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| Yeonjun saw the Pandas |
Had a fun vacation in August with my BTS pals. We went to see Epik High, went to the San Diego Zoo to see the new pandas (Yeonjun photocard in tow, ifykyk) and got up at 1am to watch the Stray Kids Dominate concert in Seoul. Bought a whole lot of K-pop albums and swam in the pool a lot. A nice break.
On the drama front, it feels like we are all waiting for a fresh crop of dramas which began in late August and are not ready for review (Love Next Door, Cinderella at 2AM, No Gain No Love, Serendipity's Embrace) so I was floundering a bit trying to find something to watch for another month. But I expect to have lots of thoughts next month!
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My Sweet Mobster
In the summer drama drought, it felt like everyone was watching My Sweet Mobster because there was literally nothing else worth watching. In the normal glut of competitive shows this one might not have stood out but considering the conditions it was a silly but cute one.
Go Eun-ha (Han Sun-hwa) is a children's content creator who is struggling to raise the profile of her channel. When she is working a food festival, she ends up encountering some "mobsters" who are attacked by a local. She tries to stop the fight and since the cameras were rolling this footage ends up on her channel without her knowledge. These mobsters are actually rehabilitated ex-cons who work at a food company and their leader Seo Ji-hwa (Uhm Tae-goo) has made a place for them to live and work. But this is the kind of bad press that keeps setting them back. Meanwhile one of their members is missing and the local prosecutor Jang Hyeon-woo (Kwon Yul) is just waiting for them to make a mistake. But he also has a crush on Go Eun-ha. And there's a rival gang that is also trying to suck the mobsters back into battle and therefore back into crime. When things go badly for Go Eun-ha and her channel gets shut down, she ends up living with the mobsters and teaching them. Naturally.
It's an obvious broad comedy with a "fated" love story. Sadly, I found Go Eun-ha really unappealing. There was not a lot of there there to her character and I did not necessarily care enough about her past struggles to get invested in her present ones. The romance goes a bit gooey for a while and it's excruciating but then things bounce back when Seo Ji-hwa's mob boss father gets out of jail and there are actual stakes when he tries to shake down his son to re-join his criminal enterprise.
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Like Flowers in Sand
The Netflix previews for Like Flowers in Sand did it no favors and I had not even thought to watch it until Jae-ha Kim mentioned it on her substack. But it ended up being an unusual small town drama with a stand-out performance that went against type for lead, Jang Dong-yoon.
Jang Dong-yoon plays Kim Baek-doo, a failed ssireum athlete (a kind of traditional Korean wrestling). His father and brother are former ssireum champions. The whole town revolves around the ssireum training center and he's grown up thinking about nothing but becoming a ssireum champion. But Kim Baek-doo has never lived up to his youthful promise and now in his 30s he keeps thinking this is the time he will give it up.
When the ssireum team coach disappears, and an outsider is found dead in the local reservoir, some new people come to town. Oh Yoo-kyung (Lee Ju-myoung) becomes the manager of the ssireum team and she is there with her unemployed "husband" Min Hyun-wook (Yoon Jong-seok). The "couple" are actually undercover cops trying to investigate what they believe are connected crimes and possibly match-fixing in the ssireum matches. But the minute Kim Baek-doo sees Oh-Yoo-kyung he's convinced it's his childhood friend Oh Doo-shik who moved out of town abruptly after her father was accused of murdering a ssireum player.
Kim Baek-doo is an incredibly loving, enthusiastic meathead. He decides to protect and care for "Oh Doo-shik," though she keeps insisting she is not his childhood friend.
There is a kind of childhood regression that happens with this group of childhood friends who now as adults still fall back into old patterns with each other. There is shouting and punching and sulking. But what could be cloying or irritating ends up just this side of charming.
Baek-doo has to sort of figure out what he wants in his life and the presence of "Doo-shik" kind of snaps him out of his apathy. With thick regional accents, the entire piece has a very local feel. With a murder plotline, a fight for the championship, and this nostalgic romance about childhood friends becoming something more it's a lot to juggle. But in 12-episodes they manage to keep the balance (maybe too much murder mystery for my personal taste but it's key to the set-up of all the characters).
While I am not usually a fan of "man-baby" characters, Jang Dong-yoon really finds a sincere sweetness to his character. He is trying in his own way to grow up. He may not be intuitive about people in general but he knows two things very well--ssireum and Doo-shik. And maybe that's all he needs to know in life. Watching Jang Dong-yoon process as the kind of slow but honest Baek-doo is it's own pleasure. It would be easier for this performance to get played for laughs but it really feels like this adult child who is just starting to access the adult part of his brain for the first time and with it a kind of happy blossoming of self.
The show genuinely made me want to watch ssireum matches. I kind of hate sports but the sports segments were quite exciting. But I could have done without the whole plotline about Doo-shik being an "ugly" child.
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He’s Psychometric
Yet another murderer dad ruining his kids childhood and people’s lives. It's not my favorite genre because these murderers seem to keep getting away with it and the childhood trauma kind of never ends.
Lee Ahn (Park Jin-Young) is a kind of dopey teenager who ends up being able to read people's past memories by touching them or their objects. He developed this skill after his family was killed in a fire but he has not quite refined his abilities and often gets mixed up information in his readings. When he was young, he was taken in by the impossible-for-him-to-read Kang Sung-mo (Kim Kwon), now a no-nonsense prosecutor, who acts as his foster parent. Lee Ahn runs into Yoon Jae-in (Shin Ye-eun) who he had a crush on in high school and Kang Sung-mo thinks that Yoon Jae-in can help improve Lee Ahn's skills. And maybe they can all get to the bottom of that fire that ruined all of their lives.
I ended up not making it to the end of this one. While I did like the growing but complicated relationship between Lee Ahn and Yoon Jae-in, the murderer plotline took over and it got really dark. Be warned, the abuse addressed in this one is quite heavy. I stopped watching and then struggled to get back to it.
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