Love Story in Harvard

Ah… romance on campus. Unlike American movies, this drama does not involve your typical students playing pranks on roommates, partying all night, drinking just to get drunk, or students who never seem to need to study. It is after all an Asian drama and we all know Asian kids study hard (or die at the hands of their karate fighting parents!).

With the prestigious Harvard University as the backdrop, the drama starts off by introducing Kim Hyun-woo, an international student here to represent South Korea at Harvard Law. He is proud, he is smart, he is funny, and he believes in justice. Your typical hero. Yes, he has an accent and can’t speak very well in English, but he does have a heart-melting smile!

Enter the serious and top of the class student, Hong Jung-min. Your typical rival. Complete with the wanting on Hyun-woo for his father. Always the best in everything he does and he knows it. Great in class, great on court (haha he’s a lawyer AND a basketball player!), and great with the ladies. He knows he’s got game and he will do anything to be the best. Too bad his English is worse than Hyun-woo’s… Maybe that’s why he doesn’t get the girl, the girl being the lovely Kim Tae Hee, who has the two men throwing daggers at each other whenever possible.

Even though for a good chunk of the drama you have to endure the unfortunate accents of our Korean actors, it did help how the writers were able to create a lot of situations where the actors thankfully also get to speak in Korean. The fact that they are eye candy also helped. :p The non-Korean actors on the other hand… they could speak English, but acting? TT______TT Thankfully the writers end the love story at Harvard and bring us back home to Korea where the rivalry between Hyun-woo and Hong-min continues in both their professional and personal lives.

Don’t get me wrong, so far the drama is playing out quite well even with all the accents and the bad acting from the supporting characters. The romance and rivalry between the three main characters is interesting to watch and so is the challenge Hyun-woo faces in dealing with the dreaded professor. However, while I thanked the writers for taking us back to Korea, where our actors could comfortably speak in their native tongue, I also realized 15 minutes into the episode that the drama’s plot would go downhill from there… Because that’s when all the melodrama starts! Complete with the evil white man, opposing parents, near death crashes, and cancer.

My bad. There’s no cancer.

Yes, so why did I keep going until the end? Because I invested so many hours watching the two fall in love and I wanted to see how their relationship would end! Grrrr… TT___TT

Skip this drama. If you do watch it then I suggest only watching up to episode 6.

p.s. – I would repeatedly bang my head against the wall whenever that aweful theme song played!

Dragon Zakura

Story:
Definitely similar to GTO, but still different. The drama was really brought down by the scene involving the chairman and the other teachers who constantly bicker. I ended up fast-forwarding all of that.

Acting:
The main actors were the ones that really, really held up this drama. All the actors who had minor roles did very little to support the series. In fact their contribution made the drama worse…

Music:
Background music fits the scenes, but the insert and theme songs aren’t much to talk about. Bored me completely actually…

Overall:
I learnt a lot about how to study. Interesting tidbits about effective studying methods. The series ends well though.  If you have nothing else to do then try this drama. It’s not good, but it’s not bad either.

Dance Drill

Story:
Completely unoriginal. Absolutely uninspiring in every way possible. If they had at least shown more than 2 cool dance routines then maybe I’d give higher marks, but they didn’t. The side stories are also really boring except maybe the one involving the teacher. The teacher’s story gets more interesting. Mind you, don’t expect that story to blow you away or anything.

Acting:
Yes… I guess they did okay. I frankly liked the karate girl and girl with glasses best. Everyone else was pretty boring. Although it wasn’t completely their fault since the characters don’t really change in terms of personality.

Music:
Background score wasn’t appealing. Quite forgettable.

Overall:
Pass on it.