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burhaa aadmi
Hic Sunt Dracones
New Wrong Carriage, Right Groom
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Right Idea, Wrong First Pair
It's a testament to the strength of the core concept that I kind of stuck this one out. I don't watch historicals, but the 'bride swap' intrigued me so I gave it a go. By ep 3, the core problem was clear - the WRONG pair was primary lead. I kept hoping for more of Bingyan and her General, but by ep 10, they were bit players. So I skipped to episode 21, where I cracked up laughing at the amount of exposition. It was a totally random pick for where to start watching "the end" but it woked really well as the Old Grandmother helpfully had a conversation with TianLei and Yuhu that filled me in on the 11 eps I'd skipped. It also confirmed that I missed nothing except endless politicking and trickery from the villain and stupidity from the non-villains.Overall not an awful watch, but definitely not worth sitting through all 24 episodes, when so many of them are "rinse and repeat" storylines. Had Bingyang and the General been the primary leads, it could have been a real treat.
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Bitter, sweet, fun
Like most who watched this, I enjoyed it. I watched it with my wife, and we both laughed a lot throughout. We've been married nearly as long as the leads have have been alive, so the OTT rage was genuinely funny for us. Sveral have commented on the chemistry between Jeong So Min and Kang Ha Neul, and there's no question that was central to the movie's success. Both delivered very good performances, and Jeong So Min especially cemented my high opion of her as an actor. The first thing my wife said when Jeong So Min first appeared on screen in this movie was"she's really pretty". and obviously I can't disagree. But her range even in a light romcom like this was impressive. I highly recommend this for anyone wanting an uncomplicated and genuinely funny romanceVond je deze recentie nuttig?
A pleasant surprise
This Drama ended getting 8/10 from me for surprising me in positive ways more than once.First, it COMPLETELY threw me as to who the killer was, I did not see that coming at all - excellent!
Second, the tone ended up being rather unexpected, another pleasant surprise
Third, it's handlnig of the characters showed intelligence. There was nuuance and context for the characters' behaviour, and the final end of some characters' arcs was balanced and realistic. Not implausibly rosy or even implausibly complete. A great example was the resolution of the ML's own mother issues, the end to that arc was note perfect.
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Three episodes too long
This Drama started very strongly, with the central character Lee Ro Um especially interesting. Portrayed as a genuine sociopath, she was fascinating. The basic setup seemed like 70% Leverage, 10% Dark Angel, and the first 3/4 of the Drama set it up well.The major flaw was that it was too long, and as a result, it went soft and soggy in eps 13&14. This was especially noticeable with Lee Ro Um, but the Drama also burdened us with the inevitable mother and child reunion for the ML character Han Moo Young. Yawn.
Another flaw caused by the Drama's excessive length was the mystery of the mystery. The Drama dragged out its central mystery, who the "Big Bad" was, until the end of episode 13. The whole team were supposed to be prodigies of various kinds but somehow they missed the fact that the Bib Bad was basically walking around with a tattooo on their forehead that said "I'm the Big Bad" from at least episode 6.
The final 2 epiodes tightened up a bit, and overall it was a much better K Drama spin on "Leverage" than the actual Korean Leverage was. But it could have been so much better with fewer episodes.
One other important point to note: Besides doing an excellent job of portraying her character, Chun Woo Hee is also "really, really, really ridiculously good-looking" ?
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Koshiba Fuka does it again
I've had this Drama on my PTW for ages because I wanted to compare it to the Korean original. Then recently I watched Yuganda Hamon and was stunned by Koshiba Fuka's performance in it, so moved this up the list. She did not let me down. Her performance here, in a role that could not have been more different from the restrained, downbeat introvert of Yuganda Hamon, proved that she is a very good actor.It was her performance, and that of Sakuma Yui as her BFF, that ended up getting this Drama 7.5/10 from me, versus the 4.5/10 I gave the original. The storyline is VERY problematic, but the portrayal of the relationship between the two friends in this Drama really shone. Both actors sold their roles well, and their interactions made this a pleasure to watch. The ending scenes were cute too, and a nod to what I really WISH they had done with Ms Koshiba's character at the end.
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Almost perfect
Right up until episode 10, this Drama was heading for a score of 10. Every episode was taut, tight, and ruthless. It was edge of the seat stuff and utterly compelling. Unfortunately it wobbled a bit in the final third by trying to inject human interest, in the mistaken belief that it needed to. The utterly outstanding Forest of Secrets (1 &2) both avoided that trap. Their chief protagonist never changed, and that was a smart move. This show went slightly soggy by turning the Eun Jung character into comic relief, distracting from the previously unbroken focus on the workplace battlefield. And the "mother and child reunion" sequence was eye-rollingly nauseating. Utterly out of character and utterly unnecessary.Despite those failings though, this remains an outstanding show. The key player are all VERY smart, and the action is entirely cerebral. Le Bo Young smashed it out of the park with her portrayal of Go Ah In, and both the badeuk playing CEO Jo and the Machiavellian patriarch Kang were perfect. It is such a rare and blessed treat to watch a Drama that doesn't insult viewer's intelligence but respects it, and celebrates the success of strong females who triumph on merit and by strength of character.
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A Solid Remake
I can't believe I haven't written a review of this Drama that I watched 4 years ago, but I've been prompted to by the number of reviews from people who have never seen "In Time With You"This is a "friendship first" " friends to lovers" next, Drama, for sure, and is VERY MUCH a remake. As remakes go, it's one of the best I've seen, of any Drama. As others have said, the music is not as strong, and personally I don't htink anyone's going to top Chen Bo lin's performance in the original. ITWY was one of the Dramas that made me a hardcore fan of Ariel Lin Yi Chen , and she aced her performance in the original, BUT, the one outstanding area where this remake beat the original in my view is in the personality and behaviour of the FL. Ariel's character was, quite frankly, just ruthlessly self-absorbed for too much of ITWY, and it was Ariel's delivery that made her character first tolerable, then likeable. The FL in this version was much easier to like. The fact that the J-version is significantly shorter didn't hurt, either.
In summary, ITWY has an ineradicable place in my heart, watched in the year I first started watching East Asian Dramas, and probably the 1st TW Drama I ever watched. So no remake was going to displace it. But this is a fine remake that stays true to the spirit and intent of the original, and improves in at least one significant area
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The Temperature Of Language: Our Nineteen
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Better than I expected
This Drama is about 19 year-olds, and it is several decades since I was that age, so I wasn't sure how I'd react. I watched it after being impressed by the performance of Park Se Hyun in "Best Ending" and seeing her listed in the cast for this Drama. She did not disappoint, and nor did the Drama overall. Ms Park's character and her delivery were the standout for me, but the whole Drama was more nuanced and intelligent than I was expecting. The only letdown were the AWFUL subs. They were worse than most fan subs - full of typos and really bad, awkward English. Happily, the Drama's cast defeated the bad subs by shining despite them.Vond je deze recentie nuttig?
Life is like a box of Nagamashi
Tokyo Sentimental centres around Karuri Takuzo, who is a maker of traditional Japanese sweets. The drama is best viewed like a collection of sweets, individually wrapped and testing better when not consumed all at once.The structure of each episode is really simple: A hopelessly romantic dreamer in his mid-50s "falls in love" each episode and wanders around a specific part of Tokyo with his new love, before the episode and the new love end.
The drama is very well named. It is all about Tokyo, and about being sentimental. There is no central plot or story arc connecting all the episodes, they really are like individual treats. Because they are all very similar, watching a lot of them back to back can be a little much, in the same way that having too many sweets all at once can be a little much. Taken one or two at a time, they are deliciously sweet and enjoyable.
I really like this drama for a couple of reasons: first of all I had the pleasure of QCing the subs for the first five episodes, which meant lots of long lingering looks at each of those episodes. Second, I like the fact that Karuri-San is a man of roughly my age. A confirmed bachelor who never stops dreaming of finding "the one" he reminds me of Don Quixote, a man whose perceptions of himself are strikingly different to the way others perceive him.
This Don Quixote also has a Sancho Panza. Takahata Mitsuki absolutely shines as his very levelheaded shop assistant/reality anchor Sudo Akane. Their relationship is strictly platonic and a nice demonstration of how dramas can show warm close friendships that have nothing to do with romantic attraction. Akane-chan gets one episode in which she is the central character, and experiences her own crush, and that is one of the highlights, both for giving her the focus she deserves, and also as a break from the formulaic nature of the basic structure of most episodes.
There is one other episode in which despite conforming to the standard formula there is a lot more emotional depth. The episode in which Karuri-San interacts with a woman he knew as a child who now has dementia was very touching, and gave Yoshida Kotaro an opportunity to show more emotional depth and range and his character. The episode in which the actor plays the shopkeeper learning to be an actor was also one that stood out for me.
The other thing which makes this drama a success is the fact that each episode does feature the same object of affection - Tokyo itself. The episodes are actually named after the part of Tokyo in which they are set, and as someone who is unlikely to ever go, the languorous and loving look at the byways and alleyways and nooks and crannies of various parts of Tokyo is a standout. In the life of the lead, women may come and go but the city he loves remains, and he loves sharing his encyclopedic knowledge of that beloved city with each of his episodic dates.
So if you want to show that celebrates Tokyo, that embraces mature middle-age and that can be a lot of fun in small doses, do try an episode or two of Tokyo sentimental. Then, before "sweet" becomes "cloying, " put the box away and have a couple more on another day.
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Mikaiketsu no Onna Special
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Competent SP but over long
I watched this SP in preparation for watching Season 2 of Mikaiketsu No Onna. It was refreshing to watch an SP that matched the main series in terms of acting and story.The story followed the template of the series well, with a strong focus on the two female leads. The SP opened with a scene described in a voice over as irrelevant but that turned out to be anything but.
The only flaw was the length. The culprit was obvious 15 minutes before the end, and much of the last 15 minutes was exposition that restated the obvious. Overall, a satisfactory warmup for Season 2
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NOT worth the wait
I held off watching Radiation House until this SP was subbed, and while the Drama was great and well worth the wait, the same could sadly not be said for this SP.This was a 90 minute SP that was 45 minutes of flashbacks woven into a couple of interesting "case of the week" stories. It was clearly intended to "catch up" viewers in time for Season 2, and felt like a filler, way too much padding. Which is a shame because if the flashbacks had been cut out, or at least massively trimmed, the fresh content would have stood out more. I'm not sorry I watched this, but it adds VERY little to the series overall, and leaves me hoping that Season 2 returns to the excellence of Season 1
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Worth the wait
I held off watching this Drama until the SP was subbed, but it was worth the wait. I loved the carefully constructed medical "mystery of the week" and the way the various cases were used as vehicles for, or analogies for, the growth of the team - and sometimes both. The Drama even managed to put an interesting spin on the "kindergarten kismet" trope that I intensely dislike, to such an extent that I was a bit frustrated by the end, while at the same time being impressed with the intelligent ambiguity of the closing shots.Vond je deze recentie nuttig?
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Stunning debut
This was such a sweet, fun story, and qualitatively very much better than I expected. The dynamics of the story are reminiscent of Put Your Head On My Shoulder with the ML falling fast and hard while the FL remains oblivious for a long time. And what an FL! She is CLEARLY the alpha in the pairing, which is rare enough as is, but for an 18 y.o actress on debut to have such a role, and to excel at it, was a real joy to see.With a few episodes to go I was going to give this Drama 8/10 but then noble idiocy made its expected appearance. The way the Drama handled it caused me to bump its score UP to 8.5.
So often in Dramas, noble idiocy is dragged on for ages, then brushed off as a passing irrelevance of no real import, but this Drama did neither. The noble idiocy itself was wrapped in a relatively short time (yay), but then the CONSEQUENCES were shown to be very serious, particularly the emotional impact on the injured party and those close to them(yay+). The person guilty of being the noble idiot even suffered physical pain as part of their penance. This was VERY refreshing, especially the dialogue given by the injured party, clearly explaining the reason the "noble" idiocy was nothing of sort, but was selfish and stupid.
All in all, this was a very satisfying and sweet watch, with a powerful romantic OTP, intelligent dialogue and bright and forthright FL and a great performance on debut by the lead female. Who also has a lovely singing voice :)
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Part of that was the overly-elaborate time travel recursion. I have absolutely no problem with shows that don't bother trying to come up with an explanation for time travel, because there isn't one. As the Doctor said, it's all just "wibbly wobbly, timey-wimey stuff", so Dramas can cook up whatever explanation they like, or none at all, which is how this Drama handled it. But I think the writers got a bit carried away the idea of Inception-style layers upon layers, like a Matryoshka doll version of the Matrix. The intricacies took some of the gloss off the OTP and made it easier to focus on and cheer for the single-timeline stories. The boy who became a celebrity so that his crush could call him Oppa was my favourite of those.
Overall, by no means an awful Drama, and it did have the virtue of being short, total runtime well short of 9 hours. I've definitely sat through much worse.
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