My Name (2021) by Kim Jin-min

[cranefly]

Right off the bat let me apologize for watching something that doesn't start with a J.  But hey, the director's last name starts with a J.  (Or is that his first name?)

The daughter of a gangster seeks revenge when Pop is gunned down while trying to visit her.  The daughter is played by Han So-hee, a hot commodity actress in South Korea right now.  She's tiny, and it requires some suspension of disbelief watching her dismantle much bigger opponents left and right.  Still, she worked harder and longer than anyone else at "fight school" preparing for this role, and she's super fast, kicks well, and to my mind sells her flurries of combinations and complex take-downs.

I'm done with 6 of the 8 episodes.  The early ones concentrated on training and fighting.  But the later ones have undergone a tonal shift -- more atmospheric, suspenseful and intellectual as the police and gangsters try to outwit each other in various ways.  There's cleverness in how they figure things out.  In fact, this is one of the smartest police procedurals I've ever seen.  The only real slip-up is using the good cop/bad cop routine to get a gangster to talk.  Just because every American police show uses it doesn't mean it works.  It doesn't!  But all else is well done.

I wonder if Han So-hee got injured during filming, because after her impressive fisticuffs in the early going, there's a many-episode lull where she doesn't fight much.  Still, the episodes remain engaging for their tonal shift.

Two more episodes to go.  There's been a lot of stuff revealed.  Things are not as they seem.  Anxious to see how this wraps up.

[cranefly]

And done.

Two notables.  There's a preponderance of knife fights in this series.  So much stabbing.  I'm pretty sure it's all overhand grip, like double daggers in Bak Sil Lum.  It takes like 400 stabs to kill someone, so these are very bloody fights.

Also there's been a changing of the guards.  No longer does an eatery signal an impending fight.  Nope.  Now it's a long hallway.  If someone starts down a long hallway, you can bet it won't easy reaching the other end.  The Raid has been very influential.

All in all, a good series.  Maybe a bit dragged out, which is true of most series I've seen.  But this had great characters and complex relationships to carry it through the slow parts.  It also had lots of twists and was very hard to predict where it would go next.

[Drunk Monk]

This is in my queue. It was recommended by my UNESCO editor who is based in South Korea. She tells me it’s the trend there now in the wake of Squid Game but she felt the choreo could’ve been better. 

Netflix’s algorithm recommended it to me when it came out and it’s been in my queue all along.

[Greg]

Okay. I watched the first episode. Where does she learn to fight in the realm of the movie? She just starts punching the bag and then the nice crime boss man tells her to hit the weak points in her opponents, doesn't show her how or anything, and then she wipes out everyone in the school. It would have been nice for to have a trainer or a mentor.

I also didn't feel a lot of variance in the pacing, no urgency. It was all this happened and this happened and then this happened. Yes, that is how stories are told, but there was no high points or low points. There was all the same energy in every scene.