“I even enjoyed watching him in A Love to Kill although not too many were happy about the drama.”

I don’t think the director and writer were on the same page. But, for its flaws, there’s a insular power that, taken on its admittedly contrived terms, throbs with a gorgeous, immersive fatalism that draws oblique poetry from tethered bondage. If MiSa is a 16-episode miasma about being in love and wanting love, A Love to Kill is a 16-episode grope about happiness and freedom, forgiveness and release.

A Love To Kill is directed like a noir romance. In fact, the first few episodes reminded me a little of Won Kar Wai’s “Fallen Angels” in that the direction evoked a urban existence where everybody and everything was squeezed into a tiny space, and where in this cramped loneliness, oversized celebrity images and mad lovers running into traffic seemed perfectly of the elements. Many of the seduction and romantic scenes were done in tunnels, stairways, darkly lit streets, in the shadows of private conversation and obscure looks, conveying all things purgatorial in a lonesome crowded city. Then occasionally, you had brief lapses of nature, of happiness, to make the lucre more filthy. All devices of noir.

BUT A Love To Kill is written like a gothic melodrama. The show is obsessed with death from the start, with the claustrophobia of eternal burden. The story is laid out like a revenge drama, but from the beginning, the real subjects are emotional exhaustion and spiritual oblivion. But the script is trying to express a madness through its cycles of deep, suffocated longing, and merely the revenge is there to structure that process into narrative.

I thought Rain was wonderful in the scenes with his character’s brother. As an actor, he is at his best when he brings out his inner child. Here it comes out in all forms of private anguish, and in turn it creates a portrayal of a man (and then a man and a woman) who is in way, way over his head. Who, in choosing revenge, unwittingly chooses a private hell that thoroughly brings him to his knees, such that he almost beseeches the void (or his brother) to save him from the psychic toll of his own perfect revenge. Love incarnates as hectoring guilt and it forces him to develop a guilty conscience that he cannot live with. Rain hits all those things with a unnerving intensity. While watching it, I felt that his character was too young to handle this much pain. I rarely emphasize that way in a Korean melodrama.

I also think asking Rain to be tough/macho in a show is like asking Yoon Eun Hye to be an alpha bitch. Both can do it well enough, because there’s plenty of examples and both are gifted with physical charisma. But it’s all external stuff: mannerisms, posturing, tics, struts, etc. There’s no real origin of threat coming from their performances. When the writing centers on his melancholy, moodiness, and “look at me!” sweetness, then his emotions seem internal and his connection with the audience is gold.

Having seen also Sang Doo, A Love to Kill (I liked this the most) and I’m a Cyborg, I can say that he is a pretty decent actor. I hope for him to do more k-dramas and American movies (because American movies have the most distribution worldwide). He, Lee Byun Hun and other talented Korean actors should be recognized and known outside of Asia.

Haven’t seen any of his movies but watched all his dramas and I like Sangdo the best FH has definitely raised him into stardom, infact it’s bikyo combo in FH that has raised the couple into stardom, they complimented each other so well, without each, the show might not be as popular.

His humble experience in early life is indeed very touching… what a determined guy. The last time I showed my friend the picture of Rain in Ninja Turtle, we realized that our Rain is not a young boy anymore. Rain, Fighting!

Oh just remember… October is just a stone throw away…, can’t wait to watch LBH’s comback drama