What have I been doing this week? I’m glad you asked! Here’s what’s been on my watchlist this week:
*Note: My reviews usually contain spoilers. You have been warned. Proceed at your own risk.*
TV
My Love From the Star (2013)
What a gem of a show! Jun Ji-hyun is by far one of my favourite actors and her performance alongside Kim Soo-hyun creates for one of the most memorable pair of leads. This show left a strong lasting impression, and barring a few minor missteps, My Love From the Star is beautifully made.
I’m no stranger to Writer Park Ji-eun’s work, and have watched both Legend of the Blue Sea and Crash Landing on You. As a viewer, it is easy to see a lot of the themes of this show reflected in these later works, and arguably done better there. The fish-out-of-water elements definitely work better in Blue Sea, and the antagonists are much more well realised in CLoY, but there are definitely components that she managed to capture beautifully in this show, that didn’t have quite the same magic in the follow-up projects.
The mixing of two timelines into a single narrative is the first that comes to mind. Kim’s stranded alien forced to spend the last 400 years on Earth waiting for his spaceship back home is pitch-perfect, capturing the weariness of being among a people that you can’t understand and distancing yourself from them. But as we peel back the layers of his character, we find that he did once engage with them, and that the scars left from those interactions forced him to retreat rather than subject himself to more heartbreak. The Joseon storyline shows us just how much he was able to feel back then, and contrasts well with the cold professor we get in the modern day.
Cheon Song-i on the other hand, seems to wear her heart on her sleeve, and we see her start to break through the tough veneer that Do Min-joon has spent centuries perfecting. She’s so disarmingly charming that it’s difficult not to fall in love with her, and Jun is unafraid to be ridiculous in the role in service of the character. Whether it’s crying over her shoes, yelling about her anti-fans or posting on social media, Song-i is always larger than life, and she manages to creep into every corner of Min-joon’s life despite his efforts to push her away.
Of course there was the fact that she looked like the woman he fell in love with when he first arrived on Earth, but that seemed like a convenient plot-element rather than having any actual place in the show. The other plotline that seemed like it was there just to be there was Song-i and her family being abandoned by her father. It was one part of the story that perhaps worked better on paper than in practice, because it was never really explored and resolved a little too easily for my liking.
Of the secondary characters, my favourite would have to be Lawyer Jang (Kim Chang-wan). His poignant friendship with Min-joon was just as lovely as his hilarious exasperation with him, and I loved the running gag of him speaking to Min-joon so formally despite the actor being decades older than Kim Soo-hyun. My other favourite was comic book store owner Hong Bok-ja (Hong Jin-kyung). She serves as an audience surrogate in many ways, getting to observe the shenanigans from afar, but she also grounds Song-i when she starts to get out of hand and supports her even if she might not agree with her. While everyone else in her life is a yes man, Song-i values her opinion because she knows she’ll tell it to her straight, even if it isn’t what she wants to hear.
Song-i thought this of Yoo Se-mi and Lee Whi-kyung too, but both ultimately had ulterior motives, and neither truly had her best interest at heart. These two characters were perhaps the most infuriating, because they could have been subversive of the typical second lead tropes that we usually see, but the writer falls back on those tried and tested cookie-cutter characters, and they feel flat and lifeless. Lee Jae-kyung also feels like a caricature villain, complete with ring-twisting, evil smirks and greasy-hair.
And that’s where the show felt most underdeveloped. The murder plot went on too long, without any real justification or clear reasoning behind it, and of course it spawned the completely unnecessary inconsistencies in Min-joon’s abilities (Why is going to die if he kills someone?). The external conflicts felt almost redundant when there was so much more meaningful storytelling to be hard from the internal conflicts.
But, of course, I am nitpicking a little bit. My Love From the Star deserves the critical acclaim and love that it gets because it truly does deliver a near-perfect show. And quite frankly, I could watch Jun Ji-hyun and Kim Soo-hyun on my screen any time.
Do Do Sol Sol La La Sol (2020) – Ep 15-16
?????? !!!!!! 😡
Can that just be my review for the show? I’m so disappointed with how this show turned out, that it’s hard to write about it without getting a bit angry. While there were so many elements of this show to love when it began, the writer seemed to get more and more lost on what to do with her characters as the show progressed. It seemed like we covered practically every trope in the book: Runaway chaebol, clueless heiress, overbearing parents, stalkers, murder plot, dead friend, truck of doom, the list goes on and on. But the one that seemed to be dumbest in the long list of dumb was the writer’s most decent addition of the cancer storyline. WHAT?! And to make things worse, Joon lies to Ra-ra about his illness robbing her of being able to spend time with him, and then has his mother lie to her that he’s dead! For how long you ask? Maybe just a few weeks or at the worst a few months, right? Nope! Five freaking YEARS! There’s nothing noble about that, that’s just plain idiocy. I’m mad that the writer felt like it was okay to jerk us around like that. I wish Joon had stayed dead, to be honest.
This was a show that I decided to live watch, something I haven’t done in years, because I wanted to keep up with the community discussion and enjoy the show in the format that it was intended to be told. Sadly, it hasn’t been an enjoyable experience at all, and I’m wishing for that time back. I wish I’d waited till the show was done before deciding to watch it. That’s not to say I might not have watched it if I’d known it would end badly, but at least I would have had the choice. And that’s essentially what it comes down to. It isn’t that I’ve never watched a bad show, of course I have. But most of the time, I go in knowing it’s going to be bad, but want to watch in anyway. For the writer, the director, the cast or the story. I’ve mentally prepared myself for it being disappointing, so I can manage my expectations and enjoy it for the reasons that I chose it, rather than dwelling on the things that aren’t up to par.
All this waxing poetic to say that I feel cheated by DDSSLLS. Because it showed promise, because I kept giving the show the benefit of the doubt, and perhaps because I didn’t know to quit while I was ahead. But like I said, I liked so many things when this show began: The townspeople of Eunpo, the wonderful colour palette, the way that music was incorporated into the show, and the cuteness of Go Ara and Lee Jae-wook (even if their characters can be described as questionable at best, and that’s me being generous). So, I’m going to take that from the show and hope to forget the rest. Ugh. Whatever, it’s over. Finally. We now return to our regularly scheduled program…
Colourful Granny 