Tell me you love me

I just sped through 15 episodes of a Korean drama. Which is somewhat of a feat, since I crammed 15 hours into about 6. The story is about a happy young couple who enters a company together. An older, accomplished woman falls head over heels in love with the young man and plots to break them up. She went at extraordinary lengths too, to obtain what she wanted. And as villainous as she is supposed to be, I found myself secretly rooting for her.

The drama is called, "Tell me you love me" and it was playing on youtube. I know this is going to sound shallow, but here goes. There were more than a number of decidedly unattractive characters in the show, men with faces that looked like God wasn't paying attention when he molded them, or a little fat chubby girl with a complexion like that of rice pudding and legs that look like she has had one too many of them as well. Her height was most comical, she was almost as wide as she is tall, so she comes across oddly boxlike. Lord, they were an annoying bunch. And I didn't understand their purpose in the show, perhaps for comic relief? The reason I am going on this rant is because I think for the purposes of a soap opera, the producers ought to employ only good looking or interesting looking people to star in the drama. That is one reason why we watch them no? Eye candy. To feast our eyes on beauty. Instead, every time these odd assortment of weird looking people come on, I felt the protest of my eyes at being subjected to such unaesthetically pleasing pictures.

To be honest, this show stank. The two bright things in the show would be, the female actress is a gem and shines at her role of being both a manipulative vixen and also a pathetic woman who just loves too heartbreakingly. Secondly, even though I watched the translations, I could tell the lines are written with more care, wit and thought. It wasn't very bland soap opera fare nor was it overly dramatic. At times, there were sprinkles of philosophical statements, just the way I liked it. The minuses of the show would have to be, the show became increasingly weepy and the bawling grew both in magnitude and frequency. I was not in the mood to bawl along, so instead, I just rolled my eyes and fast forwarded. Even the male lead couldn't stop crying like a little five year old who just had his toy snatched from him. I lost a lot of my patience with him and I didn't understand why a smart 30 year old and quite beautiful woman would go completely and utterly insane over him. Over him? Surely she could have done better.

The angelic female lead, the mother theresa who is on the receiving end of all plots and manipulations, but of course also the innocent one whom her lovely young man adores - she just annoys me. Her face reminds me of other Korean actresses before her, and she's like the generic version to a brand, or a knock-off substitute. She never quite stepped up to the lead female role as well as the villainous one, with all her scheming ways, was able to. I know I've committed heresy by sticking up for the evil one. All the commentators on youtube.com were screaming for her blood by the end of the show. They got so worked up, I had almost as much fun reading those comments as anything else.

To sum, I don't always root for the good guys I guess, whatever "good" means. I am intrigued by this theme of sheer raw desire, a manic bent on grasping that which you crave, I root for mad obsessive compulsion to own or possess something, I root for wanting something badly enough that you would stoop to almost anything to get it and know it too. At times, when facing such a dark side to human nature, it takes courage to confront the enormity of one's greed and to recognize it for what it is, sheer greed, the bottomless pit in the human heart that always craves for more and more, whatever that may be. Okay, I don't endorse this, don't get me wrong, but I am admittedly captivated by this theme.