Tag: Show

K-Drama: Extraordinary You (1st Impressions)

I breezed through the first four episodes of Extraordinary You and I love this drama so much! It’s really going to hurt to wait for new episodes, but luckily I’ve got a busy couple months ahead which will hopefully help.

There are so many things to adore about this drama. Here is a list:

It is unique. Even though it’s about a girl who finds out she is actually a comic book character, which is similar to W (k-drama) and Unexpected (c-drama), the plot line and camera angles are very different then any drama I have watched.

The plot is very interesting. See summary below. The way it’s executed is fantastic and there is something for everyone since it’s part fantasy, mystery, school plot and romance with some humor thrown in.

The main character Eun Dan Oh played by Kim Hye Yoon is hilariously adorable. She is a tad bit whiny but I forgive her because she makes the unbelievable believable.

I have zero idea what’s going to happen next from episode to episode, so it leaves me hanging, but excited to see what comes next.

SUMMARY

What would you do if you found out that you were, in fact, a character in a comic? And an extra character on top of that? Change the course of the story, obviously!
Eun Dan Oh is a 17-year-old high-school student from a wealthy family who suffers from a lifelong heart condition that inevitably means she will not live past her teenage years. However, when Dan Oh realizes she is experiencing long gaps in her memory as well, she comes into the unhappy inheritance of another fact in her life: she is a character in a Korean webtoon and all of her actions are predetermined by the artist who draws her. To make matters worse, she discovers she is only a supporting character in the cast. With her newfound understanding of the world she inhabits, she is determined to find true love in her own plot-line and circumvent the author’s plans for her character by utilizing the flashes of storyboard she alone is able to see.
(Source: onehallyu)

C-Drama: Nice to Meet You (1st impressions)

Nice to Meet You is ending this week, which I think is always a perfect time to start a show, so that is exactly what I did.

I started episode 1, which began with some serious drama. It was a wedding and the groom was apparently hurt by the bride, and so he humiliated her in front of everyone before hurling a ring into the water outside. It was a really good start. It made me wonder what happened and want to watch to find out.

But then it went downhill, FAST. Before I tell you how, here is the plot, care of MDL:

An aspiring designer almost loses everything due to a scheme to take her down. She meets the successor of a premier jeweler that paves the way for a sizzling romance. Gao Jie has always dreamed of becoming a jewelry designer, so she packs up her bags to find work at a mining company in South America. She falls in love with Yu Zhi, the successor of Shengfeng Jewelry. Things do not gosmoothly for Gao Jie after returning to China, but in order to pursue her passion, she gets a job at Shengfeng. Shengfeng used to be the gold label in the industry. However, fierce competition from Western jewelers has reduced the brand’s prominence over the years. To get the company back to its former glory, Yu Zhi breaks tradition by focusing on Western designs. After Gao Jie joins Shengfeng, she becomes fascinated with the exquisite beauty of traditional Chinese jewelry and becomes set on creating designs that fuse Eastern and Western influences. Alas, their cooperation and budding romance encounter roadblocks due to Yu Zhi’s stepmother, Mu Zi Yun. She is also Gao Jie’s aunt who has been conspiring to take over the company.

How did it go downhill so fast you ask. My answer: It got so cheesy, pizza couldn’t rival it. The lead was introduced as he was rock climbing, where he almost fell, but righted himself with his massive (and by that I mean medium sized) muscles. The viewers are clearly supposed to come away seeing him as a strong adventurous type. He then sees the female lead at a club and is immediately interested. He manages to save her from her lecherous boss a short time later, then they part ways. The following morning her awful boss forces her to go to a jungle mine which wasn’t safe. Next thing you know men jump out at her crew and beat them all up (not clear why, maybe to steal what they got from the mine, but I don’t think they’d arrived yet, so it’s a head scratcher) and she runs away and ends up falling down a hill into the water.

Cue the adventurous hero who saves her, and just happens to have tents and a guide with him making running from a jungle gang into a camping experience. But despite the male lead saving her and having necessary jungle equipment and acting gentlemanly towards her, the girl decides to head back by herself. So dumb! She is quickly confronted by a giant python which the male lead saves her from (I told you it was cheesy).

The leads end up together in the jungle, no idea where the guide went, and the female starts to have the feels for the male after he shows her a “tree of life,” which just looked like one of a hundred jungle trees to me, but what do I know.

By this point I was barely hanging on. I had filled my cheese quota for the day, but I kept watching because it could get better, plus what happened to make their wedding so cray. I really want to know. But then the male lead got into the water to bathe (this was ok, shirtless is good says the cougar blogger) and tilted his head back, and at that moment I thought to myself PLEASE DO NOT DO WHAT I THINK YOU’RE GOING TO DO BECAUSE IT’S JUST TOO CHEESY AND I CANT TAKE ANY MORE. And whattaya know, he did it. The male lead came up out of the water like Ariel in the little mermaid and tossed his hair as water flew off him in what was supposed to be a “moment”, but was sooooo ridiculous I have no words for it.

And imagining 49 more episodes like that (49!) does not bring me to my happy place. Maybe it gets better. Usually I give a show more of a chance to reel me in than I’ve given this one so far, so maybe I’ll pick it back up, just to blog it or I could turn it into a drinking game, which is always fun with terrible thing, to drink every time they do something hokey. Although, my low tolerance probably couldn’t handle it if the story stays as corny as it was in episode 1.