Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.

Haru ga Kita
(春が来た/Spring Has Come)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

Hello! It’s time for another review!
I’m so happy that I made the decision to put Love’s Lies on hold to work down my watch-list because now I’m really making progress and I find myself enjoying the series I really wanted to watch again. However, I’ve decided that from now on I’m going to follow my mood, not necessarily my list. I’m just going to go through my list, pick a series that I feel like watching, and in doing so decreasing the feeling of ‘necessity’ of watching a specific series in a certain order. I’ve learned that making a list beforehand (like, I’m going to watch these 10 dramas in this order in the next couple of months) also kind of takes away the fun of starting something new.
This may sound as a weird argument I’m having with myself, but this is the life of a drama addict after all. I sometimes take trivial things too seriously.

So, anyways, moving on with my 2018 listing, I finished watching this short drama today. It’s only 5 episodes long and it’s kind of a Japan-Korea collab. One part takes place in Japan, the other in South-Korea, so there’s both Japanese and Korean being spoken and I like to think of it as a nice way to show a connection between the two countries (or at least their respective drama cultures). It was interesting to see them get lined up next to each other.

Haru ga Kita is a 5-episode series about Kishikawa Naoko (played by Kurashina Kana), a plain 31-year old salesperson at a lingerie store. She lives with her elderly parents and younger sister in a run-down place. Their family has fallen apart a bit and they don’t really communicate with each other. One day, when Naoko has to bring a bustier for a photoshoot, she meets the photographer, a young Korean man named Lee Ji Won (played by EXO’s Kai/Kim Jong In). There is an immediate spark between them, and he takes her out for dinner after the photoshoot is finished. When he asks about her family, Naoko lies to him to hide her embarrassment. She tells him that they’re really close, that her parents have respectable well-paying jobs, all that. However, Ji Won finds out the truth that same night when he takes her home after she sprains her ankle. Her mother invites him in and he sees for himself the tension and poverty they live in. He bails and Naoko feels really bad, thinking she’s never going to see him again.
However, a few days later, he turns up at her house again and offers to help with some chores and cooking. Slowly but surely the family warms up to him. With Ji Won’s help, the family members grow closer again and come clean about the things they have been hiding from each other.
As the relationship between Ji Won and Naoko deepens, we also find out more about Ji Won’s past. He has suffered a childhood trauma with his mother and he has been avoiding her ever since. After seeing Naoko reconnect with her family, he is inspired to go back to Korea to take care of his mother as well, inevitably causing him and Naoko to part ways.

I was wondering beforehand what this short drama was going to be about, if it was going to be a typical romantic comedy, how it was going to combine the Japanese and Korean cultures, etc. In some ways I think making it a short drama like this gave it something special and unique, it wasn’t like a typical drama because of that and it conveyed a more metaphorical message than any other drama would have. At the same time I feel like they swooped over some ‘chapters’ so they had enough time left to give Ji Won’s story all the attention and closure it needed in the last episode.
Even though there were only 5 episodes, each episode is almost an hour long, so there was definitely time and I think that they managed to wrap everything up, but I couldn’t help feeling they rushed through some parts.

For example, after seeing the first two episodes I thought the series was going to be about Naoko’s family and how every family member would get his/her own ‘chapter’ where the secret they were keeping got out and they would come to terms with it as a family.
Let me take you through Naoko’s family a little more in detail. First we have her father Shuuji (played by Sano Shiro). He got laid off by his company a while back and is now working a construction job, but it has caused him to feel useless to his family. He is not communicating with his wife (or vice versa) and he basically just lays around the house. However, he regularly sneaks out of the house at night to dress up as a woman and have a nice night out with fellow okama. It makes him feel alive and he finds it fun.
Naoko’s younger sister Junko (played by Furuhata Seika) seems to be the typical teenager that’s just embarrassed about her family and looks down on everyone. She’s only focussed on herself and wants to get out of the house as soon as possible. She doesn’t help out at home, she just dresses up and leaves the house whenever she can. She secretly works at a high school girl service agency where she gets paid to take strolls with lonely men.
Naoko’s mother Sue (the blessed Takahata Atsuko) has been neglecting her house and household chores because she doesn’t really feel the need to keep it and herself clean for the family. Her socks have wholes in it, the house is stuffed with garbage bags and they barely have cash to do proper grocery shopping. She’s a in a real slump as well. We later find out that she’s been ill for a while too, but I’ll get to that later.

We could say that Ji Won helps in the first steps to bringing the family back together. Because of his regular visiting, the family gathers around the table more often (maybe not Junko, but at least Mom and Dad). They start to like him, and this brings them and Naoko closer too. Mom starts to regain hope for Naoko to marry and to still bring something good to the family.
Then, one night Shuuji participates in a photoshoot with other okama and the photographer turns out to be Ji Won. After an initially awkward encounter, Ji Won doesn’t judge him and they have dinner and talk together and Ji Won invites Naoko one night to introduce her to her father’s alter ego. While she’s initially not very understanding, Naoko hears her father’s story and together they reveal the truth to Sue. Sue first had the suspicion that her husband was cheating on her because she found a bra in his pocket, but after learning this truth she has even more mixed feelings. Her husband’s argument that he sometimes just longs to be someone else and to get away from his family is even worse than cheating in her opinion. However, Ji Won and Naoko manage to soothe her and she and her husband reconnect.

Now comes the part where I thought they started rushing a little. They gave Shuuji’s ‘coming out’ quite some attention, and then I thought Junko was next. I thought Ji Won or someone else would catch her while she’s taking a stroll with someone, or that something else would happen that would make her reveal her secret activities to her family.
We have already seen some scenes in which Junko goes to her parttime job, changing outfits and taking a stroll with several men (who are all depicted as typical middle-aged creepy-looking guys). We can also see that she doesn’t particularly like the job and presume that she’s only doing it for the money. When the time runs out during a stroll, she uses that as an excuse to get out of there immediately, muttering to herself about how gross the guy was. She is reluctant to hold hands or even pretend to be intimate with her clients – basically, she thinks she can just walk away when she’s done without thinking of how it makes her clients feel. Her running away and declining some services while they have ‘paid extra’ visibly causes frustration with her clients. I had the premonition that one day, someone wouldn’t let her go so easily. This is exactly what happens.
A client starts chasing her and eventually grabs a hold of and pushes her to the ground. Luckily Junko is saved by a friend who happens to pass by, but we all know it could’ve been very bad. It’s like this is the first time that Junko realizes for real the situation that she’s in. I thought that, after an event like this, something would happen that would force her to come clean to her family. It did, but not because she wanted to.
She goes home, gets into a big fight, (this could be some days later, I’m not sure) and just when she wants to rush out again, there’s a couple of police officers asking for her. They’ve shut down the place she works at because they’ve discovered that some of the services they provide are plain inappropriate and they want to confirm her involvement. After being taken to the police station her family is informed about everything.
So, in a way, Junko gets away with it. It’s not like she really ‘comes clean’ about a secret, she’s busted only afterwards and when she’s already decided to quit. I found it a bit sudden. One day she’s like ‘people suck and I can only rely on myself and I want to get out of this stupid house’ and the next she’s suddenly all mature like ‘I realized the person I really hated was myself’. End of story. I’m not sure if I explain it right, but I just mean to say that I was expecting a more elaborate story about her feelings while hiding this from her parents and her personally daring to admit what she’s been up to in order to bring her closer to the family. But now she just made an unexpected turn and I just felt like they conveniently swooped over the confrontation in regards to her ‘secret’ a little bit.

Everything seems to be fine now, Junko has turned over a new leaf and is suddenly all too eager to help out more in the house and she even starts making friends rather. She learns that she can depend on people.
The relationship between mother and father becomes better, they even start cuddling and sleeping right next to each other again.
For Naoko, everything seems more than fine, she and Ji Won are really great and she is now even anticipating a marriage proposal from him.
However, what she gets is an unannounced goodbye: Ji Won disappears without saying a word.
Naoko follows him to South-Korea and tracks him down there and this is where we learn Ji Won’s true story. When he was very young, his father died in a fire and this made his mother lose her mind. When he was six, she walked into the winter sea with Ji Won in her arms, planning to drown with her son – luckily some fishermen came to stop her. But then she was put in a carehouse and Ji Won was raised in an orphanage. From the age of six on, he has been wondering why his mother did that and wondering if it was because he had been a bad kid. Anyways, the most important thing is that he has lost the connection with his family when he was really young. He has been on his own, avoiding his mother. But seeing Naoko reconnect with her family in Japan makes him realize that he has walked away from something important as well. He decides that, rather than already starting a family of his own with Naoko, he needs to get his own closure by taking care of his mother first. That’s why he goes back. He doesn’t say anything because he’s afraid of the confrontation with Naoko (I think). However, when she finds him, he just sits down with her and tells her the honest reason. Seriously, I was so scared that he was going to use the old trope and just ghost her – it did look like that in the beginning, but I’m glad he chose to be honest with her and didn’t keep trying to avoid her. She came all the way to Korea after all.

Let me fastforward to the ending before I go on with my personal comments and criticisms. Naoko’s mother was really excited about her daughter and Ji Won getting married. So excited that she already started preparing the traditional wedding robes and Naoko didn’t tell dare tell her that Ji Won went back to Korea without saying anything. When she went after him, she just told her mother that she went on a trip with him to meet his parents. Before she came back, her mother has a fatal seizure and passes away before learning the truth, which, as father points out, may have been for the best. When Naoko meets Ji Won again at his art exhibition, she decides not to tell him her mother died when he asks how her family is doing. She drew a line not to let him into her life again. She just got over him and this was for the best.
Now I have to admit that this is my opinion after mulling it over for a few moments because my first reaction of the ending was ‘What? What?? What?!’ I was really confused as to why Naoko and Ji Won had to break up, why they were being so dramatic about it, and why the heck her mom had to die so suddenly. As I mentioned before, only at the funeral they mention that she must have been sick for a long time and never told them – which links back to something their father said before, that Sue ‘doesn’t say anything’ about what she’s feeling. But seriously, even if that was the case, they could’ve showed some scenes of Sue by herself showing some symptoms and hiding it from the family. Just like they showed Shuuji’s and Junko’s secret activities. Because now it just came out of the blue and I still don’t really see the point of it, except that they wanted to avoid Sue finding out the truth about Naoko and Ji Won breaking up and being disappointed about it. The way she died was just so random now, she’s all fine and then suddenly ‘twitch’ and she’s down. It was a bit unbelievable to me.

Regarding the dramatic break-up, I had to turn it over in my head a couple of times too before I could make peace with it. My first reaction was confusion why suddenly everything was falling apart, why they couldn’t stay together etc. But now that I’ve phrased it like this, it makes sense to me. However, I still think they were a little dramatic about it. I mean, the part where the first snow fell and they were like ‘omg we promised we’d always be together at the first snow!’ and they ran back and he came later so that she almost thought he wasn’t coming and they had this great slowmotion hug and then Naoko was like ‘omg I finally realize how hard it’s been for him… we have to part ways’. Simple translation: Ji Won wasn’t ready for a commitment to another person before he committed to his mother and his own trauma first. He stopped avoiding his responsibilities as a son and that was more important to him. That doesn’t take away the fact that he loved Naoko very much. It just wasn’t the right timing. It’s a very natural explanation. Too bad they didn’t end up together, but it’s not like they couldn’t be together for inexplicably complicated reasons. I still don’t really find it a big enough reason to say goodbye forever, I mean, she could’ve waited for him or something. Oh well.

Another thing that I can’t help but mention is the predictability. Seriously, multiple times I was able to predict something that was going to happen, something they were going to say, or a specific shot that was coming up.
Example: when they said goodbye and they both turned around to walk away, I knew there was a wide shot coming showing them both walking away from each other. When Naoko walks up to a tree just starting to blossom at the end, I knew she was going to say ‘Spring has come.’ It sometimes was really predictable and that took away some of the spark for me. It was interesting to see a combination of Japanese and Korean influences, but for some reason it really highlighted the superficiality of the Japanese characters for me. I felt like Ji Won had much more depth as a character than Naoko, who could only giggle and smile like a typical Japanese female character. She seemed only interested in the outward benefits of having a boyfriend like Ji Won, the fact that he was handsome and kind. When it suddenly was about his unfinished childhood business, she found it easier to just walk away rather than get involved. Even though it wasn’t too much for her to give him a suitcase full of money when he had financial problems to ‘help him out’. Anyways, I can appreciate that at the end they tried to make Naoko into more of an ‘independent’ woman and making a life for herself without a man, but it still didn’t feel very real to me because I still couldn’t completely get on board with her decisions.

Let me just go over a couple of cast members before wrapping up.
I have seen Kurashina Kana before in Cain to Abel, and I have to say that she had much more personality there than she showed as Naoko. I will assume that this was just the writing and that Naoko was supposed to be a little plain and dull, that’s why it was such a miracle for her that Ji Won appeared in her life, but I would have liked to see a little more emotional depth – and I don’t mean the dramatical crying scene after Ji Won told her that her whole vision of their life together was burdening him. To be honest, she was already making up their whole future in her head when he was dealing with some real emotional stuff, so I’m with Ji Won on this one.
Anyhow, I’m sure she’s not a bad actress, so maybe it was just this character.
I would really like to compliment Kai’s acting in this drama. He was such a sweetie! His acting was so much more mature than in Andante, of which I wrote my first review. It’s nice to see him develop his skills and show that he’s more than just a pretty face. Well done!
I’ve seen Furuhata Seika in a couple of minor roles, I think, but yeah I think she was a good typecast for the role of rebelling younger sister. I find it a bit of a shame that she didn’t get as much backstory as Ji Won. I would’ve liked more insight in why she was acting like this. Now it was just her stating that other people annoyed her and the next day she suddenly realized she needed to change her ways and all was well in the world again. If the dad’s secret life could be taken under a magnifying glass, why not hers?
It’s no secret that Takahata Atsuko is one of my favorite Japanese actresses. She’s like the Japanese Kim Mi Kyung for me. I’ve seen a couple of roles of her in which she nails it every.single.time. In Naomi to Kanako, she plays a Chinese lady and she is amazing, nailing that Chinese accent in her Japanese. She was my favorite character in that whole series. Love her!
Lastly, I just want to add that I love Kentaro and I love how he’s growing as an actor. I believe he already got his own lead role as an adult – I am definitely going to watch Tokyo Love Story one day. I was happy to see him make a guest appearance 🙂

All in all, it was cute but I had hoped for a little more depth in the characters. It’s like they combined a Japanese and Korean drama in one, giving the Korean character the elaborate emotional backstory, and keeping the Japanese characters a bit shallow.
In the end, I think the show has a message of how important family, or at least ‘the sense of family’ is. Naoko and Ji Won needed each other to both find their way back to their (sense of) family. And it was nice to see a possible metaphor in the spring theme, too. Ji Won had been trapped in that ‘cold winter sea’ since he was a child, and facing his trauma finally opened up a new season for him, just as it did for Naoko when she got her family back. Even when she broke up with Ji Won, her family was there for her to fall back on and she finally had the strength to live her own life.
In the end, spring comes for everyone. After the mother passes away, the rest of the family all starts depending on one another, helping each other out in the house, becoming more independent. And Ji Won too.
It was a nice in-between short drama.

I’ll get back to you later with another Korean drama that I’ve been waiting to start on! Bye-bye!

Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.

Go Go Waikiki
(으라차차 와이키키 / Eulachacha Waikiki)
MyDramaList rating: 6.5/10

Hello everybody! Back with my new review.
I hope everyone is doing well in this crazy time of quarantine, sitting/working at home. Since May is quite the national holiday month where I’m from, I’m currently enjoying my second long weekend in a row, which gives me good opportunities to watch more dramas and relax, but at the same time working from home is becoming more and more dreary. I hope everyone is hanging in there!

This drama has been on my list for way too long, probably since 2018 when it came out. I think mostly because of Kim Jung Hyun, because I liked him in the previous dramas I saw with him (Jealousy Incarnate, School 2017). I probably saw the trailer and thought it looked funny so I put it on my list – as I said, it’s been a while and I don’t remember my reason for listing every drama, haha. Anyways, it’s a comedy, all right.

Go Go Waikiki is about three guys, Kang Dong Gu (played by Kim Jung Hyun), Lee Joon Ki (played by Lee Yi Kyung) and Bong Doo Shik (played by Song Seung Won). They run a guesthouse called Waikiki, along with Dong Gu’s sister Kang Seo Jin (played by Go Won Hee) who also lives there.
Business is bad, in the first episode water, gas and electricity are cut off because they can’t pay their bills for lack of guests. The three friends have one shared dream: making a movie together. Dong Gu is an aspiring director, Doo Shik is a writer and Joon Ki is a rookie actor.
Things become tense when they find an abandoned baby in one of their rooms – soon to be claimed back by her single mother, Han Yoon Ah (played by Jung In Sun). Yoon Ah has nowhere to go and ends up living at the guesthouse as well, provided that she helps run the place. Lastly, Dong Gu’s ex-girlfriend Min Soo Ah (played by Lee Joo Woo), comes to join them after she gets conned and robbed by the boyfriend she dumped Dong Gu for. The six of them all try to make their own living while tackling personal problems in relationships, work and life in general. We follow them in their daily lives as they get through all sorts of awkward situations.

First of all, Go Go Waikiki is like a sitcom. It doesn’t have a real storyline, it’s just a daily-life-of kind of series. Every episode lasts about an hour and consists of at least 3 sub-chapters. It’s interesting to see that, although at first it’s really just about the three guys, the girls and their stories also enter one by one and become more regular. Soo Ah only starts becoming a regular character halfway through the series, at first she’s just Dong Gu’s ex that dumps him and never wants to see him again. But when she gets into trouble and becomes a regular character, we find out she’s actually also a little crazy, same as everyone else.

Let me briefly go through the ‘storylines’ of each character. First, we have Dong Gu. In the beginning he is very impatient and grumpy. In the first episode, he is dumped by Soo Ah and he attempts to sell their golden couple rings to get money to pay their bills but he ends up feeling too guilty after being busted at the jewelry store by Soo Ah. He has a hard time getting over her, attempts a few times to win her back, even uses Yoon Ah to try and make her jealous, but in the end they have a good closure talk and it’s over between them. After that, he starts focussing on his main goal and even gets the opportunity to work with a director he used to know on a new movie project. He starts developing feelings for Yoon Ah about halfway through after they have to pretend to get married to fool the guesthouse’s landlady and she kisses him. Even though he was the meanest to her out of everyone when she first moved into the guesthouse, he becomes softer and more mature because of her, even willing to become a father figure to Sol, the baby. In the beginning, his stories mainly consist of continually embarassing himself in front of Soo Ah after she already gets a new boyfriend.

Then there’s Joon Ki. Joon Ki is a very expressive, energetic person. He knows no shame when it comes to acting, in fact he puts on an act everytime he delivers his portfolio to a casting agency. His stories mainly consist of acting jobs that he gets with really weird co-starts. Of course, no matter how weird his co-stars are, Joon Ki always seems to be the only one who can’t deal with them. The director and the other people are never bothered by it. Here we get a lot of guest appearances from famous actors. For example, we have an actor who doesn’t talk but only points with his finger to communicate and everyone except Joon Ki is able to understand him. Then there’s this woman who gets so immersed in her grief-stricken mother role that she almost punches Joon Ki to death. There’s a guy who just had tongue surgery and can’t pronounce Joon Ki’s role name correctly, to which Joon Ki can’t control his laughter etc. But because of his determination to make it as an actor he always gets through it by himself. Even if he has to wear monster make-up for an entire day because the shoot is postponed, or when he has to emotionally bond with a turtle to satsify the director. All sorts of insane situations occur within Joon Ki’s life, probably the most of everyone. Halfway through, Seo Jin suddenly finds herself attracted to him and while he can’t see her as anything more than a little girl in the beginning, he changes his mind when he sees how much of a woman she can be. In the beginning Joon Ki and Seo Jin are like cats and dogs, but they make a weirdly adorable couple.

Doo Shik is the most mild-mannered of the three guys and he works part-time at a convenience store while trying to work on a manuscript called ‘The President is Bruce Lee’ or something like that. Doo Shik’s gimmick is that he falls in love at first sight way too often. The running gag is that whenever this happens, the sound of his beating heart becomes so loud that even others can hear it. However, his crushes never end well, even after a girl agrees to go out with him. Maybe it’s his lack of true knowledge about women, but he always unknowingly screws things up in his attempts to show affection. Despite his mild-mannered nature, there are moments when he loses his temper, not often, but when it happens he takes off his glasses and starts yelling and cursing and whatnot. When Soo Ah moves in he starts helping her with her new online shopping market, even though he has to wear her ridiculous self-designed clothing as the only model they have. He spends a lot of time dealing with Soo Ah and in the end Soo Ah confesses she likes him and it is suggested that they start dating (we don’t see it but we can assume from how they act in the last episode).

Han Yoon Ah is a single mother a baby who’s not even a year old yet. She gave birth to the baby after being forced to break up with the baby’s father, so he doesn’t even know she had his baby. She doesn’t have anywhere to go and in a moment of irrationality she left her baby in the guesthouse – but she comes to get her back the next day because she felt too guilty.
After the break-up with Sol’s father she has had a hard time trusting people so she’s a bit awkward in interacting with the guesthouse residents in the beginning, pulling up her shirt to feed Sol in public without a warning and stuff like that. Her biggest dream is to become a rapper, but it turns out she doesn’t really have a talent for it (I thought it was cute, though). She screws up a couple of times with cooking, but after surprising everyone with some delicious muffins, her new dream becomes to become a patissier and she starts attending baking classes. Because of her petite appearance and kind and naive demeanor, she’s the kind of woman guys fall for because she exudes that vibe of ‘someone you want to protect’. She is pursued by a number of guys, but in the end they’re all chased away by Dong Gu when he starts falling for her as well. She rejects him at first because she’s too scared she’ll get hurt again, but in the end she’s the mature one in the relationship while Dong Gu shows the most worries about her choosing someone else over him. In the last episode, Sol’s father turns up and makes a weak attempt to win her back, but she firmly tells him that she loves Dong Gu. When Dong Gu proposes to her partly out of her that she’ll leave when he’s gone (he’s about to go abroad for a month for work), she comforts him in saying that he shouldn’t worry so much because she doesn’t, and that she’ll be with him forever.

Kang Seo Jin has just graduated and is looking for a job. Her dream is to be a reporter. Kang Seo Jin’s running gag is that her facial hair tends to grow quite rapidly, and if she doesn’t shave for a day or more, she gets a moustache. At first it’s something she’s really embarassed about, she doesn’t dare let the sunbae she’s dating know and she tries to hide it as well as she can. But at some point she starts accepting it more because the people around her do too. In the beginning Joon Ki makes a lot of jokes about it, he even nicknames her ‘Chewbacca’. When she lands a job at a news agency, Seo Jin struggles with a particularly power-abusing senior who sends her on all kinds of impossible errands and gives her unnecessary deadlines. After she and Joon Ki start dating and Joon Ki lands a main role on a drama series and gets more busy and starts having less time for her, she starts to feel neglected. Although she supports and helps him whenever she can, at a certain point it becomes too much of effort for her because she herself isn’t feeling so great either, and she decides to take a break. Joon Ki fixes it by clearing up all misunderstandings and genuinely telling her how much he loves her.

Min Soo Ah, in the beginning, seems to be the kind of girl who is way out of Dong Gu’s league. She’s a model, she’s tall, skinny, pretty etc. When she breaks up with him we have already seen what a mess Dong Gu is, so we (at least I) can’t really blame her. She seems to be happy with her new boyfriend until she gets conned and robbed by him and now has nowhere to go. Reluctantly she moves into her ex-boyfriend’s guesthouse. With her dream to become a fashion designer, she launches an online shopping mall called Soorgio Armhani with the help of Doo Shik. Even though her designing talents are not very good and the mall doesn’t provide much business, she still continues to search for that one thing that makes her happy. And eventually she realizes that Doo Shik’s help means a lot to her, not just because he’s a friend but also because she starts seeing more and more good traits in him. In the end she confesses to him under the influence of an anesthetic during an endoscopy because she ate a piece of paper on which she had written the love match calculation between her and Doo Shik and didn’t want him to find it. This is exactly the kind of situations this drama is filled with.

So, I have basically summed up almost all of the running gags and jokes and situations that are most regular in this series. Apart from that, there were some moments that were really disgusting. There was this one scene in Joon Ki’s storyline (the one with the actress so immersed in her role that she beat him up), in which she was hanging over him, all snot and tears, and her snot actually fell into Joon Ki’s mouth. I literally gagged when they showed that and even just thinking about it makes me nauseous again. Things like that, and humor about people farting and getting indigestion etcetera.
Sometimes the jokes were really predictable and so overly slapstick that it became more like ‘Oh haha let me guess, this and this is going to happen, oh look what a surprise that’s exactly what happened’.
Things like: something happens to someone or someone’s appearance which makes it really difficult to go out, and then they’re suddenly called in to meet someone really important and it’s the worst possible timing.
I think it’s difficult to come up with a lot of ‘funny’ situations, because we’ve all seen enough cartoons in which all these kinds of situations have happened before. So sometimes the humor became a bit too predictable and lame for me. But it doesn’t take away the fact that I also laughed out loud a lot while watching. Particularly about Joon Ki, because as hysterical his character may be, the actor had really great timing in his comedy.

About the actors, I would like to give some comments as well.
As I mentioned before, I knew Kim Jung Hyun, mainly for being the male lead in School 2017, where he acted alongside Kim Se Jung (love her). In both that and Jealousy Incarnate he played a mainly stoic character who didn’t show a lot of emotion. So it was really interesting to see him act so over the top in this ultra-comedy. It really brought out a new side in him.

I’ve also seen Lee Yi Kyung a couple of times before, I think it was in Go Back Couple that he also played a comical character, and for the rest he played a lot of side characters as well. At one point, I think it might have been a reference, in a picture of the guys when they were younger it showed Joon Ki with really long hair and he looked exactly the same as his younger version in Go Back Couple when they went back in time. Since this drama was full of inside jokes and references it might have been one.
But here, as one of the main characters, he really want all out with the comedy. Sometimes it was really obnoxious, but you still grew to love his character because we as viewers learn to accept that that’s how he is.
I think he showed great comical timing and talent.

I knew Son Seung Won mainly as Ji Won’s friend in Age of Youth because I shipped them so much, lol. It was nice to see him get a bigger part and show off more of his acting talents. For me, Doo Shik was one of the most sympathetic characters because he was less manic than the others. It’s nice to have a bit of calm in between all the hectic crazy.

Jung In Sun looks REALLY familiar to me, but when I check Dramawiki I can’t find what I know her from. I’ve seen Circle but I don’t remember her from there even though she had an important role.
Anyways, this woman is SO. FREAKING. ADORABLE.
Like, literally, she is so tiny and cute and pouty! I just want to hug her. But I really liked the balance they showed in her character, because even though from the outside she is this adorable little woman with her big round eyes and pouty lips, but on the other hand she’s been through a big thing, she’s a single mom and she is not someone who just lets herself get swept away by the next best man who claims he can take her of her and her baby. She really stood her ground the entire time, rejecting people and being real with people while they expected her to just go with it. Loved her character.
As one of the inside jokes, in the first episode when everyone was pretending Yoon Ah had already left the guesthouse but Dong Gu finds out she and the baby are still there, Joon Ki denies that it’s Yoon Ah and says something like ‘that’s not her, that’s someone else! Hello miss In Sun!’, which is of course a reference to the actress’s real name.
Also, WHO IS THAT BABY?! I can’t find her in the credits, though I’m sure she must be credited somewhere. Little Sol was so adorable T^T

I didn’t know Go Won Hee before, but I like that she had the guts to perform such weird situations, especially the facial hair parts. In the beginning it was maybe funny and embarrassing, but I found myself not being bothered by it quite fast into the series. I mean, what the hell does it matter?
There was this one crazy moment when the sunbae she was dating had this really nasty habit of picking his nose until it started bleeding and when she confronted him and tried to help him stop, despite pretending not to care about her facial hair, he suddenly went all ‘Hey, I accepted your moustache, can’t you accept this from me? I mean, what’s more embarrassing, picking your nose or having facial hair as a woman?’ Of course, he lost all respect there. I mean, seriously? I would say nose picking is the most nasty habit, especially the way he did it, and it’s not healthy. Growing facial hair, even as a woman, is natural and human. And you can always shave it. So his argument was nowhere near valid there. Anyways, even though sometimes I found Seo Jin a bit annoying, she really matured throughout the series.
There is this episode in which she was so fed up with Joon Ki’s habit of goofing around that she actually forbade him from making jokes and being funny because it was ‘childish and embarrassing’. Which basically translates to her not accepting him for who he is. Because making jokes and goofing around is who Joon Ki is. After trying to please her command his energy was literally drained because he couldn’t be himself. At that moment I really thought, girl, this is the last thing you should ask from your lover.
Luckily, she realized this after he actually had to go to the hospital due to too much stress and drained energy. In the last two episodes, when they’re relationship was in jeopardy, I found her very mature. We all saw for ourselves how Joon Ki just took her support for granted. When he had to cancel on her again, he would just apologize and take her ‘It’s okay’ as being the final word. He never went out of his way to look if she was really okay, which she wasn’t. In other words, I could totally relate why she wanted a break, even though it wasn’t easy on Joon Ki either.
I liked how in the last episodes we saw some serious acting from her, she did a good job.

Lastly, even though she also looked familiar to me, I also didn’t know Lee Joo Woo. But I liked how she also found her balance between the Soo Ah in the first and latter halfs of the series. In the beginning she seemed to be the cool, has-got-her-stuff-together kind of girl who was way too normal and succesful to be a part of the guesthouse residents’ life. But after being scammed and having to rely on herself, suddenly this crazy streak came out and she wasn’t shy to act out scenes in which she got insane indigestion and her running gag became that she farted while sleeping a lot. I always appreciate actors who dare to come out of their comfort zone and show this kind of over the top acting while it goes against their outward appearance stereotype.

All the characters have ‘pretty’ and ‘ugly’ characteristics, and even after finishing the series I’m not able to say that I found all of them all that sympathetic or friendly per se, but that’s what make them very realistic, human characters. They all have a dream and they all go towards that dream with all the falling down and getting ups that are needed to eventually get there. Of course, the situations they get themselves in are very exaggerated, and in real life everything would just be solved by telling someone the truth. Honestly, some episodes were so Dear Evan Hansen, they just dug their way deeper and deeper into their own lie while it would’ve been so easy to act normal and just tell the truth.
I can imagine that for this reason (the craziness, the unnecessary dramatics) some people might not like this drama and find it too slapstick. As I said, there were moments where I had that too, when things were just so predictable it kind of took the ‘funny’ out of it. But underneath the overly comedy-ness it was a nice story about a group of people who learned to accept themselves and each other and found each other to enjoy being a messy bunch together. It’s also about accepting the unusual about other people, because there’s a lot of crazy types of characters and somehow they all have people who accept them for who they are. So I think that may also be a hidden message of this series.

Lastly I would just like to say how much I appreciated the ending. The final episode was so wholesome, everything was wrapped up really nicely, all the couples ended up back together with all their problems fixed and the epilogue (2 months later) showed how they actually started working on their own super low-budget movie. It’s nice they made full circle, mentioning their dream of making movies in the beginning when it’s still a really far away and impossible goal, and then actually ending with the whole gang working on the movie together. And then they had to run because they didn’t have a permit to shoot and had to flee from the police. I really liked the ending shot of them all running and then jumping in the air as the lovely misfit bunch they were.

I noticed that there’s a second season or sequel to this drama, in which only Joon Ki seems to be remaining from this season’s cast. I’m not sure if I’ll watch it, maybe in the future when I’m up for some more crazy comedy, haha.

To sum things up, Go Go Waikiki/Laughter in Waikiki is almost like a sitcom, it’s a really light and comical series. I enjoyed it while sometimes just putting on an episode in the background and glancing over while I was drawing or something. Because of its format as a comedy, the lack of storyline actually makes it really easy to watch because you don’t have to focus or really pay attention. Of course there’s a continuity in which they talk about things that happened in previous episodes, but it’s really necessary to pay attention to all the details. The dividing of every episode into three parts is also nice because for some reason it helps to make the one hour plus something episodes feel like they’re NOT more than an hour long. It’s just like watching three short episodes within one.

I’m working through my 2018 batch as you may have noticed, next up is another Japanese drama which I have been looking forward to. I will post my next review as soon as I’m done with that one! Stay tuned! 🙂