Journalist, Author & Syndicated Columnist
The Nth Room targeted Korean women in a lower socio-economic class who needed money. They also set their marks on underage girls, who were too young to handle what they had been tricked into. These crimes are continuing, but now with with teenage boys at the helm.
Set in a hospice, the point of “If You Wish Upon Me” isn’t that the dying can only leave this world if they have a wish fulfilled. Rather, sometimes they need peace of mind before they’ll allow themselves to go.
After learning that his long-time girlfriend is deathly allergic to dogs, Min-soo sets out on a journey to to find a new home for his beloved golden retriever. In the end, he realizes that the solution to his problem was nearby the whole time.
A fast-moving action film, “Yaksha: Ruthless Operations” is a spy thriller full of special ops, backstabbing and political intrigue. Last year, I stopped watching about 20 minutes into the movie, because it didn’t hold my interest. But when I went back to it this year, I found it to be thoroughly entertaining. Is this a prestige film? Absolutely not. But it was a fun ride with a (straight-laced) fish-out-of-water concept.
A psychological thriller that sounded much better than it actually is, “Somebody” revolves a serial killer (Kim Young-kwang) who uses a dating app to find his victims — and the app developer (Kang Hae-lim) who identifies with him, even after finding out his true identity.
“Summer Strike” is one of those series that I started started, was meh about, and then returned to a few months later and found myself binging the rest of the show. The premiere episode was strong, focusing on a young office worker whose good nature is taken advantage of both at work and in her long-term relationship with a man who breaks up with her.
The “Green Mothers’ Club” revolves around a group of moms whose lives are spent pushing their young children to academic excess. They spend money they don’t have on after-school hagwons for extra tutoring. And they clique together and take turns turning on whichever mom has been deemed the weakest for that week. Ultimately, the young lives they’re trying to elevate are the ones who suffer.
In an unusual cinematic coincidence, two critically acclaimed films about South Korean adoption were released in December depicting different sides of the adoption story. Broker focuses on a teenage girl who leaves her infant at a church’s safe haven baby box, while Return to Seoul tells the story of a French woman who reunites with her birth family just days after arriving in Korea. To better understand how these films speak to real-life adoptees, I talked to Korean academics, human rights experts, and adoptees. My reported piece for MASHABLE.
답답해. That’s the first feeling that comes to mind when I think of the K-drama “The Interest of Love.” The entire series is about a group of broken people who can’t articulate how they feel and are in a constant state of unhappiness because of this.
The conceit of “May I Help You?” revolves around a young woman who is working as a funeral director. Dong-ju is smart with a sunny disposition, but no one believes that handling dead people is a suitable career for her. But she has been gifted with a special power to talk to the deceased and grant them their final wish.