does diet Coke work too? I dislike the overly sugary flav of regular coke…

@having triplets for older sisters means:
you will have hand -me -down x 3 ( that’s nice….. sarcastically)
every friends of your parents automatically ask you if you’re the 4th triplets (uh???)(I’m not making this up), and the best of all,
you just have to remember ONE birthday date for 3 of your siblings
(We’re actually very close, and we talk almost daily )

Your space odyssey will have to wait.
LDH’s definitely in this one…just not in the first trailer.

Two more months to go!!!!

no doubt. reminds me a bit of my binnie and kjh in space / slavers western in space fusion sageuk-y kind of drama, without the space bit, or binnie, or kjh, or lee dahae or nam sang mi. but other than that… lol.

=)

Wow, triplets?! I don’t have any sisters, so I can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like to have three that are the same age.

Doing better with the cold. Luckily, it’s your standard head cold which isn’t putting me too out of commission except for that fact that I’m completely exhausted.

But guess what perked me right up?
(@ Samsooki – Avatar looks great…but take a look at this)

http://www.kbs.co.kr/drama/chuno/hunting/index.html
or
mms://vodt.kbs.co.kr/event/2tv/dra_chuno/prev/prev00-01_h.wmv

If I still had my voice, you’d be able to hear my fangirly screams.

“It really feels like the show was shot on a soundstage, and that was intentional.”

And there you have it, I went in with the wrong approach and judged and appreciated CS on an incorrect platform. As piece where four good actors dressed up, played their roles and interacted, CS was good, and all of the most enjoyable scenes were the one-on-one dialogues between each of the four leads in various pairings. The politics, the spys, the grander scale of history – CS is an abysmal failure – but then it’s not, because it doesn’t aspire to deliver that to begin with.

As for Princess Pearl – I’ve made a concerted effort to erase that theme song, as well as all story lines and theme songs from Chuong Yao novels turned dramas from my mind. In retrospect, it doesn’t stand the test of time. The Bund, and other classic TVB dramas, it stands the test of time.

@ cingdoc

You really should watch B&W. It’s really that good.

Me too. My mum has a few hundred dramas at home, and they are ALL historical dramas. The theme song to Princess Pearl always reminds me of dinner, because we always watched it on TV during dinnertime. Ho-oah-oahoah-hoooo!!!!!!

I love watching daehas. Fashion 70s is kind in tweener status for me. On one hand, yes, I treat it as a daeha. But I still process it like a SBS Blockbuster Melo-Drama, which means I expect certain things like childhood love story (check), amnesia plot (check), rich guys (check), poor girls (check), villain moms (check), and terminal disease (nope but then again . . . ) The formula is all there, and well I DID like Stairway to Heaven, you know. (Piano on the beach FTW.) Now, where I do love F70s is that each of the four characters can be watched as a fractured aspect of SK after the war. Watched that way, the SBS Melo Formula, then, becomes merely the choreography for how the psyche opens up to us. Roman God Joo Jin Mo’s character represents moral justicie and political hopefulness coming out of the war. How his character eventually fails to save one of the other characters represents that even good intentions couldn’t save everybody. Lee Yo Won’s character presents the rise of the proletariat, and how eventually social progress would come, not from the social elite, but the people, who would also reconcile traditional values with the future. The future is with the people. Chun Jung Myung’s character represents the generational gap; he partially represents the “lost” of is generation. Finally, Kim Min Jung represents both the anachronistic status of the social elite coming out of the war (her character represents one concept of progress or forward thought, the notion that progress will come from the West, whereas Lee Yo Won’s character represents the notion that true progress will come from the working class), as well as the traumatic scars that, even with a new identity and social advantages, cannot stay hidden. Now, the thing about this drama is that the relationships in that show follow the Melo-Formula, but they also inform and reinforce the thematic strata of each character. It works marvelously together until about the last 1/3 of the show, which eventually succumbed to the complciatiosn of live-shoot extensions.

But, yeah, all daehas need a helicopter scene. *swoon*

“I can only say, Capital Scandal was not epic-enough at the end of the day, does that make sense? ”

That definitely makes sense. And that is the “does it work?” litmus test with Capital Scandal. CS is really meant to be a kind of comedy. Cheeky, cartoony, a lil bit of screwball, a lil bit of “good looking people dressing up to the nines”, with a little bit of history all in there. It really feels like the show was shot on a soundstage, and that was intentional. In turn, the vet leads mostly acted as such.

The story was based on a different novel from the author of Coffee Prince. In that sense, the story is first a romance, then a who-dun-it, THEN about the history of its time. In other words, it’s still a small story.

Kang Ji Hwan is meant to act Big. He can do subtlety great (such as HGD, where really most of his acting was in bringing out the emotional tenor of his partners), but his underlying strength is his ability to act in space and use his voice to project his character. Capital Scandal really enabled him to show that off.

I guess it’s the same thing with Gong Yoo and Coffee Prince. Classic GY is really something like his characters opposite Kim Sun Ah, or Hello My Teacher opposite his friend Gong Hyo Jin. Coffee Prince was Gong Yoo really, really dialed down.

Thanks for your take on CS – always interested in your takeaway from a drama, especially when it provides a counter-point. My review above was actually quite terribly written – I had a really hard time critiquing CS because (1) I didn’t finish it, and (2) I still can’t quite put my finger on why the drama does not appeal to me/tug at my heart strings, when its plot and setup is like catnip to me (I LOVE period pieces, grew up on them from Taiwan/HK dramas).

Han Go Eun’s character was my favorite, and she was wonderful as Cha Song-ja. I only compared it to the only other k-drama daeha I’ve watched, Fashion 70′s, which is like comparing oranges with tangerines, kinda in the same family, but still a different fruit.

I can only say, Capital Scandal was not epic-enough at the end of the day, does that make sense? As I was thinking about how to respond to your posting, it suddenly occured to me what I unconsciously founding lacking in CS.

For a period piece about fighting the Japanese occupation – Capital Scandal was no The Bund, 1980 version. And that’s the platinum standard for me. The Bund, a TVBS production from Hong Kong, was THE drama that catapulted Chow Young Fat on his way to Asian superstardom. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the last episode of The Bund, the airing pretty much emptied out the streets of HK that night. And the ending is STILL the best, most awesomely impressive and gloriously *I can’t believe this happened* ending in all the dramas I have ever seen.

It’s unfair to compare, I know, but I did it without realizing, and so CS bored me with its silly Japanese imperialists and the political/nationalist struggle that was so micro-scripted, though I love the cheekiness of the beginning eps, but the later angst and the turmoil, it was a little too grade school for me in its simplicity.

See a young, young, handsome Chow Young Fat below, with the iconic theme song from The Bund. All remakes have stunk to high heaven. There is, and ever will be, one Xu Wen Qiang (one of the coolest characters ever written), and that was CYF with his iconic three-piece suit, fedora, coat and scarf.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbsFDc_gTC0&feature=related