Pretty pretty emo: Magic Ring and Sang-Doo, Let's Go To School.
I am currently watching Sang-Doo, Let’s Go to School (Korean dorama with Rain) and Magic Ring (Taiwanese dorama with Joe Cheng).
I would classify both of them as entertaining but not great. Of the two, Sang-Doo is superior (though considering I am 10 eps into SD and only one into MR, this can change), with tighter script and less OTT acting. But Magic Ring is a joyfully giddy pleasure. I’ve summed it up before (just click on the ‘magic ring’ tag in my lj) so I won’t do it again, but I have to say the plot is making me all gleeful.
I am rather impressed by Joe Cheng in this. While this dorama has him do some very over-dramatic bits (the bit where he finds out his brother died in the train accident and just runs on the pier screaming is rather Vaderish. I get it, I get it, the one person in your family who loved you unconditionally is gone and it’s horrible, but that whole scene is very over-dramatic), he is excellent in the quiet scenes: just watch the look on his face whenever he is with his father, the quick reactions and the hurt. And I am impressed by him because this role is very different from his role in ISWAK.
His character in this is miles different from the icy, perfectionist, reserved Zhi Shu in It Started with a Kiss, who is also admired by all and is the darling of his family (one of these days I really must do a post on the types of heroes in doramas). Jing Hang is what I would classify under ‘angsty wild boy’ and his family situation? Well, to put it very simply, it sucks. To use the Lord of the Rings analogy, he is totally Faramir to his father’s Denethor. He is viewed as the ‘spare’ son, the bad one. His father dotes on his elder brother but views Jing Hang as a profound disappointment and JH is acutely aware of it every moment they are together. In fact, there is a scene where a worked up JH asks his father if he had a choice, who he’d pick, him or his older brother and his father replies that it’s not even a choice, that the Older Brother is ‘my true son’ and JH looks both devastated and unsurprised (because I am sure he’s told himself that he knows this is the fact but to hear it confirmed must be horrid for him) which I am giddy about as it adds to JH’s pile of angst.
The family is very Steward of Gondor in another way. Despite the blatant favoritism of the father, the brothers are devoted to each other. Well, minus fighting over that girl who OB was supposed to be engaged to but who preferred JH though JH doesn’t want her and never wooed her or anything. Hello, are you blind, OB? You are OK enough looking, but when your baby bro is Joe Cheng, you have to have some sympathy for the girl there. And realistic expectations of the outcome on her even getting a glimpse of the hotness. Plus, you clearly fell for someone else double quick so no harm no foul. I think OB realizes his mistake in trying to court in Joe Cheng’s proximity because the woman we see him married to later is someone he met in the US, and he got hitched before she got introduced to his brother and could change her mind :P
In fact, part of the reason JH loses it so much when Older Brother dies in the train wreck is because that was the one person in the family who cared for him (especially since OB conveniently recorded a loving message for JH and about how no, his father really loves you Faramir, it’s just he can’t admit it).
So here we have it, one distraught angsty wild boy (he got into a fight in the first ep!) who is also a really good lawyer and who looks like the Asian version of Orlando Bloom (I noticed the resemblance a bit in ISWAK but Zhi Shu was so different from the characters Orlando normally plays it didn’t come through. Here, Joe Cheng is boyishly emo and with a more Orlandoish haircut, so it comes through a lot more).
But for every distraught wild boy from a rich but unloving family, we have to have a warm, spunky heroine who is caring but dirt-poor. And thus we have Xiao Jun, a sweet plucky girl, with a romantic streak, who works in a store and has the curse of a gambling-mad stepfather who takes all her money. Oh, and she also has an unfaithful (but cut!) boyfriend who has made her pregnant (I have to point out I love the fact that the heroine of this one is a non-virgin and it’s not perceived as a subject for moralizing or anything other than matter-of-fact). Xiao Jun is on the same train as Older Brother, on track to becoming a broke single mother. Due to a combination of circumstances, she ends up chatting with OB and his wife and wife lets her try her engagement ring, a heirloom of the Du (OB and JH’s surname) family right before the train wreck.
In the aftermath, with OB and his wife both dead, and our heroine unconscious, Chairman Du assumes Xiao Jun is OB’s wife because of the ring and is ecstatic to discover she is pregnant because it means his beloved son did not die without leaving something behind after all. So Xiao Jun wakes up in luxurious surroundings, cared for and cosseted, and with no idea who she is (she has that beloved of doramas disease, amnesia). And we end with JH deciding to go home in the devastating aftermath of the deaths. Want to bet they will meet? Wanna bet sparks will fly? And they will fall in love? And there will be guilt because she is his brother’s wife and then guilt when she remembers who she is and I am sure he also blames himself for brother’s death (because he wouldn’t have gone away years ago if it wasn’t for that fight over the girl) and I am going to enjoy this very much.
So far, I like all the clothes in this (in general, Twdramas give me least to complain about on that scale) except for the bizarro credit clothes where someone thought it was a good idea to give Joe Cheng a quasi-roman perm and a tunic to boot. WTF?
I do wish the subtitles were better. They are comprehensible (unlike the scary, gibberish subs of official versions of ISWAK and Goong) but are indubitably ‘Engrish’ and it throws me a bit to have people like a high-class lawyer or a Board Chairman speak in a grammatically incorrect and sometimes misspelled fashion. There are no fan subs for this though and the subs are passable, so far be it from me to complain.
The other dorama I am watching is Sang-Doo, Let’s Go to School. I am on ep 10 and have been watching this off and on for a month. I enjoy it but am not mad for it so when other doramas I get obsessed with come up, they get priority. I have also summarized it before (click on ‘sang-doo’ tag), so I am going to get straight to meta.
This is a good but not great dorama. I guess it can be summed up by saying that I like it a lot but I am not mainlining it like heroin the way I did with doramas like A Love to Kill or Mars or Pride. Part of the reason is that this is Rain’s first dorama and it shows. He is adequate but far from being as excellent as he was in A Love to Kill and while he can do boyish, and blabby, and pensively sad very well, more complex nuances of emotions are hit and miss. But oh boy, he is already excellent at devastated. And quietly angsty. And messed-up. Yum.
Also, episode eight made me cry so hard I couldn’t see very well. Yup, it’s a Korean dorama alright.
They really can’t let go of each other, can they? He is desperate to prevent her from going to an engagement party and resorts to silliness but the desperation is there. But of course, even though she goes to fetch him from the police station, and she nurses him, and she looks for him and all that, the rational part of her knows SD is nothing but trouble and Min-Suk is someone she should marry. I love that the dorama has her seriously grapple with that. So she tells SD it was nothing more than puppy love in front of Min-Suk and goes away with him. I do think if SD didn’t show up she could have been happy with MS, even if SD would always be in the corner of her mind.
And he is all devastated and self-loathing and he tells that client lady to go home and feed her kid (I think he is so angry at parents abandoning children because he was abandoned himself) and tells her ‘I am kind when hell freezes over. I seduce women like you for money.’ I think his career is going to be short-lived with such a talk.
And then he shows up for the school trip even after all that (motorbike!!) and it’s actually to the area they grew up in. And I love seeing her lost in the flashbacks which show how much they loved each other then: SD sucking out snake poison on her leg despite a cut in his mouth and her trying to stop him, SD writing love graffiti in that cave and telling her he missed her so much he thought he’d die, SD asking her to run away with her and that he’d work anything for her since their parents don’t want them together. And telling her he loves her. All of this is making me cry because they were such young innocents back then, so much more open and vulnerable. Maybe that is why SD likes school now: he can escape from the wreck of his life.
But Sang-Doo remembers too, and it’s his flashback that is making me cry so hard I can barely see. Because he remembers the day when his life was wrecked, when he pushed that man to get EH’s gramophone back and the man ended up seriously hurt due to an unlucky accident. And we see SD being taken away in the police car and as they drive by his house he sees EH crying at his door, repeating over and over ‘Sang-Doo, let’s go to school’ but he can’t even reach through the glass. And then he gets out of prison and he knocks at the door of his house only to find out his parents were ashamed and ditched him and moved (evil!) and he is totally uncomprehending and then the girl tells him when he asks about EH that EH moved too, and he completely refuses to believe it because no matter who else abandons him, EH won’t and he runs to her house in the snow and he is screaming her name over and over and sobbing and it’s very depressing and I am crying (interesting that he has more faith in her than in his parents. Of course, they did indicate his Mom is concerned with status so I could see how she was ashamed and ditched). I wonder if EH and SD will ever find out why the other disappeared. I hope so.
So he ends up sitting on that bridge which is associated with the best (being with EH) and worst (pushing the man) times in his life and I love it when EH sees him and is frozen. And then he goes back to the campfire (and Rain has never looked hotter in that dorama than at that moment) to see ES and MH be asked lovey-dovey questions and made to act a couple and the look in his eyes, OMG! And he quietly walks away.
I love the bit the next morning where he comes to the cave he and Eun-Hwan used to go to and falls asleep there and he thinks he sees teen Eun-Hwan and he tells her that he hung on just because of her, all these years. And he wanted to let go. And he is so exhausted (which neatly parallels his later telling Min-Suk (EH’s fiancé) that he thought of killing himself 400 times but he couldn’t because Bori (his daughter) and Eun-Hwan would hang-on to him (I assume metaphorically :P) and he thinks that is love. So he doesn’t mind getting hurt now, or even dying because they saved him before so it’s a fair trade (I love how MS has this dawning look of comprehension on his face. Grrrr. Someone should tell him the whole back-story).
But anyway, to get back to what I was writing. And then the real EH comes there and sits with him until he wakes up and he is so quiet and he stands up to leave and she tells him she is not going to lie any more, or hide and that she loves him. EEEEE! Love the look on his face.
They have really good chemistry. I love the bit where he just calls her and she holds the phone and they don’t say anything just go like this for hours. And he’s given up his gigolo job and working seven billion odd jobs (loved the bit where he was telling Uncle that he won’t do it any more and if they need money for Bori’s hospital bills he’ll do anything, work any job but this. And said he feels filthy enough to bathe in bleach if he could. Rain isn’t as good at projecting the self-loathing desperation here as he is in A Love to Kill but it’s still a neat scene).
And then we get the typical ‘she waits for him in the rain but he can’t come’ bits and their cool first proper date, with bike riding and roller-blading and he is telling her he is selfish and he wants her around even if she’ll get hurt so she should leave him (awwwww) and she tells him she’ll share everything with him and doesn’t care about stuff like that and he asks her ‘you mean you’ll love me no matter who I’ll turn out to be?’ and she goes ‘huh?’ Oh boy, I can’t wait to see the fireworks when she finds out about his daughter, and his past job.
I have to say, bits with Bori and that whole storyline kinda bores me. I want to deal with the romantic stuff. But this dorama is full of bad parents, isn’t it? There are Sang-Doo’s adoptive parents who ditched him (ugh!), his Uncle who is useless and a criminal. EH’s mother left her own daughter and Bori’s Mom only now acts maternal. I am beginning to worry for the future of Korea’s youth :P
Of course, now that the poor OTP has been happy for half an ep, I must brace for the crash, mustn’t I?
I am deadly worried about Sang-Doo’s reiterating that he will die for Eun-Hwan (and it’s more than words. He jumped into the ocean though he couldn’t swim because he thought she was in trouble. And then she jumped after him. LOVE. Ugh, how I loathe EH’s prank playing immature bastard of a brother. But it led to her crying in the hospital so it’s all good).
Dammit. Nobody is allowed to die.
x-posted in dangermousie
I would classify both of them as entertaining but not great. Of the two, Sang-Doo is superior (though considering I am 10 eps into SD and only one into MR, this can change), with tighter script and less OTT acting. But Magic Ring is a joyfully giddy pleasure. I’ve summed it up before (just click on the ‘magic ring’ tag in my lj) so I won’t do it again, but I have to say the plot is making me all gleeful.
I am rather impressed by Joe Cheng in this. While this dorama has him do some very over-dramatic bits (the bit where he finds out his brother died in the train accident and just runs on the pier screaming is rather Vaderish. I get it, I get it, the one person in your family who loved you unconditionally is gone and it’s horrible, but that whole scene is very over-dramatic), he is excellent in the quiet scenes: just watch the look on his face whenever he is with his father, the quick reactions and the hurt. And I am impressed by him because this role is very different from his role in ISWAK.
His character in this is miles different from the icy, perfectionist, reserved Zhi Shu in It Started with a Kiss, who is also admired by all and is the darling of his family (one of these days I really must do a post on the types of heroes in doramas). Jing Hang is what I would classify under ‘angsty wild boy’ and his family situation? Well, to put it very simply, it sucks. To use the Lord of the Rings analogy, he is totally Faramir to his father’s Denethor. He is viewed as the ‘spare’ son, the bad one. His father dotes on his elder brother but views Jing Hang as a profound disappointment and JH is acutely aware of it every moment they are together. In fact, there is a scene where a worked up JH asks his father if he had a choice, who he’d pick, him or his older brother and his father replies that it’s not even a choice, that the Older Brother is ‘my true son’ and JH looks both devastated and unsurprised (because I am sure he’s told himself that he knows this is the fact but to hear it confirmed must be horrid for him) which I am giddy about as it adds to JH’s pile of angst.
The family is very Steward of Gondor in another way. Despite the blatant favoritism of the father, the brothers are devoted to each other. Well, minus fighting over that girl who OB was supposed to be engaged to but who preferred JH though JH doesn’t want her and never wooed her or anything. Hello, are you blind, OB? You are OK enough looking, but when your baby bro is Joe Cheng, you have to have some sympathy for the girl there. And realistic expectations of the outcome on her even getting a glimpse of the hotness. Plus, you clearly fell for someone else double quick so no harm no foul. I think OB realizes his mistake in trying to court in Joe Cheng’s proximity because the woman we see him married to later is someone he met in the US, and he got hitched before she got introduced to his brother and could change her mind :P
In fact, part of the reason JH loses it so much when Older Brother dies in the train wreck is because that was the one person in the family who cared for him (especially since OB conveniently recorded a loving message for JH and about how no, his father really loves you Faramir, it’s just he can’t admit it).
So here we have it, one distraught angsty wild boy (he got into a fight in the first ep!) who is also a really good lawyer and who looks like the Asian version of Orlando Bloom (I noticed the resemblance a bit in ISWAK but Zhi Shu was so different from the characters Orlando normally plays it didn’t come through. Here, Joe Cheng is boyishly emo and with a more Orlandoish haircut, so it comes through a lot more).
But for every distraught wild boy from a rich but unloving family, we have to have a warm, spunky heroine who is caring but dirt-poor. And thus we have Xiao Jun, a sweet plucky girl, with a romantic streak, who works in a store and has the curse of a gambling-mad stepfather who takes all her money. Oh, and she also has an unfaithful (but cut!) boyfriend who has made her pregnant (I have to point out I love the fact that the heroine of this one is a non-virgin and it’s not perceived as a subject for moralizing or anything other than matter-of-fact). Xiao Jun is on the same train as Older Brother, on track to becoming a broke single mother. Due to a combination of circumstances, she ends up chatting with OB and his wife and wife lets her try her engagement ring, a heirloom of the Du (OB and JH’s surname) family right before the train wreck.
In the aftermath, with OB and his wife both dead, and our heroine unconscious, Chairman Du assumes Xiao Jun is OB’s wife because of the ring and is ecstatic to discover she is pregnant because it means his beloved son did not die without leaving something behind after all. So Xiao Jun wakes up in luxurious surroundings, cared for and cosseted, and with no idea who she is (she has that beloved of doramas disease, amnesia). And we end with JH deciding to go home in the devastating aftermath of the deaths. Want to bet they will meet? Wanna bet sparks will fly? And they will fall in love? And there will be guilt because she is his brother’s wife and then guilt when she remembers who she is and I am sure he also blames himself for brother’s death (because he wouldn’t have gone away years ago if it wasn’t for that fight over the girl) and I am going to enjoy this very much.
So far, I like all the clothes in this (in general, Twdramas give me least to complain about on that scale) except for the bizarro credit clothes where someone thought it was a good idea to give Joe Cheng a quasi-roman perm and a tunic to boot. WTF?
I do wish the subtitles were better. They are comprehensible (unlike the scary, gibberish subs of official versions of ISWAK and Goong) but are indubitably ‘Engrish’ and it throws me a bit to have people like a high-class lawyer or a Board Chairman speak in a grammatically incorrect and sometimes misspelled fashion. There are no fan subs for this though and the subs are passable, so far be it from me to complain.
The other dorama I am watching is Sang-Doo, Let’s Go to School. I am on ep 10 and have been watching this off and on for a month. I enjoy it but am not mad for it so when other doramas I get obsessed with come up, they get priority. I have also summarized it before (click on ‘sang-doo’ tag), so I am going to get straight to meta.
This is a good but not great dorama. I guess it can be summed up by saying that I like it a lot but I am not mainlining it like heroin the way I did with doramas like A Love to Kill or Mars or Pride. Part of the reason is that this is Rain’s first dorama and it shows. He is adequate but far from being as excellent as he was in A Love to Kill and while he can do boyish, and blabby, and pensively sad very well, more complex nuances of emotions are hit and miss. But oh boy, he is already excellent at devastated. And quietly angsty. And messed-up. Yum.
Also, episode eight made me cry so hard I couldn’t see very well. Yup, it’s a Korean dorama alright.
They really can’t let go of each other, can they? He is desperate to prevent her from going to an engagement party and resorts to silliness but the desperation is there. But of course, even though she goes to fetch him from the police station, and she nurses him, and she looks for him and all that, the rational part of her knows SD is nothing but trouble and Min-Suk is someone she should marry. I love that the dorama has her seriously grapple with that. So she tells SD it was nothing more than puppy love in front of Min-Suk and goes away with him. I do think if SD didn’t show up she could have been happy with MS, even if SD would always be in the corner of her mind.
And he is all devastated and self-loathing and he tells that client lady to go home and feed her kid (I think he is so angry at parents abandoning children because he was abandoned himself) and tells her ‘I am kind when hell freezes over. I seduce women like you for money.’ I think his career is going to be short-lived with such a talk.
And then he shows up for the school trip even after all that (motorbike!!) and it’s actually to the area they grew up in. And I love seeing her lost in the flashbacks which show how much they loved each other then: SD sucking out snake poison on her leg despite a cut in his mouth and her trying to stop him, SD writing love graffiti in that cave and telling her he missed her so much he thought he’d die, SD asking her to run away with her and that he’d work anything for her since their parents don’t want them together. And telling her he loves her. All of this is making me cry because they were such young innocents back then, so much more open and vulnerable. Maybe that is why SD likes school now: he can escape from the wreck of his life.
But Sang-Doo remembers too, and it’s his flashback that is making me cry so hard I can barely see. Because he remembers the day when his life was wrecked, when he pushed that man to get EH’s gramophone back and the man ended up seriously hurt due to an unlucky accident. And we see SD being taken away in the police car and as they drive by his house he sees EH crying at his door, repeating over and over ‘Sang-Doo, let’s go to school’ but he can’t even reach through the glass. And then he gets out of prison and he knocks at the door of his house only to find out his parents were ashamed and ditched him and moved (evil!) and he is totally uncomprehending and then the girl tells him when he asks about EH that EH moved too, and he completely refuses to believe it because no matter who else abandons him, EH won’t and he runs to her house in the snow and he is screaming her name over and over and sobbing and it’s very depressing and I am crying (interesting that he has more faith in her than in his parents. Of course, they did indicate his Mom is concerned with status so I could see how she was ashamed and ditched). I wonder if EH and SD will ever find out why the other disappeared. I hope so.
So he ends up sitting on that bridge which is associated with the best (being with EH) and worst (pushing the man) times in his life and I love it when EH sees him and is frozen. And then he goes back to the campfire (and Rain has never looked hotter in that dorama than at that moment) to see ES and MH be asked lovey-dovey questions and made to act a couple and the look in his eyes, OMG! And he quietly walks away.
I love the bit the next morning where he comes to the cave he and Eun-Hwan used to go to and falls asleep there and he thinks he sees teen Eun-Hwan and he tells her that he hung on just because of her, all these years. And he wanted to let go. And he is so exhausted (which neatly parallels his later telling Min-Suk (EH’s fiancé) that he thought of killing himself 400 times but he couldn’t because Bori (his daughter) and Eun-Hwan would hang-on to him (I assume metaphorically :P) and he thinks that is love. So he doesn’t mind getting hurt now, or even dying because they saved him before so it’s a fair trade (I love how MS has this dawning look of comprehension on his face. Grrrr. Someone should tell him the whole back-story).
But anyway, to get back to what I was writing. And then the real EH comes there and sits with him until he wakes up and he is so quiet and he stands up to leave and she tells him she is not going to lie any more, or hide and that she loves him. EEEEE! Love the look on his face.
They have really good chemistry. I love the bit where he just calls her and she holds the phone and they don’t say anything just go like this for hours. And he’s given up his gigolo job and working seven billion odd jobs (loved the bit where he was telling Uncle that he won’t do it any more and if they need money for Bori’s hospital bills he’ll do anything, work any job but this. And said he feels filthy enough to bathe in bleach if he could. Rain isn’t as good at projecting the self-loathing desperation here as he is in A Love to Kill but it’s still a neat scene).
And then we get the typical ‘she waits for him in the rain but he can’t come’ bits and their cool first proper date, with bike riding and roller-blading and he is telling her he is selfish and he wants her around even if she’ll get hurt so she should leave him (awwwww) and she tells him she’ll share everything with him and doesn’t care about stuff like that and he asks her ‘you mean you’ll love me no matter who I’ll turn out to be?’ and she goes ‘huh?’ Oh boy, I can’t wait to see the fireworks when she finds out about his daughter, and his past job.
I have to say, bits with Bori and that whole storyline kinda bores me. I want to deal with the romantic stuff. But this dorama is full of bad parents, isn’t it? There are Sang-Doo’s adoptive parents who ditched him (ugh!), his Uncle who is useless and a criminal. EH’s mother left her own daughter and Bori’s Mom only now acts maternal. I am beginning to worry for the future of Korea’s youth :P
Of course, now that the poor OTP has been happy for half an ep, I must brace for the crash, mustn’t I?
I am deadly worried about Sang-Doo’s reiterating that he will die for Eun-Hwan (and it’s more than words. He jumped into the ocean though he couldn’t swim because he thought she was in trouble. And then she jumped after him. LOVE. Ugh, how I loathe EH’s prank playing immature bastard of a brother. But it led to her crying in the hospital so it’s all good).
Dammit. Nobody is allowed to die.
x-posted in dangermousie