Crazy Vintages and Get A Divorce Already, Ji-young!

We’re already on to episode 20 of Love Truly (aka I Really Really Like You) – how time flies when a show is on 5 days a week. What is it about this beyond ridiculous show that I can’t get enough of? Is it the catchy, repetitive music cues? The nonsensical plot? The endless mopey montages? The endless happy montages? The duck? At first it probably was the duck, but she hasn’t appeared in a while and for some reason I’m still watching. Could it be the lead actress, Korean pop sensation Eugene? I actually like her, even though I have a feeling her cornball accent would be unlistenable if I could discern it. She’s cute and healthy-looking – by healthy I mean not scrawny and anorexic-looking like some of these Korean actresses you see. Lee Min-ki, who plays the cocky Bong-gi, occasionally channels Danny Kaye at his most spastic, but mostly reminds me of a Bollywood comic actor, especially when he gets all huffy denying his feelings for Bong-soon (“Neva neva neva!”) Actually, I know what my favorite thing about this show is: it’s whatever slang expressions Bong-gi is using and their English translations. He keeps on calling Bong-soon a “vintage hillbilly” and can’t understand how he got all mixed up with all these “crazy vintages”. Vintages? He sometimes uses the phrase “for realz”. Also, this is the only show I’ve ever seen where the word “shit” will be in the subtitles but the middle “hi” will be censored. All right, so what’s going on? At this point, Bong-gi and Bong-soon both know that Joon-won is the President’s son. Bong-soon is (still) in love with Joon-won but is trying to repress her feelings because he’s married – to a woman who has suffered from “dementia” for the past three years. The family wants them to get a divorce so she can go live with her parents in America, but he insists on taking care of her. However, Mr. Wonderful is starting to feel a little resentful now that he’s gotten a taste of what life could be like with Bong-soon. A few episodes ago he broke her heart saying that she was like a little sister to him (ouch!) and that he never once thought of her as a woman (double ouch!!), but it looks like he’s starting to reconsider. Wait, aren’t they actually brother and sister? Nope, turns out that Mr . President found the infant Bong-soon, abandoned by her birth mother, when he was on the run from the police in the mountains, and took her in. He left her with her “grandma”, the woman they stayed with in the mountains, after he went back to Seoul (and for some odd reason, never stayed in touch with the little girl he helped raise). So he’s not her biological father - or a cheat, which I’m sure everyone is relieved about. Her mother, on the other hand, is right under her nose – Bong-soon comes face to face with her in the last episode’s cliffhanger. She’s a former “erotic” movie actress who now works as an extra, and seems to have lots of trouble with creditors and the law. She also has two daughters, one of whom is the same bad apple who stole all of Bong-soon’s money! Bong-soon, in the meantime, has gotten a job working at the Blue House cafeteria, and is buddies with the Presidential chef. Her boss, Jin-kyung, has a thing for Bong-gi, while the square Blue House photographer (whose name I forget) has a thing for Jin-kyung. Bong-gi has dated Jin-kyung a few times, but clearly has a thing for Bong-soon (he even bought her a cell phone while on a date with Jin-kyung, a sure sign that the relationship won’t last). I thought Jin-kyung was cute at first – she’s the only character on the show with an inner monologue, and is fond of the phrase “ooh la la!” – but now she seems kind of shallow and petty. She’s mean to Bong-soon and her co-workers, and is only starting to think about Mr. Photographer seriously because he seems to have more money than Bong-gi. Bong-gi continues to struggle with his feelings for Bong-soon, but can only express them through insults. There’s also kind of a sad (I guess it’s supposed to be hilarious) subplot where Bong-soon’s overweight co-worker becomes obsessed with a hunky Presidential guard, who is horrified. I’m rather curious to see how that one gets resolved.



Meanwhile, on Bride From Vietnam… Ji-young has gone crazy. Really, really crazy. She WILL NOT get a divorce, even though it’s the only logical thing for her to do. Her husband doesn’t want her lying ass anymore, her husband’s family desperately wants her out, they’re offering a ton of alimony – and she says no way. Even Scary Mom is giving sound advice and telling her to give it up. But for some reason, Ji-young still believes that she really loves Young-min and that she can turn this whole thing around if they wait six months. In a revealing scene with Scary Mom, Ji-young indicates that her biggest fear is becoming like her mother and that this is her real motivation for sticking it out – she doesn’t want to end up alone. Scary Mom tries to explain that she is setting herself up to do just that, but Ji-young won’t hear it. It seems that Ji-young’s motivation to become Mrs. Huh’s apprentice is twofold: revenge (you can tell when Mrs. Huh asks her why she’s so interested all of a sudden, the voice in her head is going “don’t say revenge, don’t say revenge…”) against Jun-wu, basically for existing, by replacing his wife as Mrs. Huh’s successor; and the hopes that by securing Mrs. Huh’s name for their company’s rice cake project, she will help Young-min succeed and win back his heart (what’s with all the women on this show thinking that the way to a man’s heart is to get him promoted? Besides which, his father owns the company – does he really need her help?) Mrs. Huh, in a rather mean ploy to test Jin-ju, agrees to take on Ji-young as an additional student, even though it’s apparent that she’s going through a messy separation involving Mrs. Huh’s family. Mrs. Huh tells her assistant Yeon-ki in private that you can tell a real gem by putting it next to a fake one, or something to that effect. Still, it’s pretty ridiculous that she would force her pregnant and faithful student (and blood relative) to compete with her husband’s nasty ex who does nothing but insult and threaten her. It’s funny – for a long time, even though Ji-young is clearly the antihero of the show, she wasn’t a bad guy you loved to hate. I actually felt sorry for her, having to live with her uptight husband and controlling, high-strung mother-in-law who didn’t want to let her hold a job or be on birth control (!). But now that Ji-young’s got nothing left to lose, she’s really turned the corner towards becoming a bona fide bee-yatch. Meanwhile, Young-su and Se-mi are living on their own and have gotten jobs waiting tables. Young-su, while cute, is really showing his immaturity – he whines about having to work and spends their rent money playing video games. I wonder if Se-mi will still want to marry this guy when they finally do go home, or if she’ll insist that he do some growing up first. This is why you live together first, people! Also, it’s totally out of the bag that Won-mi faked her pregnancy. Han-suk, of course, was furious, but she seems to be getting over it. And, wouldn’t you know it, people are starting to talk about how there must be “another reason” for Sung-il’s refusal to let Se-mi and Young-su marry. They should have just called this show “The Other Reason”. Now that everyone knows about Ji-young, there’s really just one more secret that has to come out… and it’s a biggie.

By the way, you can watch any episode of Bride From Vietnam (aka Golden Bride), Coffee Prince, and about a trillion other K-dramas via www.mysoju.com. You can also download them if you have the Veoh player, although I find the actual player annoying and prefer to watch them using VLC Player instead.

A Belated Update and A New Show

Sorry I haven’t updated in a while, but I’ve had a LOT of catching up to do TV-wise. The K-dramas have been filling up the DVR faster than I can possibly get to them. Who knew this addiction would be so time-consuming?

First off, Coffee Prince ended its run on AZN – and promptly started up again at the beginning! Great news for those who haven’t managed to catch this series yet. Overall, I really enjoyed the show. It was different from other K-dramas I’ve seen in so many ways… people having sex before marriage with impunity, for example. But the thing that seemed almost bizarre compared to other K-dramas I’ve seen is that, once Eun-Chan was outed as a woman and Han-Gyul got over his initial shock, not that much really… happened. For the entire last third of the series, it seemed like the biggest conflict was, “oh, I love you and you love me, but we can’t decide when we should get married”. Sure, Han-Gyul’s grandmother wasn’t a fan of the relationship, but compared to the threats of suicide and disinheritance commonplace in other dramas’ parent-disapproval scenarios, Grandma’s “eh, I don’t like her, she looks like a man” seemed ridiculously tame. And she even liked her enough to send her on a free ride to Italy (to “barista school” – is there such a thing, really?)! I suppose this story couldn’t have ended in any other way than a full-blown self-realization scenario for Eun-Chan – her character couldn’t have just gotten married and become a pampered housewife, naturally. I did think it was a little annoying that after all Eun-Chan’s self-righteousness about money, and insisting on paying back her wealthy boyfriend everything he lent her with interest, that she didn’t blink an eye about accepting Grandma’s free ride, but whatever. It was kinda cool that half of the last episode actually took place two years into future, when Eun-Chan was slated to return from Italy as a certified barista. Like Audrey Hepburn, she comes back from Europe with a snazzy new hairdo and feminine clothes – clearly a sign that she’s “matured” (at least in TV/movie land). Also, she apparently won something called the “World Barista Competition”. Good for her. Oh, and as for Han-Sung and his crappy girlfriend, they not only got back together, they got married! She proposed, saying something romantic like, “we can always get divorced”. Awwww. She was pregnant briefly, but it was implied that she had a miscarriage. While I would never wish that situation on anyone in reality, in the case of these two fictional characters, thank God! I was betting that she was going to have the baby, and then two weeks later be like, “you know what, motherhood is kind of cramping my style. I think I’ll move to Canada,” leaving her doormat husband to raise the kid alone. I really don’t quite get what the makers of Coffee Prince were trying to say with this story line (it wasn’t covered in the “Making Of” special shown after the finale). Are they really holding these two up as an example of a mature, long-term relationship? I can tell you one thing: if this couple were real, they would not age well. Their adorable jabs at each other would not stay cute for long – before you know it, they’d be fifty and screaming at each other like the couple in the Stella d'Oro Breakfast Treats commercial. “Where’s my pre-amp?” “How should I know, you cheating asshole? Maybe your trannie ex-girlfriend took it!” “Fuck you, you fucking whore! Why don’t you run off to New York again?” Actually, I would TOTALLY watch that show. They could call it something like “Bitter Screaming Couple”. Hello, SBS?

OK, next up: shit is totally hitting the fan every which way on Bride From Vietnam. Where to start? Young-su and Se-mi have run away from home, the parents are freaking out and searching for them, and everyone is ready to let them get married except for Sung-il, for reasons no one has figured out yet. I’m sure this reinforces a valuable lesson to Korean kids everywhere: if your parents say no, just run away! They’ll reconsider. Well, unless your father has an illegitimate daughter in your girlfriend’s family that he can’t let anyone know about. In much, much bigger news, though, Ji-young got BUSTED! Young-min encounters a blotto In-kyong in the parking lot and chivalrously offers to drive her home (actually, he offers her a ride in his chaufferred limo – he’s that rich). In-kyong isn’t drunk enough to spill the beans, but she is out of it enough to leave behind her date planner – with the picture of her, Ji-young and Jun-wu from college sticking out. OHH SHIT! I expected the quaking Young-min to run upstairs and slap her silly, but he holds on a little longer to confirm a few details that leave no doubt that she’s been lying. When he does finally confront her with the picture, she actually has the balls to keep lying! She says Jun-wu was never her boyfriend, that he was a crazy stalker and of course she couldn’t tell him about it. It’s like she has a pathological disease where she just can’t stop lying. It doesn’t work, though – Young-min follows her to Jun-wu’s place of employment where she interrupts his meeting (!) to have a royal freakout. She thinks he sent the picture to Young-min to get revenge (strangely, no one has corrected her on this yet). Young-min, standing outside, overhears the whole thing. It’s so over. Now Ji-young is really starting to go bananas – even threatening Jun-wu, saying she’ll never forgive him (him!) for how things turned out for her (is she serious???) Jun-wu is haunted by her remarks in the very next scene, in one of my favorite K-Drama conventions, “The Flashback From 30 Seconds Ago”. Young-min doesn’t want to worry his parents –they’re already freaking about Young-su running away – so he’s keeping his mouth shut for the time being, but is absolutely set on a divorce. He isn’t buying another word out of Ji-young’s mouth, not even her tearful declaration that yes, she might have married him for his money, but she really loves him now! Then, in a bizarro move that would make In-kyong proud, Ji-young decides the solution to her current problems is to…become an artisanal rice cake maker? I really have absolutely no explanation for this turn of events. Are there no other options open to women in Korea besides housewife, corporate drone, or rice cake maker? She shows up at Grandma’s (aka Mrs. Huh or Auntie) to beg for an apprenticeship, oblivious to the fact that Jin-ju is already her apprentice (and also, we learn, about to become Mrs. Huh’s successor). Mrs. Huh angrily turns her away multiple times, culminating in her sitting out in the pouring rain and having to be hospitalized as a result (I know, right? Ooohh, she got wet! Get this woman to the hospital immediately!) Oh, wait, I forgot maybe the biggest news of all – Jin-ju IS pregnant! The Degrassi scenario wins. I guess they must have done it after all.

Finally, there is a new show I have to tell you about. Two weeks ago, I had just finished watching one of the last Coffee Princes (I always record them and give them enough lead time to fast forward through the commercials, because the commercials on AZN are, no joke, THE WORST COMMERCIALS on cable TV. More on that another time) when I found myself in the middle of another drama I had never seen before. The very first thing I saw was this:


I immediately set my DVR to “Record Entire Series”.

The show is called “Love Truly”, and you know what? I Truly Love it! The aforementioned episode was the second in this 34-episode series about, according to a synopsis, “those who work in the Blue House (Korean presidential residence). This drama introduces the viewers the place considered mysterious and tabooed in TV dramas. It also features the people working inside the most unknown place in the country.” That may be, but this is no West Wing: no boring politics interfere with the non-stop barrage of insults, poop jokes, and ducks crying animated tears. In a nutshell, the story follows three characters: Bong-soon, a young woman raised in the remote rural mountains by her grandmother who comes to Seoul to find her real parents after her grandmother’s death; Joon-won, a surgeon, low-profile son of the President and general Mr. Wonderful; and Bong-gi, an arrogant Secret Service-type employee of the President who keeps getting assigned to guard Joon-won – even though he doesn’t know Joon-won is the President’s son. That must be why he keeps calling him a piece of crap. The three cross paths when Joon-won, alone on some emotional hiking expedition in the mountains (I still haven’t seen the first episode, so I’m not sure why he was out there) is rescued by plucky Bong-soon. Bong-gi is assigned to go to the mountains to escort Joon-won back to Seoul, which ruins his vacation plans, so things don’t exactly start off on the right foot with those two. Bong-soon’s ailing grandmother dies, but on her deathbed reveals that she is not Bong-soon’s real grandma, and that she should find her real parents. Bong-soon digs up some photographs of herself as a baby with her real parents – one of whom bears a striking resemblance to the President. Kindly Joon-won has offered to be her guardian from now on, so she sets off, Bong-hee the duck in her backpack, for Seoul. Within days naïve Bong-soon has had all her money stolen, been kidnapped by a cult, and had her prize 100-year-old bellflower eaten, but she perseveres. She’s befriended Bong-gi’s father, a gardener/custodian at the Blue House, and is staying with him and Bong-gi. Bong-gi is beside himself that this hillbilly – who maliciously stole his very important badge and hid it because she didn’t like him – is living not only in his house but in his room. He’s the one who ate her bellflower without her permission, after all. He’s kind of a jerk, but I have a feeling he will develop a heart of gold by the end of this series. Anyway, check it out. It’s on AZN Monday through Friday at 10:30 PM.