If, like me, you've been pleasantly surprised by the live-action version of Bisco Hatori's Ouran High School Host Club, you'll be pleased to hear they're planning a movie tie-in, too. I was particularly happy to hear this, because thus far I think the heroine (the ever-placid Haruhi) has more chemistry with the secondary love interest (calm, calculating Kyoya) than she does with the official OTP (the adorable-but-ridiculous Tamaki), and if they're going to stretch this sucker out that much further I can probably enjoy the rest of the drama without having my hopes* for a Haruhi/Kyoya romance totally dashed.
I finally saw the trailer for the live-action J-drama version of the manga Ouran High School Host Club. Behold:
While I enjoy the silliness of the Ouran manga, and thought it worked really well as an anime, this is not one of those stories that translates naturally into the live-action format. I'll probably check out at least one episode of this drama... eventually.
The trailer for the upcoming Taiwanese drama take on the Japanese manga Skip Beat is out:
Uh... well, everyone looks pretty (particularly Korean actor Choi Siwon–that man is amazingly good-looking), but I'm always a little weirded out by T-dramas. They frequently stick too close to their source material, even when said material doesn't really suit a live-action format, and I don't understand the whole "hiring Korean actors and then dubbing them" thing. Why not stick with actors who already speak the language fluently? I understand that they want to appeal to an international audience, but don't viewers find the dubbing distracting?
The fine people at Dramabeans have been kind enough to keep us updated on the status of the upcoming K-drama adaptation of the Japanese manga Itazura na Kiss, so we were interested to learn that Hwang In-roi has apparently signed on as director. Hwang previously helmed Goong and Return of Iljimae, both of which were appealingly acted and perfectly gorgeous to look at, so this is good news for fans of the series...
...but I'm still not sure I'll be able to stomach this sucker. I mean, I'm curious, but in a rubber-necking, car-crash kind of way. Itazura na Kiss is just so bad. The heroine is supposed to be loyal and plucky and adorably dim, but she just seems pathetically stupid, and the hero is an arrogant butthead. Hwang has made some super-fun stuff, but I don't see how anyone could be up for the challenge of making this story—which features a sexual dynamic straight out of a C-grade Harlequin series romance from 1962—palatable for a wider audience than the most hardcore shojo fans.
Of course, I had almost the exact same complaint—practically word-for-word—about Twilight, so what do I know?
I finally watched the first episode of the J-drama Yamato Nadeshiko Shichi Henge, which is based on one of my all-time favorite manga series, Tomoko Hayakawa's The Wallflower. For those of you unfamiliar with the series, it's about a horror-obsessed Japanese schoolgirl named Sunako and her housemates, four incredibly handsome boys constantly trying (and constantly failing) to transform Sunako into a "Yamato Nadeshiko"--the ladylike ideal of Japanese womanhood--in exchange for free rent.
Judging by the first hour, my hopes are not high. The plot was all over the place and the lead actress played Sunako as a sobbing, squeaky mess (a far cry from her portrayal in the book). Still, I laughed out loud at least three times, the actors were all very pretty, and things seemed to be looking up towards the end, so I think I'll give it another shot.
Ohohoho, dear readers. Exciting news: According to Dramabeans, the Korean drama PTB have cast Lee Min-ho (of the way-more-popular-than-it-deserved-to-be drama Boys Before Flowers) in the upcoming drama Personal Taste, which is apparently based on the popular novel of the same name about a straight dude who pretends to be gay in order to live with the female lead. If you cast your minds waaaay back, this is the same project that was originally rumored to star the two main actors from the slightly-more-popular-than-it-deserved-to-be drama Goong. I think I would have preferred the original pairing, but my heart wasn't set on it: either way, this sounds like the perfect set-up for the K-drama medium*, and I'm all a-flutter at the thought.
*Cute, funny, and they'll obviously have to hold off on any overt sexuality 'til the very end (lest the heroine catch on). Seriously, this sounds like it was made to be a K-drama.
If you're still unfamiliar with K-dramas, A) you are seriously missing out, and B) you might want to start with Cinderella's Sister, an upcoming 20-episode series scheduled to begin in March. According to Dramabeans, the cast for this adaptation/retelling of the classic fairytale is going to include Tamra the Island actress Seo Woo (an up-and-coming star) and Moon Geun-young (already an A-lister in Korea, best known here in the US for her role in the horror film A Tale of Two Sisters). I have really high hopes for this drama--frankly, I don't think Moon would sign up for something at this point in her career without some amazing buzz behind it, and Seo Woo can probably pick and choose her drama projects, too.
Turns out they're making a K-drama version of one of my favorite manga titles of all time, Yayoi Ogawa's Kimi wa Petto, and it's starring Kim Hyun-joong, the gorgeous but wooden musician-turned-actor who played the Rui character in the k-drama version of Hana Yori Dango.
This is a mixed bag of news, dear readers. Kim Hyun-joong is seriously hot, and he can dance (important, as his character dances professionally). However, the role he will be playing—Momo, Ogawa's noisy, goofy, unexpectedly complicated protagonist—is a difficult one, and he's not going to be able to get away with flashing his (admittedly adorable) smile and calling it a day. We'll have to wait and see, but my hopes are not high.
Note: I wonder if they considered Lee Min-ki for the role? He's ridiculously hot, too, and I think he would have been spectacular.
GYAH. Dramabeans says they're making a K-drama out of Itazura Na Kiss!!!
Why this series? WHY?!? It's already been adapted into two enormously popular Taiwanese dramas and a Japanese anime, but none of them (and they've all been relatively high-quality) have obscured the fact that this series is seriously, tragically, monumentally stupid, and I don't care how good the Korean adaptation could be: it's not going to be good enough to fix this story.
Itazura Na Kiss is the story of a sweet, stubborn girl who's as useless as she is dim-witted. She has almost no redeeming qualities, but she falls in love with the coolest, handsomest, smartest boy in her school... and when a freak accident results in the two of them living together, she decides to confess her feelings. He icily shoots her down, but over the rest of the series (and it goes on for years) he grows to care for her. He remains a cold, nasty, high-functioning prat, and she remains a total idiot, but their respective inadequacies are supposed to total up to true love.
In news that wouldn't raise many eyebrows if we were talking about his American counterparts, fantastically man-pretty Goong actor Joo Ji-hoon has been charged with drug use (of Ecstasy and Ketamine), and the resulting scandal is turning into a big ol' mess for the Korean entertainment world.
Despite his undeniable hotness, I don't really care about Joo Ji-hoon one way or another, but I have been fascinated by the public response to this event. Just how high are the standards for celebrity behavior in Korea, anyway? I've always been a little taken aback by the "no public relationships" thing expected of K-drama actors, but I guess I thought that was a calculated move on the part of the stars' management—an attempt to create an illusion of availability. (Teen girls might shell out big money to attend a fan-meeting if they think their favorite star is free from emotional entanglements, and therefore more likely to fall in love with them.) I didn’t realize drug use—and comparatively mild drug use*, at that—would cause such utter condemnation, but people are coming down on this dude like a load of bricks. It's certainly a different (and interesting) cultural perspective.
*Please don’t send me nasty e-mails about this comment. I am NOT excusing any form of drug use, and Ecstasy and Ketamine are real, scary, potentially life-destroying drugs. But from the public response, you’d think Joo was a hardcore junkie, shooting up his tear ducts or something.
If you're a K-drama fan with video-making skills, Dramabeans is having a Boys Before Flowers-themed giveaway. Submit your fan-made parody video for your chance to win one of three prizes.
I asked, and whatever kind, generous, hardworking people are working on this series totally delivered! (I'd refer to the subbing group by name, but I'm not sure who they are yet.) The earliest fan-made subtitles for Boys Before Flowers are already available via sites like MySoju.
Enjoy, everybody! And, as always, please support this series by buying a licensed version if/when it becomes available in your area.
Dramabeans has posted her recaps of the first and second episodes of Boys Before Flowers (the Korean version of Hana Yori Dango), and her opinion seems generally positive--the show has its fair share of problems, but she still sounds pretty excited about it.
Not as exciting as it would have been a week ago...
As an enthusiastic fan of Korean entertainment, I was very sad to hear of the suicide of actress Choi Jin-Shil, whose most recent production was the sweet, funny, Cinderella-esque k-drama My Last Scandal. Ms. Choi's death cast a profoundly depressing shadow over what would otherwise have been a weekend's worth of great drama news: according to Dramabeans, the powers that be have now fullycast the Korean version of Hana Yori Dango, so I'm assuming the project is now up and running.
According to the ever-delightful Dramabeans, the production for the Korean drama version of Kamio Yoko's manga Boys Over Flowers has been delayed due to "casting and organization" issues, and won't air until sometime next spring.
This news is a bummer (and makes me a little dubious about the chances of series being released at all, frankly--delays are rarely a good sign), but I was cheered up by another post announcing that Yoon Eun-hye and Joo Ji-hoon, stars of the massively popular drama Goong, might be teaming up for another project*.
I'm hearing rumors that Yoshiko Nakamura's deliciously funny revenge manga Skip Beat! is going to be made into a Taiwanese drama starring Ariel Lin. Frankly, my hopes are not high.
Not everything about this idea is terrible. Ariel Lin is an appealing actress (although she's a solid decade older than the character she would be playing), and most of the T-dramas I've seen have stuck very closely to their source material. Unfortunately, I don't think this story will work as a live-action production.
The heroine of Skip Beat! is a sweet, gentle girl named Kyoko, who is totally devoted to her childhood friend Sho. When Sho decides to run away from home and become a singer, Kyoko goes with him, taking on several part-time jobs to support them. Kyoko comes home early one day and overhears Sho telling his manager that Kyoko is nothing but a servant to him, and (now that he's a success) he plans to send her back to their old home. Enraged, Kyoko swears vengeance and buries her nice-girl persona forever, deciding to become a star in her own right...
Most of the humor in this series comes from Kyoko's innappropriate, over-the-top reactions to her new world. It's full of the kind of sequences that are funny in a single manga panel, but will be very difficult to recreate in a live-action. Here's Kyoko's reaction to overhearing Sho's real opinion of her (that evil-looking thing in the trunk is one of Kyoko's inner demons):
And this is a couple of pages later, once all of Kyoko's inner demons have emerged and she's busily killing off her selflessness and love for Sho (represented by those sweet little fairy-things she's squishing):
Hmm. It would probably work as an anime, and it MIGHT work if they play it totally straight in a live-action, but I suspect we'll be in for a lot of cheap-looking comedic fantasy sequences and sitcom-style over-acting.
I am not a fan of Yuu Watase's work (a friend made me watch all 8,000 episodes* of Fushigi Yugi in high school, and I've never fully recovered), but she's certainly enormously popular. Her series Absolute Boyfriend is being serialized by VIZ Media in its Shojo Beat manga anthology, and has now been made into a live-action j-drama. If you're a fan of "dramedy" romances featuring improbable love triangles (in this case, between a man, a woman, and the woman's perfect android boyfriend), you'll find this series has a lot to offer. Absolute Boyfriend can be watched via MySoju.com.
*This might be a slight exaggeration... but it certainly felt like 8,000 episodes.
While reading the excellent Dramabeans blog, I was delighted to see that there's going to be a K-drama adaptation of the cheese-tastic shojo manga Hana Yori Dango. I enjoyed the recent Japanese version*, and I tried to watch the Taiwanese version, but I prefer Korean dramas. (Japanese dramas are too short, and Taiwanese ones are too long. K-dramas are just right.)
Hana Yori Dango, for the six or so manga fans out there who've never heard of it, is the story of Makino Tsukushi, a poor, hardworking girl who gets into an ultra-elite school on scholarship. She does her best to lay low, but when she angers an insanely wealthy, powerful classmate, she becomes the target of a school-wide attack. It doesn't take too long for her chief tormentor to forgive her (and--shocker!--fall in love with her), but poor Makino still spends the next zillion volumes surviving physical attacks, thwarted admirers, and evil plots to steal her boyfriend/social position/maidenly virtue. The series is the soapiest story on God's green earth, and I'm totally excited to see what Korean TV will do with it.
*Well, I enjoyed the first season. I tried watching the second, but I was really turned off by the scene where the heroine is threatened by a group of black guys in NYC.
Sometimes it's hard to be an anime/drama geek. Distribution is limited, only a fraction of the interesting projects get translated, and the stuff you'd actually pay for doesn't get licensed at all. I hate to say this, but sometimes your only option is to settle for watching stuff online.
That said, it's not always easy to know where and what to download. You can usually find the buzz-worthy stuff on YouTube, if you're willing to download episodes in 8 minute increments, but there are actually some far superior options for downloading manga and dramas. We suggest these two sites:
CrunchyRoll.com is a huge anime/movie/drama archive. You have to register (although the registration process is painless), the videos aren't particularly high-quality, and once in a while there's a pop-up window that is immediately eaten by my virus protection software, but you can't beat this site for sheer volume. They've got everything from the anime versions of Nodame Cantabile and Gakuen Alice to the live-action version of Lovely Complex. Plus, they're really good about removing projects once they've been licensed, so you don't need to worry about stealing food from your favorite writers' mouths.
MySoju.com focuses on dramas and movies. They only offer a fraction of CrunchyRoll's titles, and they're not quite as careful about licensed titles (I'm pretty sure that both Full House and My Girl are licensed, and they've got 'em both up there), but their videos are higher quality, their archive is easier to navigate, and they limit themselves to fairly big-name titles. Check this site out to stream everything from the Taiwanese version of MARS to Japan's Hana Kimi.
If, like me, you've been pleasantly surprised by the live-action version of Bisco Hatori's Ouran High School Host Club, you'll be pleased to hear they're planning a movie tie-in, too. I was particularly happy to hear this, because thus far I think the heroine (the ever-placid Haruhi) has more chemistry with the secondary love interest (calm, calculating Kyoya) than she does with the official OTP (the adorable-but-ridiculous Tamaki), and if they're going to stretch this sucker out that much further I can probably enjoy the rest of the drama without having my hopes* for a Haruhi/Kyoya romance totally dashed.
