Category: Feature

K-Drama Report: Love is for Suckers, Part II

April 14, 2024

Something I’ve long found interesting in media studies is why people decide to watch what they watch. What goes into the decision, if a decision ever comes from the endless browsing across multiple platforms? In this most academic pursuit, I’ve been privileged with a curious, compelling subject – myself – and every now and again, he baffles me. At the moment, I’ve got at least two shows running: Love is for Suckers, and season two of The Shield. That follows. It’s season two because I watched the first way back in college, during the great mania around prestige television. Unfortunately, it vanished off streaming, and I’ve only returned to it ten years later. It’s good. It’s probably the best police procedural I’ve ever seen (if The Wire and Mindhunter are just stage-left of procedural), in part because it’s honest and seems to have a mission. In its exploration of police corruption, we see the grisly effects but we also understand the very logical cause. The bad guy’s gonna get away with it, so we want Vic Mackey to step in with his extrajudicial methods. Why wouldn’t that impulse exist in the real world, and is the system strong enough to resist it? … More K-Drama Report: Love is for Suckers, Part II

K-Drama Report: Love is for Suckers

April 8, 2024

Another K-drama, another shock — to me and my imagination so constrained by the conventions of story. In countless instances before, I’ve shrieked, “You can’t do that!” upon narrative shortcuts like coincidence or melodrama. Here, Love is for Suckers plays out for four episodes and only begins on the fifth — and it’s brilliant. Clued in by a flash-forward cold open, we know that this will be about a romance between the producer of a Bachelor-style reality show and one of the contestants. But before that reality show even begins filming, we watch entire relationships come together and fall apart. Jobs are lost. There are medical emergencies. We learn about pasts enough for people from those pasts to reemerge. It may just be table-setting, but it feels like an entire show — with the commensurate emotional weight. … More K-Drama Report: Love is for Suckers

K-Drama Report: Doona! (2023)

October 29, 2023

Beautifully directed and powerfully acted, in a roundabout way, this ultimately inconclusive series proves to me that K-drama storytelling is storytelling. Now, a phrase like that is always gonna sound defensive, but I’ve had reason to doubt the form ever since annyeong. I mean, we all sort of agree that “K-dramas” are a single thing, which is the opposite of how we talk about anime. There is no “Belladonna of Sadness to Clannad” range to the K-drama, and its assessment requires a different language. It isn’t “That first kiss was so formulaic,” but “How good was The First Kiss?” However, The First Kiss isn’t just two people kissing, nor is a K-drama just a series of sympathetic faces and crying and swooning. … More K-Drama Report: Doona! (2023)

K-Drama Report: Hello, My Twenties! Part II

August 25, 2023

I’d also recommend Hello, My Twenties! but I can’t yet because we have the rare second season to contend with. So to cap off the first, I want to start with something a little bit different, which is to review the show’s character dynamics. It’s an assertion on my part that they’re the heart of the series, but that may or may not be true. In the meantime, they at least set parameters for my expectations going forward. (Because I love them so much!) … More K-Drama Report: Hello, My Twenties! Part II

K-Drama Report: Hello, My Twenties! (2016)

August 19, 2023

A couple of years ago, I started seeing clips online for a K-drama entitled Work Later, Drink Now, starring Eunji from Apink, and I was frustrated because it never showed up on any legal streaming platforms. I really liked the idea of a show that centered on a group of women, in a more casual setting than the workplaces of, say, Search: WWW. And somehow this led me to Hello, My Twenties!, but I think it was probably just that clip of Ryu Hwa-young planting one on Han Seung-yeon, and I’ve got both shows mixed up in my head. But when it came time to choose which one to watch first, the occasion of my 30th birthday made the decision easy: I will start watching the show called Hello, My Twenties! … More K-Drama Report: Hello, My Twenties! (2016)

The Oldboy and I | A Comedy on Purpose

August 19, 2023

Oldboy is one of the key titles from a time in my life when I watched movies a lot. Not a breadth of movies, but a small selection over and over again. I was studying to be a moviemaker myself, so I was doing a lot of director commentaries, and I doubt I was absorbing much. Actually, there’s this lesson you learn early in film studies, that anything substantive can be gleaned from watching bad movies. False! Sure, it’s a kind of deconstruction, and it’s easy to see the mistakes. “I won’t make a mistake like that,” you say, and then dream about what you’d do instead. But it’s harder to visualize what you’d do, especially once you’re in it, suddenly realizing that this successful execution of a payoff doesn’t make for an actual scene, as that’s an entirely different step. First you set everything up inside the broader structure, and then you have to ask, “What might be cool?” It’s a process of construction, and this is a separate discipline. … More The Oldboy and I | A Comedy on Purpose

Siren: Survive the Island – Final Report

June 12, 2023

Boy, that Physical: 100 finale must have left scars on all of us. In the back of my mind, there was such a sense of “contestants vs. producers” throughout that, in the end, it was easy to blame everything on the anonymous, unseen puppet masters doubtlessly manipulating every frame of this so-called “reality” programming to whichever nefarious ends. By the time I’m writing about its spiritual sequel Siren – hoping to give it any kind of boost – proper accreditation never enters my mind. The contestants, sure. Those ladies are badass and I love them. But the bloodsucking producers? No! And I find myself now winding toward an apology not just because the creator of Siren is also a woman, though that certainly helps. Her name is Lee Eun-kyung, and with Siren: Survive the Island, I think she’s done something really great. … More Siren: Survive the Island – Final Report

Jang Eun-sil Report – Physical: 100 Episode #7

February 14, 2023

In between last week’s episodes and this week’s, I found myself engaging with a Facebook group I’d otherwise elected to hide from (long story). Somebody wanted to know if anyone was watching Physical: 100, and apparently, I’ll take any chance to raise my hand and flail about. In that time, I’d also written an article for Collider, and characterized the show in breathless terms: “Whether all the contestants believe it, men and women are equal competitors in these challenges which emphasize a variety of strengths, creating a final, holistic visual metaphor — this time, for egalitarianism.” Wow! Put that on the DVD box: “Egalitarianism” – Collider. Naturally, I then bit my tongue, remembering that Jang Eun-sil was on thin ice, and if she goes down, the rest of the women follow. … More Jang Eun-sil Report – Physical: 100 Episode #7

Jang Eun-sil Report – Physical: 100 Episode #6

February 9, 2023

Last episode, we learned that five eliminated players would be returning, though their identities weren’t revealed right away. “So, they’re the survivors,” Chung-hoon says in proper anime form as they walk in – still unrevealed. We flash back to a “Quest 2.5,” where the torso busts hang from the ceiling via shibari, and the room is lit with steamy red. This is when Seohyun walks in and cracks the whip, but unfortunately, Love and Leashes never made it to the Netflix top ten. Physical: 100 hit number two this week! … More Jang Eun-sil Report – Physical: 100 Episode #6

Jang Eun-sil Report – Physical: 100 Episode #5

February 7, 2023

After bonding over this show on an episode of the podcast, Donovan and I were messaging last night about the upcoming fifth installment. I told him I wouldn’t be able to sleep, with the terrible weight of soon knowing Jang Eun-sil’s destiny on the bridge. He asked when the episode was actually gonna drop on Netflix, and we discovered it’s 8:00 GMT. What that means for our time zones, I could not tell you. You know how it is, with math. … More Jang Eun-sil Report – Physical: 100 Episode #5