RECIPE FOR LOVE (Ep. 43-44) The show is continues to stumble to the end. This week continues the morass trend of the characters falling a part. The bickering OTP is tackless and childish. Grandpa Yang now has cancer that he hides from his family. Grandpa Gong is bait to catch his psycho kidnapper. Yang learns the councilman is in bed with developer Taehan who want to bulldoze his market.
THE LEGEND OF THE KITCHEN SOLDIER (Ep 7-12) As expected, Kang learns that he himself inherited chef skills from his father. Also as expected, Kang leads the outpost out of the bowels of disbandment by winning a cooking completion against the master Officer’s Mess chef. At the end of the contest, outpost commander blows the whistle on Baek’s food supply scam. discharge, and takes with him Kang’s recipe notebook. Min Ah returns to do a story on Kang’s victory; and he is confident enough to hold her hand. What I did not like was the ending with the game giving him a new quest (screams sequel) because it is not needed. It was an enjoyable but predictable series with the last two episodes having more food p*rn than a hungry viewer could handle.
AGENT KIM REACTIVATED (Ep. 1-2) We have a widower raising from childbirth a rebellious daughter. We have the daughter being bullied at school, leading to a fight against the Rich Kid bully whose father is a wealthy ex-thug CEO. Rich Kid ambushes Min-Ji (this is social media influencer Seo Su-Min’s first acting role) and hits her over the head with a brick, seemingly killing her. She has a gang get rid of the body. Kim goes into full Marvel universe bad man when his daughter goes missing. It is a copy of a Charles Bronson-Liam Neeson revenge movie but this time he had to deal with the police, two GANGS, a vicious rich CEO and the North Korean assassin. But we find out that Min-ji is still alive, barely. The police finger print will trigger the reactivation of his unit – – – taekwondo master Seong and wild boar marine Park (Yoon Kyung-Ho has to be the busiest character actor in SK: 4 movies & 2 dramas in this year).
CHEAT ON ME IF YOU CAN (Rewatch Ep 1-4) Such a well made series. What sets it apart is the direction, the cinematic camera angles from smirking behind a door to inside a freezer screams drama. Jo Yeo Jeong plays with ease a smug, conceited, complex, naive but terrifying character. All the characters have their own burning issue. Favorite line said to her cheating husband after he asks why she married him (it was not love because he just hung around her often) and how she feels now (“Honey, I love you . . . enough to kill you.”) Even in the rewatch every episode seems fresh.
PARASITE (Film Rewatch) After seeing a couple cinephile review videos on-line, I rewatched this Oscar winning film looking for the director’s methodology. Director Bong was a movie fan (he has a personal collection of more than 6,000 films) and an expert in film techniques and symbolism. In Parasite, he showcased two…
