Korean Movie Night: Little Forest 리틀 포레스트 (2018) Korean

Kim Tae Ri, Ryu Jun Yeol, Moon So Ri, Jin Ki Joo

Movie rating: 8/10      Neck score: A

An art house film filled with food. I was expecting it to be artsy, but I wasn't expecting it to be 75% her cooking food from scratch as a coping mechanism. Food prep as therapy taken to a whole new level, and I loved it. It made me want to move out to the middle of nowhere and just live off the land like that too. It is a way to go back to her roots and find comfort in the "little forest" that her mother had left for her in her hometown. But it did make me very hungry. I wanted to eat all the food.

Everyone did a really good job. Especially in the art house movies, where there is very little dialog and little to no background music, and it is essentially showing and not telling to the extreme, this is very important. I could tell they were friends from childhood, and they had their own struggles, and it was beautiful.

As confirmed members of team Ryu Jun Yeol, we were bound to love it no matter what, but it was also just really good. It was slow moving and quiet, but we were never bored. It was so visually appealing, it kept us interested the whole time. We were curious about each food she made, and learned more about her and what she was dealing with with each recipe. It was wholesome and comforting. It wasn't dramatic or even full of conflict. It was just healing- and lots of it. It was beautiful. Now I'm hungry again. I'm going to look up those recipes.

Korean Movie Night: Socialphobia 소셜포비아 (2015) Korean

Byun Yo Han, Lee Joo Seung, Ha Yoon Kyung, Ryu Jun Yeol

Movie Rating: 8/10     Neck Score: A

We finally had another Korean Movie Night, and we were trying to decide what to watch.  We were thinking of watching Chingu, but weren't in the mood for sad, but somehow that message didn't get all the way through to Lizabreff who suggested Socialphobia.  I was thinking more on the lines of thriller so we all agreed, and then didn't consider that this was still going to mess with our heads.  It was a thriller, but more of a psychological one.  It was freaking messed up, and left us feeling weird.  That's not to say it wasn't good.  It was amazing, but that was because it was so real.  This is the world we live in.  A world where people troll people on the internet because it doesn't seem real, and they don't realize the consequences of what will happen.  People's lives are ruined.  People die.  It was an amazing show of the consequences of social media and cyber bullying.  It was sick.  It was also an interesting paced movie.  Since all the action was literally online, it had the effect of being both boring and stressful.  Curdy couldn't handle the stress part, but I was also having problems staying away.  It was a lot of reading, a lot of silence, and very tense all at once.  A very interesting movie, but not for the faint at heart, or the short attention span.  It probably messed me up more than Chingu would have, but I still loved it.  It's gritty and real, from the fact that no one is a good person, but no one is a bad person.  From the fact that this is how messy life is, and how all our actions have consequences.  It was brilliant and not a fun watch, but a good watch.

Korean Movie Night: A Taxi Driver 택시 운전사 (2017) Korean

Song Kang Ho, Thomas Kretschmann, Yoo Hae Jin, Ryu Jun Yeol, Park Hyuk Kwon

Movie rating: 9/10     Neck score: B

I guess this wasn't really a movie night, because we went to see this at 11:15am.  But I'll count it anyway.  Omo, seeing it in a theater is just another experience.  It was us and a bunch of halabeoji and halmeoni, and we were definitely feeling outnumbered.  The halabeoji sitting next to Lizabreff was probably texting his friends that he was sitting next to three weird white girls.  We also had random people talking in Korean in the middle of the movie, probably louder than they thought.

It was so good!  It made us feel all the emotions, it did such a good job of taking us back to 1980, and seeing all the different sides of the issues.  I also love that they got a German actor who could actually act, in German and English, and it was just great.  We felt all the emotions.  From sweet to sickening, to outright tears (of course).  It's funny because we saw Battleship Island as well, which is much more action packed, but the brutal police/military violence of this one was some how more horrifying.  There was no discrimination in who they beat, it was awful.

With such a heavy topic as the Gwangju massacre, it was nice that they were able to add some sweet moments, and some comedy, bringing out the humanity and the love, which of course made the awful terror and brutal violence all the worse, as well as all the sacrifices of the people for their friends and colleagues that much more touching and tear jerking.

We got to see them all grow as well.  Each of the characters has a story.  Our taxi driver Kim Man Seob (Song Kang Ho), who is just a working man trying to support his daughter, whose seen a lot and doesn't really want to get involved.  He is such a tender hearted man who is trying to be tough and mercenary, who doesn't want to rock the boat to protect himself and his family.  He ends up taking a German reporter named Peter to Gwangju, which is blocked off by the military because of rioting.  Peter knows what to expect to a certain extent, and Man Seob to a different extent, because the government is falsifying reports about the riots, but he knows his people.  They end up getting help from a local taxi driver, reporter, and college student, who of course all have stories that make us love them as well.

So there is a lot of everything.  laughter, tears, military brutality, rioting, saving, and you just feel everything right there with them, because they did a really good job of giving a face to these people, so we know who they are, what they felt, and why they did what they did.  I cried a lot and laughed a lot, and it was so, so, so, good.  I am super happy that I got this chance to be in LA when it was in theaters, so I could watch it.  Absolutely no regrets, it was awesome.  I highly recommend it.

209. Lucky Romance 운빨로맨스 (2016) Korean

Hwang Jung Eum, Ryu Jun Yeol, Lee Soo Hyuk, Lee Chung Ah

Drama Rating: 7/10     Neck Score: A++

All the points in this drama go to Ryu Jun Yeol for being flipping adorable.  Without that adorableness, this show might have fallen flat on its face.  I love Hwang Jung Eum, but her character was of a person who had an overactive guilt complex which made her think everything was her fault, making her a self-sacrificing coward.  That makes for a frustrating plot.  However, she and Ryu Jun Yeol had excellent chemistry and we totally adorable when the plot wasn't being frustrating.  He just made his typical genius with issues character so lovable and real that you couldn't help but love him.  Also, all the other characters in the show were pretty likable.  I especially had to love Chicken Ahjussi.  How could Jung In Gi play such a cute ahjussi in this one and such an evil detective in Squad 38?  At the same time!?!  He's amazing, that's how.  Hyun Bin's name, haha.  Amy's (Lee Chung Ah) bad jokes.  Lee Soo Hyuk just looking way too hot even when we were screaming out: "Go away, Gary!"  Seriously, those 2nd lead peeps were as annoying as heck sometimes, because that girl was already ready to run like a scared rabbit, and then they tried their darndest to mess them up when they never had a chance.  That's what made it all the better, they literally never had a chance.  Even though she kept trying to run and hide thinking she'd ruin everyone's life, she consistently loved him and would be adorable around him too.  So really it was pretty consistently good until the end, because our couple was in love like the whole time and being adorable all the time.  Then the second to last episode was super draggy so it was boring, but not bad.  Then they solved everything really quickly, which made it unbelievable, but whatever, it was a happy and good ending, so I'll forgive it, because it was adorable.  I couldn't help but grin stupidly.  He said "yay!" which is the most adorable thing in the universe.  Like I said, Ryu Jun Yeol makes everything better.  Also, we got to see that stupid shaman dude get some comeuppance.  He's probably one of the only peeps we really hated.  Him, and how she wore pants under all her maxi skirts.  What the heck was that fashion choice?  That was a nothing choice.  Her poor legs must have been so hot.

K-Drama Cameos FTW!

I recently started watching Squad 38, and to my delight, Kim Sung Oh made a cameo appearance in episode 2.  This got me thinking of how much I love cameos.  This stems all the way back to when I was a kid and watching the Muppet Movie and the Great Muppet Caper, etc, which are full of wonderful cameos.  This probably makes me appreciate all the lovely cameos in K-dramas as well.

So I made a list of all the cameos that I especially loved, and some that even made me watch the drama just so I could see the cameo, which is pretty much the most ridiculous thing ever.

179. Reply 1988 응답하라 1988 (2015) Korean

Lee Hyeri, Ryu Jun Yeol, Go Kyung Po, Park Bo Gum, Lee Dong Hwi

Drama Rating: 8/10     Neck Score: A

Well that was a perfectly wonderful drama that fell flat on its face in the end.  Everything was wonderful until they finally did a time jump.  Then all the sudden they tried too hard to wraps things up too suddenly.  You know, the things they'd been neglecting while they spent more time on the gloriously awesome other things.  I mean neglecting all the romance in favor of family and community matters.  Don't get me wrong, I loved the family and community matters.  This show was one big neighborhood romance as opposed to a romance or love triangle.  Well that's what I thought it was until they forced it back into a love triangle husband hunt in the last few episodes.  Narratively, the romance didn't make sense.  I have no idea why they wrote it that way.  Why would they make us care about one person so much that they completely neglected building up the person who was actually going to end up married to her?  Mmmm, no.  Not okay with it.  I cared about every single character in this drama.  I was absolutely in love with Jung Bong, and Samcheonpo (Kim Sung Kyun), and Cheetah Ahjumma, and Jin Joo.  All five of the kids.  Literally everyone was compelling.  Their stories together, the little mundane things.  All of it was so good.  The only thing that wasn't good was the way they handled the romance.  It was like the battle of the 2nd male leads.  They made us care about Jung Hwan by showing us his feelings from episode 1, and then they made both him and Taek do nothing... for the rest of the series.  We never knew what Deok Sun was thinking.  She ended up being an impressionable girl who married the only guy who ever actually did something, after 6 years of doing nothing because the writers are lame, and we never knew what she was feeling the whole time.  I might have given this show a 9 or a 10 if the ending hadn't been so lame, but that really leaves the last impression, doesn't it?  I was actually so angry at the way they played so mercilessly with my emotions that I didn't even want to finish episode 19, and if it wasn't for Jung Bong's scenes being next I probably wouldn't have.  They literally spent so much time making me hurt for Jung Hwan that I literally didn't care about anything else.  That's just messed up.  Literally the only good thing that happened after the time jump to 94 was Sseuregi Oppa.  The end.  They needed to balance the romance with the neighborhood love so we actually have time to care about the couple.  We needed to see the couple grow, not have their love force fed to us in the last two episodes.  Like, they literally rammed it down our throats in such a way that even if I was team Taek I wouldn't have been satisfied.  Like seriously no.  Very badly done.  Narratively, it was a huge slap to the face to all characters involved.  I mean, Cheetah Ahjumma going through menopause was more compelling than the love story, and that is a fact.  So the ending gets a 1 or a 2.  The rest of the series gets a 9 or a 10 (because they made me love them) so that evens out to a 7 or 8.  Since I want to be generous and try to not let the bad aftertaste taint how fun the rest of the show was, I will make it an 8, but that is being very generous on my part.  (She's not even sitting next to him in this poster!)