Some recent Asian Dramas

I watched the Chinese drama The Ancient Detective. I really liked it. It was a lot of fun.  Very corny, cheesy, twisty turnl y (I guessed the ending, tho, gotta brag). If you don’t like martial arts movies where people fly through the air and freeze people’s blood with the right hand blow and use umbrellas as lethal weapons, well, you should pass on this.  I thxink this would be a fun one to watch with boys- it’s pretty chaste, with the possible exception of one scene toward the end where a couple do some very pretty spinning around in slow motion (gorgeous historical costumes full of drapes and layers and swirls) and fall into bed and then you cut to the next scene.  A couple chaste kisses. A very effeminate man (who is offended by people thinking that).

I watched and thoroughly loved Lee Min Ho’s The King, Eternal Monarch.  If you have heard this show is a waste of time so you haven’t tried it, please reconsider.  I thought it was gorgeous, wonderfully done for the most part, extremely well acted by everybody involved, and a terrific plot that kept me guessing.  The ending was a little weak and sort of petered out a bit and left an important question unanswered, but that happens a lot with my favourite K-dramas, and it wasn’t a total thud, just a bit of a squib, fizzle, pop instead of a terrific bang.   There were too many product placements, but I got a kick out of them.

There are a lot of people who write professional reviews, or at least, highly paid popular blogs, who did not understand this at all and so they hated it and thought it was the writing, and that it was ful of plotholes.  While there are always problems in time travel and parallel universe stories that cannot be resolved if you think very hard about them at all, that doesn’t seem to be the issue with the people hating on this show. I’m going to be snotty and say that the plotholes are in their childhood reading and understanding of faith and fairy tales. They probably didn’t like Iris or Ahlhambra, either, both shows that had distinctly Christian imagery and themes running through.  I also remember one of them hating and being absolutely baffled by the notion that the bad guy could not enter the wormhole in Faith (‘the wormhole has moral agency? What on earth?!) because she didn’t understand that it wasn’t the wormhole with moral agency, it was the deity that controlled it and the rest of the universe- hello? The title of the show is FAITH.  But anyway.  The King wasn’t so obviously connected wtih Christian imagery as the others, but there was some. More distinctly, it is plainly a fairy tale with elements we’ve also seen in The Magician’s Nephew- like  a literal Wood Between the Worlds, and other fairy tale imagery, like a magic flute.   These elements exist in other classic fantasy/fairy tales both east and west, but some reviewers obviously haven’t read those books. They are not quite Eustace Scrubbs, but it is a danger I see in their futures.

I’ve only seen two episodes of It’s Okay Not To Be Okay and I am utterly, completely, totally hooked and I don’t want to be saved.  Reel me in, baby, reel me in.   It’s creepy and beautiful and breath-taking, and goosebumpy. Luscious costumes, an adorable big brother with (probably) autism, and I just need this not to go south.

I thoroughly enjoyed Hospital Playlist.

I got bored with I’ll Find You On a Beautiful Day and quit fairly early. I liked Find Me In Your Memory, but I am a huge fine of Kim Seul Gi and she was as adorable as ever here.  The rest of the story got a bit draggy for me.

I’m enjoying Team Bulldog- a weird mix of serial killers and zany comedy and sweet friendships.

I watched all of Good Casting, but cannot say it was great, or even that good.

Tell Me What You Saw was an really interesting part for Jang Hyuk and I watched it for him, and he was good.  But it was also dark, scary, creepy, and the female cops choices made absolutely no sense whatsoever to me.

I’m ten episodes in with Dinner Mate, and so far it’s pretty cute, although the television production stuff is boring to me and there are too many long silences.

Two legit streaming sites you may not have heard of: Iq.com and OndemandKorea