Last year around July a drama premiered that appeared both zany and cute, leaving everyone excited that a good farce was to be had. Alas, Spy Myung Wol turned out to be a debacle of epic proportions on and off the screen, and right now Haeundae Lovers is reminding me of SMW for various reasons. It’s about the premiere in 2 weeks during the fun Summer season, the premise is kooky and rife with identity hijinks and undercover tensions galore, and the promos and posters all gear towards good-natured self mockery. Until I watched the actual teaser (not the two beach ads that aired last week, but a real teaser with footage of the drama), I remained uninterested in this whole shebang.
Leads Kim Kang Woo and Jo Yeo Jung are fine but hardly excite me, and second leads Nam Gyu Ri and Jung Seok Won are even less interesting to me. That all changed when I watched the trailer, which looks just so stupid and silly and, dare I say it, bad on an am-I-seeing-this level, I actually want to check it out now. This might be fun if you check your brain at the door and watch for the sure to be abundance of bikinis, bare chests, and lots of wetness galore since its set at the beach. And please, can we refrain from tittering about Jo Yeo Jung’s impressive bosom, other than the shout out I just gave it. Consider me impressed, though the reason I like her because she’s a very sincere and lovely actress.
The two posters for Haeundae Lovers is a whole new level of jaw-droppingly terrible I have no words. The last thing a poster wants to evoke from the viewer is the uncontrollable desire to laugh AT it. Jo Yeo Jung’s catch of the day being Kim Kang Woo might be cute but for the fact that his expression is just so dazed and confused. The Titanic moment on a small speed boat is about 16 years too old of a joke, even if I find the two leads absolutely adorable together in that pose.
The character stills are not bad. My favorite are the ones featuring the gangster ahjusshis.
Let’s check out some stills of the characters in action. Just as a refresher of the plot: Kim Kang Woo plays one of my most hated K-drama character tropes – the investigating public prosecutor. As a lawyer it seriously kills my brain cells to see a prosecutor pulling double duty as the lead investigator in building his case. In HL, he goes undercover as a gangster in Haeundae to gather evidence for his mob case and conveniently loses his memory. Pre-memory loss Kim Kang Woo is engaged to Nam Gyuri’s character, but afterwards he falls in love with the mob boss’ daughter played by Jeo Yeo Jung. She is herself a self-sufficient fish monger/can-do business woman who hates her mob upbringing and vows to leave it all behind. Jung Seok Won plays the son of the rival mob boss who edges Jo Yeo Jung’s mob daddy out of power. So there you have it, the recipe for a classic screwball comedy right there. As much as this drama appears so mockworthy, if done right, it has the potentially to be really fantastic with the funny and the touching all blended together into a Summer snow cone of deliciousness. I hope that’s what we end up getting.
Trailer for Haeundae Lovers:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrYuMarHPvk
All I see in the first pictures is boobs. Not a good sign if we’re relying on the cleavage.
Also, is it me or does someone look a LOT like Lee Dong Wook in sunglasses?
lol, they both look about the same size (his and hers, I mean).
That teaser is so bizarre… You can’t guess what’s the genre chosen for the story.
I love the 2 fighting ahjussis (I love the actors who play the characters actually). For the rest, it’s a big ????.
Are there investigating prosecutors in Western dramas? I admit my ignorance in this area. I always just assumed that the Korean justice system ran a little differently and gave prosecutors more investigative authority than (what I presume is normal for) American/Western prosecutors.
I have to admit I don’t really care either way, because a) I’m not in any kind of law profession (though it does bug the crap outta me when procedural dramas do all kinds of things to muck up a crime scene, imaginary though it is), and b) KKW is to me pretty much the hottest thing on two legs. Not sure why, but he hits all the right buttons for me. ~oogles~
I think the investigating prosecutor bit is a truly K-drama construct. I can’t imagine a legal system where the counsel acts as the evidence gatherer, because that just breaks about every bit of privilege and chain of evidence issue. An overzealous counsel could collect whatever evidence scrounged up to make a case, without any impartiality. The trifecta would be if the investigating prosecutor was also the judge. I think my brain would explode in that case. Anyways, unless there is a shortage of cops on the street, I don’t see any reason for the prosecutor to GO UNDERCOVER. O__O I’ll take it for dramatic license purposes but I hope folks don’t think this is anywhere near reality.
You know I was wondering the same thing b/c I think in CH, the prosecutor started investigating. And also in Ghost, the prosecution just took over an investigation and all the evidence in the episode I just watched.
LOL!
You mock this drama’s premise (and almost every aspect about it) and yet you absolutely adored the hot mess that was BIG. Not sure if I’m following your logic…
LOL!! You got the point 🙂
Oh my head hurts. Your comment fails the basic test of making a connection between two wholly unrelated objects. I’m merely discussing HL based on what I see of it and the expectation stemming therewith. How you could bring up Big, or any other drama for that matter, frankly leaves me befuddled. My comments on HL are backed up what my observations. Agree or disagree, it’s my opinion. And it’s so far from anything I wrote on Big that I can’t even call it comparing apples to oranges. That would require both to be fruit.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think this drama is intended to be ridiculously funny, it’s just a gender of comedy that likes to mock itself, like, for example, the movie “the naked gun”. It’s not a bad gender of drama/movie but you have to be aware that the plot is not going to be coherent and that anything is possible. Unlike BIG.
BIG was not this kind of gender and it was supposed to be a romance with elements of fantasy, drama and occasional comedy, but in the end was badly orchestrated, it had many things unsolved and that didn’t make sense. Although not a good thing in a drama, still one can madly love a drama in spite of all its incoherencies. I, myself, loved “my princess” and it had a lot of incoherency, still it was good enough for me. Maybe the same thing happened in BIG for Koala.
You can never understand the matters of the heart – why one likes the things one likes. I think koala didn’t deny the incoherencies of BIG, she just liked it in spite of that, its her taste, try to respect it.
I think I will check this one, probably this will surprise me… I havent comment anymore in your BIG pages ockoala, but not because I dont like it, but because too many people already comment about it, so I decided to keep all my comment and impression inside my head. Despite so many viewers dislike BIG because of the ending, but I just think the ending is perfect, thats all I can say.
I agree with u as I have done watching it too…
OMG, Kim Kang Woo, I am in lust. Will definitely check this out just because the man is so hot.
I’m gonna give this one the benefit of the doubt because of the residual love I have for KKW from Story of a Man. BUT….it won’t take long to pull the plug if too many of my brain cells start dying.
This is gonna be checked and checked!
The guy with the plaid shirt around his waist, is He the actor from Rainbow Rose? The one that played the Japanese student?
Hm, the preview was a little WTH, but I’m always willing to give a potentially funny drama a try. Unfortunately, many of my brain cells have exploded after watching the latest Dr. J episode so I do have to be more careful in the future with “train wreck” dramas…
This does indeed look rather terrible. Let’s hope the crack-smoking team behind the marketing will not be the team behind the show.