It is has been a little over a week since I returned home from Seoul and admittedly, I am still reeling from the after effects of seeing this extraordinary musical and, well, G.O! I thought I would offer some final thoughts on the musical and his wonderful performance.
I wish all Korean drama musical directors would woo G.O into singing a song on their respective OSTs…and often! His voice and range is so perfect and lends itself well to any genre of music from smooth R&B to upbeat pop like his latest offering for the I Need Romance 3 OST, You. Yes, I am pretty biased, but he truly has a wonderful voice.
And, he is so dreamy……LOVE!! ♥♥♥
Kim Junsu’s musical, The Musical December: Unfinished Song, is currently running in Seoul (and soon to play to audiences in Busan and Daegu). It serves up some gorgeous melodies from the ever-versatile and inexplicably talented vocal force that is Kim Junsu. I really cannot say enough about this young man’s talent.
I have not seen the musical but picked up a special album of 6 songs from the show. The songs are not performance cuts nor is the album an OST, but rather Junsu singing a selection of songs his character, JiWook, sings in the musical.
Actress Ku Hye Sun is quite the renaissance woman it seems. She is pretty accomplished and not yet 30 years of age. She is an actor, director, writer, illustrator, and singer. I admit to knowing nothing about her and her short film, Pieces of Memory, featuring Yoo Seung Ho, is my intro to her. I don’t even know her as an actress because I am probably one out of about a billion K-drama fans who has never seen Boys Over Flowers. <gasp>
In this short film which she wrote, directed, scored and even sung the theme song for, we have a gentle commentary about the passage of life and how the memories we collect determine how sweet (or not) it was. Touching and poignant, the film takes us through a journey of one man in five stages of his life as he contemplates and looks back on it. We get the beautiful doe-eyed Yoo Seung Ho portraying the man in the third stage of life, or as the young man.
This is the time in life when you are no longer a child or a teen but on the verge of starting to embark upon the journey as an adult filled with hope and verve of being ‘the conductor’ of your life. Best laid plans, right? There is very little dialogue and primarily voice overs but the message is thought-provoking and lovely with lines like, “Fragments of sweet memories came to me”, “Life was perfectly beautiful just so long as there were those sweet memories.”
It is the first Korean film to be shot using 4K3D technology which gives vivid and outstanding 3D effects as well as beautifully enhanced imagery. The set is immaculate and precise and the colors vivid and rich. This is a beautifully shot film and won Ku Hye Sun the Young Director Prize at the 2013 Seoul International Silver Film Festival.
Seung Ho has such a nice presence utilizing his gorgeous eyes to pretty much communicate his thoughts throughout the film. I love eclectic independent film work like this and believe it suits Seung Ho perfectly.
[Source: ygfamily.com/Video credit: YG Entertainment]
At precisely 12:00 PM Korean Standard Time on January 2, 2014, there was a downpour of Rain that I could not have been possibly prepared for. I only have three words: Rain. Is. Back.
야뇌 (Acoustic Version) – BMK [Warrior Baek Dong Soo OST]
I seriously do not know where to begin. This drama took me on such a ride, I simply was not prepared. There is so much to say about it, but since this is a postscript to my K-Shot post on Yoo Seung Ho, I am going to focus solely on the agonizingly conflicted Yeo Woon (Un). Gosh, the minute I say or think of his name, Un, I am filled with such incredible emotion. Yoo Seung Ho became Un – he wasn’t Yoo Seung Ho playing a character, no – he became the character he was cast to play. And it was amazing to watch unfold.
I feel like this is a celestial event. You know, the kind of thing that happens every 5000 years or something!! I just finished up and posted Yoo Seung Ho as my latest K-Shot, as you know, and Rain awhile ago. I knew when I decided to blog about the delicious men of the K-entertainment world that the amount of information out there would be so vast and wide, it would be next to impossible to find ALL of it, and indeed impossible to include in a single post. Hence, the K-Shot Postcript. My dear friend and fellow blogger, Stephe at Cloud USA and over at stephethornton.com has been a wonderful supporter of all I do over here (so much so she offered me a position on the Cloud USA staff as a writer) so I have her to thank for thunking me over the head with this one. Sinew and smolder collide when Rain and Yoo Seung Ho meet in the gym for Adidas. Oh yes this makes me very happy!! 🙂 Thank you, Stephe!!
Ok, I really liked Speed Racer. And, no not just because Rain was in it although it was really cool that he was. But even more importantly, he landed on the Wachowski’s radar and THAT resulted in Ninja Assassin. I concur that Rain would make an incredibly good action film star with a healthy side of brood and insolence mixed in. I rather enjoy him in broody, insolent roles where you ultimately end up liking him because somewhere buried beneath those layers of insolence is a decent guy who upon discovering his own decency, lets us in on it. Rain’s Taejo Togokahn is one of those guys.