Wok of Love

Waiting for contracts to finalise and meetings to be scheduled...and so at loose ends as I've done about as much prep work as I can do for now and I don't want to pick up any other projects as I know I'll have to drop them very soon...so...have started another K-drama. Is that terrible? Am doing some research/reading, but really, I've outlined about as much as I can. Anyway, this one is called Wok of Love.

I've about to start on episode 5. Unlike Thirty but Seventeen, quite a bit has already happened in this one. From left to right, we've got Seo Poong (Junho, 28), Sae Woo (Jung Ryeo Wong, 37), and Chil Seong (Jang Hyuk, 41) who are thrown together after a chance meeting.

Seo was a rising star chef at a large hotel restaurant where, even though he wasn't the head chef, he had been instrumental in having the restaurant earn 2 Michelin stars. He marries his long-time girlfriend (though hasn't yet filed the registration papers), though he doesn't know that she has been cheating on him with the CEO of the hotel that he works for. Why she goes through with the ceremony is a mystery as it's obvious from the very beginning that she's a total bitch and has been cheating on him for a while and doesn't want to get married. Through circumstances partly to do with her, he winds up quitting/getting fired (kind of both) and vows revenge.

Sae Woo is an heiress about to get married, but on her wedding day, her father is arrested from some kind of shady business stuff, her mom collapses, her fiancé abandons her AND she gets a phone call from the doctor saying she's in the final stages of cancer. Yikes. I gotta say right here that this seems like a bit of overkill and since she's apparently going to be involved in a love triangle...um...and this seems like it's supposed to be sort of a romantic comedy...where are they going with the cancer thing? Gonna suck if she dies in the end.

Chil Seong is a somewhat reformed former thug/gangster guy who is trying to turn his former flunkies into upstanding citizens who can live normal lives. He had them running a restaurant (that happens to be located across the street from the Giant Hotel with this horrible CEO dude and mean chef, both of which had it in for Seo Poong) in the hopes that they would pick up the skills to thrive in normal society...but they totally suck at it. He also is immediately smitten with Sae Woo when he meets her at a salon as she is getting ready for her wedding. I kinda love him. He's older (closer to my age) and he's hilarious. Already planning to look for more stuff with this actor.

I strongly suspect that the romance in the show is going to wind up being the other two characters (Seo and Sae), which is a shame. Why not Chil? He rocks. Curious though, as based on their ages and how these things normally go, it could go either way. I'm not sure how old Seo is supposed to be in the show though -- he was supposed to have worked in the hotel for 10 years, so it seems like he *should* be around 28-30 in the show. But not sure how old Sae is supposed to be either, so her real-life age may not make a difference. (Edit: they never say how old Chil is supposed to be, but Sae's character is supposed to be 2 or 3 years older than Poong's)

Anyway, Seo wants to open a restaurant across from the hotel and get revenge by being better, Chil wants Seo to teach his gang how to actually cook, and Sae, I am guessing, will wind up there as well because she's now at loose ends and broke.

More later after I've watched more episodes. There are 38 total and this is another show where they wind up between 28 to 32 minutes each. Will update.

Edit, mid-episode 6: Wait. It's her effing horse that has cancer, apparently. WTF. Not sure how I'm liking her character at the moment. Yeah, she's going through some crazy stuff all at once but, while she started out pretty strong (first episode or two), she's devolving into wafflehood and weakness and stereotypical-ness. We'll see. For something that started off pretty fast, now it feels like they've slowed down the pace a bit too much. Kind of uneven. At this point, the show should be moving things forwards and making you care about the characters, especially the main ones, but I feel like it has backpedaled from that and, if anything, I'm liking them less. Thug Ahjussi is still the best. At least they've finally (at least according to the preview at the end of episode 6) bringing in all the random characters together that were seen before in little mini-scenes where you had no idea who they were (apparently, they're going to work at the restaurant).

Edit, about to start episode 11: Welp, still not sure how I'm feeling about this, mostly because I am very ambivalent about the leading lady. I realise that she's supposed to be messed up because of what is going on but...I dunno. Not sure really why either guy should like her. Kinda want them both to find someone else. Possibly because she had all of her problems from the moment all hell broke loose at her wedding, but she just feels like she's getting weaker and taking advantage of people without thinking about them at all. Especially in the case of Seo Poong when it's obvious that he's a bloody mess. And can these people not tell the truth about anything? Even stupid things that you're not sure why they are lying anyway?

And seriously, poor Seo. He's got a bad temper but the writers keep piling things on top of his character and he keeps getting the crap beat out of him both literally and figuratively (the latest being that he found out his ex-wife/girlfriend/person had been pregnant with his baby before she even met the guy she left him for and she had an abortion without even telling him and then gets beat up by a bunch of goons after going to confront her. She's seriously awful.).

Edit, about to start Episode 18: Well, Sae is growing on me a bit. Based on the comments, I'd say that some people think she is cruel to Chil, but actually I'd say she's finally starting to act reasonable. She's not beating around the bush and being clear to him that she doesn't see him in a romantic way. Yeah, she could probably say it in a nicer way, but at least she isn't leading him on and is honest about her confusion. And she calls out Poong when he's not being clear, telling him that she doesn't like ambiguity. I get why he's being that way, but it's actually progress for her to tell him that she doesn't want that. It's something, anyway.

Otherwise...still find the pace of the show to be a bit too slow. Weirdly, if it was an hour long show and the two 30 minute episodes were together, then it might not feel as if things were too slow. Hard to say. But, yeah, it does drag a bit and some things are kind of being dragged to death.

Other thoughts...the guy who plays the evil CEO type...the casting was dead on for that. He hadn't even said a word in the first scene I saw him in and I was, like, OMG I hate him. There's something imminently smackable about his smarmy face. A lot of it is the dyed hair somehow. I'm sure he's probably a lovely person and maybe even a nice character in some other shows but in this one you really do just want to hit him. Same for the rival chef at the hotel. Totally smackable.

Edit, around episode 31: I'm enjoying the bromance between Poong and Chil more than the romance between Poong and Sae Woo. She's supposed to be 33? Can't stand her mother at all. Absolutely useless. And, yes, she's supposed to be that way, but I can completely understand what one commenter on Viki was saying when she said the writers of this show must really hate women. All of them have some severe faults, even our erstwhile heroine, whereas even the gangster guys with criminal records are shown to have "hidden hearts of gold." I'm going to finish it at this point, of course, but I'm going to have to find something with a good female lead/supporting actresses next to get the frustration out of me.

Edit, about to start episode 35 out of 38...holy frankamoly, I'm feeling like this will never end. While there are bits of this I'm enjoying and I want to finish the story, I really think it could have been accomplished much more tightly (and pleasingly) in about 2/3 the episodes. Maybe even 1/2. There are some shows where you do actually want it to go on and on forever so you can get more of your favourite characters, but there are so many imminently frustrating characters/themes/plots that keep on going forever in this one that this is not that show. And I shouldn't feel bad for Poong that he's in love with this girl. I was holding out hope that the father wasn't going to be as bad as the mother, but looks like that was a false hope. And the thing is...having life experience...trust me, if the family is horrible (especially from the get go), it's gonna make Poong's life miserable in the end unless she cuts herself off completely. Even if the show ends "happily ever after" I somehow think that, yeah, not really. And they need to hurry up and get the vet girl together with Chil Seong, since that's obviously his "happy ending." But, like everything else, that's taking forever too.

Edit...final episode...finished it. Finally. Meh. So for all the dragging things out and out and out...the last episode was actually too rushed AND they left a bunch of plot threads waving in the wind. Chil Seong and the veterinarian lady never have their promised 5th meeting (at which point, she was going to consider it fate). You never see Sae Woo's parents accept Poong. Poong asks Sae Woo to marry him at the end, but how is that going to work if the mom is still an utter bitch? Not that it should matter, in a way, as they're supposed to be in their effing 30's and shouldn't be behaving like little kids anyway. The dad wound up okay, though he would just kinda sit there and smile while the mom threw little-girl-worthy fits. The mom was just...omg...OMG annoying and it's made me never even want to look at that actresses' face again. What happened to Imma the horse? And dim sum the cat? Where the heck is Poong living? What happened to Poong's ex-wife? She disappeared somewhere mid-show and her CEO hotel dude wound up getting arrested? You'd think the writers would have at least given a little closure to that (and a stab in the back)?

On the plus side, I really liked Junho (Poong) and Jang Hyuk (Chil) and will definitely look them up in other dramas. The Mael Dang (hopefully spelled that right, as I'm not going to go back through to figure it out) character played by Jo Jae Yoon was really quite endearing as well (he's the grey haired gangster dude). I would have actually loved a bit of an epilogue with all of the gangster boys as they were adorable. Should I call grown men adorable? Ah, what the hell, they're all younger than me. Yoon and Hyuk are the only ones around my age, I think.

Oh, bless their hearts.

I don't know what I'd rate this one. There were a lot of things I liked but I was also very frustrated by a lot of things in it. It wasn't even that I minded the actress who played Sae Woo. I think she did fine with what she was given. At least the chemistry between all of the leads was good. Definitely liked the bromance aspects and the themes of loyalty (except that it was pushed too far in the case of the knife handler and noodle maker for Sae Woo's mom...). Mostly...well...I think it just really needed tightening. There were too many times I was sitting there going FFS move it along already. But I wouldn't fault the acting. Even the minor characters you never learn the names of did a good job.

I forgot to add -- the cooking bits were also great and very interesting to watch. And made me hungry.

Am I glad I watched it? Mostly, yeah. Would I re-watch it? Probably not. Though I might pull up a still photo every now and then of good moments if I wanted to remind myself.