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Sep. 2nd, 2021 10:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsOver the summer we've been watching Vincenzo, the Netflix kdrama starring Song Joong-ki (of Sungkyunkwan Scandal and Space Sweepers fame, among others) as an Italian-Korean mafia consigliere who's moved back to Korea after a falling-out with his adopted Italian mob boss brother, where he plans to extract a secret stash of gold from under a rundown shopping center and then use it to set up a new life in Malta.
In the A-plot, Vincenzo meets the nonprofit lawyer who has an office in the shopping center and his energetic but amoral daughter, who works for an evil Big Law firm that's on retainer for the the even more evil Babel Corporation; for reasons of his own, Vincenzo makes it a personal quest to help the nonprofit law firm take Babel down. The battle between Vincenzo and Babel exposes the hypocrisy within every one of Korea's institutions and forces the lawyers on both sides to get their hands increasingly dirty, as the conflict escalates into an all-out war.
In the B-plot, the rest of the charming group of misfits who maintain shops in Vincenzo's new strip mall headquarters -- a children's piano teacher, a modern dance choreographer working on his zombie-inspired magnum opus, a cranky tailor, a pair of married pawnshop owners, a ramen shop owner and her delinquent son, a fake-Italian restaurateur, a couple of monks, and a rogue undercover SIS agent with a Mafia fetish -- collectively decide that they are now his Animal Crossing villagers. He is responsible for solving all their problems and in return they will bring him small useless gifts!
(It is important to note that the villagers also all have skills -- some more secret than others -- that can be utilized in the battle against Big Babel. It's amazing the number of problems that can be solved with a zombie-inspired modern dance piece.)
Vincenzo is .... an incredibly enjoyable show. It's very funny, extremely mood-whiplashy, and in many ways deeply surreal. "It's a bit like a Coen brothers movie," I said, at one point, attempting to describe it to somebody. "It's like, of course you shouldn't do an American remake, but if you did, you could cast Steve Buscemi as Vincenzo --" Then everyone else in the conversation who'd seen Vincenzo immediately shouted me down because it's a frequent and important plot point that Vincenzo is devastatingly hot and literally everyone who meets him falls madly in love with him.
Anyway, my point is: it's an Experience.
I also want to take a second to talk about the villains, because they're really good villains, by which I mean they are absolutely unrepentantly unredeemable in a way that is meaty and fun to watch. I especially want to shout out evil lawyer Choi Myung-hee, who has spent most of her career doing dirty work for mediocre men she doesn't respect, and finds increasing job satisfaction in her new role committing increasingly-less-secondhand murders as second-in-command to a legit sociopath: she loves winning! unlike many cinematic henchwomen she is neither anything approaching a love interest nor a surrogate mom for Babel's head (not pictured because his identity is a spoiler), they just have a deep professional respect for each other's evil competence, and it's not at all touching, because they're both just truly awful people, but it's really enjoyable to see on a screen.
For the first fifteen episodes or so our grade for the show was at a solid 95% (minus five percent for the moderate homophobia in the episode where Vincenzo reluctantly agrees to honeypot an evil gay chaebol.) In the last five episodes or so it lost another five percent for the contortions that the show had to go through after a certain point to justify Vincenzo not just killing the ultimate villains the third or fourth time he had the opportunity to do so, which would have prevented several heavily foreshadowed deaths; in the final episode we subtracted five more points for a.) some really, truly gratuitous death scenes b.) getting its thematic arguments muddled and c.) the fact that a flight out of the country via hot air balloon was heavily foreshadowed all through the back half of the show -- Vincenzo was indeed personally handed a ticket to catch the country's top tier escape balloon service! -- and yet never did we actually see anyone take Chekhov's hot air balloon. We were robbed.
Nonetheless, 85% is still a really solid grade, and overall all of us would recommend the show for a good time! Who doesn't want to see a dazzlingly hot mafia consigliere reluctantly accept responsibility for an Animal Crossing island?
In the A-plot, Vincenzo meets the nonprofit lawyer who has an office in the shopping center and his energetic but amoral daughter, who works for an evil Big Law firm that's on retainer for the the even more evil Babel Corporation; for reasons of his own, Vincenzo makes it a personal quest to help the nonprofit law firm take Babel down. The battle between Vincenzo and Babel exposes the hypocrisy within every one of Korea's institutions and forces the lawyers on both sides to get their hands increasingly dirty, as the conflict escalates into an all-out war.
In the B-plot, the rest of the charming group of misfits who maintain shops in Vincenzo's new strip mall headquarters -- a children's piano teacher, a modern dance choreographer working on his zombie-inspired magnum opus, a cranky tailor, a pair of married pawnshop owners, a ramen shop owner and her delinquent son, a fake-Italian restaurateur, a couple of monks, and a rogue undercover SIS agent with a Mafia fetish -- collectively decide that they are now his Animal Crossing villagers. He is responsible for solving all their problems and in return they will bring him small useless gifts!
(It is important to note that the villagers also all have skills -- some more secret than others -- that can be utilized in the battle against Big Babel. It's amazing the number of problems that can be solved with a zombie-inspired modern dance piece.)
Vincenzo is .... an incredibly enjoyable show. It's very funny, extremely mood-whiplashy, and in many ways deeply surreal. "It's a bit like a Coen brothers movie," I said, at one point, attempting to describe it to somebody. "It's like, of course you shouldn't do an American remake, but if you did, you could cast Steve Buscemi as Vincenzo --" Then everyone else in the conversation who'd seen Vincenzo immediately shouted me down because it's a frequent and important plot point that Vincenzo is devastatingly hot and literally everyone who meets him falls madly in love with him.
Anyway, my point is: it's an Experience.
I also want to take a second to talk about the villains, because they're really good villains, by which I mean they are absolutely unrepentantly unredeemable in a way that is meaty and fun to watch. I especially want to shout out evil lawyer Choi Myung-hee, who has spent most of her career doing dirty work for mediocre men she doesn't respect, and finds increasing job satisfaction in her new role committing increasingly-less-secondhand murders as second-in-command to a legit sociopath: she loves winning! unlike many cinematic henchwomen she is neither anything approaching a love interest nor a surrogate mom for Babel's head (not pictured because his identity is a spoiler), they just have a deep professional respect for each other's evil competence, and it's not at all touching, because they're both just truly awful people, but it's really enjoyable to see on a screen.
For the first fifteen episodes or so our grade for the show was at a solid 95% (minus five percent for the moderate homophobia in the episode where Vincenzo reluctantly agrees to honeypot an evil gay chaebol.) In the last five episodes or so it lost another five percent for the contortions that the show had to go through after a certain point to justify Vincenzo not just killing the ultimate villains the third or fourth time he had the opportunity to do so, which would have prevented several heavily foreshadowed deaths; in the final episode we subtracted five more points for a.) some really, truly gratuitous death scenes b.) getting its thematic arguments muddled and c.) the fact that a flight out of the country via hot air balloon was heavily foreshadowed all through the back half of the show -- Vincenzo was indeed personally handed a ticket to catch the country's top tier escape balloon service! -- and yet never did we actually see anyone take Chekhov's hot air balloon. We were robbed.
Nonetheless, 85% is still a really solid grade, and overall all of us would recommend the show for a good time! Who doesn't want to see a dazzlingly hot mafia consigliere reluctantly accept responsibility for an Animal Crossing island?
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Date: 2021-09-03 07:25 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2021-09-03 07:35 am (UTC)(I just texted a friend like "we need to watch Space Sweepers!" after a year of Becca telling me I need to watch Space Sweepers based on this news)
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Date: 2021-09-03 07:40 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2021-09-06 01:05 pm (UTC)