Big Disappointment

Well, the title says it all, really.  I stuck through to the bitter end.  Let me be clear, this was no Mary Stayed Out All Night level of suckitude, but I really expected more out of the Hong Sisters. 

You know what this felt like?  As though they had written up notes for the characters and plotlines but something happened and they had to pull in a ghost writer.  Because it just did not feel like their show.  It was just...off.  I don't blame them for trying something new, but it didn't work and I hope that going forward there were lessons learned from this.  A lot of people thought Best Love/Greatest Love was just...too much (Not me! But people. Out there.  In the interwebs.) Maybe they responded to that criticism by pulling back too much. 

Let's face it, Gong Yoo is awesome but he can't carry the weight of the entire show.  But darn he was cute. 

So onward and upward.  I wrapped up Protect the Boss.  I can recommend that drama for people who are just looking for something pleasant.  There's not a lot of angst and the characters are really likeable. It was a nice change and I'm glad I watched it.

Right now I'm all about Faith and Haeundae Lovers and am heavily drawn to Arang and the Magistrate. My schedule will probably be ramping up again soon so I just don't know if I have the time.  So many dramas... 

Too. Many. Dramas.

I'm watching 5 dramas.  Drama overload.  There aren't enough hours in the day.  


City Hunter I haven't watched since a certain event in King2Hearts because the drama is hurtling toward its endgame and I'm still traumatized from K2H.  If anything bad happens I can't take it.  So rom-coms it is! I'll come back to it because it's really good but I've got to be ready for it. 


Protect the Boss I'm really enjoying, but it's been spinning its wheels the last couple of episodes so I picked up Full House thinking I wasn't going to watch anything currently airing and I wanted to see something a little more old school. 


Foolish, foolish Penny.


I already posted about I Do, I Do.  I've been totally sucked in because I want to see how the drama between the A and B female leads plays out.


And then there is Big.  I was feeling some ambivalence but it's the Hong Sisters and Gong Yoo so it's not like I could stay away.  Plus I really liked Lee Min-jung in Boys Over Flowers (She played Ha Jae-kyung.  Am I the only person who was upset that she didn't get the guy?  I actually liked Ha Jae Kyung more than Geum Jan-di and thought that Lee Min-ho had a ton more chemistry with Lee Min-jung than Ku Hye-sun. But that's another story...) Anyway....Gong Yoo is killing me playing a teenage boy (*waves hands* "Whatever!") and his post army body is....killing me in a completely different way.


(Dear Gong Yoo,
I'm sorry for objectifying you.  I know it is wrong.  But the army was very, very good to you.  And everyone else.  The end.


Love, 
Penny)


So, yeah, it's Drama City around here.  Sigh!  Can you tell I'm really, really happy?


P.S.  We need to talk about the person responsible for Rain's wardrobe in Full House.

Big Excitement

Okay, as more and more promo materials come out I am getting more and more excited about Big. Coming from a place of ambivalence I'm starting to look forward to June 4.   From what I understand it will be a situation where the body of Gong Yoo's doctor character will be inhabited by a teenager's soul with the added complications of the doctor's fiancee and the teen's girlfriend.  The inherent complications of this should be a fount of both comedy and drama.

I'm particularly interested to see how the Hong Sisters will handle the body situation.  Is the doctor "dead"?  Has his soul moved on?  And is the teen's body in a coma or has it died as well?  Also, who has a better claim, the fiancee of the body or the girlfriend of the soul?

Korean Rom Coms

I've been taking a little break from my regular dramas because I've been on a Korean rom-com binge.  I'll talk a little about what I've been watching and my opinions.  I'm not going to do a movie review because that really isn't my thing.  People who write those always seem to have a much better handle on storytelling through film than I have.  I just have opinions.


She's On Duty -  Wow, talk about your missed opportunities. Kim Sun-ah, Gong-yoo, you'd think this was made in heaven. Instead it just felt flat. 

It's not that the leads didn't have chemistry.  There were a couple of scenes where you could see that they did.  I think the problem lay with the murky storytelling and the directing.  The rhythm was off and it just seemed to jump from scene to scene but without any emotional weight, if that makes any sense.  It was like: this happens, then this happens, then this happens. Also Gong-yoo was tragically (TRAGICALLY) underused. Sigh!  Though there are some fun fight scenes.


Tropes that sucked me in:  High School all over again, secret identities, bad-ass chicks. 

Gong Yoo. You're Welcome.

Run, do not walk, over to Dramabeans.  You can thank me later.

Hong Sisters Take on Freaky Friday

Dramabeans had an update today on the new Hong Sisters drama "Big".  The casting of Gong Yoo has been confirmed, as well as the main plotline. Instead of remaking the Tom Hanks movie, this will involve a body swap, a la Freaky Friday, between and 18-year-old and Gong Yoo's character of an adult engaged businessman.  

more after the jump...