Saturday, October 23, 2021

Jirisan

Jirisan
16 90+ minute episodes
Saturdays and Sundays starting on October 23, 2021
with Gianna Jun and Ju Ji-Hoon
tags: action, drama, fantasy, folklore, Korean, mystery, supernatural

Jirisan is a Korean action drama series about mountain rangers at Jiri Mountain National Park. Seo Yi-Gang (Gianna Jun) is the best ranger who knows virtually everything about the area at Jiri Mountain National Park including where to climb the mountain. Kang Hyun-Jo (Ju Ji-Hoon) is a rookie ranger who graduated from the military academy and was once an army captain. They become partners in rescuing hikers who get lost around Jiri Mountain National Park.
I've seen the first episode and I loved it already including the OST by Jin of BTS. This is high-octane action drama with superb cinematography, even the CGI, and top-notch cast. Clairvoyant newbie Kang Hyun-Jo isn't given time to change clothes nor brief orientation and dives right into action. 

Friday, September 24, 2021

The Great British Baking Show


The 9th season of Great British Baking Show's first episode started streaming today with new bakers. Something to look forward to on Fridays. The show opened with the judges and hosts wearing tacky Billy Ray Cyrus mullet wigs and singing their baking version of Achy Breaky Heart. Prue is even wearing moustache and cowboy hat. So. Much. Cheese. I like it.


You can have your fun
Make brownies by the ton
You can fill your donuts up with jam
You can ice your bun
And then when you are done
You can load your quiche with cheese and ham
You can do a choux
And then whip up a roux
Then produce a few nice cookies you can chew
You can sit and watch the muffins rise
You can make a cream puff and some pies
But don't bake my tart
My flaky pastry tart
I just don't think you understand
You'll over bake my tart
And that will break my heart
And then you'll never shake my hand...

My favorite baketestants so far are the funny Lizzie and the pretty Crystelle. I don't care if they are not the best bakers in the first episode. Lizzie and Crystelle have bright sunny personality and I hope they don't get eliminated quickly. Not only do Lizzie and Noel have matching pink smiley clothing, they have matching sense of humor and are very entertaining together.

Noel and Lizzie wearing matching clothes with pink smiley design

Thursday, September 23, 2021

Jaguar

Jaguar
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
6 episodes
tags: 1960s, action, Nazi survivors, Netflix streaming, revenge, Spanish series, thriller

From IMDB

In the 1960s, Spain became a home to hundreds of survivors of the Mauthausen camp. Isabel, a young Spanish woman, is one of them. She is looking for Skorzeny, Europe's most dangerous man, but she is not alone.

Jaguar is a highly entertaining and binge worthy 6 episodes European Spanish thriller series set in the 1960s about a group of Nazi survivors trying to capture, shame, and punish Nazis sneaking into Spain and other European cities. The lead female actress Blanca Suarez as the title character Jaguar is enough reason for me to watch when the series started streaming yesterday. I first saw Blanca when she was just 18 years old together with Ana de Armas who was 19 in the 2007 Spanish melodrama El Internado. 

Highly recommended. Watch in European Spanish with English subtitles.

Monday, September 20, 2021

My Favorite Korean Dramas 2021

South Korean dramas last year and this year created several family oriented and clean fun with very little romance or none at all. They are currently the favorites of viewers from around the globe, not just South Korea. I made a short list of my favorites so far and 2 are family friendly. All the series were broadcast in 2021.

Netflix streaming
16 episodes, 60 - 65 minutes

My number 1 favorite drama is family and friends oriented, funny, has well developed characters, there are no lingering and annoying villains, the very young and very old people become close friends and are almost equally represented. A heart warming dramedy with plenty of humor and cheese [but in a good way]. The badminton games are surprisingly enjoyable and exciting as though the competitions are real. All the actors are excellent specially the teen boys and girls. I will surely binge watch the series again.

even when the much-awaited wi-fi was finally working at the house, the racket boys and girls prefer to hang out at neighbor grandma's house to enjoy her company and yummy food

2. Move To Heaven
Streaming on Netflix
10 Episodes

Based on the writings of a real person who cleaned up what the deceased left behind, excellent script and character development, great story telling, superb acting, no boring romance. Each story will probably make you cry, make sure there's a box of tissues nearby.
Geu-Ru is a 20 year old young man with Asperger's syndrome. He works in his father’s company, Move To Heaven, sorting out items left by the deceased. One day, Geu-Ru's own father dies and he is left alone but his father left a will assigning an unknown "uncle" Sang-Gu to be Geu-Ru's guardian. Sang-Gu is a bitter and cold man, a former martial artist who fought in underground matches. He went to prison because of a tragic incident during one of his fights. They run Move To Heaven together with the help of a teenage female friend and neighbor of Geu-Ru.

3. Hospital Playlist Season 2
streaming on Netflix
12 episodes, 80 - 90 minutes

I am not a fan of hospital dramas but this one is different. It is also about friendship, a little romantic relationships, and family. The "band" sings at end of each episode. It's an ongoing joke that the lone female doctor always sings out of tune and is hopeless.
"Wise Doctor Life" depicts the stories of doctors, nurses, and patients at a hospital. 5 doctors all entered the same medical university in 1999. They are friends since and now work together in the same hospital.


Sunday, September 5, 2021

Closet Disco Queen

I've never heard of this group. The name of the band Closet Disco Queen joined by another band with a cute "cheesy" name The Flying Raclette plus the title of their new album, Omelette du Fromage, made me look, listen, and download from Freegal music. Not bad; I like.

Monday, August 30, 2021

Shutter Island














tags: mystery, psychological thriller
⭐⭐⭐⭐

From GoodReads
The year is 1954. U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his new partner, Chuck Aule, have come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, to investigate the disappearance of a patient.
Multiple murderess Rachel Solando is loose somewhere on this remote and barren island, despite having been kept in a locked cell under constant surveillance. As a killer hurricane relentlessly bears down on them, a strange case takes on even darker, more sinister shades—with hints of radical experimentation, horrifying surgeries, and lethal countermoves made in the cause of a covert shadow war. No one is going to escape Shutter Island unscathed, because nothing at Ashecliffe Hospital is what it seems. But then neither is Teddy Daniels.
I've heard of this book more than 10 years ago but never had the interest to read maybe because it was made into a movie with the trio I really dislike - director Scorsese and actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo and the movie sort of sullied the book for me. These 3 are the Hollywood people whose movies I avoid the most. Scorsese to me is an overrated director; DiCaprio acts the same way in all of his movies, and Ruffalo is a loud mouth Hollyweird personality with no talent whatsoever. But I digress. This post is about the book. Sorry. 😔

Although I have suspected who Teddy really is from the clues left by the missing inmate and when he finds and has a conversation with her in a cave, it is still a great psychological thriller and it kept me guessing the whos and whys up to the end. The ending has all the answers although Teddy's fate is a bit vague and it is up to the readers to draw their own conclusion. 

  

Sunday, August 29, 2021

He's All That

tags: Netflix streaming, teen romance
91 minutes
⭐⭐⭐⭐

He's All That is a teen romantic comedy movie which is a gender-swapped remake of the 1999 movie She's All That. Rachael Leigh Cook who starred in the original movie plays the mother of the main character, Padgett Sawyer, a high schooler.

Padgett earns lots of money with her status as a popular social media influencer. She is able to save money for college and helps her mom with household expenses. She gets humiliated on live video finding her boyfriend with another girl, losing many followers and beauty product endorsement earnings. She vows to get her influencer status back mainly for her college funds and makes a bet with her friends that she will makeover an unsuspecting boy in school because she is the so-called queen of makeovers. The 3 girls choose a loner boy who doesn't follow the trend in school. He has only 2 friends, his younger sister and a girl who is of Indian descent. The boy, Cameron, is not ugly, he is just not stylish and is a magnet to taunting by schoolmates because he doesn't socialize with them. Cameron is an amateur photographer who never shows his photos to anyone, works as a stable hand in the morning before going to school. He loves Kurosawa films which is a huge plus in my book.  

I was not interested to see it at first but then I read the nasty comments about the main actress's lack of acting chops and experience because in real life she got famous for being a social media darling. These people, I find, are just jealous. IMHO the movie is better, yes, better than the original. The script as expected is clichéd but acting is good. I liked it.

Don't listen to the negative comments and watch this updated remake with the same theme as Pygmalion, My Fair Lady, etc.


Tuesday, August 24, 2021

Squid Game

 
tags: gory, horror, Korean drama, Netflix streaming, violent 
Episode 1 streams on Sept 17, 2021

Similar to horror books and movies Battle Royale, As The Gods Will, The Hunger Games, The Circle, Liar Game, etc, is a new gory drama series from Korea based on a children's game. Can't wait to see it.

Sunday, August 22, 2021

Bullet Train














tags: bullet train, Japanese, Shinkansen, thriller
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

from GoodReads
Nanao, nicknamed Lady Bird—the self-proclaimed “unluckiest assassin in the world”—boards a bullet train from Tokyo to Morioka with one simple task: grab a suitcase and get off at the next stop. Unbeknownst to him, the deadly duo Tangerine and Lemon are also after the very same suitcase—and they are not the only dangerous passengers onboard. Satoshi, “the Prince,” with the looks of an innocent schoolboy and the mind of a viciously cunning psychopath, is also in the mix and has history with some of the others. Risk fuels him as does a good philosophical debate . . . like, is killing really wrong? Chasing the Prince is another assassin with a score to settle for the time the Prince casually pushed a young boy off of a roof, leaving him comatose.

When the five assassins discover they are all on the same train, they realize their missions are not as unrelated as they first appear.

A massive bestseller in Japan, Bullet Train is an original and propulsive thriller that fizzes with an incredible energy and surprising humor as its complex net of double-crosses and twists unwind. Award-winning author Kotaro Isaka takes readers on a tension packed journey as the bullet train hurtles toward its final destination. Who will make it off the train alive—and what awaits them at the last stop?
Can I give this novel 10 stars out of 5? Yes I can. I enjoyed the book very much and it is like reading a Takashi Miike movie script on steroid. 3 professional hired killers, 1 vengeful dad, and 1 demented bad seed teenager aboard the Shinkansen (Japanese bullet train) have different reasons for being on the train. The synopsis from GoodReads and pretty much from other booksellers is far from accurate. Only the 3 assassins have connections to each other. The dad and the brat have their own story but get to meet the other 3 people and several passengers who may or may not be connected to them.

- Nanao, the black-framed eyeglass wearing hired killer called Ladybug, in my version of the novel, is assigned to steal a suitcase filled with money, then get off the next stop. How hard could it be? Nanao finds it's rather complicated. 

- The twin fruit assassins Lemon and Tangerine brought the suitcase onboard which they have recovered after successfully rescuing the kidnapped son of a much feared underworld boss. They are to deliver both to someone at the last train stop.

- Kimura, a former hitman and a recovering alcoholic, armed with a handgun is on board to kill the teenage boy, the Prince, who pushed his son off the roof of a building and the son is now in a coma.

- the Prince is a demented 14 year old androgynous boy who looks innocent but is manipulative and deadly, and has an obsession with killing. His reason is to taunt Kimura.

What could go wrong? Heaps with a capital H. A tale that is twisty turn-y, full of humor and philosophical musings, thrilling, unpredictable. The novel is hard to put down once you start reading.

Highly recommended. EBook is available to borrow from Hoopla.

***********************************************************************************

I read that the original title is MariabÄ«toru (Maria Beetle) published in 2010 and is now being made into a Hollywood movie. 🙄🙄🙄 Oh please, avoid the movie which I predict will change the story to make it one of, if not the worst, movie adaptations ever. IMHO, everything Hollywood touches becomes garbage.

A Rant: People who have read the book compare it to Tarantino movies but I beg to disagree. Obviously they haven't watched a single Takashi Miike movie. Tarantino is a talentless moviemaker who steals ALL his ideas from other movies specially from Japan, Hong Kong, other Asian countries, and a few from Scandinavian countries too. Tarantino is one big poseur and a FRAUD.
   

Wednesday, August 18, 2021

Hue And Cry














tags: classics, mystery
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

from GoodReads
In six months, Marion “Mally” Lee will wed the dashing Roger Mooring and become mistress of Curston, his family estate. Determined to enjoy her freedom before she becomes a married woman, Mally impulsively accepts a position as governess to the young daughter of a shipping magnate.
 
But when she arrives at the Peterson townhouse in London, Mally has the strangest urge to flee. Sir George Peterson, whose wife left him for an itinerant artist, is an enigma. His sister, Lena Craddock, is nice enough, but Mally’s young charge, Barbara, hates Lena’s nephew, Paul, with a passion. When Mally is suddenly branded a thief and spy after valuable papers and a priceless diamond pendant disappear, she does the only thing she can: run away.
 
With her fiancé believing the worst of her and private investigators hot on her trail, Mally goes on the lam, feeling like a fugitive from justice. But she’s stumbled upon a dangerous criminal conspiracy led by men desperate to get back the missing documents before a critical encrypted message is decoded.
The stand alone novel was written by Patricia Wentworth in 1927, a year before she created Miss Maud Silver. The tone and style is a tad different from Miss Silver books although the author's favorite word "frightful" is scattered all over the novel. It is a short but amusing and delightful novel. 
 
Some readers find Mally a frustrating character and I agree a little bit, but I do like her a lot. She is one of the funniest young female characters I have read. She is hardly meek, always speaks her mind, and does whatever she wants. Her scary but funny adventure dodging her pursuers, real and imagined, made me smile and it leads her to the truth and finding love. The man she chooses is not her handsome and debonair fiancé but a young man that she describes as hulking and ugly.

Highly recommended.