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wishingstar589
Reviews
Liu xing hua yuan (2018)
Drama about gorgeous boys falling for a homely girl stretches credibility
Netflix has been recommending this to me for so long I finally caved.in. The boys are good looking all right. Dao Ming Si (Dylan Wang) and Hua Ze Lei (Darren Chen) are truly gorgeous. So I found it hard to believe that such guys would fight over such an unappealing girl. I watched the 2001 Taiwanese Meteor Garden for comparison and found Dong Shan Cai there (Barbie Hsu) to be much more palatable. I kept wishing the director/casting staff made Dong Shan Cai as endearing here.
I understand the story is from a manga series and it probably depicted the girl to be homely but cute. Dong Shan Cai in this drama is too serious to be cute. Her acting is rather wooden. I watch cdramas generally to satisfy my aesthetic needs. I immediately drop those that don't. I had thought of dropping this many times, my frustration at watching such an unappealing female lead mounting with each pouty expression and plodding movement she made, but Dylan Wang kept me going. The way he embodied the character is mesmerizing. He successfully made the audience root for a spoiled brat, who doesn't know the meaning of love thus bullies the girl who makes him feel it, to grow up.
Chang Yue Jin Ming (2023)
Publicity! Publicity! Publicity!
According to a statement from the production team, video game visual effects were used to hook viewers to the drama and get them addicted to it. I suppose the intimate scenes that viewers have been slobbering over also serve this end.
Can't help wondering... if the drama is amazing, why resort to such antics? The simple reason is that it isn't. Only the publicity is amazing. The story used so many cdrama tropes - self-sacrifice, bad boy turned good, thirst for revenge after being bullied, misunderstandings, denying romantic feelings, secondary female who won't let go, and many more - that, bereft of exceptional dialogues and acting, it got cheesy, annoying, dragging and boring, putting me to sleep several times.
Oh, did I mention the publicity? The team certainly spared no expense in that regard. This drama is even featured at the top of "best Chinese dramas" or some such lists on Youtube even though no reputable rating site considers it as such.
In fact, Chinese netizens have nominated it for "King of Bad Dramas in the first half of 2023". Furthermore, Douban, a prestigious social networking site in China, gives this a score of 5.6, meaning marginally okay. If you wish to know how this compares to other Chinese dramas, here are the Douban scores of some dramas (as of 7/13/2023):
Love Between Fairy and Devil = 8.1, The Rise of Phoenixes = 8.1, Ashes of Love = 7.8, The Untamed = 7.7, Goodbye, My Princess = 7.6, Love Like The Galaxy = 7.6, The King's Avatar = 7.3, Ten Miles of Peach Blossoms = 6.6, Who Rules The World = 5.7, Till The End of the Moon = 5.6
Had the team behind this drama stopped at hiding its flaws behind addictive visuals and intimate scenes, I would have kept quiet. But creating fake news went a bit too far. There is no caveat in those Youtube videos that the reports were based on personal opinion, thus misleading viewers into thinking the reports are official.
Chang feng du (2023)
The taming of the indolent heir
Gu Jiusi is the heir of the Gu family, the wealthiest family in the land. Believing he does not need to work because of his family's money, Jiusi does nothing but have fun with his friends. By chance he meets Liu Yuru, the legitimate daughter of a humble cloth merchant whose household is ruled by his concubine.
Growing up a laughingstock due to her stepmother lording it over her and her mother, Yuru has dreamed of marrying her best friend's brother, Ye Shi'An, who happens to be the ideal man Jiusi's father wants him to be.
Alas, just when Yuru's dream was about to come true, she finds herself engaged to Jiusi. Though she gets married to a guy not of her choosing, she learns to be content. Her in-laws are sweet and trust her. They retire to a villa in the suburbs leaving their son and the household to her.
Problems start to appear and Yuru and Jiusu need to move to another place and disown their wealth. Would they be able to recover the Gu family's lost glory? Would Jiusi grow up and be up to the task?
This drama started out extremely interesting for me but somehow lost steam halfway. Still a good watch, much better than other cdramas I've watched recently.
Tou tou cang bu zhu (2023)
A young girl lying and getting away with it? I'm out
This looked interesting - a story of a young girl who falls for the friend of her older brother.
But it lost me when this young girl asked her crush to pose as her brother when her teacher told her to bring a parent to school for some disciplinary action. First, her crush had to lie that he was her brother. Next, he had to lie why he, "her brother" was there instead of "their" parent. Lying seems so endemic in Chinese society. So, is it, "Lying is good as long as you don't get caught?"
And the leads did get away with it. No repercussions whatsoever. What a lesson to teach young girls! A romance that starts off with the leads being partners in a crime instigated by the young girl is something I would be hard-pressed to root for. I couldn't drop this fast enough.
I'm so, so disappointed with cdramas nowadays. Have they run out of ideas?