Anne: Happy Tuesday theater lovers! It’s been a cold, cold few days in South Texas. Now…I like that the icy road scare left the highways mostly empty during a work day, so that was pretty good. The downside is that I had to be very careful not to crash my car. Now, in addition to my very exciting commute to and from work, I had spent the day working on documents. So there are so many.
Here is my current completed project.
It took me a good two weeks. I don’t know why I’m so addicted to these little building blocks. I’m working on my next one to take to work. Maybe I’ve watched too many Chinese fantasy dramas and now I want to experience one.
I hope everyone has had a great, or at least uneventful, start to the year. Here are some of the dramas I’ve seen over the past couple of weeks.
Knight’s Flower
Actually, I started because I was watching Secret royal inspector and joy, and it showed up on my Viki list. Right away, I like the plot synopsis. A widow forced to “mourn” her husband who died for 10 years (MDL says 15, but I could have sworn that in the series, it was only 10) years hides a secret identity as a masked benefactor at night. Cho Yeo Hwa was trained in martial arts by her brother, who disappeared on a mission over 10 years ago, and she is still searching for him. During her brother’s absence, she married, against her will, at the home of the left-wing prime minister, with their only son. However, on his wedding day, the groom was attacked and died. (I don’t quite understand why she was still considered married, when the rites were not completed.) So she entered her in-laws’ family as a widow from the beginning. (It was most likely a set-up, and the fact that the family cheated on her and her “groom” was probably dead well before the wedding.)
During her “secret Robin Hood” missions, she met the new inspector, Park Soo Ho, who has secrets of his own. It’s not hard to see that she is attractive to the handsome inspector, even though she is still trying to keep up appearances and live the best life possible in her current situation.
The first two episodes were surprisingly funny. Yeo Hwa is a woman who doesn’t quite fit the ideal type of a perfect daughter-in-law. What she longs to do is be free and help the people she cares about. On the other side, Soo Ho tries to resolve his family’s drama and realizes that he is quite intrigued by this window which is not like all the other women.
Now, there is a real age gap between FL and ML, and FL has a lot of maturity in her look. It’s entirely possible that Yeo Hwa is probably around 20 years old in the drama, because when she got married, she was obviously a very young girl. I really like the visual dynamic between FL and ML. I think the fact that FL is more “mature” adds to the overall dynamic.
This drama started with a lot of promise, here’s hoping it maintains that pace until the end.
The Sun Brothers
This one was started because my husband wanted to watch something he could get me to watch with him. This is a Netflix production that includes a fairly international cast and the languages spoken range from English to Mandarin, Taiwanese and Cantonese (I’m not sure about the last one, but it’s up to what some swear words look like…).
The plot is very Taiwanese, let’s say. He is Charles Sun, who is the eldest son of a triad member, and although he is a well-trained killer, all she really wants to do is cook. Then there’s his mother who lives in Los Angeles with her younger brother Bruce, who has NO IDEA about the family business because he left when he was so young. Bruce, who is going to medical school because of his mother, just wants to take his advanced courses and be less of a loser.
Poor Bruce suffers the shock of his life when, in order to pay his tuition fees (which he spent on his advanced courses), his best friend convinces him to sell drugs in a club. And in this club he meets his older brother and a whole series of characters who ended up with a blown up wall, many dead drug dealers, and he comes home to his lovely mother, in the kitchen, dismembering a body of a guy whom Charles killed in the morning.
Into this mess enters Alexis, who is a childhood friend of Charles, and who knows his family’s affairs very well. She wants Charles to give her an idea of what’s going on because she wants a big deal to promote her career.
It’s a fast-paced action “movie” with some very blatant and bizarre family interactions. And how funny is it that Asian parent/child interactions are well displayed. One of my favorite scenes was when Bruce threatened Charles that he was going to report him to their mother if he didn’t take him to school now. As most obedient Asian children know…we can talk loudly about defying our parents…but in the end, we usually give in. (These are very large mahjong tiles. Even larger than those that go into the automatic tables. These tables will spoil you so much that you will never want to wash these tiles manually again!)
The mutations
I started this because of Huang Xuan, my favorite inspector in Luoyang. The drama is quite short, only 12 episodes. Chu Si Jing, an inspector, is sent to investigate an “epidemic” in a town near the sea. Despite the proximity of a food source, the population is starving and eating everything except what they can catch in water. There is an island, inhibited by a group of people, who individually punish anyone who eats fish.
There is something underwater that infests marine life, which then infests the humans who eat them. (What are all these Asian monster movies?)
I haven’t gotten very far and I’m only on episode two. So far, it’s intriguing and worth continuing.
And that’s all the regular drama I’ve managed to catch up on over the past two weeks. Let’s see how much I dedicate myself to deeper and taller piles of paperwork. Fingers crossed my water pipes survive the freeze!