I have good and bad reasons for not posting recently.
The good:
I've been working on distributing Dote in more locations. Dote is now available in Australia, Japan, the UK and France (soon).
The bad:
I'm completely addicted to the Korean drama, Boys before Flowers (꽃보다 남자 / Kgotboda Namja). To the point that not only am I not blogging, I'm not working either. And staying up to 2am to catch episodes (pretty foolish considering I have to get up 5 hours later when Ellis wakes).
I'm not an F4 fan, and I avoided Taiwan's Meteor Garden even though it was such a big hit -Jerry Yan and his boyband counterparts had zero pull.
While I am not big on Taiwanese style dramas - let me qualify by saying that I did get hooked at one point but have since come to my senses, mostly because I couldn't handle the manja Taiwanese-style Mandarin - I do love me a good K-drama.
My friend had raved about it but here's the review from ST that convinced me to watch the show. I laughed at the ridiculous storyline but was intrigued enough to give it a shot on mysoju.com.
Are you waving your white flag yet?
----------------------------------
The Straits Times, Life!
Singapore, 20 Feb 2009
By Foong Woei Wan
What does a woman want?
About a century since pioneering psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud asked the question, scientists are still experimenting, staring at their data and trying to map the mysterious terrain of female desire. But as i read a recent report about their research in the New York Times Magazine, it occurred to me that makers of oestrogen-rush dramas such as Meteor Garden and Boys Over Flowers may be ahead of them.
According to the story, the current thinking in science is that female lust is not so much fuelled from within as ignited by somebody else's desire: What women want is to be wanted. They also want pretty contradictory things. As professor of psychology Marta Meana posits, "women want to be thrown up against a wall but not truly endangered. Women want a caveman and caring".
In other words, maybe a man like the hero, some might say anti-hero, of Boys Over Flowers, the third live-action televsion adaption of the 1990s Japanese manga of the same title in eight years. In an age of Hollywood wake-up calls such as He's Just Not That Into You, all this Korean drama wants to do is sweep women off their feet.
Here is a moody, rich campus celebrity who is totally into a spunky, poor girl and launches a campaign of romantic terror to win her affections. His idea of courtship is having men in black kidnap her to his mansion for a surprise spa session and makeover, with trinkets thrown in. Or re-routing his school trip from Europe to a remote isle, just to be in the same place as her. He does nothing by halves and neither does she - kicking, screaming and tossing ice cream and insults in his face.
And I lapped up all this silliness, although much of it is similar to the first two adapations, 2001's Taiwan trailblazer Meteor Garden and 2005's Japanese version Boys over Flowers. It is not just proof of the primal appeal of manga artist Yoko Kamio's original tale, but also a testament to the acting.
As the heroine, Gu Hye Seon (Hearts of Nineteen) seems at once aggressive and defenceless, suggesting a girl who has to fight not to fall in love too hard. Lee Min Ho, as the hero, steps assuredly into the shoes of his predecessors, Taiwan's Jerry Yen and Japan's Jun Matsumoto. Less self-conscious than Yen and better looking than Matsumoto, he flickers convincingly from dangerous to mischievous to sweet. Somewhere out there, entire oestrogen brigades are on the point of surrender.
