One of the best moments of “Love is Drop by Drop” was in the 43rd episode where Woo Huyk had stickers made for Bang Wool’s coffee cup that said: “I am rooting (cheering) for you”.
응원합니다 “Eung won hamnida” I was so proud of myself for memorizing this phrase!
Now that the crew over at Dramabeans have dramatically (pun intended) expanded their recapping capabilities with additional staff members and a new website, almost every prime time Kdrama is being recapped. That’s so awesome! I am all in favor of more coverage for Kdramas. However, there are still a few nooks and crannies of the Kdrama/Kmovie world the usual blogs don’t cover–weekend dramas get minor coverage, and dailies get even less. Continue reading
A/N: My apologies for getting this out later than I had planned. My normal go-to site for screencaps has no larger, hi-def video feeds for Episodes 117-119, and so some screencaps are from Dramacool/Openload (the smaller ones) and some are from newasiantv.me
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At least I can’t say I didn’t know this would happen!
Back when I first started writing about LIDD in “Fishing for a Holiday Melodrama”, I wrote that I knew this show would cause me remorse, but I wanted to watch it anyway. I feared it would derail eventually, and make me unhappy. What I didn’t know is that the derailment would be in the last third of the show. It was as if the last 40 episodes had a different writer altogether.
A/N: With the postponement of the last episodes until Thursday/Friday, I curse TPTB out of one corner of my mouth–and cheer with the other. I thought I was gonna have to skip to Ep. 118 but now I can throw a few things in from Episodes 115-116.
I think that it matters greatly in a Kdrama that a character finds out the Big Secret from the appropriate person. Case in point–In “My Love Eun Dong”, Eun Ho finds out from Eun Dong that Ra Il is really his son, conceived on a getaway weekend 10 years ago, and right before the accident that paralyzed Jae Ho and wiped out Eun Dong’s memory until recently. I loved that when her memory came back, she told him herself. He didn’t hear about it second-hand, or from overhearing a conversation he shouldn’t have. I really applauded the writer for that. Then as that show imploded, Ra Il found out that Jae Ho was not his dad–by overhearing the nurses at the hospital gossiping about it. Ugh. It felt like lazy storytelling to me.
Even when a drama is going downhill, there can still be some stellar moments hinting at the possibilities of what might have been. Since this show seemed to jump the track much later than the average Kdrama daily, it’s especially frustrating to see quality work from the crew who are working on a very slim budget. When their efforts are blown up with a storyline that is far less than what viewers expected given the excellence of the first ~75 episodes, I feel that it needs to be acknowledged.
One of the ways LIDD seemed to lose steam as the episode count got into the upper 70’s was that the show’s comic relief seemed to nearly vanish. When I reviewed “Remember–A Son’s War” with Yoo Seong Ho last year, I also mentioned that it too suffered from lack of humorous interludes. When the comedy is appropriate and sprinkled throughout the show, it allows a mental break for the viewer and the show succeeds. When the comedy fails (like the ‘Domestic Violence as comedy’ concept from Heard it through the Grapevine) it’s bad, and when it’s minimal to non-existent (like in the dropped “I’m Sorry Kang Nam Goo”) it makes the show unwatchable for me. Walking that line between humor and melodrama is not easy, but it is doable. The first 13 1/2 episodes of “My Love Eun Dong” did a better job than most melodramas in having comic relief; even Joo Jin Mo got into the comedy and it worked very well.
Another similarity that LIDD had to “Remember” was that the writer chose to heap so much bad stuff on the decent people in the drama that it became tiresome and depressing. In “Remember”, the writer turned things around in a big way just past the halfway point, and then the show was much more enjoyable. Unfortunately, that did not happen in LIDD–and finally after 110 episodes, we are seeing the baddies get some serious setbacks. Unfortunately, most viewers are left feeling as if it’s too little, too late. If a writer is able to pull off letting the good guys having a small win or two here and there, and setting the baddies back a notch it keeps the viewers like me from giving up on the show and suffering through Kdrama burnout, high blood pressure and the worst ailment of all–feeling the desire need compulsion to write fan fiction to correct the perceived shortcomings of the drama. Continue reading
This was a short week due to the election coverage, but these three episodes had some great prop and BG music choices that I wanted to cover. Even as this show winds down into what I believe will likely be a rushed and messy ending, the goodies for Shamrockmom keep on coming!
