David Dubrow

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Squid Game and Other South Korean Diversions

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Few things in life are more enjoyable than sharing one’s interests. So it’s awesome that the South Korean show Squid Game has become such a big thing. Since eschewing Hollywood as a source of entertainment I’ve had to go further afield for screen entertainment, and South Korean dramas more than fill the gap.

Some time ago I wrote a roundup of some of my favorite K-dramas for the site Hollywood in Toto, and I’ve discussed other shows here. In light of Squid Game becoming Netflix’s top streamed show at the time of this writing, I wanted to do a brief review and recommend other shows connected to Squid Game. You know, like tentacles from a squid’s body.

Who doesn’t like calamari?

Squid Game: The Death Game subgenre of horror benefits greatly from this K-drama treatment, with its heavy focus on plot and character development. The genre doesn’t work if you don’t care at least a little bit about the characters, and the K-drama format excels at making even the antagonists sympathetic. Squid Game does a great job of keeping you watching episode by episode, building dread, and even if there aren’t a lot of surprises, you can’t turn away. Extremely gory, with an unnecessary sex scene for the American Netflix audience, it entertains throughout. Just don’t expect a fully satisfying ending.

Lee Jung-jae, the male lead of Squid Game, starred in a terrific show called Chief of Staff. Here he plays the polar opposite of the scummy character from Squid Game: a refined, educated chief of staff to a particularly disgusting lawmaker. A lot comes together in this show: politics, the press, espionage, and class distinctions. If you’re not familiar with South Korea’s politics (I’m not), some of it can be a bit confusing at first, but the emphasis on personal relationships, character, and ethics makes it a gripping watch. Two seasons, ten episodes each. Definitely worth your time if you dig high intrigue and politicking.

Wi Ja-hoon, who played the cop in Squid Game, starred in Something in the Rain, a romantic drama in which he played the female lead’s younger brother. Something in the Rain tells the story of an older woman (early 40’s) who gets romantically involved with her younger brother’s best friend, and the complications that arise from it. Themes of socioeconomic class, family responsibility, and social pressure take center stage. There’s a subplot about workplace sexual harassment that kind of goes nowhere, and the middle-to-end of the 16 episode-long story drags until it runs out of ideas. I kind of liked it, I watched all of it, and I wish it had a better conclusion.

O Yeong-su, who was Squid Game‘s player 001, had a smallish part in the romantic K-drama Chocolate as, what else, a very old man at death’s door. I really wanted to like Chocolate. It was about food and medicine and family discord and romance, but it did none of them well except for the food. I wanted to like it so much that I endured all 16 episodes of it. But it just never ignited. The female lead was entirely passive, even somnolent throughout, and the male lead didn’t manage to develop any chemistry with either her or the viewer. You’d think a show featuring a former brain surgeon who reluctantly goes to work at a hospice would excite some affect at some point. It didn’t. Still, the views of Greece were nice, and the food photography was vibrant.

There’s a lot more from South Korea besides Squid Game, and if you dug that, you’ve got a lot of great TV to watch.

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Bits and Pieces 2/28/2020

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Between recent illness and attendant insomnia, I’ve found a bit more time over the last few months to take in media. My sleep loss is your gain when it comes to media reviews, so let’s hit it.

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Memories of the Alhambra: I tried like hell to like this, but could only get through the first episode. It had some interesting ideas: a disappearing programmer, an immersive augmented reality game, the mingling of old-world Spain and modern technology. And yet it didn’t do it for me. Not sure why. Call it the one K-drama I didn’t like. I may try again in the future.

Save Me: I gave this a brief mention in my K-drama rundown on Hollywood in Toto, but it bears mentioning here. This is a very dark show, and goes places with the characters that I’ve never seen on other television programs. The plot involves a cult called The Mighty New Sky, and how it tries to take over a town in South Korea. It’s full of disturbing moments involving a nice family’s seduction and destruction, horrific betrayals, and bizarre rituals with a creepy cult leader. A bit too long, but full of unforgettable moments. The themes of friendship, familial love, and aging cynicism vs. youthful idealism really make this a show to watch.

Ultraviolet: A Polish crime show set in Lodz, focusing on a group of vigilantes solving both cold cases and new crimes using social media hacking, much to the chagrin of the local police department. The characters are likable, and there are some genuinely funny moments, but no surprises to speak of. The culprits tend to be rich industralists, Polish nationalists, and other such stock heavies. Still, it’s fun and fairly lighthearted. As good as any cop show you’ll see on American TV, though with similar social commentary.

Unit 42: A Belgian crime show, this one about a team of cops solving crimes that have a technological angle, like internet-connected pacemakers that explode and semi-autonomous vehicles chauffeuring corpses. A bit heavier than Ultraviolet, which gives it a more gripping style, but like Ultraviolet, there are no surprises. An alert viewer will figure out whodunit long before the cops do, which is a problem: the episodes often only make sense if you ignore the massive plot holes throughout. You will be entertained if you turn off your brain before watching.

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I also read books, on occasion.

Salt: A World History: The title says it all. It’s a history of salt and its effect on various cultures throughout the world. A dry subject, naturally, that edifies and occasionally entertains. I like how it destroys myths about salt and explains its value to civilizations both ancient and current. Author Mark Kurlansky has books on other foodstuffs, including Cod and Milk. And Paper, if you are inclined to eat it. For my part, I’m full.

A History of the World in Six Glasses: Author Tom Standage provides a sweeping history of six world-changing beverages: beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and Coca-Cola in a book that’s far more than the sum of its drinks. Who knew how important coffee was to The Enlightenment? What was the first beer made of, and how important was it to early man? The parts on Coke are a little more anemic compared to the section on tea, for example, but that’s more due to Coca-Cola’s place on the world stage than a weakness of the text. A lot of fun to read. Think of it as a history book for people who hate history books.

American Pie: My Search for the Perfect Pizza: I’ve had a lifelong interest in baking bread, and when my wife got me a copy of Peter Reinhart’s book Artisan Breads Every Day more than ten years ago, it helped kick-start my bread making to the level I’d always wanted: artisan loaves with the big holes. While American Pie isn’t a new book, published in 2003, it’s nevertheless a terrific travelogue of Reinhart’s quest to find the best pizza in the world. What constitutes the perfect pizza and if he actually finds it will have to be read about in the text. Full of recipes for both dough and toppings, Reinhart promulgates the idea that the quality of any pizza starts with the crust: 80% of the grade, so to speak. So even a pizza with mediocre sauce can be saved by a great crust. Obviously, this is a cookbook in large part, so factor that into your buying decision. If you want to know how to make tasty pizza at home, from lean Neapolitan pies to the more substantial New Haven pizzas, this is the book you need. My only problem is the disappointing paucity of pictures. All that reading makes my lips hurt.

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K-Drama Review: Possessed

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Most of the time I can’t stand urban fantasy: werewolves, vampires, zombies, half-demon/half-angel hybrids, and other such figures crammed into a big city somewhere, interacting (having sex) with ordinary humans who happen to be half-angels themselves or whatever. It’s a crowded genre, both in its conventions and its representation in fiction.

But the South Koreans do it right. At least on television. While I mostly enjoyed the urban fantasy drama Black (except for the end), I really enjoyed Possessed, which has a terrific take on faith, love, death, and the supernatural.

At its heart, Possessed is a show about transformation: not only do the characters undergo significant changes, but the world itself transforms, and with it the show’s tone. Halfway through the sixteen-episode run, the story gets much darker, and the bits of humor interspersed here and there save it from becoming a grim, dreary fable. Because of this, the show takes risks that few American dramas do: characters make reasonable, if destructive choices, and become more believable as a result.

As a primarily character-driven story, Possessed relies heavily on the performances of its principal actors: Song Sae-byeok as detective Kang Pil-sung and Go Joon-hee as psychic Hong Seo-jung. This reliance is not misplaced. Kang Pil-sung is a character with tremendous depth, and it shows in his portrayal. In a lesser actor, he would merely come off as gruff and dim, but here he shows a multilayered personality behind his awkwardness. Hong Seo-jung, as the psychic, has an amazing way of communicating either humor or sadness in a single glance; with her perfect face and wide, serious eyes, you can’t help but be drawn in.

As is often the case with these long-form, complex K-dramas, the side characters take on a life of their own, including the antagonists. They’re well-drawn and fleshed-out, and as the story progresses, endure terrifying trials. At no point does Possessed ask you to take them for granted, and they would steal the show themselves if the protagonists weren’t so riveting.

The story isn’t original, but makes the tropes seem unworn. A serial killer of women named Hwang Dae-du is caught, tried, and executed, and decades later, a psychopathic doctor makes a shaman pull Hwang Dae-du’s soul from Hell to possess him and make him a more effective murderer. Psychic Hong Seo-jung, who lives a simple life as a clothing shop employee, gets involved, meets detective Kang Pil-sung, and the two team up to stop Hwang Dae-du. Ghosts, ritual magic, and psychic journeys ensue, while Hwang Dae-du initiates a plan to turn the entire world into the Hell he escaped from.

As you can guess from the show’s title, a number of people get possessed by others, but not in a casual, body-jumping sort of way. The more powerful Hwang Dae-du gets, the more desperate the main characters become to stop him, hampered by a world that doesn’t believe in the supernatural.

Unlike Black, the end is satisfying, if sad. The writers didn’t cut corners: no one is safe, and the genre considerations take a back seat to good storytelling. That’s rare. It’s good TV. Check it out.

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Black: K-Drama Review

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I like things to be tight. Joseph Simonet, a tremendously skilled, thoughtful martial artist with a terrific sense of humor, said in one of his instructional videos, “In martial arts, like in everything else, tighter is better.” Those of us who know Joseph know what he meant by that. It’s the same thing writing fiction: you want to cut out extraneous words and have your characters move the plot forward through their actions. Nothing wasted. That’s tightness.

As great as a tightly-written story can be, too much tightness can choke the reader. This is the case with the Korean urban fantasy drama Black, available through Netflix. Compelling, well-produced, and hopelessly over-complicated, everything in every episode is connected to something else, turning it into the television version of a Klein bottle with about seventy-seven openings.

Describing the story is simple, but the plot gets so convoluted that it defies explanation. It’s about a young woman with the ability to see who’s about to die, and, if she gets close enough, how. She meets a detective who is murdered, gets possessed by a Grim Reaper (a Grim Reaper is a ghostly being who escorts newly-disembodied souls to the afterlife), and spends the rest of the 18-episode run trying to figure out who killed him and why.

Ara Go plays the death-seeing young woman Ha-ram with workmanlike competence. Physically she fits the role well, but invests little into her performance. The stand-out is Seung-heon Song as Black/Joon/the Grim Reaper 444: he starts with appropriate amorality and arrogance, and over time develops enough humanity to turn him into a sympathetic, understandable character. Both are likable, as are the dozens of side characters who attain admirable depth; you care about what happens to all of them. After over twenty hours of the show, you have no choice, really.

Black‘s complexity forces you to pay attention to everything; its attention to detail leaves you with no room to breathe. This minor figure turns out to be a major figure who is tragically killed off just when he gets interesting, but you see what he was up to in flashbacks involving other minor characters, who end up becoming much more important characters later on because of things they did in other flashbacks. With so many people running around, the names can get very confusing; this is a South Korean show, after all, and names like Man-shik and Woo-sik don’t stick in the American memory the way Frank and George might. Can’t be helped.

During the show, the character Black is occasionally helped by a pair of Grim Reaper colleagues whom nobody else can see. They always steal the show, mixing gravity, pathos, and humor in entertaining ways.

In tone, Black is all over the place, which can be jarring, even off-putting. Slapstick humor sits cheek by jowl with brutal violence, and at times you’re not sure if you should laugh or not. Certain scenes are extremely hard to watch: stuff that wouldn’t get past American censors. It isn’t the violence, but who the violence is occasionally performed upon that can be disturbing. As is typical for the K-dramas I’ve watched, familiar themes of suicide, familial relationships, and government corruption figure prominently throughout. Children in Black are abused, abandoned, adopted, and even murdered; even though it’s clear that death is not the end of existence, it’s still tragic and to be avoided. The attempts at romance between characters fell flatter than a lead dirigible. There’s chaste and discreet, and there’s distant and awkward. Black fell into the latter category.

The last episode is extremely bad. Particularly the last ten minutes. People familiar with the production say that Black was intended to be a 20-episode show, but it had to be cut to 18, and the original writer couldn’t/didn’t do the final wrap-up. Everything got hurried. With so many moving parts, several issues were left unaddressed by the closing titles. I can only judge the output, not the intentions. So the ending was the kind of failure that leaves you writing the finale in your head later on and pretending that’s what happened.

I enjoyed watching Black, but I don’t know if I can recommend it. Binge-watchers who want to turn their brains on instead of off will dig it and overlook the final episode’s shortcomings. If you decide to give it a try, just know that the slapstick humor does start to taper off in the early episodes, and it gets quite dark later on.

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The Stranger: K-Drama Review

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I always try to live my principles instead of just bleating about them. And while hypocrisy isn’t the great sin of our age that our betters in mass media proclaim, it’s silly to proffer advice without taking that same advice yourself. If the dishes are dirty, you clean them. If there are people in need, you help them. And if you think Hollywood is a cesspit of degeneracy, pedophilia, horrible political activism, sexual assault, and institutionalized prostitution, you stop funding it. So I’ve eschewed all Hollywood-produced media made after 2000. I’ve opted out. It’s a lot easier to do than you might think.

It does leave a gap in my entertainment time, however; I’m a storyteller, and I find it valuable to not just read fiction, but watch it on the screen. And, let’s face it: who doesn’t like movies and TV?

So, like I’ve advised ad nauseam in this space, I’ve gone indie. And foreign. There’s a lot of outside-the-box material being produced away from the Hollywood machine; programs that are different not just to be different, but because the writers and directors aren’t bound by a formula that you can see coming before the starting titles flash across the screen. Not only that, but the focus on plot over diversity/ideological box-checking is refreshing.

Foreign television programs, particularly ones made by non-Western countries, provide valuable insight into storytelling that you won’t get through Hollywood. The differences make you look at plot and the unraveling of complexities in different ways. Despite our cultural differences, all human beings like a good story, and if something’s popular across the ocean, it’s probably going to strike a chord here in the States.

One example is the South Korean legal drama Stranger, available on Netflix. Starring Seung-woo Cho as prosecutor protagonist Si-Mok and Doona Bae as police detective Yeo-Jin, it’s a lengthy, complex thriller that handles several themes well, with characters that are entirely likable. Even the antagonists. The setup is that as a child, Si-Mok suffered from an ailment that gave him frequent sensory overload; after brain surgery, he was better able to function, but his ability to experience emotion was significantly lessened. What differentiates him from Star Trek’s Mr. Spock is that there’s no suppression of natural human reactions on Si-Mok’s part, nor are there slips into occasional emotionalism; he’s simply a man with a handicap. It’s the other characters’ reaction to his lack of affect that’s a sticking point in his day to day life. Seung-woo Cho plays this role with admirable subtlety, turning the character into a real person instead of a gimmick.

Yeo-Jin plays against Si-Mok’s straight man with required humor, but she doesn’t come off as comic relief. Once she gets used to him, her attempts at drawing him out of a shell from which he’s physically unable to leave become poignant; she doesn’t know that his coldness is an immutable characteristic. What’s remarkable about their chemistry is that it doesn’t move into romance or even longing. It simply isn’t an issue, despite that both characters are young, attractive, and single. They achieve a kind of friendship that Yeo-Jin insists upon at first, but becomes necessary to Si-Mok as the show progresses. How Doona Bae makes the character warm and funny without being childish and cute is a feat most actresses need to learn from.

The plot is complex without being complicated, involving murder, graft, and government corruption that reaches to the highest levels. Much of the action moves from character to character, giving the viewer a full picture of the story. The antagonists’ motivations are understandable despite their criminality; they’re real people making sometimes terrible choices in a dirty world.

There are some clumsy parts; the Dune-style insight into some characters’ thoughts gets to be a little over the top, and there’s so much detail that certain plot elements can get lost if you’re not paying very close attention to everything. This, however, seems more a function of South Korean television than an issue peculiar to this show, as I’ve noticed it in other K-dramas.

The acting is superb, and it’s fascinating to get a glimpse of how South Koreans portray themselves and their country on television. I suspect life in Korean cities isn’t all soju tents and Hyundai sports cars. Nevertheless, if you want to see a different culture’s form of storytelling with a fascinating narrative, you need to take a look at Stranger.

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