Happy Holidays and welcome winter!
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Moon River
Kang Tae-oh and Kim Se-jeong really elevate this material which walks a fine line between comedic body-swapping and serious palace revenge drama.
Lee Kang (Kang Tae-oh) is the Crown Prince who is reeling from the untimely death of the Crown Princess who was his first love. Due to the machinations of the Left State Minister, she was deposed and threw herself into the icy waters of a lake to die. He wants to plot revenge against the minister and has joined forces with his cousin, Prince Jeon (Lee Shin-young), whose mother was killed as well. The Crown Prince runs into Park Dal-i (Kim Se-jeong), a lowly peddler, who strangely resembles his late wife. She has lost her memory but ends up saving his life and risking her own for him. So they become more intertwined. And at some point, they suddenly switch bodies.
But I liked how they integrated the Crown Prince's servants into the narrative. Rather than dedicated to the Prince, they are sarcastic, not always servile, and characters of their own.
Once a lot of the body swapping has passed, and the revenge plot becomes more centered, the seriousness of the endeavor to bring down the minister kicks into gear. But an eleventh hour effort to "explain" the Left State Ministe's motivations seemed unnecessary.
I was totally unprepared for the body switching, and rather than just have the actors play out the role through the body they jumped into they play more serious moments back in their rightful bodies, even if still swapped at that moment. The actors do a fine job keeping this straight but it creates these uneven tone shifts in the material. And I think they are trying to right the ship to walk this fine line between the comedy of the body switching with these tender moments. But it's awkward af.
That said both actors nicely embody this Face/Off-like premise with each changing their body language, vocal patterns, and nature to match whatever character they are playing. They also switch bodies back and forth a lot. It serves certain plot points but also becomes a little overused.
And maybe it could easier to reconcile this if there was not also a giant-dinosaur-bird-full-of-poison plot too.
It's frustrating because actually the struggles betwen the Princes and the Minister form a really challenging palace plot that is hard to untangle. To bring down the minister is to bring down the whole crown and you feel that acutely.
Meanwhile, I would absolutely throw the character of Kim Woo-hee into a volcano. She is set up as the love interest of Prince Jeon but this comes after she is first established as someone willing to kill to get her way. I feel like I could never forgive her and accept her as anything but an enemy of the Crown Prince.
The actor, Hong Su-zu, was also totally useless. Maybe if she could have played any complexity to the character I would have been on board. But she didn't. And this secondary couple seemed so poorly matched, with Prince Jeon quite sweet and dutiful and Woo-hee either straight-up evil or just mopey.
But I liked how they integrated the Crown Prince's servants into the narrative. Rather than dedicated to the Prince, they are sarcastic, not always servile, and characters of their own.
Once a lot of the body swapping has passed, and the revenge plot becomes more centered, the seriousness of the endeavor to bring down the minister kicks into gear. But an eleventh hour effort to "explain" the Left State Ministe's motivations seemed unnecessary.
In any event, the chemistry of the leads and their charming dynamic made this worth the journey.
This complicated "contract" marriage story gets wrapped up a little too quickly and neatly making the threats to the couple small speed bumps rather than dramatic challenges.
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Would You Marry Me?
Yoo Me-ri (Jung So-min) is a dedicated fiancée who does everything for her fiancé Kim Woo-joo (Seo Bum-jun). They register their marriage before the wedding he leaves her for a rich girl he meets. She loses her apartment to a scam around the same time. Everything is going sideways for Me-ri but then she wins a contest and the prize is an expensive house for newlyweds. She had entered the contest when she was still with Woo-joo. But suddenly she needs a husband to collect on the prize. After a literal run-in with another man named Kim Woo-joo (Choi Woo-sik) she tries to convince him to help her collect the prize. But this fraud gets more and more complicated when the newlywed couple has to stay together for three months. The complexity increases when Me-ri finds her company has won a contract with her new fake husband's company and they have to work together.
Me-ri is truly cornered and her reasons for fraud are sincere (she wants the money to pay back money borrowed from her mother). And ex-fiancé Woo-joo is truly trash so losing out on this chance feels extra unfair.
While Jung So-min is one of my faves there was something but about the unending suffering her character experiences here. And while Choi Woo-sik is a lovely antidote to a shitty ex I'm not sure there was much chemistry here.
And at 12 episodes the couple comes together too quickly and major conflicts get resolved too efficiently (you've never seen a murder get punished this fast in Korea). This is why 12-episode arcs are the devil.
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Dynamite Kiss
Do I have to finish this lovers to enemies to presumably lovers drama?
I was interested in this horny, noona-ish drama at the start, with a hot and heavy vacation romance, but it devolves into a woman being forced to suffer emotional abuse from a guy who says he likes her. He's mad at her so he turns his affection into aggression. And frankly I don't need this. Nor did she!
And she had a major dose of helplessness which requires him to rescue her A LOT, and that is a total turn-off for me. Pull your shit together lady.
Absolutely started rooting against the couple and for the second male lead. Not a good sign.
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