This is a video of a Korean Daehan Steel plant where scrap metal is salvaged and turned into rebar. They also, oddly enough, grow vegetables at it. The photography is excellent; several shots are quite spectacular. The video is not narrated, but you'll want to turn the captions on. They are informative and amusingly flippant at the same time.
Mr. Queen, which is available on Netflix, is a television show with the premise that a modern-day Korean male chef is magically transported to a Queen's body in the Joseon era (19th century). Were it an American show with that premise I would never watch it, anticipating that it would be awash with endless humorless gender lessons.
However, it is a Korean show, so the Western gender studies stuff is nonexistent and instead they just mine the absurd situation for laughs. The result is a very funny and entertaining show that I highly recommend. In most of this post, which mainly covers the first episode, I'll try to avoid spoilers about events later in the show.
The cook, Jang Bong-Hwan, is the head chef at Blue House (Korea's White House). He's an arrogant, skirt-chasing, alpha male who thinks very highly of himself. He gets framed for corruption in the Presidential kitchen, and while being chased by the police, he falls off his balcony into a swimming pool and bonks his head on the bottom. When he wakes a beautiful woman in flowing robes swims up and kisses him. He passes out once more.
When he awakes again, he's in an old-fashioned room. He's disoriented, and when he finds a mirror, he is horrified to discover that he is now a pretty woman. He decides that he must be dreaming, although he's miffed that he's dreaming he is the girl instead of being with the girl. Eventually, he figures out things are too vivid for this to be a dream which throws him into a panic.
He goes into the hallway to find it lined with maids bowing down to him calling him 'your Royal Highness' which only increases his hysteria. He blindly runs around with a tail of maids and eunuchs chasing after him until, as shown in the clip above, he decides that some twisted human trafficking outfit kidnapped him and gave him a sex change operation. It isn't until the implication of them all wearing old-timey clothes sinks in that he realizes he traveled through time as well as ending up in a different body.
He calms down enough to start questioning his maids as to what happened to the woman whose body he's in. They're puzzled by the fact that he refers to the Queen as someone other than himself, but by this point they're dialing into the fact that their Queen appears to be a bit bonkers since she woke up from her near drowning. He discovers he is in the body of Kim So-yong, the Queen Bi (the King's fiancé). He also connects the water she almost drowned in to the water in the swimming pool he fell into, and decides water is the key to returning to his body.
First Mr Queen runs around dunking his head in every bit of water he can find: mop buckets, horse troughs, and the like, but that doesn't work. It only convinces the maids that their Queen has a few more screws loose than they originally thought. He decides the lake the Queen nearly drowned in is the key, so he cons his maids into showing him where it is. As soon as he sees a sign pointing to it he sprints off to do a swan dive into it, only to land in the mud at the lake's bottom because it had been drained to prevent any more drownings.
Mr Queen then remembers he's the Queen, so he orders his flunkies to refill the lake. They tell him they can't, because the orders came from higher up. So, covered in mud, he sets out to find the King to get water back into the lake.
When we meet King Cheoljong, he's in a pavilion reading a Korean version of the Kama Sutra. His eunuch tells the King he has been studying the book for too long. The King replies that he needs to properly prepare for his most important duty -- producing an heir. Oh-oh, Bong-Hwan (a.k.a. Mr Queen) may have another problem besides returning to his body.
The King then sees Mr Queen and calls him over. Mr Queen lifts his skirts and runs over. Mr Queen barely greets the King, instead he immediately launches into asking/demanding that the lake be refilled. The King tells Mr Queen that he can't fill the lake because the draining was ordered by the Grand Queen Dowager and that he won't, or can't, rescind the order.
As soon as the King first saw the mud-caked Mr Queen he had started holding his nose from the stench. This only annoys Mr Queen even more, and he ends up slapping the King to knock his hand off his nose. The palace staff is horrified. Also, as is the habit of middle school boys worldwide, the King has disguised his racy book with a fake cover. Mr Queen gets interested in it and grabs it to look at it. The King grabs it back, and soon Mr Queen and the King are in a ridiculous pissing match over the book while the increasingly aghast palace staff looks on. Eventually, after their fight manages to demolish the book, Mr Queen leaves to sow chaos elsewhere.
The series is a type of Korean historical show called a sageuk, which frequently feature a lot of palace intrigue and this show is no different. We soon meet the Grand Queen Dowager, the real power in the palace, and her slimy brother, who are the main villains. The Royal marriage is for political purposes, and they're worried that the news of the Mr Queen's current bout of bizarre behavior will leak out and ruin their plans. So, they move the wedding up to the next day.
Needless to say, Mr Queen is repulsed and horrified when he hears that news. To his priority of making it back to his body in the future, he now has to add not getting noodled by the King in the meanwhile. First Mr Queen tries to tell the King that he actually isn't the Queen, that he's really a man from the future. All that accomplishes is Mr Queen getting dragged off to see if the Court Physician can treat his case of sudden-onset insanity.
The day of the wedding arrives. Mr Queen, who is buried in layers of ceremonial garb, doesn't know, nor does he care to know, the procedures and etiquette of a Royal wedding so he just sort of plows through it making a hash of things in the process. The palace denizens keep getting more bewildered and alarmed by his strange behavior.
However, he makes it though the wedding and the night of matrimonial bliss is on the horizon...
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Mr Queen's two principal maids preforming their hopeless task of trying to keep their Queen prim and proper |
Would I recommend it? Absolutely. It has good production values, music, sets, costumes, sword fights, and is one of the funniest shows I've seen in a long time. The character Mr Queen is a supremely self-confident fish out of water who careens through whatever situation he finds himself in and imagines he is handling it perfectly. He also, when speaking, mixes in modern Korean expressions and English loan words so the locals often times have no idea what he is even talking about. Plus, he tries to flirt with every pretty female he encounters, although they are always mystified by what he is going on about. His loony decisions and unhinged behavior are hugely entertaining. The people around him are always baffled by what he's saying and doing, and their hopelessly confused reactions are spot on.
I have to give a special hat tip to Shin Hae Sun, the actress who plays Mr Queen/Kim So Yong. She captures the mannerism of men, the way they walk, sit, talk and their expressions. Added to her excellent acting is a male voice expressing her inner thoughts, so the viewer quickly accepts that it is a man inside the Queen's body. Shin Hae Sun creates a memorably silly character in the process. I doubt the comedy would work as well with another actress cast in the role. She carries the film and steals nearly every scene she is in.
Another fine performance is Kim Jung Hyun as King Cheoljong. When first introduced the King comes across as a pompous dimwit. We'll soon discover that there is more to him than meets the eye; he's only a puppet King, but like everybody else in the palace he is engaged in endless scheming. He also always tries to maintain what he supposes is the proper level of dignity for a King. Since he is usually Mr Queen's straight man, his blustering over Mr Queen's nonsensical antics works well.
Court Lady Choi, played by Cha Chung Hwa, deserves mention. She's Mr Queen's principal attendant and she's tasked with maintaining the decorum of the Queen's office. Needless to say, with Mr Queen that's an impossible task and poor Court Lady Choi has a slow-motion nervous breakdown as the show progresses.
Jo Hwa Jin, played by Seol In Ah, is the Royal Concubine and the King's girlfriend. In the clip below she is the woman called Uibin (that's her title). She would rather be the Queen herself and is none too happy about the king's betrothal to Mr Queen. Since she's pretty, Mr Queen naturally tries to flirt with her. However, as is the case with all of his flirtees, she has no idea what he is doing. Instead, she thinks his odd behavior is just Mr Queen playing a 4-D chess version of palace politics and replies with veiled threats which pass well over Mr Queen's head.
Royal Chef Man Bok, played by Kim In Kwon, comes to rue that day he ever met Mr Queen, who takes over his kitchen and torments him endlessly: insulting his cooking, infesting the kitchen with his maids, and at one point reducing the Royal Chef to doing nothing more than tending to the fire.
Finally, here's another scene of Mr Queen in action. It shows him at his macho best.
Generally, I dislike the idea of prank videos. All too often they are just intruding upon people to create content for social media. While some are harmless annoyances, others trip well past the bounds of decency to be completely obnoxious. Just look at the case of Johnny Somali for an example of that.
That said, I'm posting a few Korean prank videos. Call me a hypocrite if you must.
It all started with my YouTube feed's recommendations. Most of the recommendations are aimed at blocks of people with presumably similar viewing habits, but some seem to be an attempt by YouTube to tailor the videos to your individual taste. Since, in looking for things to post, my viewing habits are very eccentric I get some mighty odd recommendations.
One day I started getting Korean prank videos. I don't know why. At first, they were videos of guys asking young girls questions, and then saying "thankyou auntie" when they left. Age is a big deal in Korea, and I guess assuming somebody is much older than they are is a social gaffe of hilarious proportions.
Then these two guys started appearing in my feed. Their bit was to sit in cafes and have ridiculous conversations the other patrons overheard. I've got to say that some of their scripts were pretty funny, and the reactions of the people trying not to laugh and make it obvious they were eavesdropping were entertaining. Although, I think a lot of them caught on sooner or later that this was just a prank.
Be sure to have captions turned on.
As I recover from the Wuhan Flu I've been subsisting on bread, crackers, water and coffee. Above is a video of Koran comfort food. I'll be damned if I know what it is, but maybe I would be eating it if I were sick in Seoul. Or maybe not. As an extra, below are drinks from a beach somewhere in Korea.
Who among us doesn't crave a traditional American meat sandwich? I'm not sure what it is, but whatever it is it looks tasty. There are four variations of the meat sandwiches, and each one looks like they would be worth trying. Below we have double bacon cheeseburgers and a Texas-style BBQ, and my lord, I don't know what a Texan would think of it, but the BBQ platter of brisket, ribs, chicken, home-made sausage, French fries and stew looks amazing.
These are all Korean cooks. With the abomination of cultural appropriation properly shoved aside, this is cultural diffusion in operation. I can't wait until the day when I can go to a local restaurant and order an Americanized version of a Korean American meat sandwich. The World turns round and round.
I have previously posted a video of a Mongolian fellow making a hotdog. His idea of a hotdog was shredded beef on a hotdog bun. It missed the mark, but it's the thought that counts and it did look tasty. In the above video a Korean chef makes hotdogs from scratch and the result definitely looks delicious.
Today we tour a harmonica factory in South Korea. Harmonica building is more complex than you might first think. It's a precise process to get all of the reeds tuned properly. As tone deaf as I am, I would probably end up sweeping the floor if I got hired to work there.
In case you're fascinated by the humble harmonica, previously on Flares there have been three other posts with/about harmonicas:
Time to review another Korean show. This review is of a makjang drama called Penthouse: War in Life (you may have to look around a bit to find it, I watched it on Rakuten Viki). It ran for 3 seasons. I'll try to avoid spoilers, but some will creep into this review.
A makjang is a show where the plot and situations are deliberately excessive. A makjang will feature crazy plot twists, birth secrets out the wazoo, revenge plots, adultery, scheming, fighting, murder and more. Penthouse delivers all of that in spades. It has great cinematography, a booming orchestral soundtrack, and lavish sets with over-the-top acting to match its ridiculous and overblown plot. This all combines together to make a wonderfully entertaining show.
The above video is the very first scene in it. The elegant woman in the elevator, the party with people dressed like members of Louey XIV's court waltzing around and the girl who gets tossed off the 47th floor balcony are all mysteries to set the hook. We then move back two months to find out what this is all about.
The building they're in is called Hera Palace. It is the choicest piece of real estate in Seoul. The richest of the rich live there and they all jostle for social status. Our characters are the very upper crust of the place. We discover that they are all very competitive, enormously greedy, suffer from an advanced stage of moral turpitude and are willing to walk all over each other to get to the very top of the pecking order -- the penthouse.
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| Our opera students engage in one of their frequent brawls |
The mystery over who the girl was that got chucked off the balcony, and why she was murdered, is covered in the first several episodes. It turns out that the daughters of the rich folks are all opera students at an elite high school. Yes, you read that right -- opera students. Along with the amusement factor of watching tiny Korean ingenues belting out arias, we are given our first hint that logic and reality are not to be expected in this show.
The murdered girl is Min Seol Ah. She is an orphan girl who lives in Jewelry Village. When she first appears, she is a voice tutor for the rich opera students. However, when the school year starts, she turns out to be enrolled in their high school. Since she is poor all of the other students are aghast to have her as classmate. Throughout the show almost all of the rich people treat any poor person as subhuman scum that is barely tolerated.
So, all of the kids hate and bully her. The parents also despise her as well, thinking that her mere presence besmirches the honor of their school. This is made worse when Min Seol Ah bests their darling daughters and wins an important singing competition. In addition, she finds out that two of their parents are having an affair and holds that over their heads.
The end result is that she ends up tied up in an equipment room and virtually all of the characters wander in from time to time to slap her around. They all have the motive, and sketchy enough morals, to be the one who pushed Min Seol Ah off the balcony.
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In one of their many marital spats Dan Tae tries to strangle Soo Ryan |
It gets more complicated. Shim Soo Ryun, the elegant woman we saw on the elevator, is married to Joo Dan Tae. She's the stepmother to his twins, while her own child has been in the hospital for 16 years in a coma. However, all is not as it seems. Dan Tae, who is a cheerfully Eeeevil fellow and the story's main villain, had for some unfathomable reason switched Soo Ryun's daughter at birth with another kid who he then drugged for 16 years to keep it in a coma. Well, aside from not making any sense (why not just drug her real kid?), that's not very nice.
Anyway, Dan Tae's minion was supposed to toss Soo Ryun's baby into a lake. However, being greedy like everybody else in this show, instead the minion sold the baby to an orphanage. The orphanage head, being greedy as well, eventually sold the orphan to a rich American family who needed a bone marrow donor for their sick son. Once the marrow was donated, the adoptive parents then framed the orphan for theft which got her unadopted, arrested and deported back to Korea.
Of course, Min Seol Ah was that baby and Soo Ryun eventually figures this all out. Needless to say, when she discovers that Min Seol Ah was her birth daughter, she gets monumentally pissed off and swears to find the murderer and get revenge on everyone involved.
In this case, everyone involved is pretty much the entire rest of the cast. Aside from the 'tied up in an equipment room' business, the Hera Palace people had been planning a fancy party when Min Seol Ah had the audacity to ruin their plans by flopping into the arms of their beloved statue and splattering the place with blood. Not wanting the party to be ruined, they clean up the mess and move Min Seol Ah's body to her dingy apartment in Jewelry Village and make it look like a suicide. They are all implicated in the crime.
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Seo Jin, aka The Mother of the Year, counsels her daughter Eun Byul to lie through her teeth until the day that she dies |
Meanwhile, in another plot thread Cheon Seo Jin, a famous opera singer, wife of Dr. Ha Yoon Chul and head mistress of the elite opera teaching high school, gets annoyed by a pecan pie (don't ask) so she throws herself at Soo Ryun's husband Dan Tae and starts an affair with him.
Seo Jin is also the mother of Ha Eun Byul, another aspiring student opera singer. Under Seo Jin's expert mothering, Eun Byul gets nuttier and nuttier as the show goes on until Seo Jin has to feed her an experimental amnesia drug so Eun Byol can forget about bonking another student over the head, and apparently killing her, with a trophy they were competing over.
Seo Jin starts as a haughty, arrogant and corrupt woman who gets increasingly demented as the show proceeds. It can be argued that by the end of the show she even surpasses Dan Tae as the main villain. Considering what a psychopath Dan Tae is, that's no easy feat. With her endless scheming and multiple murders, she's a hurricane of chaos that sweeps through the story.
Seo Jin was my favorite character on the show. She tried to put up a facade of indifferent elegance like Soo Ryun naturally possessed, but underneath it Seo Jin was a seething cauldron of ambition and anger. Her frequent outbursts and tantrums were hugely entertaining.
Kim So-yeon, the actress who played Seo Jin did a fantastic job with the role. Her over-the-top acting, which suited this drama well, approached the edge but was always under control. She created a memorable character in the scheming, power hungry and wicked Seo Jin.
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Yoon Hee defends her daughter Ro Na who has once again been framed for a nefarious deed by her classmatess |
The third female lead is Oh Yoon Hee. When we meet her, she is an ex-opera singer/real estate agent who is struggling to make ends meet. She has a daughter, Bae Ro Na, who -- no surprise here -- wants to be an opera singer.
We soon learn that Yoon Hee and Seo Jin have a history and they hate each other with a passion. They had been opera singing students in the same high school back in the day. Seo Jin, using the father's influence, had cheated Yoon Hee out of the top prize in a competition. They got in a fight in the dressing room and after battering each other with pillows and smashing much furniture Seo Jin ended it by clobbering Yoon Hee with the trophy. This damaged her vocal cords and ended her hopes of a career in opera.
Yoon Hee doesn't want Ro Na to pursue a singing career, but Ro Na is persistent and eventually she gets accepted to the opera singer high school. This brings Yoon Hee and Seo Jin into direct contact with each other, with both vowing to destroy the life of the other. Also, since Ro Na is poor, naturally all the other students hate and bully her and even Seo Jin isn't above messing with her.
The two women's conflict starts out with verbal sparring and quickly moves into screaming and regular hair pulling fights. As the show goes on their schemes against each other get ever more deadly and convoluted, with both swearing to kill the other.
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| Dan Tae getting ready to murder somebody |
The show's main villain, at least until Seo Jin goes completely off the rails at the end, is Dan Tae. He's a rich businessman and the owner of the penthouse. Seemingly cool-headed, he is in fact a psychopath. So he could marry her for her money he killed Soo Ryun's first husband (and keeps the fellow's chopped off finger with the wedding ring still on it in a drawer in his office), he beats his kids, abuses his staff and most of all endlessly plots to swindle or kill those around him.
And he does all that with a smile. Altogether, he is an extremely cheerful villain. Nothing seems to lift his spirits quite as much as coming up with a ridiculously elaborate plan to ruin, cheat or kill somebody.
Of course, his ludicrous schemes never exactly work, but he does leave a trail of mayhem and bodies in his wake, and aside from frequently beating his faithful but inept minion to a bloody pulp because he botched things, he never gets too frustrated by their failure.
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| (L-R) Go Sang Ah, Lee Gyu Jin, Ha Yoon Chul, Kang Ma Ri |
There are a number of supporting characters that get a lot of screen time. Among them are Sang Ah, the bubble-headed former TV presenter who is the wife of Gyu Jin, a money-grubbing, mamma's-boy lawyer that delights in the misfortunes of others. The hapless Dr. Yoon Chul is Seo Jin's cuckolded husband. Ma Ri claims her husband is in Dubai, but he's actually in prison taking the fall for one of Dan Tae's earlier murders. She puts on airs of being wealthy but is actually a masseuse at a spa.
In addition, and not pictured, is the mysterious Logan Lee who shows up halfway through the first season and has an important role in all this foolishness. There are also a number of teachers, students, minions, staff, family members and others who act as foils, companions and accomplices to our main characters.
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| Even as a high school student Seo Jin was an insufferable snob |
Most of the above is only from the first few episodes. Penthouse hits the ground running and never eases up, with virtually no filler or down spots. It has at least one, and generally more, plot twists per episode so one is never sure where it is going next.
A makjang is deliberately over-the-top. With its ludicrous situations and characters all it is aiming for is entertainment. Penthouse succeeds in delivering that entertainment. There is also a lot of humor sprinkled in and many memorable characters: our vengeance-minded heroine Soo Ryun, the Eeeevil Dan Tae, Seo Jin and her nutty daughter Eun Byul. The supporting characters are all fleshed out and interesting as well.
The production values are top-notch. The directing is crisp, and the cinematography and sets are gorgeous. Much of the dialog crackles, and the orchestral soundtrack is outstanding. As absurd as much of its plot is, it is really a well written, produced and acted show. Two thumbs up from me.
Finally, after the jump I've included a few more clips from the show (be sure to turn the captions on). They are spoilerish, but don't really give away much.
This time of the year I figure people may be getting sick of the same Christmas songs, so I post weird Japanese (and Korean) Christmas songs for a change of pace.
Christmas was introduced by foreigners living in Japan who would celebrate the holiday, Although the Christian underpinnings of the day were of no interest to the Japanese, they quite liked, and adopted, the secular elements: decorated trees, lights, Santa, candy canes, peace on Earth, jingle bells, and a traditional bucket of fried chicken from KFC.
Also, it has evolved into a couple's day similar to Valentine Day. You can see that in the above video Christmas? what is that? Is it delicious? where they've changed jingle bells into single hell.
Following that is another two rather frantic Japanese Christmas songs, one keeping jingle bells and the other being just plain weird. Finally, there are two Korean Christmas songs by Girl's Generation and Crayon Pop respectively.
I guess I've always thought a chopstick was just a chopstick, but as the the Chinese, Korean and Japanese ladies show us in the above video there are differences between their shapes and weights. The variations were large enough to make it awkward for them to use the other nationalities' chopsticks.
As an aside I learned how to use chopsticks while I was in the Navy. As a sailor -- well, more accurately as a drunken sailor -- I learned how to use them when was a little, or a lot, tipsy. To this day I'm still clumsy with them when I'm sober.
If you want to learn how to use them, sober or otherwise, the post How to Use Chop Sticks is a good guide.
Also, if you want to be an insufferable bore at a Asian themed dinner party, in Chinese chopsticks are called kuĂ izi, in Korean they are called jeotgarak, and in Japanese they are hashi. Be sure to mutter about cultural appropriation when you correct people about their proper names.
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This video is a bit longer than I usually post, but it is entertaining. It is a sort of Koran version of Cops, but with out all the trailer parks. However, since it is set in the Itaewon nightclub there are a lot of drunks (behold the wonders of our shared humanity). Be sure to turn on the captions to get English subtitles.
It follows a trainee and her mentor as they patrol the district on a Friday. The first incident they encounter is a fight between two groups of foreigners. In trying to sort out what happened we hear the one group saying the fight was over a stolen phone and chain. The mentor can't really figure out what happened -- he either doesn't speak English well or doesn't really care -- so he writes it off as being caused by bumping into each other while dancing, an excuse he seems to have used more than once in the past.
As the night wears on most of what they deal with, both on the street and in their station, involves drunks. The police come across as being very patient with the drunks. It struck me that some of the more obnoxious ones deserved getting the bejeebles tazed out of them, but that didn't happen -- maybe it was just for the show.
There's one segment where an alarm at the nearby U.S. base sounds which throws everybody into a panic until they realize that North Korean artillery shells and missiles aren't raining down on them, so they relax and go back to their clubbing. Altogether it is an interesting watch.
A while back I did a post on Cossack sword dancing. Today we follow that post up with some Korean sword dancing. Above is a video of young ladies from Chungnam Arts High School doing a sword dance. Their swords are no where near as long and dangerous looking as the Cossack swords, but the costuming and choreography is very nice.
Korean sword dances are called Geom-mu(검무). All the examples of Korean sword dancing I saw featured women; I'm not sure what the story behind that is. The dances appear to be more formalized and theatrical than the Cossack dances. Below are a couple of other examples of Korean sword dances.
