Friday 30 June 2017

Dropped like a hot potato - Successful story of a bright girl (2002)

This is a new series of posts, for all the dramas I dropped recently and don’t indent to finish watching. 

It is one of the classic Korean dramas that made more or less Jang Hyuk and Jang Nara famous. I was prepared for the awful early 2000s fashion – I haven’t watched a series/movie that has escaped from that - and more predictable story line. I’ve watched old movies and dramas and if they had that extra factor to make them timeless, I loved them to pieces. And this is where the problem lies with this case. Successful story of a bright girl didn’t age well. 

It sets the tone and expectations from the first minutes, where a girl dreams of fighting school boys to protect her prince while the swan lake music plays in the background. Try to picture that. We have the standard jerk male lead, Ki Tae, and the standard country pumpkin female lead, Soo Ki. Their first meeting is with him falling with a parachute into the bathtub she is washing herself outside the yard of her house. He certainly knew how to make an entrance. Anyway, her parents have a huge debt so she agrees to work as a housemaid to repay that, because her bold and brave parents run away. So, we have several shenanigans between out hot-tempered hero and the equally hot-tempered heroin.


One of my biggest complains is the lack of chemistry. In the reviews I read, they compiented about the chemistry between Jang Nara and Jang Hyuk. I didn’t see it. At all. I could have watched this drama despite all the other misgivings, if the chemistry worked. But it didn’t. I understand that this is an older drama and things were less explicit then than now – if you can say that now they are explicit in comparison. For me, the body language didn’t show that. 


Here the actors were pretty much newbies, so the acting is the strongest, however the direction isn’t doing anyone any favors. And when we have the fashion and the music combined, well then, my eyes hurt a bit. When it comes to writing this isn’t a very eventful drama. An episode can pass by and almost nothing that moves the plot or the characters happens. And the characters are one dimensional and not that charming or winning. And in the second half it went to corporation drama territory, which was blah.
I think I wrote too many words for a drama I didn’t even like. If you want to watch it proceed at your own risk.

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