Song of the Bandits

Song of the Bandits | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix K-Content

It looks like a Western, but it's set in Korea, so does that make it an Eastern? The show has a bit of comic-book flavor, but that's okay, we don't really want to look too closely at what's going on here. In reality it's pretty awful, so we'll pull back a bit and let our focus be a bit fuzzy. We're in early 20th century Korea and we've got people wearing Western clothes, riding horses and carrying great big six guns. The landscape looks like the American west - wide open plains with mountains off in the distance. I suppose there could be places like that in Korea, but I haven't found any. Kind of reminds me of Clint Eastwood's old Spaghetti Westerns.

Japan invaded Korea in 1910 and occupied it until the end of WW2. The Joseon Empire that ruled the country collapsed at the end of the 19th century. Now we have Japanese soldiers roaming around the country shooting anyone they choose, and we have gangs of bandits roaming around the country shooting anyone they choose, and we have the resistance army roaming around the country shooting anyone they choose, and then we've got the peasants, who mostly just get shot. Very violent.

The story has more bad situations than any show I have seen since I don't know when. The story revolves around a half dozen Koreans. Two guys, a master and his slave, joined the Japanese army. The story starts with the slave heading north to make amends for previous misdeeds. He feels his just punishment would be his death, and he is fine with that. The man who he has wronged (by killing his family) no longer wants revenge, he is simply trying to preserve the lives of local villagers. The master is fully in thrall with the Japanese, even though he is still second class, his being Korean and all. He is disappointed in his slave, who had become his friend, but now that he has gone north, he is just one more rebel to be destroyed.

Then there is the black market arms dealer. A mature woman, dressing in the latest Western fashions, operating out of a brick, four story hotel in what looks like Topeka, Kansas in 1880. She keeps her inventory well stocked by sending her minions out to scavenge arms from the dead whenever there is a battle.

Another woman is a hitman, killing people for a price. She gets to display her talents in, I think, episode 2 where she goes all John Wick on an entire company of soldiers in a hotel.

Lastly we have a femme fatale, a real Mati Hari, who is in love with the slave, but pretends to be in love with the master to the point of marrying him, in order to get military information that can help the rebels. She has also wormed her way into the railway company's administration, so she is privy to all kinds of top secret info.

Korea Railroad Map
From a screenshot taken just after the eleven minute mark of episode one

The Japanese want to extend their rail line farther north. They want to use it to transport troops north to fight the rebels. To this end they ship 200,000 won (worth about $10 million in today's money) north via an armored car. Rumor gets out about this shipment and the colonel in charge wants to cancel the operation, but his subordinate (the master) wants to let it go ahead because it is sure to attract the bandits and when they attack he will be there to crush them.

Our girl assassin gets wind of this shipment and manages to locate the manager of the bank that will be shipping the money. She pays him a visit and tells him that the bandits are going to rob the armored car and since they will undoubtedly be successful, they should fill the strongbox with dirt and keep the money. The bandits will get blamed and the manager and the assassin will get off scott free. Clever, if all goes according to plan, but something tells me that's not going to happen.

Until I saw this show I had no idea what happened in Korea prior to the Korean war. My history education kind of missed that. As far as I knew, prior to the Korean War, Korea didn't exist. That they have managed to come so far since then is flat-out amazing.

One of the things that bugs me about Korean shows are the times someone laughs at something that is not funny. I don't know whether this is a common screen writer's trick to ensure that the audience knows that this character is an idiot, or whether it reflects actual behaviors. Pretty weird in any case.

Kingdom - Netflix Series

Kingdom | Official Trailer [HD] | Netflix
Netflix

Another series about Korean royalty a thousand years ago, but this time with zombies. We started watching this once before, but the zombie business turned us off. Since then we have watched The Last of Us, which acclimated us to the whole zombie edifice, so now we are more accepting of weird tales.

It all starts when the royal physician attempts to bring the recently deceased king back to life using an acupuncture needle dipped in a potion derived from the 'resurrection plant'. It brings him back to life, but as a crazed monster craving human flesh. The monster king attacks the physician's assistant and kills him. The physician puts his assistant in a coffin and carries him back to his clinic. All the people at the clinic are slowly starving to death due to the general famine. One wise guy gets the idea to cut up the dead body and make soup to feed all the people. The female doctor and her assistant are out in the woods gathering herbs, so they don't get any of the soup. They get back to the compound just in time to see all the people turn into monsters. Evidently the wise guy doesn't eat any of the soup because he doesn't turn into a monster.

So now the disease is spreading, a nearby town is destroyed and the monsters are running loose across the countryside. The only saving grace is that they become comatose during the daylight hours.

The show is full of reminders of how bad things used to be. Besides plague and famine we also have slavery, torture and psychopathic idiots in charge. Okay, that last one is still with us. I imagine there could have been an epidemic of rabies a thousand years ago and it might look a whole lot like a plague of zombies.

The show has several scenes with hordes of zombies running amok and it struck me that it looked just like a modern day riot, which says something about rioters.

P. S. The setting is more like 500 years ago, not 1,000. Besides the usual Samurai swords, bows, arrows and spears, some of the soldiers had matchlock rifles.

The whole point of reviving the King was to keep him alive until the Queen gave birth to what she hoped would be a boy. If she could also dispose of the Crown Prince (her step son), she would be the acting ruler of the kingdom until her son came of age. Actually, she would be a puppet for her father.

But the Queen has a miscarriage. She conceals the miscarriage and collects half a dozen pregnant women and sequesters them in some spare room in her personal palace. Her plan is to wait until the women give birth and collect a boy baby (surely with that many women at least one will give birth to a boy) and claim him as her own. Once that happened, all the other women and babies were executed. Seems unbelievable that someone could be so vile, but if history has taught us anything it's that there is no limit to human depravity.

The King's Affection - Netflix Series

The King's Affection | Official Trailer | Netflix [ENG SUB]
The Swoon
Korean historical drama set back in the day of the Joseon kingdom, whenever that was. This is kind of a weird show. It goes back and forth between idyllic scenes of children / young adults to the bloody slaughter of innocents and then back again. Of course, this all involves royalty and their entourages. If the king says you die, you die and nobody says squat. Kind of reminds me of this line:

Politics is and always has been a blood sport. If you're not prepared to take it on at that level you have no business getting involved in it. - Karl Denninger

All the murder and mayhem starts because the queen delivers twins, a boy and a girl. This evidently an outrage against all that is right and holy in Joseon, so the king orders the girl killed along with all the people who were attending the queen, all except for the queen. Because this is highest level of the empire there are like two dozen people there and the royal guards kill them all within a few seconds.

The queen, devious conniver that she is, has the baby girl spirited away to a monastery / temple up in the mountains. That's great until the head monk dies and now the girl is homeless. Now, of course, she finds her way back to the capital and becomes an apprentice court maid. Now things get really squirrely.

Wikipedia page

Under the Queen's Umbrella - Netflix Series

Under the Queen's Umbrella | Official Trailer | Netflix
The Swoon

Here we go again with another Korean historical drama involving machinations in the royal court. It's mostly about the queen, the king's mother and the king's ten other wives and all the petty and not so petty intrigue going on. The king's mother seems to very pleasant on the surface, but it is slowly being revealed that underneath she is a murderous thug, just like everyone who has climbed to the top of the heap. The king's wives are all trying to promote their sons into positions of power, but like all teenage boys they just want to get out of the palace where they are confined and are constantly being watched. So far they haven't figured out that they are just pawns in this real life chess game and their lives may be forfeit if they are not played correctly.

Seems like we have seen a bunch of these kind of shows. I mean I'm starting to recognize some of the buildings and the costumes are all very similar. From the way they look they all seem to be set right around the same time. Shoot some of them may be about the same exact events, just told from a different point of view.

The Fortress - Korean Movie

The Fortress Trailer #1 (2017) | Movieclips Indie
Rotten Tomatoes Indie
Here we are in the 17th century, 100 years after the whaling ship San Juan de Pasajes, this time on the other side of the world. The Qin and Ming Empires have divided China between them. Korea (Joseon) was formerly allied with Ming, but Qin have pushed their way in so Joseon and Ming no longer have a shared border. They are divided by Qin, and Qin is offended that Joseon is allied with Ming, so we have an invasion.

The movie alternates between battles and high level discussions amongst the leaders. The Koreans are on edge because the invading Qin army is ten times the size of their own. The minister of defense is an aging blowhard without much in the way of brains. He's going to get them all killed if someone doesn't put a stop to him pretty quickly.

The way the crowd of courtiers starts howling for blood when they hear something they don't like reminds of nothing so much as the antics that have been going on in Washington D. C. since, well, since forever.

Nam-Han Fortress Battle Scene (The Fortress) Korea vs China

The Koreans have muskets. Since the minister of defense is such a stupid bull, someone else probably instigated their acquisition, most likely the King. How accurate are these props? Wikipedia says muskets have been in common use since the 16th century, so for a hundred years before this battle, which should give them enough time to migrate from Europe to Korea.

Wikipedia has a page about the fortress, a very real place.

2 hour movie on Netflix, in Korean with English subtitles.

Kingdom: Ashin of the North

Kingdom: Ashin of the North | Main Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
A violent, vicious movie set in the Joseon Empire, which means somewhere between 1400AD and 1900AD. It was a little hard to keep track of who was what, too many furrin names. Near as I can make out, we have a group of Jurchen people who, with the permission of the Joseon Emperor, came south across the border with China and settled in Joseon, which is modern day Korea. In this case specifically North Korea. Things are going along moderately smoothly until a group of Jurchen come south across the river to hunt for ginseng. The local lord takes exception to this and kills them all. Another guy, not quite sure what his position is, a leader of a group of soldiers (we'll call him the major) dares to speak up and tell him that he shouldn't have done that. The ginseng hunters violated the Emperor's law, so they should have been dealt with within the law, not executed out of hand.

Now the Major (in an attempt to cover up the local lord's misdeed) sends Ashin's father, headman of the group of Jurchen living in Joseon, to the Jurchen in  China (north side of the river) to explain that the ginseng hunters had been killed by a tiger. So now we have a tiger hunt. The Major brings a squad of soldiers and large group of peasants to act as beaters. The Jurchens (from the north side of the river) send a squad of lunatics armed with knives. I mean, who goes after a tiger with a knife? I mean, except Tarzan.

Meanwhile, out in the woods, there is a plant that can bring the dead back to life. Seems a deer ate one of these plants and in short order fell into convulsions and when the convulsions ended, the deer was now a zombie, intent on attacking and killing anything that moved. And wouldn't you know it, the first thing the deer runs into is the tiger. Of course. The deer puts up a good fight, but the tiger prevails. However, the deer got in at least one good bite and now . . . you know what happens . . . the tiger becomes a zombie!

Now we have tiger hunt and when the tiger is finally killed (after wiping out half of both hunting parties including a score of peasants), the Jurchen discover that it is some kind of devil and didn't actually kill the ginseng hunters, which means Ashin's father is a liar, and since he is also Jurchen, he is a traitor.

The northside Jurchen attack the southside Jurchen village, kill everyone and burn the place to the ground. Ashin escapes because she wasn't there.

Time goes by, the child Ashin grows to be a tough young woman who has managed to acquire a bow and a goodly supply of arrows. She is being employed by the local lord (the major? someone else?) to spy on the northside Jurchens. An opportunity presents itself and she sneaks into their village where she finds that they have kept her horribly mutilated father in chains all these years. She's pissed to say the least. She manages to escape with her father, and obeying his wish, kills him.

Meanwhile, the bulk of the soldiers from the village where she's been living have been called away to fight against a Japanese invasion in southern Joseon. That's okay, killing the people that are left will make a good start on her revenge. She turns some of them into zombies and when they get going she stands on a rooftop and shoots anyone who looks like they might get away.

China - North Korea Border

The opening sequence shows a map of the China-North Korea border and I realized I didn't know much about the area. The border consists of the Yalu River on the west, Paektu Mountain and the Tumen River on the east. At the far west end of the border is the Sino-Korean Friendship Bridge which we repeatedly bombed during the Korean War.

Violent and vicious. With Zombies. On Netflix, 90 minutes long, in Korean with English subtitles.

MY SASSY GIRL

MY SASSY GIRL 엽기적인 그녀 Ep 10: Joo Won & Oh Yeon Seo's First Kiss [ENG]
Another Korean historical drama. This one is a little short on history, though someone who is fluent in Korean might be able to pick out some clues that would tell you the era. It's not too old because some people are using chairs, and I suspect that didn't happen before the Europeans showed up. No firearms, which is kind of odd because those came with the Europeans as well. But we aren't too concerned about the history here. We are here to watch boy-girl interactions, and they are amusing.

We've watched several of these Asian historical dramas, some are from Korea, some from China, and the plot lines are fairly similar. We watch them because the lead characters are attractive, their clothes are made of acres of fabric, and the buildings are fabulous. I think the hook that keeps us interested is that there is always a bad guy plotting some kind of underhanded skull drudgery, and since the subtitles are invariably weak, we have to piece together what is going on. So it's a romantic comedy with a bonus: a challenge to unravel the thread of mystery.

Rookie Historian

Rookie Historian Goo Hae Ryung | Official Trailer | Netflix
This series is a historical drama set in Korea around 1820. The series isn't complete, or at least not all episodes are available just yet. Naturally, it's mostly a love story, but we also have palace intrigue, bits of comedy from some of the supporting cast, acres of fancy cloaks, spectacular buildings, and some real insight into how people think. We're enjoying it.

Our girl, Hae Ryung, family name Goo, lands a job as one of the first female court reporters. They call them historians here, but court reporting is what they do. They take their notebook and pen-and-ink case to official meetings in the palace and transcribe what is said, holding their writing brushes vertically and drawing pictographic characters lickety-split.

One of the subplots involves a 20 year old secret connected to the Catholic church. Digging around, I turn up a massacre of Catholics in 1801, which fits our time frame. The secret hasn't come out in the series yet, so we will have to wait and see how well the show correlates with the very scant history I found.

Another plot excursion involves smallpox inoculations. Seems the standard method of treating outbreaks of smallpox at this time was to quarantine the villages where the outbreaks occurred, but there is one woman (associated with the Catholics somehow) who knows how to perform inoculations. The king has sent his number two son to the area to reassure the people by performing some ritual. The prince gets wind of this inoculation business and decides to be the guinea pig in a public demonstration. It's easy to think now that it would be a simple matter, but back then, when it wasn't well understood, it would take some real intestinal fortitude to do such a thing.

So mostly we have a very attractive couple making goo-goo eyes at each other, but every once in a while they display some real courage in situations that would have any normal person shaking in their boots. I mean, situations where if the king is in a bad mood you could lose your head.

Mr. Sunshine

Mr. Sunshine | Official Trailer [HD] | Netflix
We started watching this series a couple of nights ago and it promises to keep us occupied for many more. The first couple of episodes hold much of the back story and are a bit confusing. Who are all these people? But eventually it sorts itself out. The story takes place in Korea around 1900. Japan, Russia and the USA are all trying to carve out a place in Korea. The Americans send a fleet of five warships, including a paddle wheel steamer. It was pretty great seeing that on the screen, even if it was just a computer generated image.

The best part is the alien thought processes on display, and the conflict between the different cultures about what is normal, right and proper. It's pretty great.

The story centers on an orphaned Joseon (Korean) slave boy who escapes to America and a young Korean noble woman. The slave boy  grows up and becomes a U.S. Marine officer, who then gets sent back to Korea as part of a diplomatic mission. The young woman is a contrarian, not satisfied with a life of flower arranging that her grandfather wants. She takes up target practice, initially with a matchlock rifle and later with bolt action repeating rifles.

Wikipedia has a short piece about the movie and a longer article about  Shinmiyango, which is the starting point for the story.

On Netflix with subtitles.