Bing-Bong, Shin, Jung, and I can't find my Shues, Darn It

             Great Korean Drama Lines, and other sound bites
"Can't you see I am blushing?? Can't you hear my heart beating wildly?" Shin Mi demands, pulling away from the arms of Suk Bong.
"No," says Bong, confused. "But I can certainly hear your shrill voice..." (Becoming a Billionaire)

Peculiar hang ups in Korean shows
#1:    Americans don't have an aversion to bathroom humor per se, sometimes it turns up in movies but not often and it is never overt. Not so in Korean TV. They not only have person-on-toilet shots, complete with rolls of toilet paper and narrow stall, but they talk about it in almost graphic detail. There is even audio. Which makes me wonder, are we watching because we ENJOY what we see or are we watching because the creator of the show enjoys filming what we have to see? Is this a supply out of demand sort of thing? Or is this how-far-can-I-take-realism sort of filmmaker thing?
#2:    Let's revisit the repulsive food shoveling shots... watching Bu Tau_ (can't remember her full name) eat whipped cream cake is not so very terrible. I sat thinking, is she really having to eat this or are they making it look like she is swallowing but she is really spitting it out off camera? And I was thinking, is it low calorie Cool Whip ? Surely she couldn't really be eating half a whipped cream cake every show or she wouldn't be able to squeeze into those darling little glittery tee shirts she wears as dresses. Anyway, her cake eating is a necessary part of the storyline. She was a fat child because her father didn't give her enough love or time. He gives her money instead of love. So when she is upset, she eats. We all know eating sweet stuff is a temporary replacement for love. BUT, when the gross man (who mysteriously knows everything about everyone) eats with his mouth hanging open in every episode, the audience might not feel it is carrying the story along. The audience might actually think it is discouraging viewers from watching. I certainly find myself turning away.
      Koreans kind of have an honesty in their shows that is lacking in the western world. I guess gross behavior is part of that, but I wish we were not subjected quite as often to it, especially since I have a 36 inch screen and a mouthful of seaweed dripping down a smeared greasy face is rather startling in HD. It could be that I would not be so offended if I took my TV's picture control off High Definition and Wide screen.

     #3: Having never heard a discussion about menstruation in any movie or show before, I don't know how to judge and maybe I ought to leave the topic for another time. Suffice to say no bodily function subject is taboo in K-Drama's except maybe sex, which is fine with me. I've already expressed how I feel about voyeurism. There's nothing less appealing to me that watching copulation or anything close to it if it is not me. If it's you and another somebody, great. Just not in front of me.  

     One GREAT thing about KD is that no "bad Guy" is ever just a bad guy. The reason they are bad comes out in the story and you begin to feel great compassion if not warmth toward the bad guys. No one is ever all good either. They have their yucky sides. They say mean things sometimes. They are rounded out full characters and the audience is not forced to like one and hate the other... you are sort of sitting in mild judgement through out 18 or 19 episodes... You can't decide if you want Bong to love the chilly heiress or the fit-throwing heiress. And as for the fathers! Which father would be least gruesome for Bing Bong to discover is his real dad? The one who steals? The one who hires thugs to wreck lives? The one who is so stingy he doesn't mind when others suffer? Or the one lying comatose in the hospital who has lost most of his brain? It's a dilemma. So you watch, and you watch, and you watch, until you begin to dream in Korean at night. And you can't understand what is being said in your dreams....until someone kindly turns on the Subtitles located just under your pillow. And your dream even has a name. "Bing-Bong, I Can't Find My Shoes Darn It" only the word SHOES is misspelled Shues. It makes no sense, but dreams are like that...

The Unsavory Side of Korean Drama

This week end I am watching Becoming A Billionaire, another Korean Drama. The subtitles are not quite as good as the other dramas I've watched, and I notice it is not DramaFever made. I don't mind so much that the typist often forgets a letter here and there, but it is almost impossible to see some of the dialogue at times because the yellow print is too light for the scene and mostly because there is Asian writing beneath it. I guess it is also in Chinese or Japanese. They need to fix this issue and make the text visible to the audience who can't understand Korean. But I am grateful there is a translation, even imperfect.
I am picking up a few words here and there though, despite the fact that the most mundane words are almost never said the same way twice. Maybe the translator is just simplifying everything too much. You hear 60 seconds of a character speaking Korean, and on the screen it says, "OK. sure." and you KNOW that's not what they said, but what can you do? You can't call someone and complain. You just live with the dumbed down version.
    Having watched 49 Days, My Fair Lady, Secret Garden, Padam Padam, and a few others, I know Korea is a macho culture and I have no complaint with that. In truth I sort of like it. But in this current drama I am getting an uncomfortable feeling. The two main characters keep playing a childs game where the loser gets hit in the forehead. And the girl keeps losing to the guy who almost kisses her, but then hits her as part of the game instead, and she walks around with a big dark bruise on her forehead. I was shocked by this, because beneath the game is of course sexual tension, and the result is a woman who has been flirted with...but who has actually been struck in the face. And that is not sexy. That is not cool. That is not entertaining or charming or cute. It is the opposite of all that. It is more repellant than the close up shots of people chewing too much food. The Korean culture must have a thing for mouths jammed with food.  They show a lot of sloppy chewing and smeared food on the face. There is actually audio of stomachs rumbling in hunger. Sometimes the cultural differences are interesting and strange, and sometimes they are upsetting and infuriating. Food dripping out of the mouth is tolerable. Bruised girl is NOT.

The Deep Significance of Korean Drama, sorta

I write this blog as sort of a conversation. In an isolated existence, one has to have someone to confide in, and since I don't even have my cat anymore (Russell got removed rather roguishly by Rosa Mimosa), I speak to the blog. "Blog," I say, "Remember when we only watched comedies?" Blog listens. "Years of Richard Dreyfus and Dan Akroyd and Dudley Moore. And then we transitioned to thrillers, spy movies, Russell Crowe and Michael Caine..." Blog is attentive. "Alias was great...then the supernatural took over. I guess it went from Alias to Lost, and from Lost I went koo koo over anything supernatural. I still think LOST is the best television show in history to date. Every actor was sublime. Every phrase, every spoken word was memorable. Every character was to die for... Not just Jack and Charlie and Sawyer but Hugo and Jin and the adorable grumpy Korean guy who I can't remember his name, he might have been the best of all. And his father! And all the women. Lost is unbeatable. But after several years of constant supernatural, I drifted. It wasn't intentional..." Blog remains silent when I say this... "You don't believe me? I tell you, it was a natural occurrence. Oh wait, I forgot Jewish historical movies and documentaries. Yes yes! That's when it happened! It was the Korean guy in Lost, then watching every documentary on world war two Jews (like Resistance, the Bielsky Brothers...)that I could find until I came upon "Sugihara", the Avatar Hero who saved 3 thousand Jews from the death camps by giving them visas to Japan. OK, so Japanese is not Korean. But it's close. When I lived in Europe everyone called me Canadian. I didn't mind. I don't speak French and I am not Canadian but it was close enough, right? And I was already following Miles, aah yes, Miles was his name in Lost. I was already following his acting, and drinking up PERSON OF INTEREST because he was in it with the ASTOUNDING actor Michael somebody who played Ben Linus on LOST. Drift drift.... I just have to say this Michael guy speaks with the grace and depth of old fashioned royalty. Despite playing beside the whispering dark superman guy, Michael is the one my daughter and I swoon over. His presence is electric. I'm way too old to swoon but my 28 year old daughter is a testament to his adorableness. I even loved him as Ben. Michael Emerson is his name.  So anyway, I am hooked on Korean drama." I stop typing for a moment to let all this information sink in. Then I say, "Where was I? Oh, yes, Padam Padam, the onomatopoeia title that means "the beating of two hearts as one", a 20 episode K Drama with DramaFever subtitles, about a rough guy who is dying of cancer and a girl out of his class. I don't see the class difference, frankly. The upper class girl has a total thug for a father who beats young boys at the drop of a hat and spits on everyone he doesn't like... he's a really gross character and if he is supposed to be the upper crust then gee whiz... The main girl is chilly, almost without character, but the dying guys mother is INCREDIBLE. She dresses and looks poor. Korean drama is SO realistic in some ways. The characters really do look like what they should look like... the rough guy dresses in rough lower class clothes, the mother is chubby and without grace... It makes for a much more compelling show when the people look the part. May I just say in the USA movies the poor people are never really poor looking, they never behave without hope, they just don't seem poor. In Padam Padam the mother sells fish on the sidewalk with her competitive neighbor. At night, she talks with her dying son about how impossible their lives are. OK so the mother shouts everything, you might want to turn the sound down, she shouts so much, but the poignant moments between mother and son, when they cry and cry and cry over his terminal illness and his unfair prison term and their inability to fix any of the wrongs in their lives, those moments are academy award winning raw honest insights into the lives of most of the world living on the edge of despair. Wait, is the Academy for movies and Oscar for TV? or is Oscar for Broadway? anyway, I am not saying that every moment of this new genre I have discovered is brilliant... it is soap opera, and often tediously repetitive in the storyline. There are inconsistencies... the mother says to the doctor that she can't read. But later she is texting GookSu. But the REALNESS that comes through with average looking people, not instantly-beautiful main stars (they become beautiful as you grow to love them...)  hilarious remarks making fun of themselves/the show, (The guy who is part Angel in Padam Padam says in dismay when the feathers fall off his wings, "What will my father say? I've become a mutant featherless chicken.") these are what draw me again and again. (BTW, the most endearing sweet, sad little baby is a bright star on this show.)
Yes, I wept when the dying young man and the veterinarian girl he's in love with have a brief argument which fills the dying young man with anguish and regret, and she soothes him by saying "You're attractive when you're being mean to me.." it is both hilarious and heartbreaking at once, and she pats him while he shakes from the pain of cancer, and her patting is the same as when he lay in his mothers bed and his mother patted his back while he sobbed all night, not wanting to die. Despite their over-the-top storylines, Korean dramas strike at the deepest issues of the day; The anguish of living and dying, the unfairness of life and the inability of one human being to fully know the pain of another. It contains the ugly and the everyday. It is a venue for the modern times when we are all on electronic equipment skyping with those we love rather than sitting together singing and playing guitar under the night sky. This is a new kind of entertainment...different from the old soaps where murder and affairs and secrets strung us along, the glue being more about deceit and falsehood than anything else. These Korean shows are dramas for a world wide generation that does not get close enough to others to begin to express their loneliness and confusion. In a world where we long to be appreciated and loved, money is not the medicine. What these dramas convey is the anguish and hurt of a generation lost in the very big crowd, a generation who needs to feel and to express their darker feelings, but living in the flat screen of FaceBooks superficial friendships they do not dare do more than yearn for more "likes" and "comments" to assuage their starvation for a humankind existence. We live in and through machines. For the young, this is all they have ever known, and for that we should all weep."
   Blog doesn't answer. Blog fell asleep.

Crying in Korean

I am not sure which began first, my job taking care of an ailing personality during the days, or my obsession with watching Korean soap operas. I think the job came first, and with my first paycheck I bought Internet service, connected to Netflix, and began to watch a show called 49 Days. I fell in love with Jung Il Woo, who is 4 years younger than my youngest daughter, but never mind, he was beautiful, elegant, humorous, and his face full of expression without much movement.... I mean, he did not have to frown to look angry, or open his mouth to look surprised. He played the part of Death and you never saw such crying in your life as there was in 49 Days. The adorable main girl (who was partially a ghost) cried constantly over her father, her fiance, her life, and the fact that she was in a coma.
 After he stole the show as Death, I was surprised he lost the girl to Yoon Sang Hyun in the next drama I watched called My Fair Lady, which I found when I did a search for more Jung ll Woo shows. In this one Woo is a rich young man who has shed his parents money and position and become a lawyer helping the poor. Although his darling smile is enough to knock any woman over, it was his incredible clothing and the way he wore it that was riveting. His suits! His shirts! They were beyond clean. his shirts were pressed so perfectly as if they were ironed onto him. How can one describe perfection in a mans shirt?  it was like watching a double rainbow in the sky...when you see it and you gasp in disbelief, and you want to remember it exactly, paint it, photograph it, it is that mind blowing. That is the way Jung ll Woo and his My Fair Lady wardrobe struck me.  There are often long, lingering camera shots of his boots, only the cuff of his trousers and the boots visible on the screen. And he was a wonderful enough actor to go from being a total show stealer to being second fiddle in My Fair Lady. Yoon Sang Hyun was who you root for in this one. What is delicious about Korean TV is that it is so deeply different than American... The characters are often weird, weird to the point of being momentarily unattractive...oddballs. A regular line from Korean TV is "I'm going crazy" said by the main stars often. Yoon Sang Hyun starts out as an almost lowlife sort of fellow who gets rich women to give him money, and ends up the most endearing character on the show. He laughs too loudly, he shouts a lot (but everyone shouts on Korean soaps), he is often not your typical movie star face, but his personality and humor quickly change all the rules and he remains with you long after the 20 episodes, watched non stop over 3 days, are over.
     Yes, there are similarities in all TV dramas.... usually the beautiful woman is incredibly rich. Or the handsome young man is incredibly rich. Usually it runs like a bodice ripper paperback, she rejects him; he wants  her more. She rejects him. He's desperate for her. She finally sees the light; he misunderstands and leaves. etc etc, until they finally get together in the end. The differences are what make Korean soaps worth watching. They still see men as macho and women as fragile small and beautiful. Women fall apart. Men carry them. It's true the men are always grabbing the girls roughly by the wrist and forcing them to go out for dinner, or accept a ride home in their sports car. It's true that the girl is under the protection (thumb) of her father, or uncle and later gets to be under that same umbrella with her new man. The women are often terrible to one another, saying awful things about the others looks. Or their hair, or their clothing. And when they are feeling happy they admit to being more beautiful than Miss Korea. 
But mostly they are NOT happy. Mostly they weep and frown and run. Or they take long walks in snowy weather, or wander through shade trees along a leaf strew path. 
Why, if all this is true, am I obsessed with Korean TV?  Watching it means sitting and keeping your eyes glued to the screen every second because the subtitles swing by so quickly you might miss some tragic admission or a hilarious remark. Like my new favorite, Hyun Bin, in Secret Garden, when he says to the adorable stunt director, "I didn't realize Arabic people were so agile.." which isn't exactly what he said but I can't remember the exact remark. His character was endlessly awkward, Often hilarious. Secret Garden is one of the funniest shows I have ever cried through.  Yoon Sang-hyun is in it as well, as a pop star, and Lee Philip plays the adorable stuntman director, all vying for the same darling girl. And each one of them is too wonderful. How can the leading girl choose? But it is the oddball Hyun Bin's personality and almost unintentional humor that wins the audience (me) over. He may be one of the GREAT actors of the time. His timing is perfect. His awful clothes are perfect. ("Do you know how much this cost?" he demands when the leading girl makes fun of his sparkly running suit.)  You would never see anything so daring on western television as the leading guy dressing consistently like an idiot. But on Korean drama, he has the room to become cherished for an entire self, not just the outer shell we get over here. And yet I am describing the outer shell of these characters when I rave on about their clothing. It is a paradox, is it not?
In the saddest episode (number 19 out of 20), Hyun Bin and his darling girl go to her fathers grave which is a wall of little boxes with peoples remains in them. Sad music is playing in the background as it always is. The audience has been crying for 15 minutes over the cute girls father dying in an elevator and the oddball hero getting his memory back. The audience is still weeping when Hyun Bin lays the flower bouquet down on the father's box, and the camera lingers on the delicate flowers and greenery and bubble wrap..... that is when you are jolted back to realizing how strange it is to be watching Korean TV. Bubble wrap in a sorrowful funeral scene?
     And then there are the date questions that are asked over dinner... what is your astrological sign? What is the year or animal of your birth? and what is your blood type?  The first time I heard that, I swooned in admiration. What a great idea, to ask such an obscure question. And how odd that they all know the answer. I don't know my blood type. And in Lost, I remember, when Jack is dying from appendicitis and they have to give him a transfusion with a bamboo shoot, no one can help because they don't know their own blood types. Ok, maybe it was Shannon's brother who was dying from falling off a cliff and Jack was trying to save him with a transfusion but the point is, who knows their blood type? Actually Lost is where I first started getting interested in Korean Culture. They had a Korean couple on Lost who were always saying "Ani!" or "Ani Jay!" which means no or yes, I think, depending on how you say it. 
     The best thing about these shows is that they are about love and falling in love and yet there is no graphic sex scenes or even any partial nudity and only a VERY occasional kiss. The warmth and intimacy coming from a single hug is sufficient. Western movies and shows could learn a lot from that. In fact, American TV could learn a lot from these wonderfully written though maudlin dramas in general. There is a politeness in these series. The younger people defer to the older. The older you are the more respect you seem to get. That is kind of the opposite in the United States. In every Korean drama there is one cherished older man called "Oppa" which sounds like "Papa". It is a cozy familial address, though I am not sure exactly what it means. Older Brother, maybe. Once, a charming girl was horrified that her boyfriend had dropped the polite words with her. Or maybe he was upset at her, I don't recall which, it's funny how the details of these shows sort of instantly blur, anyway one of them said, "What!? Why did you drop the Honorifics with me??" What an awesome, heady word. What a great unusual line. What an amazing world is out there, beyond my world. And what a peculiar obsession I have...reading subtitles and crying watching Korean TV.