- Ressurection (just finished, review coming.)
- Painter of the Wind (MGY = my new obsession!)
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Ah… romance on campus. Unlike American movies, this drama does not involve your typical students playing pranks on roommates, partying all night, drinking just to get drunk, or students who never seem to need to study. It is after all an Asian drama and we all know Asian kids study hard (or die at the hands of their karate fighting parents!).
With the prestigious Harvard University as the backdrop, the drama starts off by introducing Kim Hyun-woo, an international student here to represent South Korea at Harvard Law. He is proud, he is smart, he is funny, and he believes in justice. Your typical hero. Yes, he has an accent and can’t speak very well in English, but he does have a heart-melting smile!
Enter the serious and top of the class student, Hong Jung-min, your typical rival complete with the wanting vengeance on Hyun-woo for his father. Always the best in everything he does and he knows it. Great in class, great on court (haha he’s a lawyer AND a basketball player!), and great with the ladies. He knows he’s got game and he will do anything to be the best. Too bad his English is worse than Hyun-woo’s… Maybe that’s why he didn’t get the girl, the girl being the lovely Kim Tae Hee, who has the two men throwing daggers at each other whenever possible.
Even though for a good chunk of the drama you have to endure the unfortunate accents of our Korean actors, it did help how the writers were able to create a lot of situations where the actors get to speak in Korean. The fact that they are eye candy also helped. :p The non-Korean actors on the other hand… they could speak English, but acting? TT______TT Thankfully the writers end the love story at Harvard and bring us back home to Korea where the rivalry between Hyun-woo and Hong-min continues in both their professional and personal lives.
Don’t get me wrong, so far the drama is playing out quite well even with all the accents and the bad acting from the supporting characters. The romance and rivalry between the three main characters is interesting to watch and so is the challenge Hyun-woo faces in dealing with the dreaded professor. However, while I thanked the writers for taking us back to Korea, where our actors could comfortably speak in their native tongue, I also realized 15 minutes into the episode that the drama’s plot would go downhill from there… because that's when all the melodrama starts. Complete with the evil white man, opposing parents, near death crashes, and cancer!
My bad. There’s no cancer.
SO, why did I keep going until the end? Because I invested so many hours watching the two fall in love and I wanted to see how their relationship would end! Grrrr… TT___TT
Skip this drama. If you do watch it then I suggest only watching up to episode 6.
p.s. – I would repeatedly bang my head against the wall whenever that aweful theme song played!
Rating:
4.5/10
Another drama on career women who put marriage on the back burner. WAIT! This one's actually really good! Okay, maybe it's not great and does nothing really to enlighten us, but it is funny. I'm sure that there might be some who won't like it because it does employ some conventional dialogue and scenarios. However, I chose to overlook those simply because I feel that the drama doesn't promise to bring us a grand story. It just promises to be a light and fun affair, which it did quite well.
I really feel I just zoomed through this one and that's probably all thanks to the main actress. Who, by the way, rightfully got chosen for the J-Drama Television Best Actress award this past summer for this drama.
Anyone looking for a quick fix of fun should watch this!
PS - Notice the opening? Using the bunny from Alice in Wonderland who says, "I'm late. I'm late. For a very important date."Anyway, I thought that was cute. Relating the theme of the drama to a great classic like that.
PSS - That brown guy in one of the episode who you all probably think was Indian was actually a Bengali person! I was SHOCKED! Anyway, here's my translation of what he was saying:
"oh wow! Your cellphone is so lovely." ('Your' is said in the most respectful form."
"Baap-re-baap. Aapnar phone-ta tho khoob shoondor."
Rating:
9/10
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