David Dubrow

Author

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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Update 8-28-2020

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When I’m not writing and rewriting, I’m planning and outlining. When I’m doing none of those things, I’m glowering at nothing, willing the words to come. They rarely obey. So, things are more or less normal.

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I’ve talked about author Joseph Hirsch in this space before, with my reviews of his disturbing science fiction novel Touch No One and his crime novel My Tired Shadow. He also contributed to Adam Howe’s anthology Wrestle Maniacs with a sort-of prequel story to My Tired Shadow.  He’s really quite a prolific writer, so don’t take this as an exhaustive listing, and he dabbles in everything from horror to drama to even romance. I envy his skills and output.

A more recent title of his is the sci-fi novella My Uncle’s New Eyes. It’s a taut, slow-burn thriller that keeps you seared to the page, and by the time you’ve read the last word, stick a fork in you: you’re done. A tale of lost memory, bizarre science, and shocking betrayal, it follows troubled teenager Michael when he’s sent to spend time with his uncle Jimmy “Grim Reaper” Reeves, a former boxer living in the desert with a beautiful, mysterious caretaker. Hirsch has a way of getting under your skin, making you feel everything his characters experience, and My Uncle’s New Eyes shows what a supremely skilled writer can do at the top of his game.

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Season 3 of Dark, the German sci-fi show I talked a bit about here, wraps up the series in a way that’s minimally satisfying. SPOILERS FOLLOW. The Schrodinger’s Cat concept introduced in this season didn’t add anything valuable to the mythology, and the Origin Trio were too obviously shoehorned in as last-minute antagonists. Clausen’s subplot went nowhere. Eva cutting Martha’s face was silly and unnecessary. Noah, a child murderer, made a terrible hero. Where everything fell down for me was the end, which reflects the problem with most of today’s science fiction. There was nothing aspirational about it; the only way to fix things was for the characters to annihilate themselves. In a universe without God or an objective moral standard, all you have left is the amoral nihilism of pure science. Also, it was funny that they had to limit Mikkel’s appearance, due to the actor’s having grown ten inches between seasons. Kids.

One show I can wholeheartedly recommend is the Israeli series Shtisel, about a Haredi (ultra-orthodox Jewish) family in Jerusalem. It does a good job of swimming in the dramedy realm, where the laughs are balanced by touching moments. Michael Aloni as Akiva makes you completely forget about his less sympathetic role as Himmler in When Heroes Fly. If I had a complaint, it’s that the show occasionally meanders in a less focused way, but with so many characters, it can’t be helped.

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I’ve also done some writing for Romans One.

In this piece, I discussed despair:

Despair is where the Adversary lives. God, who is all good all the time, has a specific plan for you, and when you embrace despair, you deny God’s presence in your life. Despair represents the loss of faith, the false notion that you’re not equal to God’s plan for you. Obviously when something truly terrible happens like the loss of a spouse, parent, or child, despair is an easy pit to fall into. In the aftermath of a horrible assault, despair can seem like the only option. Despair is soul-crushing, and when you’ve truly experienced it, you remember that feeling for the rest of your life.

I also addressed the bromide of tolerance, arguing for less of it:

Too often, though, the reality is many college kids, fattened on a diet of Captain Planet as children, Howard Zinn as a teen, and Cornel West as a legal adult, are now working on a new college degree: screaming obscenities into a black cop’s face during a race riot. They think that’ll look good on a resume, and, sadly, in some quarters it just might.

Rather than pushing back early on, parents let it go. Rather than deciding enough was enough at the very beginning, they find themselves here.

And I offered the heretical notion that politics won’t save us:

If you want to change what’s going on instead of merely watching it, you have to focus on culture: art, media, education. This means doing more work on top of your 9 to 5. If you don’t like statue toppling, church defacing, and drugstore looting, you need to run for your local school board and win. You have to become a teacher who refuses to propagandize her students. You have to make movies. You have to write books. You have to paint pictures and put on plays and make music that elevates the values you hold dear.

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I won’t sign off with “Stay safe,” because safety is overrated, and nothing important or good happens without some risk. Instead, I hope that whoever you are and whatever your circumstances, you’re having a great time and are with people you love.

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An Update and Two Reviews

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Even though I quit using Twitter, it doesn’t mean that you should be robbed of my short, pithy little comments (to be read with a lisp or not, as you like). So I’ve created The Chirper, available on the sidebar. It’s like Twitter, but so much better. Now you can come here and read the contents of my sick, bloated id without having to go anywhere else! I’ll update it throughout the week. (I stole the name Chirper from my son’s favorite program, The Thundermans, which parodied it as a social media platform for teenage girls. As Rosa Blasi said, “Chirp chirp, girlfriend!”)

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The South Korean cop show Tunnel is a K-drama for people who like K-dramas. A little less polished than Possessed, it still has a bizarre charm that draws you in. In an inversion of the British cop show Life on Mars, Tunnel tells the story of a cop in 1986 who is attacked by a serial killer and finds himself sent thirty years into the future, to 2016. There’s an understandable culture shock, particularly concerning the advancements in forensic science in the intervening decades. Some of it’s played for laughs, with inconsistent results. Much of the plot concerns itself with the protagonist dealing with this temporal dislocation, the grief of losing his wife in the past, and trying to catch the same serial killer…or his copycat.

Park Gwang-ho, the time-traveling protagonist, is portrayed as an old-fashioned dinosaur, and his anachronistic way of speaking, acting, and performing his law enforcement duties works well. He’s just clumsy enough to be excused from being subject to assault charges in 2016’s more sensitive times. The actor Choi Jin-Hyuk does a decent job with the role, though his ability to project sadness is a little less convincing.

I call it a K-drama for people who like K-dramas because it takes some dedication to get through the earlier episodes before the show grabs you. Two of the principal characters are amazingly unlikable and opaque, deliberately so, and this tended to be a turn-off until the events of the plot caught up. One character pops in and out without him going anywhere story-wise, which was jarring. Some of the more graphic parts were blurred out for censorship reasons (I imagine), a choice that took one out of the show from time to time.

Despite these quibbles, the show does everything else right. The end is satisfying, the whodunit aspects of finding the serial killer work, and you care what happens to whom. Once you get into it, it gets its hooks into you and won’t let go.

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I’m a bit more ambivalent about the K-drama Life, but that may have something to do with the show’s political/social aspects than its quality. I’m sure I’d appreciate it more if I lived in South Korea or had personal experience with the issues the show brings up, but other online commentary says that its depiction of life in Seoul is accurate.

It’s a medical show, but unlike most American hospital dramas, the focus is less on the patient of the day than it is the power struggle between the medical staff and the new executive brought in to make the hospital more profitable. This emphasis on the bigger picture allows the plot to address ideas like privatization and its attendant changes to medical care with more detail, instead of tacking them onto the beginning and end of each episode the way other dramas might. It would be foolish to draw parallels between South Korean medical care and American health care, so I won’t bother. Suffice it to say that Life has a point of view, but it doesn’t let that bias change a good story.

The protagonist Ye Jin-woo, played by Lee Dong-wook, is kind of an unknowable figure, even after close to sixteen hours of watching him. I’m not sure if it’s a function of the performance or the writing, but you never really understand why he does things; his motivations are unclear. Not terribly likable, he simply plays a role and that’s that. His handicapped brother Sun-woo is a more accessible character who comes right up to the edge of becoming tragic without quite getting there. What really shines is the relationship between the two, which is multilayered and complex.

Ye Jin-woo’s opposite number is the hard-charging businessman Gu Seung-hyo, who’s not quite a villain and not quite a decent fellow, but you get to know him and even like him a little, despite yourself. He’s played by Cho Seung-woo, who had also portrayed the emotionally distant protagonist in the legal drama The Stranger. Here he shows a little more range; he’d almost have to. Yoo Jae-myung, who was also in The Stranger, does a turn in Life as a surgeon with a somewhat troubled past, and invests depth and pathos into the character that’s desperately needed.

More a slice-of-life story than a tightly-plotted narrative like other K-dramas, Life provides a window into South Korean health care, journalism, and big business that’s interesting, but not compelling.

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Sickbed Reviews

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My 2018 holiday season was delightfully uneventful until a gastrointestinal ailment struck me down on the first of the year and hasn’t entirely let up even today. I will spare you the details.

So what did I do during this time of illness? Watched TV, of course. Too sick to do anything else. Let’s go over what I saw.

Diablero: A Netflix series that can be summed up as the Mexican version of Supernatural, complete with demons, humor, demons, family, demons, and tortillas. I was attracted to it because of the setting (Mexico City) and the style, which was entertainingly colorful and frenetic. Despite that it’s a Mexican production, it follows the new American horror tradition of Us vs. Evil, where demons are defeated by techniques and weapons instead of faith, and all the clergy are fallen or otherwise criminal. Despite this, it’s a fun show. The acting’s fine, the characters are likable, and the story’s got punch. Its attempts to integrate Aztec gods into Christian theology were less successful, but worth watching anyway. I’d like to see a season two.

Travelers Season 3: I’ve talked about Travelers before (having watched the first season during another illness; go figure) and how much I liked it. Season 2 was good: expanded the mythology, deepened the characters, included an overarching plot that was dark and disturbing. Season 3 was great until the last couple of episodes, where they ruined it such that I’m not sure I’m going to bother looking for a season 4. This is your spoiler alert. What they did with season 3 is turn the reason why the Travelers came into a global warming screed. They had to time-travel to the 21st century because this is when global warming becomes too horrible to stop. Which is stupid. Really stupid. I enjoyed the show before because it didn’t poke us with the standard Hollywood issues. Now it has and the bloom’s come off the rose. Not only that, but the screenwriters continued to write themselves into corners and then cheat their way out of it, starting with the first episode and ending with the last, where they’re essentially going to return to an earlier save point in the space-time continuum. Disappointing across the board.

The Frozen Dead: There’re not a lot of new ideas in The Frozen Dead, but it works pretty well and you wind up liking all the characters, which is a rarity on television shows. Set in the French Pyrenees, it starts with the murder of a horse and gets pretty dark from there. The madman in the asylum: is he pulling the strings? Is the lead detective drinking too much? What about the nosebleeds? And the wealthy industrialist? You get the picture. Comparisons to Hannibal Lecter are fair, but won’t get in the way of your enjoyment of the show. Think of The Frozen Dead as a frozen pizza: they’re always pretty good, they satisfy your hunger, and there’s always one around if you want a no-trouble meal. At six episodes long, what have you got to lose?

In Order of Disappearance: A Norwegian crime thriller/comedy starring Stellan Skarsgård as a man who drives a snowplow. I know, I know. Thing is, it’s good. Funny, exciting, exactly what you’d want from a movie like this. Vegan crime bosses, Serbian thugs, and stoic Stellan in the middle, dealing with the murder of his son. The more I tell you the more I’ll spoil it, so just take my word for it that it’s a movie you should see, and you’ll have a good time. That’s why we watch movies in the first place, isn’t it?

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Television Show Reviews, Part Two

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(Part One of this limited edition, hopefully once-in-a-lifetime series can be found here.)

Like any entertainment medium, television can be hit or miss, and even classic, beloved programs from days gone by may not hold up to today’s standards of production, acting, and narrative. On the other hand, there are a lot of mediocre-to-terrible TV shows out there, and more get churned out every day.

Dark is a German science fiction show that’s quite, well, dark. In it, a boy goes missing in the German town of Winden, and his disappearance near a series of caves on the town’s outskirts seems very similar to a child disappearance over twenty years prior. Winden is home to a gigantic nuclear power plant, as well as a series of characters that range from the troubled to the bizarre. Horribly burned bodies show up. Birds die. Mysteries are plumbed. And then things get very, very strange. It’s a slow moving program that keeps its cards very close to the vest, so close that most of the plot elements aren’t resolved by the final episode; in fact, even more mysteries are presented at the end. This is terribly unfair to the viewer, who after ten episodes of patient watching deserves at least some closure. Instead, the show demands that you watch the next season, whenever it’s produced, and perhaps the writers might tell you what exactly is going on. Or they might not. For that reason I don’t know that I can recommend this show, unless you have a lot of time to kill.

On the heels of Dark, and because I kind of enjoyed Harlan Coben’s Safe, I gave Coben’s other Netflix miniseries a try: The Five. This one also involves a missing child, and while the police, family, and friends deal with the aftermath twenty years later, it turns out that the missing kid’s DNA finds itself in a recent crime scene. There’s a good bit of family angst throughout, and it’s a little hard to appreciate all the characters, as some are much more likable and present than the others. There’s the bad boy who now runs a weird sort of dance hall/homeless shelter, the cop with a dad suffering from dementia, the missing kid’s older brother who still suffers guilt and shame, and the love interest whose subplot involving pill addiction went nowhere and kind of wasted everyone’s time. I did like the end, which wrapped things up poignantly and neatly, but overall it wasn’t as gripping or tragic as Safe. Skip unless you’re stuck in a hospital bed like I was.

Are you into Danish TV? Who isn’t? Either way, you might want to try out the sci-fi dystopia show The Rain. It follows a familiar sort of disease-caused end of the world scenario with a twist: anyone caught in the rain dies of a horrible illness within a minute or two. The young son and daughter of the scientist who may or may not be responsible for the disease hole up in a fallout shelter-like underground facility until the food and air run out, and must venture to the surface to survive, find other fallout shelters, and look for their scientist dad. A grim sort of show, rather formulaic, with few surprises. None of the characters were terribly likable or relatable. It ends exactly the way you would expect, unfortunately. Think of it like The Walking Dead, except everyone’s a teenager and there aren’t any zombies. If you watch it you might like it. If you don’t you probably won’t regret missing it, even on your deathbed.

If I seem ambivalent about these three programs, it’s because I am. However, they did capture my attention during a somewhat difficult time, so I’ll always remember them. Until I forget all about them.

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