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overthinkingkdrama · 5 years

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Exit Rant: Mr. Sunshine

[This is intended to be a spoiler free review of Mr. Sunshine but it may include a few minor spoilers throughout. It’s also long as all hell. Enjoy.]

Wow, here I am with my Mr. Sunshine review and it's only...*looks at wrist despite not wearing a watch* nearly three months after the final episode aired. Totally in keeping with this blog's commitment to publishing consistent and relevant content *manic laughter*.

The truth is, even if it hadn't been bad timing schedule-wise, Mr. Sunshine was going to be a difficult drama for me to review. This drama has so much to recommend it in terms of beautiful production, epic scope, unique period setting and blockbuster cast. There is something conceptually mesmerizing about Mr. Sunshine that engaged my basest fangirl and aesthetic sensibilities, but the actual experience of watching the episodes does not live up all the premise promises. What Mr. Sunshine delivers as a drama is, paradoxically, less than the sum of it's parts.

Let's focus on the positive first.

The cast in this drama is god-tier. You're rarely going to find an ensemble cast like this outside of Chungmuro. Your first, second and third leads all can and have headlined films and dramas of their own, and a lot of the stars here (like Kim Tae Ri of The Handmaiden fame) have critically acclaimed film pedigrees.

There's a lot to say about the actors and the performances, and there's no way I'm going to get to all of it. The extended cast is large and exceptionally great, and I'm not going to be able to remember and talk about everyone by name, so I'm going to have to limit myself to the main cast.

It's really the cast that moves heaven and earth to make this script work. To the degree that sometimes it felt that each actor lived in their character and lent flesh and texture where the writing let us down. Kim Tae Ri, played Ae Shin with so much fierceness and unshakable dignity that I couldn't stop cheering for her, even when the plot sidelined her character for what felt like episodes at a time.

For many people, the rousing showstopper performance of the drama was Yoo Yeon Seok as Gu Dong Mae. Early in the life cycle of the drama I recall hearing that Kim Eun Sook got herself embroiled in some controversy because people felt that the Japanese-sympathizer Dong Mae was far too likable considering his political ideology. Some hasty shuffling was done and rather than being characterized as a bald-faced fascist, Dong Mae became more of a freewheeling mercenary gangster-type. This was a positive change in my opinion. I don't want to retread what has already been said (a lot of it by me) about Dong Mae, but YYS has never been and may never be as interesting or as sexy as he was in Mr. Sunshine, in my opinion. He plays the morally grey character with edge and blazing charisma and, if nothing else does, makes the drama worth checking out.

Information broker and enigmatic owner of the Glory Hotel, Kudo Hina, as portrayed by Kim Min Jung and (my personal favorite) and the soulful Hui Seong, born into a blood-soaked privilege he can't escape, played by Byun Yo Han, wonderfully round out the cast and are, if anything, tragic underutilized by the plot. The only person here who perhaps underwhelms is Lee Byung Hun as the titular main character. I don't have strong feelings about him as an actor or as a person one way or the other. I've enjoyed some movies he's been a part of. I do feel that visually he looks too old for baby-faced Kim Tae Ri, but I'm almost used to that kind of thing in Dramaland. His performance is perhaps meant to be restrained--nigh on repressed--but it comes off as a bit bland and wooden. Which isn’t to say he’s bad, and I feel Eugene had a lot of potential to be a very interesting character just...decidedly less interesting than everyone else.

A lot of praise has been heaped on the way this drama looks, and I will agree, it’s a very pretty show. Personally, I disliked how heavily color graded certain scenes, especially outdoor scenes were. I found it a bit distracting and it took away from how otherwise gorgeous some of the scenery in this is when the sky is tan or everything in a scene is tinted blue for some reason. But the production deserves a lot of credit for creating a full and lived in feeling world, for the beauty of the sets and the costumes, the sheer attention to detail, and the way they used all four seasons to set the tone and give you a sense of the passage of time.

And let me just state that during Mr. Sunshine’s run I was decidedly obsessed with it. I posted about it, I talked about it to my friends, I talked several of those friends into watching it with me...and a few of those people still speak to me to this day. When I start criticizing it here in a few seconds, know that doesn’t mean I didn’t get a lot of hours of enjoyment out of this drama or that I think I’m too good for this show. I’ve seen 4 of Kim Eun Sook’s dramas so far and this is easily the best one. It’s not just better than Goblin, DOTS and Heirs, it’s miles better. Is that everything? I think that about covers it.

Now for the bad stuff...

I’ve said this in the past in relation to Goblin, but it bears repeating: Kim Eun Sook is good--possibly even great--at creating singular, iconic story moments and absolute rubbish at developing a cohesive plot that builds tension over multiple episodes and pays off in a logical way. At the time I said it I was basing it off of relatively little experience with her writing, but I’ve seen the pattern repeat itself two more times since then and I’m increasingly convinced that I’m a genius.

I do believe there are extenuating factors that account for the poor pacing of her dramas. The number of episodes and the episode length might not be within Kim Eun Sook’s control and she’s not responsible for poor editing either. Both Goblin and Mr. Sunshine suffer a lot because of bloated run time, and maybe that’s the network’s fault but it leaves plot feeling thin in places, even like it’s futilely spinning it’s wheels waiting for the next important event to come along.

With Mr. Sunshine the issue wasn’t even that there wasn’t enough interesting plot or character backstories to fill 24, hour plus episodes, possibly even more, it was that at times it felt like the drama flatly refused to delve into the interesting details, preferring to leave us miserably treading water in the doldrums of the story. It felt like we had to beg and wait for even morsels of backstory about certain characters--the drama was especially mum regarding Kuda Hina’s history--while the two leads endlessly mooned over one another. How many scenes did we need to watch Eugene and Ae Shin soulfully stare at one another?

Mr. Sunshine never successfully builds momentum until the last 2 or 3 episodes of the run. And while there is a lot of lip service paid to guns and glory and sad endings, but much of the drama feels like it's milling around with hands in pockets waiting for the tragic curtain call. Even the badass sniper heroine is frequently sidelined. It feels like the story remains stubbornly in the set up phase, one step forward and two steps back. It's as though Kim Eun Sook has all of these wonderful toys--great characters, huge budget, interesting time period/setting--and she simply doesn't know what to do with them.

Consistently my frustration with Mr. Sunshine was its inability to effectively incorporate the extended cast into the plot. It feels like all characters exist in separate bubbles waiting for their turn to have a scene. Those scenes are interesting but maddeningly brief, and then they are shuffled backstage once again until it's once again time for their requisite 5-10 minutes of screen time per episode.

This problem is especially present in the main cast with Dong Mae, Hina and Hui Seong. And that is what is so deeply exasperating about this drama, because there is just enough good peppered in to keep me invested, so many great elements poorly employed. It makes one want to take KES's script away from her and take it home and fix it yourself, because you just know she's not treating it right.

When calamity comes, and it does, it feels disproportionate and somewhat unsatisfying, because the build up didn’t do it justice. The drama ends with a rousing crescendo, but it feels that the individual character arcs were never allowed to reach their full potential. I’m not one to shy away from tragedy, but it left me feeling rather empty.

I wish I could a finer point on it than that, but it’s a murky issue to me. I know I’m not connecting with the story as much as I want to, but it’s hard to put my finger on the exact reason and that just adds to my frustration with it.

I stand by my assertion that this is still the best KES drama I have watched. Thought admittedly I’ve still only seen 4 of them, this one shows the most promise and, I think, the most growth. But it’s not there yet. I don’t know if I could ever watch it again, but I’m glad I watched it once. If for nothing else for the fantastic performances of several old and new favorites. I give Mr. Sunshine an 8.5/10, which is probably too high considering everything I’ve said about it up to this point. However, it’s just too strong in terms of overall production and cast for me to feel good about rating it any lower.

#Mr. Sunshine #mister sunshine #kim tae ri #byun yo han #yoo yeon seok #exit rant #exit rave #kdrama review

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theliterateape · 3 years

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Call Thru The Metal

By Dana Jerman

The following fiction was written as a stylistic response to the novel Nightwood penned by Djuna Barnes in 1935.

THE LONELY LANDLORD LIVED ON A LUCIOUS AVENUE, but in his queer heart he was prone to jealousies. It was why his marriage had not worked. It was a struggle-and-compromise formation.

And the perfect tree-lined way glittered on day after elysium-colored day. These grasping feelings came from the notion that time was constantly playing gentle tricks on his then-benign intensities and dispositions. Perhaps too some issue came in the form of no frugality in the information he chose to gather, which leads one to feel embarrassingly overwhelmed and nearly completely impenetrable to jokes and jocularities. His wife was prone to effete witticisms. They were, the pair, hopelessly incompatible.

So there was the existence of an early love letter she had written about the scenes and trials of their courtship. It lay open on a side table in the library. It was not a thing that had been opened in a long while, and the Landlord did not know how it got there, but there it was all the same.

“And I have the memory of you coming over in a taxi. So late, to make love to me while a storm raged outside. And some of my favorite music played, which became your favorite. But then you had to go—so you went. Back into another taxi to a bed without me in it. Me to a bed without you, or your hard and yearning kiss.”

Events of this sort had been reoccurring in a harmlessly slight and insidious fashion for longer than he could remember. In the life of the Landlord, there were many a “Darling, I simply don’t know” and they had to be enough. They formed a sheen around his anger, but not an impermeable one. He could rise to meet the occasion of this emotional challenge with his perceptive attentions. But his body had other more nervous and mischievous ideas for the analysis and relief of the aforementioned psychic blocks.

✶

“I PICK THE HILLS,” She had said before leaving. And to think for even a moment she had been happy in a way he could not try or did not wish to steal away. She simply could not seem to wear anything humorous.

“My taste is displeased.” He had uttered thoughtlessly one day as she was dressing. He wanted to take the statement back almost immediately. When the flash of her eyes grew dark and brave he then lost all chance at redemption.

And how closely one factor predicts another in a side-shot look. This is the endless-father correlation. The thin-sliced experiment of his smile he counts as service. Daddy is a title that means all-judgement-no-forgiveness. The one chance at intimacy ruined by absence: Away on natural life for the stabbing death of his wife. Not the landlord’s mother however, that woman is also dead. But no one ever found her body…

Oh wives and their legends, Papa would say. Here was the astounding paradoxical implicit association test of a man who went to Yale then on well-directly to replace beerkeg compression units. Meanwhile collecting remote controls and antiquated batteries and used to run a street sweeper between jobs.

Somehow the glistening ignorant city left him as impotent as a bug.

He employed murder to match the white cross-dresser’s work in the dancehall. Completing the gaudy poem of their oozing hips. Caustic gains in worths of the ill-described are thus: A moaning laugh. Cough. Someone loses a shoe in the park. No one drowns but a few get wet. One pukes when he finds the homicide.

And the tendril is the spark is the stem creeping a creep ominous and slow from the poisonous spotted orchid named malice. The tendril of disease sprawled to clutch at the softest tissue of the closest one.

Ah—it is how the small learn from those whose blood fates bloom large in their own.

✶

THE LANDLORD’S WIFE. Now Ex-wife. She had two sisters.

She was one of a set of identical triplets. They were prized for the very product of their existence. Their mother was an heiress. Their father was a writer of much loved novels. The first time the Landlord saw his Ex-wife’s sisters was in a family portrait. He came very suddenly down with an atrocious case of basorexia. He swelled with guile from a sinister prospect.

If you had inquired of the Ex-wife to describe her landlord, she might see fit to call him a filthy Pan. Evil-grinning satyr who cares for no one. Immune to certain sensational transferences in the name of a push-button sex drive and the will to kill.

She would say something cryptic like “his best sketches were done in the hospital.” And it would mean bits. Any creative impulse he grasped or even momentarily exercised were masturbatory self-portraits in cum. Or they were the exorcism of insulting passes as the female staff on days when he was most warmed over with pain and injections. (The Landlord was pre-diabetic and had dirty kidneys as well as a predisposition to gout.)

The Ex-wife would say this only after she was slain at his hand, however, because she had deemed him previously to be too soft. Too much infused of a guilty-staring complex to be capable of such a thing.

But those nights alone while the landlord sucked treatments from fluid bags into his veins, they became projections to live over and over. She was like an already dead soul, keen and trenchant in the quiet under an authentic moon. She entreated the afterlife for its embrace. Summum bonum by the Bete Noire. She held the hands of her neverborn children and heard their whispers reveal projections of the adaptive unconscious. “You are very brave to be here,” They said. Confirming all stratospheric transferences with the long, direct looks from their dark levels of brow and eyes. She knew her sisters were in danger then, but not how or why.

Alas, defamation carried in the mind does no great good to anyone beyond. Verbalized estimations, however inane, to one and from one who consider themselves to be in possession of their better faculties ought to be shared.

✶

THE EX-WIFE WAS NOT BURIED IN THE LOAMY SWAMP at the back of the local zoo for a full day when the landlord, kept out in the park to think, ran into the second sister and her husband.

They inquired eagerly after his person and their own blood kin whom he claimed was home with pneumonia and recovering with a lot of sleeping. Assuaging them tho’ he could barely keep the glee from his voice. A glee saturated with new reason. For now, the life worth living the most for the Landlord was not without murder.

And seeing his Ex-wife’s twin strolling with her beau, he could picture her sweet face in its revelatory convulsions brought on my masturbating with her favorite ivory handled letter opener. Bone-shaped handle down as the business end, of course. Here another Ex-wife shape who probably championed very similarly in the morbid throes of enacted lust. And here she was accompanied by a man whose shirt matched her dress. Seriously.

“His shirt matched her dress,” he said aloud to himself as he passed, taken up suddenly with the true and profound absurdity of life as if he was in a whole-lie-wood film. No gunspinner of the wild west here. Just the primed experiment of an officious wheedling coward. Passing poorly along his doomed life like a preened rat who cannot find its way beyond the wine cellar.

And so it was under the guise of a brief and barely meditated gathering of the remaining two sisters at the Landlords behest and exquisite dwelling place. Alerted to the notion that his wife had gone missing from within a sick delirium.

The sisters had made the mistake of coming alone. As soon as they had gathered near to the fireside and taken up the miniature snifters of cognac from the hands of their host, it was then in a few abrupt slightly ridiculous curving motions their throats were slashed and eyes punctured by two separate antique steak knives that were pretty much lying around the back of a kitchen drawer not being used at all.

Not much later, he had no trouble surrendering to the man whose shirt had so perfectly matched the dress.

#comment #antique literature #wartime fashion #murder #unchecked rage #triple homicide #syntax and style #dark expression #hopeless killer #bombastic romance

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braindamageforbeginners · 6 years

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Day 42 (I think), Radiation 29

Folks, when you come down with a disease, you’ll need a support structure. And you have to recognize that, just as you have your good and bad days, just as you grow and diminish with the disease; your friends and family will do that, too. Which means that, just you’re gonna go a little haywire once in a while, they will, too. You can’t hold it against them, living with a physical reminder of mortality is a hard thing. You just have to make sure the good days in that relationship outnumber the bad.

I bring this up, because I had an epiphany last night, thanks to dear old Dad. Now, full disclosure, my father is helping me out both financially and physically, so he probably qualifies for some form of sainthood, so, my apologies to everyone if it seems like I’m distorting him - that’s how art works, you make something three dimensional into a two-dimensional caricature. I’d do better if I could, that would require film, not text. For full context, we had a blood moon last night (more on that in a second), and Dad was excited to see it (he has even worse insomnia than me). He noted that it would 2038, before the next one, and got cross when I mentioned that really wasn’t anything I was planning on seeing.the next one. I didn’t do it in some mean or Robert Smith-esque way (I don’t have enough hair to be Robert Smith these days; I’m having a hard time pulling a Kenny Chesney these days, even with the considerable power of a Stetson). He’s mentioned that he’s betting this will be the last time I see this thing. And, Great Kraken knows, I’d be only too happy to see the last of this thing, too. Here’s the thing; When you saw the first trailers for the third “Transformers” movie - hideous as it all was - was anyone really dumb enough to doubt that there would be a fourth one? Because I have a stack of medical studies showing a rather alarming pattern for people like me.

Now, I’ll admit, I have great hopes for the Warlocks and Mad Scientist to keep me around for a while; but no doctor - since 2010 - has told me I’ll get the same sort of lump-sum 60 years as everyone else. I might get that much time, eventually, but it will be doled out over 6-18 month segments. Mad Scientist - who has been eerily accurate in her predictions - flat-out told me that the best she could do was keep me alive and mostly-intact between treatments. And the Warlocks, even though they’re gifted necromancers, have told me that this is a multi-year, total-focus investment before any sort of results can be guaranteed. In other words, although I might be able to eventually carve out some sort of life, planning on seeing the next blood moon is utterly ridiculous.

Now, full disclosure; right now, I’m not really upset or frightened or anything at the moment; I’m mostly just tired (when I have time to feel tired, anyway). I am Mark Watney in “The Martian” - so completely invested in surviving to next week that I don’t have time or energy to worry about the week after that (and, as I’ve mentioned, being a functioning sick person today is a full-time job)(and I am not exaggerating that). I solve a problem or two today. Then another one tomorrow. Then the next one. And I try to tell you guys how to solve them. Dad’s still worried about next year’s changes in health insurance policy (and I am too, or I would be, if I had time to stop and be worried). And this is all just a by-product revelation to the big one; and, in order to understand it, you have to understand, Dad loves plans - loves them - and loves linear progression. I’m not going to bash him for that; all human beings do; it’s a fundamental part of the species. We are exceedingly similar people; it’s just I had a few cells do a few more unexpected things happen than him. Which leads me to the major revelation of the piece, reader, and you won’t like it (my apologies). This whole time - since my initial diagnosis last July - I’ve had the nasty sensation that I’m the butt of some grotesque cosmic joke. I’m just the set-up, dear reader; you guys are the joke. Sort of. Follow me on this one.

Now, my existence is far, far more precarious than yours, but I’d argue that the real psychological difference between you and me - on a day-to-day basis - is that I’m just constantly hyper-aware of the degree to which our lives are governed by complete random chance. To understand the full implications here - because this is Kraken Planning 101 - I need you to go back and watch “Back to the Future” (whenever you’re having trouble understanding the universe, this is my go-to starting point, but it illustrates the point), and then - with that idea that linear causality isn’t often so linear - go back and make a list of the number of times your life changed - even moderately - because your alarm clock died. Or a date canceled. Or you didn’t have money to go out with your friends. There are entire lives you lived - or didn’t live - because the wind was blowing the wrong way. If you realized how much you were at the mercy of random chance, you’d curl up in bed and never leave.

And, in that sense, existence - or your existence - seems utterly ludicrous to me. My gods, you people. You talk to bill collectors. You hide your emotions from one another. You put up with loathsome characters you despise because they might offer you money. You don’t go to the gym. You buy dinner for pretty people you hate because they might kiss you. You worry about what your friends or neighbors will think. And you do all of this in a weird, vague hope of a future that will never come, not as you can comprehend it, anyway. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t plan ahead or cont on the future, but, as someone who’s already taken that bet and lost in the very worst way possible, trust me, it’s a sucker’s bet.

I’m not terribly happy right now, but I will say this - my life would’ve dramatically different if, 16 years ago, someone had told me, “Well, we zapped it this time, but it’s gonna come back in a couple of years. Go, now.” And if you start living your life in that time frame - without expecting to leave anything after a year or so - there is a strange sort of freedom that starts to enter your outlook. You don’t get the full human experience, necessarily, but, if you’re clever, you can get some concentrated ingots of it here and there. You can burn far brighter than you’d imagined possible. You don’t get to go to law school or plan a honeymoon, which sucks, but you get to focus on being the most concrete, focused, distilled version of you there is. And you will - I guarantee you - discover wild, amazing, scary things about yourself. Again, it’s not exactly an existence I’d wish upon anyone, but right now, I got three solid talents: I can figure things out very quickly, I am - historically-speaking - nigh-unkillable, and I can write exceptionally well. And that’s it. I’m placing all three of those on the Warlocks to win in the third race, and the crowd is cheering, and, yeah, there’s a solid chance I’ll lose that bet; but there is a weirdly exhilarating sensation to it all. And I have no idea how this will turn out, but I will write the shit out of every single thing that happens in the meantime.

And the writing. You guys have no idea, but you’re only just getting the very thinnest, smallest amount of output from me, because I have other stuff I have to do to stay healthy and solve day-to-day problems, but, this started as a sort-of hobby to help me work through it all. Now, there just aren’t enough hours in the day to get it all down. And I’m still not getting all this down in a comprehensible form - this is, by my standards, extremely unpolished and weird. And there’s a chance nothing at all will come to this, but, I will say this, reader - and I’ve already expressed this sort of sentiment elsewhere - but there is a bizarre, hilarious, marvelous, stupid, crazy, frightening story inside of me, and I can’t wait to figure it out. And I’ve said it before, but you have one in you, too.

The one great unifying factor to all human expression is that it doesn’t really discriminate, and we can all do it, with a few basic classes. People like Georgia O’Keefe, or Dickens, or Michelangelo didn’t accomplish what they did because they were paid, or because they wanted to - they did because they couldn’t stop. When they saw what was inside of them - what’s inside every single human being on the planet, really - they had to find out how deep that well went. It sucks that I don’t get to plan and scheme like a normal person, I’ll admit it. And it sucks that there are probably entire segments of the human experience that won’t be available to me, but, at the same time, I have absolutely no doubt that, should those things become important, I’ll be able to figure them out. And yeah, if I die in the next year or so, it’ll suck - believe me, it’ll suck - but the greater tragedy of my life, in retrospect, is that it took me this long to know I’m capable of that. Maybe. We’ll see. In six months.

Oh, before I forget; I did get up at 4 am to see the Blood Moon. And at 5:30 am. That wasn’t terribly intentional, but I figured I’d finish up the Temodar in a special way. Hopefully I’ll sleep somewhat-normally tonight, although I’m still on radiation. The radiation side-effects are unpleasant, but I’ll miss seeing the radiation folks. That’s kind of an odd admission, considering that my life should improve (eventually, anyway) once I rotate out of that, but they’re all sweethearts, and it does kind of help to have a set of friendly, consistent faces who’ll take song requests. Still, I’ll be only too happy to see the end of that wretched mask; I’m considering blowing it up with some sort of illegal fireworks or something. I’m taking suggestions on that one.

ANYWAY... WEIGHT: 221 lb. CONCENTRATION: Decent. I’m still completing complex tasks and stuff, but, as you’ve seen in this piece, I’m a little distracted and somewhat scatter-shot. I’m not focused at the moment, but I’m also exhausted and I’ve been running around a lot. APPETITE: Excellent. ACTIVITY LEVEL: Great, considering I didn’t get much sl SLEEP QUALITY: Excellent, but I’m still not getting enough sleep. COORDINATION/DEXTERITY: Not bad. Left hand’s having a tough time at the moment, but I think that might be more a result of pulling something in my arm than any neurological problems. PHYSICAL: Not too bad. I still have a low-grade suture head-ache but nothing that can’t be overcome with lots of Tylenol. And no temodar hang-over this morning, because I was up all night downing water and watching the moon. SIDE EFFECTS: Nothing new in this area. I have all the same problems I did a week ago, for the most part, but, sometimes the best you can ask when you have a disease, is that things don’t get worse. I mean, I have greater ambitions than very-slowly sort of imploding, but the current situation seems more of a three-steps-forward-two-steps back than a major backslide. But I could be wrong; neurological degradation is subtle; I do keep these records as a way to verify symptoms or progress.

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