Rants and Weekly Raves (RAWR) #459

Anne: Happy Tuesday Drama Lovers! It is a chilly, chilly couple of days in South Texas. Now...I do like the fact that the fear of ice on the road has left the highways nearly empty on a work day, so that was pretty good. The down side is that I had to be extra careful so I don't crash my car. Now, besides my very exciting drive to and from work, I'd spent the day working on documents. So, so many of them. 

Here's my current finished project.

Took me a good two weeks. I don't know why I'm so addicted to these little building bricks. I'm working on my next one to take to work. Maybe I have watched one too many Chinese fantasy dramas that now I want to live in one.

Hope everyone had a great, and if not at least some uneventful, start to their new year. Here are a few of the dramas that I caught in the last two weeks.

Knight Flower

I actually started this because I was watching Secret Royal Inspector & Joy, and this popped on my Viki list. Immediately, I like the plot synopsis. A widow forced to "mourn" her dead husband for the last 10 (MDL says 15, but I could have swore that in the show it was only 10) years hides a secret identity as a masked do-gooder at night. Cho Yeo Hwa was trained in martials arts by her brother, who disappeared on a mission over 10 years ago, and she is still searching for him. While her brother was absent, she was married, against her will, off to the left prime minster's house to their only son. However, the her wedding day, the groom was attacked and died. (I'm kind of confused on why she was still considered married, when the rites weren't completed.) So she entered her in-laws' family as a widow from the every beginning. (Most likely this was all a setup, and that the family tricked her and her "groom" was probably dead way before the wedding.) 

While on her "secret Robin Hood" missions, she ran into the newly appointed inspector, Park Soo Ho, who has his own secrets. It is not hard to see that she is attractive to the good looking inspector, even though she still trying to keep up appearances and live the best life she can 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 to be free and to help the people she cares about. On the other end, Soo Ho is trying to solve his family's tragedy and finding that he is quite intrigued by this window who isn't quite like all the other women. 

Now, there is a real life age gap between the FL and ML, and the FL has a a great maturity in her looks. It is entirely possible that Yeo Hwa is probably late or mid 20s in the drama, because when she was married, she was obviously a very young girl. I really like the visual dynamic between the FL and ML. I think the FL being more "mature" adds to the overall dynamic.

This drama started with a lot of promise, hoping it keeps this pace all the way to the end.

The Brothers Sun

This was one was started because my husbanded wanted to watch something that he could get me to watch with him. This is a Netflix production that includes a pretty international cast and the speaking languages go from English, to Mandarin, to Taiwanese, to Cantonese (I'm not sure about the last one, but that's what some of the curse words sound like...). 

The plot is very Taiwanese, let's just say. It's about Charles Sun, who is the eldest son of a triad member, and while he is a well trained killer, all her really wants to do is cook. Then there is his mother who is living in LA with his younger brother Bruce, who has NO IDEA about his family's business because he left when he was so young. Bruce, who is going to medical school because of his mother, really just wants to do his improve classes and be the less of a loser. 

Poor Bruce gets the shock of his life when, in order to pay his tuition (which he spent on his improve classes), was talked into selling drugs in a club by his best friend. And at this said club, he runs into his older brother and a whole slew of characters that ended up with a blown up wall, a lot of dead drug dealers, and coming home to his lovely mother, in the kitchen, dismembering a body of some guy that Charles killed in the morning. 

Into this mess enters Alexis, who is a childhood friend of Charles, and who is very well aware of his family's business. She wants Charles to give her a heads up on what is happening because she want a big case to promote her career.

It's a fast paced action "movie" with some very glaring, bizarre family interactions. And how funny is that the Asian parent/child interactions are well displayed. One of my favorite scenes was when Bruce threatened Charles that he was going to tell on him to their mother if he doesn't take him to school right now. As most obedient Asian children know...we may talk big of defying our parents...but in the end, we usually cave. (Those are some very large mahjong tiles. Even bigger than the ones that go into the automatic tables. Those tables will spoil you so much that you will never ever want to manually wash those tiles ever again!)

The Mutations

I started this because of Huang Xuan, my favorite inspector in Luoyang. The drama is fairly short, only at 12 episodes. Chu Si Jing, an inspector, is sent to investigate an "epidemic" in a town near the sea. Despite the nearness to a source of food, the population is starving, and eats everything but what they can catch from the water. There is an island, inhibited by a group of people, who severally punishes anyone who eats fish. 

There is something under the water, who is infesting the marine life, which then infest the humans who eat them. (What is with all these Asian monster movies?)

I haven't gotten very far and am only at episode two. So far, it is intriguing, and worth continuing. 

And this is all the regular dramas that I've managed to catch up with last two weeks. Let's see how dedicated I fall into ever deeper higher and higher piles of paper work. Crossing my fingers my water pipes survives the freeze!