If you have not experienced the awesomeness of K-drama, or Korean TV dramas, I highly recommend giving them a view. The set up is a bit different than American TV shows, the episodes are an hour or more long, and there’s usually only one “season” or anywhere from 16-30 episodes in each drama. Given that the stories have a definite end point instead of yearly “will they or won’t they” renewals and extra seasons, the writing, acting and storytelling are stellar and don’t suffer from consecutive seasons that become more mediocre after each year.

The Great Doctor or Faith is a historical drama and romance set in the 1300s during a time when Korea or Goryeo is under the heavy thumb of the neighboring Chinese Yuan dynasty. The young king is returning with a new queen to his homeland after years of living as a hostage in China. The king and queen are being transported by a small group of royal guards called Woodalchi. They are led by weary warrior Choi Young who has been serving for royals for many years. They are attacked during the journey and the new queen is wounded. Only a powerful surgeon can heal her, and one of the king’s advisors suggests going to a place he knows of with a magic gateway to heaven where a famous ancient doctor is said to have gone.

The gateway still exists and Choi Young is sent on a quest to heaven to find the great doctor. “Heaven” is actually modern day Seoul as the “gate” turns out to be a wormhole bending time and space. In a happy coincidence, Choi Young enters the future in direct vicinity of a plastic surgeons convention and kidnaps a surgeon named Yoo Eun-Soo after giving her a practical test to gauge her surgical abilities. The show could have easily just run with the fish-out-of-water theme that it plays up in the first few episodes, but the writers smartly kept that to a minimum and focused more on the drama surrounding the king and queen and how the two protagonists deal with that and begin falling for each other.

From the first episode to the last, the production of The Great Doctor is a stellar, movie-quality experience. The story drags a little at the end, but it’s mostly character driven with plenty of action. If you don’t like the characters at the beginning, they will feel like old friends by the 24th episode. There aren’t many special effects, but what is shown doesn’t look too corny. The magic in the world is left partly unexplained, but the character and action more than make up for that.

Much of the series reminded me of the book series Outlander in which a WW2 nurse gets sent back to ancient Scotland and falls for a younger warrior. Except this version is far more charming and romantic and doesn’t rely on sadism as a way of furthering the plot.

At first I thought Yoo Eun-Soo played by Kim Hee-Seon was annoying and acted a bit childishly for her age, but Kim won me over especially in the second half of the series as her character begins to bloom under the love of Choi Young. Young is played by the popular and easy on the eyes Li Min-Ho who came to fame from the comedy series Boys Over Flowers (if you love high school shows and comedies do not pass Go, do not collect $200, but go directly the Kdrama app where you can watch the series for free). His character is my favorite simply because I enjoy exploring the plight of the “faithful servant.” He’s killed hundreds, possibly thousands of soldiers and others all at the request of the kings that he serves and his soul (Seoul, ha, ha! Okay, I’ll stop being so punny) hurts because of it. He’s damaged in a way that I cannot comprehend, but that I’m sure many of those who are soldiers and good at it can.

Like most shows and films The Great Doctor wasn’t easily made. It suffered from production delays and the lack of a lead actor after the first and second choices for Choi Young fell through. Li Min-Ho stepped up to the plate and did a decent job. He’s a bit younger than the age the role calls for, but Li is believable as the captain of the royal warriors because he commands wonderful screen presence…and he’s tall. 🙂 Okay, all the warriors are tall (at least to me, I’m 5’3″– okay 5’2 and 1/2″), but Li was a good choice as he’s an expert at sporting a sort of bored “I’m cool” expression well-suited to a warrior who has probably seen every atrocity under the sun. Also, the King Gongmin played impressively by Ryu Deok-Hwan is tiny! At least, he appears that way in this production. Ryu does a great job portraying someone who simultaneously has a lot of power and no power and who struggles with it constantly. The king’s personal struggles with power over his own life mirror that of his best warrior, Choi Young, and their relationship is in a way more interesting than that between Young and the “great doctor from heaven.” Also, the king and queen’s relationship is sweet.

I love romances, and the love story in this is wonderful with lots of funny moments and many touching, endearing ones. By the end you just want to shout out the Jerry McGuire line: “You complete me!” Yoo Eun-Soo fills the ache in Choi Young’s heart and vice versa.

One more shout out, and that’s to the soundtrack people. The main theme is especially addicting and reminded me somewhat of the Pirates of the Caribbean music.

You may ask yourself…

Jun24

I love writing and I LOVE stories. Just saying.

Trolls for Dust

…just how is the first draft of TfD, Season Two coming along?

Answer: Scene by scene, line by line, and day by day.

At Vale TV Studios:

Eva Peters is having an identity crisis and Hezzy Lyon is being brainwashed.

Calvin Bender wakes up with nightmares while Michael Abner puts the moves on Harmony Honeydew.

P.I. Ken Friendle is on the hunt for Tippa Andrews who is soon to meet his mysterious benefactor.

And Sandra Vale’s trying not to be her own personal rain cloud while managing police, press, nosy shareholders and irritable mad scientists.

Don’t even get me started on what The Writers, McGee, Beth, and Daniels have been up to! They are driving head show director Jin Yang nuts! Silly string…it’s a long story.

And “back at the ranch,” I mean Whisper Parish:

Sassy Birch is squatting in Bunny Sweet’s apartment and doing that whole…

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The Next Harry Potter–Part 2 of 3

Jun6

2. Monster Blood Tattoo.

This series is a big reason why I miss Borders. If it hadn’t been at Borders I would have missed out on D.M. Cornish’s incredible world, for the new “American” series title and artwork are not nearly as dynamic as the first cover and title that caught my eye. I fell in love with MBT upon reading the first book, The Foundling, and was sad to see it was months before I saw it on the shelves of my local Barnes and Noble. One of Borders biggest strengths, in my opinion, was that they had a lot of awesomeness waiting to be discovered on their shelves.

Monster Blood Tattoo is the rightful name of this series, but for some reason it was deemed that Americans are too sensitive or something for this title, so it was changed to the bland The Foundling’s Tale. For me it will ever and always be Monster Blood Tattoo, and I will hereafter refer to the series as MBT. Australian author and illustrator D.M. Cornish spent some fifteen plus years creating the world of the Half-Continent. Think Napoleanic-era empire crossed with monsters and monster hunters. The result is as epic and as Tolkien’s Middle Earth with the addition of wonderful hand-drawn portraits of the characters. Add the lengthy, fascinating appendices, and it’s a veritable role-playing game waiting for geekdom.

The Foundling’s Tale as a name isn’t so far off, at least for the first three books (I am hoping there will be more), as it follows an orphan boy with a girl’s name, a kid who wants to be a monster fighter but ends up being a lamplighter on the emperor’s highway. Much like Harry Potter, Rossamünd has to continually reassess his view of world and the people and/or creatures in it. At times he’s just plain dumb, but then he’s a kid. The best character in the series is bonafide monster hunter Europe the “Branden Rose.” She’s one of those hard shell-soft core people for whom Rossamünd presents a dilemma. He insists on seeing the, well, “human” side of monsters, whereas Europe has grown up seeing them as threats only. She’s even had her organs surgically altered so she can fight the monsters with lightening. Interestingly, in the Half-Continent the majority of the monster hunters are women.

Why this could be The Next Harry Potter: Despite its rather simplistic plot at times, the series has great depth and great potential. Cornish has built a vast world meant to be explored in its minutest detail. The world and story can appeal to a wide audience, both kids and adults, and would easily adapt to the screen. The biggest challenge would be the terminology, as Cornish uses quite a few made up words much like HP or LOTR, but a talented screen writer would be able to incorporate these no problem. The series also boasts a wealth of interesting characters, both humans and monsters, political and social commentary, and the important theme that people and creatures be judged not merely for what they are, but for what they do and how they act.

Up next time: The Kingdom

The Next Harry Potter–Part 1 of 3

May31

As anyone who is a fan of books and/or movies knows, the popularity of the Harry Potter series with both kids and adults is something the entertainment industry has long been trying to replicate. Many books have been hailed as “The Next Harry Potter,” in order to get more readers and then viewers if the book becomes a movie. Some of these have failed and some have succeeded, and a few like Twilight have become their own phenomenons.

The next Harry Potter, the next Twilight, the next Hunger Games, we’re always looking for the next big thing. In searching for the “next” and wanting to be first on the bandwagon, we sometimes miss stories that are already there, books that with the right marketing, screenwriter, and stars could make excellent movie franchises. Here are three that I would like to see on the big screen:

1. The Oz series.

Most people are familiar with the iconic 1939 The Wizard of Oz movie starring Judy Garland. It is a film that made excellent use of color vs. b&w, and introduced “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” a near spiritual hymn that is deeply entrenched in our collective psyche to this day.

What many don’t know is that the author of The Wizard of Oz, Frank L. Baum, wrote thirteen other books about the Land of Oz, some including Dorothy, some not. Over the years, a few of these books have been produced as a cartoon, video, or film, the most recent effort of these was Oz the Great and Powerful directed by Sam Raimi and starring James Franco, Rachel Weisz, Michelle Williams, and Mila Kunis. While it was refreshing to see a new Oz story told, it sadly involved magic, but had none of that film magic that the 1939 movie captured so wonderfully.

A big problem with modern fantasy films whether for children or adults is that they evoke no sense of wonder or excitement of either the actual world or of our imaginations. This is perhaps due to our cynicism today, but also much due to the fact that so many film makers don’t want to tell the stories of these excellent works, but their own stories, only slapping the names and settings of better storytellers on their efforts in order to make a profit. It isn’t necessary to faithfully detail every book page to every line in a screenplay, but capturing the spirit of the original work should, I think, be a goal. I saw nothing of Baum’s Oz world in that recent film and thought it was a shame because of all the talent involved in the project.

Oz suffers a similar fate to that of Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie. In our modern times, we get too caught up in creating our own alternate versions of the story or changing it into a psychological study instead of focusing on telling a good story. This isn’t to say that alternate versions can’t be great, but, again, they should not be wholly cut off from the main source material. The source material is in almost all cases weirder, quirkier, and more interesting than the bland retellings of them crafted to “one size fits all.”

It has been some time since I’ve read the original novel, but the 1939 The Wizard of Oz at least captures Oz even if it didn’t follow the book to the letter. It captured the magic, the danger, and the political intrigue of “the man behind the curtain.” It is a movie much beloved, but not one, I think, for everyone. Let me show another example: Wicked by Gregory Maguire. I have met people who love the story, and some who won’t touch it. It is a story for a specific audience, a story that decidedly won’t appeal to everyone, but to those who desire a deeper understanding of what makes a bad person bad, or a villain a villain. For some, it’s enough to say a character is a villain because, of course evil exists in the world. For others, though, they want to know why, they want a reason either behind the bad actions or behind the label of “evil.” It’s why in the aftermath of mass shootings there is so much focus on the background of the shooter. We think there must be a reason. Sometimes there is and sometimes there isn’t. For those of us who believe there is true evil in the world, no amount of reasons makes any difference, evil is evil. That true evil can’t be corrected by therapy or giving everyone a perfect childhood, well, that’s a hard lesson to learn, and we are a bit loathe to learn that today. We want to blame the gun or the knife, or the possible abuse and/or neglect of the killer, but is the possession of a weapon or any sort of history of suffering really an excuse for the slaughtering of strangers? Aren’t we really, in some form, trying to excuse away the evil in our own hearts? I digress, these all are thoughts best plumbed in an entirely different article. My point is, stories made up to cater to everyone, whether one year to ninety years, whether living in East or West, North or South, often cater to no one.

Back on topic: My favorite book in the Oz series has long been Ozma of Oz. Ozma is a great character, not always nice, and one who shows another side of Dorothy. How wonderful it would be for this tale to have a proper big screen treatment. In fact, all of the books in the series offer plenty of plots, magic, characters, and wonder to compromise an entire franchise of films, if only Hollywood, or someone, would step to it. This is a fantasy world that has stood the test of time, and like more modern fantasy such as Harry Potter, offers much social commentary and philosophizing in the process.

Up next time: Part 2: Monster Blood Tattoo

One Idea

May21

It’s amazing in life how one idea can change everything.

Four years ago I was struggling with wanting to be a writer, yet was finding it difficult to actually get my thoughts and stories down on paper. So I started this blog with the plan of writing a one-page story every day for a year. Now I only got to 270 stories, but it was refreshing to be writing something creative every single day.

Since then, I’ve written online more sporadically than I would like, but that’s due to a project that just took off from that one idea to write every day. One of the short stories I wrote in 2010 was about an actress who had just gotten hired to be on a new TV drama that was a also a reality competition. Trolls for Dust was the name that popped into my head, and I just couldn’t let that story go.

And now I am writing the second book in the series Trolls for Dust and working on advertising the publication of the first book. As of today the Facebook page for Trolls for Dust has reached over 1,000 likes, something I know isn’t that uncommon, yet it took time and dollars to get it to that point. I’ve had so much fun not only self-publishing and creating the story and the series, but also letting my creativity loose a little in coming up with “box” ads. Now there may t-shirts coming in the future and the website itself is presenting more potential, and the second book is looking to surpass the first in both quality, drama, and awesomeness. Also, I have the privilege of giving away books to potential readers on goodreads.com and am looking into selling the print edition at a book fair or two.

I wanted to share this today, just to encourage the pursuit of ideas, especially for the writers out there. One good idea can change your life. It can open doors you never knew existed. I’m writing more now than I ever have before and a blank page no longer scares me, but intrigues me. I’m having fun pursuing a dream that, yes, is leaving a bit of a dent in my bank account, but is so much better than sitting around and thinking, “I wish…” And I’m learning about publishing, advertising, marketing, design, and writing along the way.

Thanks for reading,

Pixie