't work for me all that well. It's not even a chemistry problem really, it's just that the aloof gumiho character is something that he kind of failed to pull off in believable way. It might not even be entirely his fault, his character supposed to have A LOT of character progression and probably nobody on the production team cared to tell him to adjust his character a little.At first I did not like Hyeri in this show either, but after a few episodes I got used to her character & it did not take very long for me to realize that she is carrying the drama, alongside the second couple. Hanna is always a pleasure to watch & she had great chemistry with her partner & their characters were also written pretty well, they had some great lines and admittedly quite a few cliche misunderstandings.
Most kdramas have annoying things that I can barely force myself to watch. This one is better in the sense that the writers did not milk every single conflict and misunderstanding to the max. There are two tropes in this drama that I have always liked, namely forced cohabitation and pretend amnesia. The amnesia thing with the indignant FL was especially fun to watch, the cohabitation could've been done better though, but it was still enjoyable and fluff filled.
I especially loved how nicely they resolved the "student dating the professor" scandal. I really thought that would get blown out of proportion..
The biggest problem I had with the writing is the flea-like second ML, it felt like he is a manhwa character from Extraordinary You, his need to keep confessing, confessing and confessing when they are "on the stage" would have been more funny if they played that certain soundtrack from that show during those scenes. As far as love triangles go this one is on the weaker side of average, since the FL never hesitated, but it could not have been more unnecessary and it only ended at around episode 14. Also the whole red string of fate storyline annoyed me to no end.
There were more minor annoyances than I'd like. Like how the leads separated for a short while THREE times in the drama. I mean sure it was at most for 30-40 minutes each time, potentially not even reaching weeks in the drama's timeline, but if only they could've forgone just one of them, I would be that much more content right now.
I'm not entirely happy with the ending. I love happy endings, but this one is WAY TOO SHORT with a lot of wasted potential. The writers could have explored how he is adjusting to being human at length. I would have preferred if they spent the last 2 episodes doing just that, rather than sticking to the foreshadowed melodramatic things that ended up happening, or almost happening. Just imagine how nice it could've been, when ML was about to announce that he is turning human, he could have just turned human, like there was really no reason to really push for that dramatic ending in this one. (the whole explanation why that needed to happen & the criteria for him specifically to become human were just ridiculous)
This show is obviously very similar to Goblin & Angel's Last Mission in many ways, but Goblin is like a hundred times better. ALM:L should be worse objectively, but I enjoyed that one much more for some inexplicable reason. I rated Goblin as a 10, ALM:L at 9, so with that in mind I can only give My Roommate Is a Gumiho a 7.5.
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The most important things to know about this show are that the leads are really cute together and they have great chemistry. Also the themes shown in the show are nicely balanced, the drama is about 50% romance, 15% music, 15% gaming, 5% school life. I enjoyed the noona romance, the OTP relationship may not be the deepest I've seen on TV, but the apparent shallowness did never reach my nerve threshold (unlike in Intense Love). The fluffiness is on point and entertaining throughout most of the drama. The comedy/fluff ratio is a bit tilted, meaning that the drama could've been funnier, but still there was sufficient amount of comedic relief. The story is on the weak side of mediocre. I enjoyed how they dealt with the leads realizing what each other's real identities were, the writers did a reasonable job there, but there is not much else to praise about the writing. It feels like most of the plot follows a template, there is not much innovation or creativity here. Luckily in a romcom the story is not that important, if the annoyances are low & that is the case with Love Scenery, at least for the most part.
The creators could've done a much better job at making me believe the gaming scenes are real, if they had just made the characters wear vr glasses & haptic gloves, then I would've been okay with all the things they supposedly have done in game.
Still compared to O2O the gaming scenes are HUGELY better here, I did not need to use the fastforward button, despite the unrealistic presentation.
It's nice that despite FL working in the entertainment industry they've mostly forgone the typical events that go down when actresses/idols fight each other for resources, fame and whatnot. Sure there was a little of that, but the conflicts were always resolved in a civilized way and even the fans/netizens mostly behaved in the drama. ^
I was not blown away by any of the songs, but overall the OST is certainly above average with a decent amount of variety.
I'm okay with Ma Shen Shen's story. I've read in the comments how people hated this character and blaming drama logic for her unrealistic behavior. I've seen a similar case in real life, so it's not like people never break down in such a manner after a breakup, it's rare but it can actually happen, it's not too immersion breaking. As for her relationship with Sun Bin Yu, I think it was pretty fun to watch. I mean sure it was a bit draggy before the last 5 episodes, but still I had some minor laughs and I was quite happy for them by the time we reached the last episode.
The worst part of the drama is without a doubt FL's secondary love interest. I had the impression that he was not even miscast, but probably the writers wanted to intentionally frustrate the viewers with this creepy uncle character. I am not adverse to age gaps, but the 25 years? age gap between the actors looked quite jarring. Anyway all the mini plots he's been involved in were bad, or borderline annoying. I guess his relationship with the OTP can be considered a pretty standard love triangle. He does not have success and FL does never hesitate or anything like that, but still a woman that wouldn't know what's going on with her so called friend's advances certainly does not exist in real life. To sum it up his relationship with FL is just an overused cliche, made that much worse with all the creepy uncle with a mustache thing. It was almost like a teacher hitting on a 16 years old high school girl.
Now that I think about it, I don't think I have ever seen an FL call someone other than the ML ge or gege and me not ending up hating that character.
The 8/10 rating may be a bit high, but I think this was a pretty entertaining fluff romcom, perhaps even a rewatch is in the cards, eventually.
edit: I ended up watching the drama again. In retrospect I may have underestimated the story a little, I enjoyed it quite a bit more now, calling it mediocre is uncalled for. On the other hand Uncle Ulterior Motive has annoyed me even more than before, despite my best efforts to fast forward button his scenes.
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