The Problematic of the Unproblematic

kakashi: The " hostage episode " has been released and $846 of $100,000 or $250,000 (depending on what paragraph you read) have been fund-raised. Frankly, I do not understand why people do not donate more, cause the awards you get for it? Stellar. JoAnne: I'm looking for the option where they pay ME for having paid attention at all. $5: Name in the credits as an episode sponsor. Claimed once. Alternatively, the cast will wish you good karma through the BbF website. Surprisingly, this has been claimed zero times. JoAnne: Anything they wished you would come late, look ridiculous, and not work as promised. Be careful what you say: they are now suing people.  

JoAnne: Until they say they're done, I'm sticking with this. I have to see how deep the delusion goes. kakashi: It's a bottomless hole. It's pretty amazing.  "Episode 6" JoAnne: Supposedly, this episode is done. Ready for our viewing pleasure, however loosely you define that word. But we aren't going to get to see it for a while. The Williams sisters instead sent out an apology 'because of circumstances' and then a plea 'give us money!' What the everloving hell. kakashi: They're withholding their master piece from us, JoAnne! No pleasure until you pay!

kakashi: I like this new marketing idea, which I guess is called "it's ready when it's ready". Why stick to a broadcasting schedule when you don't have to, right? It's a really smart way to make people anticipate something they usually give a wet rat's ass about. [bwahaha] Around the normal air time (which, I think, used to be Thursdays?), people all around the world started asking themselves: "Will we get to see another episode of the USBoFiasco or not? And if yes, WHEN will we get to see it?" Shuk:  Hey everyone!  Just me, snark-bombing this mess.  Because, why not, it can't make it worse, right? [shifty eyes]

A few months ago, I was struggling to condense my thoughts about Jung-Yi: Goddess of Fire into a coherent evaluation. After enduring all 32 episodes I felt like I owed it to myself to write something about it, but I was getting nowhere, and on impulse I started watching Padam Padam... The Sound of His and Her Heartbeats as avoidance. Padam Padam was in my queue because I had recently seen the film The Good, The Bad, and The Weird , and had been intrigued by Jung Woo-Sung (who played The Good), but I discovered immediately that his costar in Padam Padam was none other than Kim Bum, whom I had just seen in GoF . Not long after that I realized that another show in my queue, That Winter, the Wind Blows , was also a Kim Bum drama, and an idea was born to watch them all back-to-back and review them together, along with Boys Over Flowers , which I watched more than a year ago but never wrote about. In the interest of completeness, I even added The Woman ...

kakashi: This, my dear friends, is Joseph Almani and Dawn Morrow's farewell episode. It may also be the very last episode of the USBoFiasco ever, so let's totally enjoy this one! Like ... even more than usual!!! bcook: on this sad and gloomy day (hold on I can't type i'm laughing so hard) let us take a second to go over all their wonderful moments...or we could just...you know... watch the 15 minute recap. kakashi: Since we last blogged about this "show", this happened:

JoAnne: Hello, yes, it's true. We're going to stick it out. Slight change in the players. Maybe not as noticeable, say, as changing out actors, but then again, who knows. Anyway!  So glad you're joining us for what promises to be a slow, painful death. Drink up! And rejoice, for the mullet is gone. kakashi: Yeah, we're still here. And we are really enjoying this show. Sure, we're crazy, but we already knew that. By the way, JoAnne, don't get too attached to the mulletless-guy. I'll tell you why later. Oh, and: We have started to call this show the USBoFiasco. 

bcook: Hello Guys. I'm writing this with a lot of reluctance fear. I'm afraid I'm going to watch this show till the end (oh yes, you will!) . Because the badness is so compelling. It's like watching a plane crash land on a train carrying baby refugees which is then derailed and runs into a bus full of cancer survivors. Utter horror and fascination. I'm going to do it though because kakashi threatened, pleaded , encouraged me to recap the second episode for closure. So this. I do for you. (Actually I saw the number of post views and got greedy. I'm a writer... I crave validation).   kakashi: bcook, I KNEW you wanted to do it. You didn't need any "encouragement" at all! This is indeed hard to stay away from. I admit, I even looked forward to it!!!  JoAnne: Oh I'm watching. I'm watching to the final credits. This is must-see TV, this is.  Simply because if you don't see it, you won't believe what we tell you it's like.

bcook: Watching bad dramas so you don't have to. If you haven't heard, an intrepid group of kdrama fans (aka people on kickstarter who should really know better) decided to make an American/western version of the kdrama catastrophe classic that is BoF (Boys over flowers, Boys before Flowers, the drama where LMH has permed hair, oh and KHJ is in it too). JoAnne: Seriously, how could this be a bad idea?

I like water a lot. And my shower scenes and swimming pool posts both made me thirsty for more water, so here we go! I could also have put "My Top 5 ... Drowning Scenes" in the title (for that is what most of them are about), but that seemed a bit too morbid? You may have noticed there is a surprising amount of people (almost) drowning in KDrama. When somebody drowns - I am sorry, almost drowns - it is almost always to mark a turning-point in the story. A bit more poetic, you could say it often symbolizes re-birth ... even if it is as an amnesiac. All the almost-drowning scenes I know have the same eerie beauty to them: the blue of the water, usually a light shining from above, a body sinking, sometimes struggling ... Here are five underwater scenes i.e. almost-drowning-scenes from KDrama You’re Beautiful My first cross-dresser drama. Loved it. And I will always fondly remember the days when Jang Geun-suk wasn't yet crazy. In this particular scene from episo...

This post is the little brother of the shower scene post . The baby brother post, really; there's nothing that can top a KDrama shower scene. Not even a swimming pool scene. In fact, I had troubles finding five swimming pool scenes with, ehem, half-nekkid men. For whatever reason, I thought there were tons of them, but when I got serious about writing this post, I failed to find them. Therefore, I went as diverse as possible in this post to show that swimming pools serve multiple purposes in KDrama. Sometimes, it's to show off the swimming abilities of some of the actors, and sometimes, it's to show them in tight wetsuits, dripping wet and ... where was I? Ah, yes... sometimes, the swimming pool is not merely a site for eroticism, but part of the story. Etc. I give you: Five noteable swimming pool scenes, in no particular order. 49 Days You thought Reapers cannot swim? Not if said reaper is played by Jong Il-woo. I happily quote from a Korean article translated ...

You don't have to look long to find crimes of hair in Korean dramas. I personally know someone who said they could not watch Boys Over Flowers because of Lee Min Ho's hair. Well, ok....I admit that was me.  I found it so distracting that I could not move on to episode 2. But the crimes I'm talking about here are not bad styling, because everyone has their favorite examples of those (Hwang Jung-Eum in Can You Hear My Heart , or the entire cast of Full House Take 2 to name a few).  No, I'm talking about crimes against hair as in just plain crazy bad drama making.  Or in other words, random hair changes that no one is supposed to notice. Now these changes fall into several categories: The COLOR CHANGE I think I first became aware of this phenomenon while watching Goong when Yul's hair changed from that ever popular reddish brown to a darker, more natural shade around episode 14. I thought it was really strange at the time - both the reddish color and the ...

If objectifying Korean men/actors is a crime, I plead guilty. But I know it is not, so I'll keep doing it all day long . See who can stop me. I consider one of the best suited victims for objectification to be Lee Min-ho (이민호). Here is why: First, he is one of the tallest Korean actors (though not the tallest, as this very useful list informs me, but then, he is the most famous among the tallest) and tall people can take a bit of objectification, no? Second, he is among the most famous Korean actors worldwide (he even has a German Wikipedia entry! Jang Dong-gun hasn't. Just saying) and has a rabid fanbase. I'm guessing about 99% of his fans are women, so he is totally used to objectification (and I am sure the 1% men also objectify him). Third, he is partially to 'blame' (applaud?) for turning me into a KDrama-addict, so I have a right to objectify him (*insert totally irrelevant additional comment*: Technically, it's Rain first and Lee Min-ho second, ...