Dramas.

I’m known to my friends as someone who isn’t always keen on Korean dramas, as much as I (appear to) like all things Korean.  The one thing about dramas is that it takes too long to follow and sometimes it’s just so irritating to see the end of one episode and then have to wait for a while for the next episode to see how things unfold.  But lately I’ve been watching a couple of dramas and I thought watching dramas sometimes isn’t too bad a thing.

Recently I’ve started watching 별에서 온 그대 (He Who Came From The Stars) after I heard that it was pretty good.  To be honest, the thing that got me interested in watching this was Jeon Jihyun, who was making her return to dramas after a long while – to be honest I’ve always known her to star in movies only, so it’s always refreshing to see her in a drama.  And I must say that her acting skills are probably the most outstanding among everyone in the drama – of course she had to be – and I believe the effect just wouldn’t be the same if it was somebody else.  As for the rest of the cast, I would say that they are OK.  Can’t say they are fantastic, but good enough.  However I was slightly peeved about the character that Yoo Inna was playing – I actually like Yoo Inna, but somehow in this drama she is giving me the goosebumps.  Probably because she is portraying a character with two faces, and the irritating thing was that she was portraying it so well!  But of course, I’ve heard people say that her acting skills has never improved since “Secret Garden” (which to some extent I think is true too), but I guess because she’s acting opposite Jeon Jihyun, so the contrast is just there.  The story line of the drama is pretty interesting, and I think I can’t really wait for the end of the whole series!

To be honest, the last few dramas that I’ve watched have all been Korean ones.  Again, it’s not like I only like Korean ones, but it’s just that the dramas from other places don’t seem to interest me the way the Korean ones do.  I mean, I do think that the Korean scriptwriters nowadays do have something that scriptwriters from other places do not have.  For example, for a nostalgic drama, 응답하라 1994 was amazing (actually 응답하라 1997 was amazing too).  To be able to find all those things that were in use back in 1994, including magazines of those days, posters, pagers, etc, showed that the crew had made such a detailed effort in portraying the events back then.  And even for things they can’t find or replace, at least they made an effort to mask it up (for example, the Seoul Station sign on the old Seoul railway station in which Samchunpo was standing in front of when he arrived in Seoul).  Recently Hong Kong also had a drama that dealt with a nostalgic theme, but it was being slagged off all over the place for the poor attention paid towards details.  For example, there was a scene in which Kobe Bryant appeared in a sports shop advertisement, when the year portrayed was 1991 (Kobe was 11 then); and then there was a scene in 2001, the main character was using a computer with Windows 7 installed on it (it wouldn’t be wrong if it was Windows XP, but most people would probably be still using either Windows ME or Windows 98).  It’s like, from these small details you can tell how unprofessional some of these Hong Kong drama makers are.  Sometimes I do think, some people have only themselves to blame when people stop watching their shows.  And I don’t even want to start talking about variety shows, as well as the music scene.

The worst thing is, some people in the Hong Kong entertainment industry still have not woken up yet.  Collaborating with China is fine, but when even China is churning out better movies, better dramas and better music, Hong Kong is just going to lose out, and you can’t blame people about not watching your shows any more.

 

The 1998 Series (Part Three).

I spent quite a bit of time thinking about what theme I should be covering in this 1998 Series – it wasn’t easy because it was after all almost 15 years ago! When I was in JC, I was fairly actively involved in the Chinese Literary, Drama and Debate Society (CLDDS). There were many memories during the two years that I was involved, some good, some bad, but all worth cherishing.

In my first year, I was part of the props team for the society’s annual drama night. I couldn’t remember the contents of the dramas, how the props looked like, or how the night went… all I could remember was that it was very tiring! That aside, it also gave me the opportunity to really got to know some good mates. We worked together, we laughed together, and I guess that is where we all build friendship, no matter in which stage of our lives we were. I still have some of them on my Facebook, and if you are reading this and you know of people who are not on my FB yet, link us up please!

After the drama night, I decided that it would be fun to be an executive member of the society, so I decided to run for the elections, and luckily enough, I was appointed the treasurer of the society. For someone who’s never good in mathematics, that was a challenge! My first taste of really managing accounts was for the Mid-Autumn Festival celebrations, and I was so relieved at the end of the whole thing that we didn’t incur a loss!

In my second year, as a senior, my involvement in the drama night was an off-stage one – I was the treasurer of the event and boy, it was even scarier than the Mid-Autumn Festival. The drama night was a huge event, so imagine the amount of money that was involved! It became so complicated that I had to have someone help me through it, and luckily again, we didn’t incur a loss! For the second drama night, I could vaguely remember the stories, the people who were acting, and the props involved – probably because it was my second time being involved things were much clearer. And yes, I was an audience for the nights so I could really enjoy the dramas!

Towards the end of my term, we organized an overnight camp in which we gauged the potential and abilities of the new batch of executive committee members – exactly the same way that I was being casted in the committee – and I remembered that after the whole camp, the bunch of us seniors had quite a heated argument as to who should be the president, but I thought we chose the right person for the job ultimately. And yes, imagine the relief I had when I finally handed over the job of the treasurer!

The things I did with the friends from CLDDS definitely formed a huge part of my time in JC (I don’t always spend time falling in love with people, in case you’d never realized), but if you were to ask me for the one thing that I remember about CLDDS, I would have to say it’s our “Society Book” – the book was basically just a big notebook in which members could write whatever we wanted, and we would just leave the book in the study area which the college called “Oasis”. We were never worried about others reading the book because most of the time people can’t be bothered. Also, the study bench at the Oasis became our “Society Bench” in which we would always hang out before the flag raising ceremony and during the recess and lunch breaks. For me, my habit would be to head to the Society Bench before flag raising, and then during the lunch breaks, I would usually hang out with people from my class – it was difficult trying to balance the two groups of great friends!

To those who are in the picture below and have not added me on Facebook, please do so! I’d love to see all of you again!

This seems like the only picture that the group of us at CLDDS 98/99 took together – thanks to Vivian who uploaded this to Facebook last year! And yes, before you start laughing, I used to look like that in JC…