What the ever-lovin’ reindeer feculence? I get home from my overnight trans-earthian sleigh odyssey, settle back with my hard-earned fifths of whiskey to read up on what I’ve missed in dramaland, and find that they’ve finished the year-end reviews without me? This is an outrage! I know who’s getting their presents revoked this year! Goddamn naughty candy cane stuffers. How could those glumdrops possibly consider a year complete without my gleaming snowballs of wisdom? They can shut me out, but they can’t shut me up! I will be heard, even if I have to bribe my hacker elf and actually watch some dramas to do it.

Here’s the Year-End Review you’ve REALLY been waiting for… *Hic!*

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Read the rest of Santa Strikes Back! [Year In Review, Part 6] (676 words)

© Santa Claus for Dramabeans, 2011. | Permalink | 100 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 49 Days, Athena, Baby-Faced Beauty, Best Love, Birdie Buddy, Can You Hear My Heart, Can't Lose, City Hunter, Crime Squad, Dream High, featured, Girl K, High Kick: Counterattack of the Short Legs, I Need Romance, Lie To Me, Man of Honor, Manny, Me Too Flower, My Princess, Myung-wol the Spy, Paradise Ranch, Poseidon, President, Protect the Boss, Royal Family, Scent of a Woman, Sign, The Duo, The Musical, The Princess's Man, Thorn Birds, Tree With Deep Roots, Vampire Prosecutor, Warrior Baek Dong-soo, What's Up, You've Fallen For Me

Part 5 is here!

As in past years, we here at Dramabeans owe huge thanks to guest bloggers — thank you, kaedejun and Dahee Fanel! — for participating in the review series, as well as HeadsNo2 for contributing to our Picks. You guys are awesome and make this time of year extra-special, providing lots of good stuff to read, think on, and, yes, sometimes disagree with. It wouldn’t be as invigorating without a little friendly debate, would it? We’d also like to extend our gratitude to thundie, who was a key part of our selection crew in voting for our Picks below. Much love to all of the reviewers, as well as everyone reading.

On to the Picks!

SONG OF THE DAY

Dear Cloud – “반짝이는 밤, 메리 크리스마” (Twinkling Night, Merry Christmas)
[ Download ]

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Read the rest of 2011 Editors’ Picks [Year In Review, Part 5] (4,602 words)

© javabeans for Dramabeans, 2011. | Permalink | 375 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Athena, Best Love, City Hunter, featured, Flower Boy Ramyun Shop, Girl K, Lie To Me, Me Too Flower, Miss Ripley, Paradise Ranch, Scent of a Woman, The Princess's Man, Thousand Day Promise, Warrior Baek Dong-soo, year in review

 
Wow, another year of dramas, come and gone. Where does the sanity go? I decided that for this year’s review, I would learn to be impartial and precise, and give systematic mathematical ratings for every show. Because numbers are fun. But then, I found that trying to rate a year’s worth of dramas was a lot like comparing apples and oranges and giraffes. It made my brain hurt and then I was all sleepy. So I did what anyone would do. I built a machine to do it for me.

Meet… the DramaMeter (patent pending): a highly scientific, totally foolproof system of computation, fine-tuned to measure any drama in any circumstance. It uses complex algorithms, longitudinal matrices, and other mathy things, to calculate a drama’s rating with exact precision, every time, without fail. I know. It’s likely to blow your mind. So without further ado, the dramas of 2011:

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Read the rest of The DramaMeter: highly scientific and foolproof [Year in Review, Part 4] (8,317 words)

© girlfriday for Dramabeans, 2011. | Permalink | 181 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Best Love, Can't Lose, City Hunter, Dream High, featured, Flower Boy Ramyun Shop, Girl K, High Kick: Counterattack of the Short Legs, I Need Romance, Lie To Me, Man of Honor, Miss Ripley, My Princess, Myung-wol the Spy, Scent of a Woman, Thousand Day Promise, Vampire Prosecutor, Warrior Baek Dong-soo, year in review, You've Fallen For Me

First off, I have to deeply thank – and bow to – Javabeans and Girlfriday - it’s an honor to be included with the most respected K-drama writers for this year. Compared to these fine people, I am an utter noob.

Speaking of being such a noob, I shall now complain: It’s so hard to write a year-end review! It requires going back to all the dramas I have seen in the past year and then come up with something intelligent to say about them. Can’t I just say, “Me Likey!” “Me No Likey?” and be done with it? No? (I can feel the death glares coming from Javabeans and Girlfriday right now…*SQUEAK*)

OK – I’ll start in chronological order, because I have no other way to do it. This year, I became a truly picky watcher. I have not watched a lot of dramas this year because I don’t just consume everything and anything like I used to. This time, if I don’t like a drama, I stop watching it, rather than painfully suffer to the end. I was vicious with the chopping block – with Lie To Me, Queen of Reversals, A Thousand Days’ Promise, Greatest Love, Spy Myung Wol, and even The Princess’ Man suffering the sad fate. (Although I may resuscitate The Princess’ Man for the winter break, it won’t make it to this year-end review.)

Here goes!

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Read the rest of The Good, The Bad, and The Hmmm… of 2011 [Year In Review, Part 2] (6,090 words)

© kaedejun for Dramabeans, 2011. | Permalink | 254 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 49 Days, Athena, Best Love, Birdie Buddy, featured, I Need Romance, Myung-wol the Spy, Paradise Ranch, Romance Town, Sign, The Musical, Tree With Deep Roots, Vampire Prosecutor, year in review, You've Fallen For Me

Time for another Year In Review series! How did a year pass by so quickly? I guess when you’re busy watching dramas, time flies.

This is my fifth year (eek) doing this series, which means you basically know the drill by now. (You can refer to the year-ender tag to catch up on past posts.) You had a chance to vote for your favorites of 2011, and now it’s our turn to weigh in on the dramas we’ve seen.

This year I’ve tacked on a little stickymeter to my reviews, based on the discussion girlfriday and I had in our last podcast about “drama stickiness.” Which is to say, regardless of a drama’s quality, how much of an impression does it leave three, six, twelve months down the line?

As in past years, you’ll notice I didn’t watch every series that aired this year, despite my best attempts to swap sleep for dramas. Also, I’m not reviewing shows that I haven’t seen fully (with the exception of those that are still airing). However, looking over the series that’ll be covered in the upcoming Parts 2 through 5 of the review series, I can assure you that we’ve got a pretty good spread covered, so please keep an eye out for the posts to come.

SONG OF THE DAY

Me Too, Flower OST – “Sunset Street” [ Download ]

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Read the rest of Measuring 2011 on the Sticky Scale [Year In Review, Part 1] (9,317 words)

© javabeans for Dramabeans, 2011. | Permalink | 199 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 49 Days, Baby-Faced Beauty, Best Love, Can't Lose, City Hunter, Dream High, featured, Flower Boy Ramyun Shop, Girl K, High Kick: Counterattack of the Short Legs, Lie To Me, Manny, Me Too Flower, Miss Ripley, My Princess, Myung-wol the Spy, Poseidon, Scent of a Woman, The Princess's Man, Thousand Day Promise, Tree With Deep Roots, Vampire Prosecutor, year in review

They had me at pig rabbit…or wait…was it the rabbit pig? The hybrid lovechild doll born out of Tae Kyung (Jang Geun-Seok) and Mi-Nam’s (Park Shin-Hye) puppy love in the hit drama You’re Beautiful had me looking at the Hong Sisters in a fresh new light.

It was just this past winter when I was first introduced to their sweet and often zany sense of humor while watching My Girl, starring Lee Dong-Wook and Lee Da-hae, while laid up in bed with a cold for 3 days. Although I thought the rom-com to be cute, sassy and funny, it wasn’t until You’re Beautiful and My Girlfriend Is a Gumiho that I was hooked…line and sinker. I mean come on, how could one not be hooked after Shin Mina’s first outburst of Woong-ahh~!

With the recent completion of their latest MBC hit drama, Best Love, it seems as though the sisters have done it again. The adorable paring of Dokko Jin and Dding-dong will forever remain on my list as one of the best couples Hong sisters have ever created. Even with Best Love now over, the viewers are still riding the aftermath of the “Dokko wave” and don’t seem to want to let go of the drama. The ever-busy Hong sisters sat down for an interview to speak about their latest mega hit, and what other projects they may up their sleeve for the future to keep feeding our addiction for the dramas we just can’t seem to get enough of…so let’s get started!

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Read the rest of Fabulous Hong sisters sit down for an interview (823 words)

© sassychef for Dramabeans, 2011. | Permalink | 68 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Best Love, Cha Seung-won, Gong Hyo-jin, Hong sisters, interviews, Yoon Kye-sang

The “Perfect Man” is back! For an interview, that is… The dynamic actor, who portrays the sweet and perfect Yoon Pil-Joo (Best Love) and the mysterious Poongsan (Poongsan, formerly Phungsan Dog) who crosses the dangerous border between the North and South Korea as a courier for hire, is the one and only Yoon Kye-Sang (Who Are You?, The Moonlight of Seoul, Best Love), who seems pretty darn close to perfect to me.

In an interview conducted by Money Today Star News back on June 14th, just as Best Love was heading to its finish, the star revealed answers to the many questions his fans wanted to know.

On one side we have an oriental medicine doctor who suffers from an unrequited love for Gu Ae-jung (Gong Hyo-Jin), a celeb who’s seen better days of her fame on the ever popular twice-weekly MBC drama, Best Love. On the flip side, there’s the dark and gritty film about a man that barely ever utters a word as he crosses North and South Korea’s dangerous borders as a courier. If Yoon Pil-joo is the perfect man within a fantasy, then Poongsan is the rough masculine manly man…you can say that Yoon Kye-sang is the perfect blend of both. So let’s dig a little deeper to see what Team Pil-joo’s Yoon Kye-sang is made of!

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Read the rest of Yoon Kye-sang: “Wishing love for everyone…crushes are heartbreaking!” (1,059 words)

© sassychef for Dramabeans, 2011. | Permalink | 67 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Best Love, interviews, Yoon Kye-sang

Podcast #7 is here! Warning: Will be long and meandering.

Also, drunk.

We recorded this podcast (of which there will be three parts) in one monstrously long session, intending to post it in its entirety. The better to monitor the progression of drunkenness, and all that! However, upon listening to our out-of-control rambling, we’ve decided to break it up into parts, since even we think we’re better in smaller doses. Stay tuned for Parts 2 and 3 soon!

 
Podcast #7, Part 1:

Total running time: 38:03

In which javabeans and girlfriday discuss:

• May Madness dramas, the first of which is Baby-Faced Beauty;
• then move on to Lie To Me (9:55);
• with a tangent on epic K-pop music videos (19:45);
• ending with Best Love (27:45).

[ Download Podcast 7, Part 1 ]

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Read the rest of Dramabeans Podcast #7, Part 1 (70 words)

© javabeans for Dramabeans, 2011. | Permalink | 143 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Baby-Faced Beauty, Best Love, featured, Lie To Me

It’s over! Did Best Love topple my long-standing No. 1 from the top of my personal Hong Sisters favorites list? Maybe not, but it did give the list a pretty decent shakeup.

As a straight-up episode, this one was admittedly light on drama — but as an epilogue, it’s one of the better ones I’ve seen in a while. (Coffee Prince will forever be a big ol’ letdown, falling flat in its final hour thanks to that unnecessary extension, while Boys Before Flowers also ranks high for awkward fast-forward jumps.) And it’s definitely one of the better Hong sisters epilogues, given that they usually make the couple angst through the end, giving them about ten minutes of happy at the end. I’ll take an hour of hugs, kisses, and declarations of love over that any day.

SONG OF THE DAY

4men – “수수께끼” (Riddle) [ Download ]

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Read the rest of Best Love: Episode 16 (Final) (4,492 words)

© javabeans for Dramabeans, 2011. | Permalink | 265 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Best Love, Cha Seung-won, featured, Gong Hyo-jin, Yoo Inna, Yoon Kye-sang

The bad news: there’s a time jump, sapping all the dramatic tension out of the surgery. Boo. The good news: still cute as ever, of course. Because I suppose in the end, it was never about whether he lives or dies, but how their love will survive in the real world. It just feels a little ass-backwards, in the whole gain-momentum-towards-the-finish-line school of thought, because last week was the height of drama, and now we’re back down to Earth. I feel like someone reshuffled the order of the episodes on me, when I wasn’t looking. Are you Episode 12, masquerading as 15? You know I’m terrible at math.

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Read the rest of Best Love: Episode 15 (3,778 words)

© girlfriday for Dramabeans, 2011. | Permalink | 182 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Best Love, Cha Seung-won, featured, Gong Hyo-jin, Yoo Inna, Yoon Kye-sang