Wednesday, December 27, 2017

Prince of Wolf [狼王子]



♥♥♥/♥♥ 
TITLE: Prince of Wolf [狼王子] 
ORIGINAL AIR DATE: July 03 to October 31st, 2016 
WIKI: n/a 
SEASONS/EPISODES: 1 season, 18 episodes, 1 1/4 hours long each. 
US AVAILABILITY (as of 2019-04-20): Viki (free w/ads), HotPotTV (free)  

Prince of Wolf is the story of an herbalist's daughter meeting and falling in love with the heir of a wealthy company who was "lost" in the woods as a little boy and raised by "wolves." This is a Taiwanese take on the classic feral child legends. Tarzan or the Jungle Book or whatnot. This one is super corny, like if George of the Jungle expected you to actually take it seriously. Lol! With the drama My Love From Another Star I wished I could rate the first half like 2 or 3 and the second half 4 out of 5... Well with Prince of Wolf it'd be backward: I'd rate the first half a 4 and the second half a 2 or 3. The ending is really good but getting through most of the second half to get to it is annoying. 

Basic summary:
Mi Mi knows a legend about Wolf Mountain and goes to photograph it, where she gets stranded in the rain and spends the night in a cave with a super buff and unworldly man named Zhe Ming whom she found swimming in a mountain waterfall pool. He becomes her guide and they spend a few days together on the mountain. She gets sick (RAIN touched her HAIR! Ahhhh!) and Zhe Ming gives her a mountain herb that heals her. Later, she is back home and Zhe Ming has moved in with her family in their herb store in the village. Mi Mi teaches him to read and write and her family accepts him and he takes care of them too. Zhe Ming is head over heels for Mi Mi but she's hard to win over. Just when he finally wins her over and they are a couple, things start going wrong. Zhe Ming's uncle is the one who left him to die on the mountain as a child, so when uncle finds out he's still alive, he begins to plot how to get rid of him, keep him a secret, or if all else fails, kill Zhe Ming. 

Flow and sequence: 
Mi Mi finds Zhe Ming and they live happily together on Wolf Mountain.
Mi Mi takes Zhe Ming home with her to the herb store and they live happily there for a while.
Things start going wrong as Mi Mi has a secret and leaves for A YEAR to hide it, meanwhile Zhe Ming's uncle wants him dead and a childhood friend of Zhe Ming's surfaces.
Mi Mi is back. Zhe Ming and Ah Wei are rivals for the company now. Mi Mi needs a personal miracle, 
Zhe Ming and Mi Mi need a miracle in their relationship, and Uncle must be stopped once and for all... 

Cast/ Characters/ Acting: 
Derek Chang who plays Zhe Ming was only 23 playing the part of a 30 year old- and wow he didn't look a day over 19 IMHO. He's super buff though... The man has muscles for days. 
Amber An who played Mi Mi is like 5'8" tall and Derek Chang/Zhe Ming still dwarfs her!! She was 31 when this was made. So they do look a little lopsided together, both trying to play 30 year olds with 7 1/4 years of age difference. 

Writing and directing: 
Okay this show was SO CUTE for the first half with Mi Mi and Zhe Ming as a couple, but the second half was insanely frustrating. I was SO FRUSTRATED. You know those shows where nothing goes right for a while and then something cracks and everyone hugs and decides to push though together and fight for their happy ending as a team? Yeah no... this one the whole second half was nothing going right. Nothing "cracked" until the very end, leaving a very short time of satisfaction after such a long frustrating time. The writers almost made Mi Mi bipolar, she was so inconsistent. I thought I was connecting with her character but then they ruined it and I was just disgusted with her and all her inconsistent and dumb-as-a-clump-of-dirt decisions. While she was running away, Zhe Ming's broken heart propelled him to become a more jaded, serious, less innocent person and I didn't like the way that happened. It was like the writers couldn't think of any clever way to make him grow up and take his place in the world without killing the beautiful innocent spark of life in his eyes. I was so mad, but I couldn't turn it off: by the time things went down the drain, I was so invested in seeing that Zhe Ming gets a happy ending that I suffered through the second half and it was torture. I'm so glad after all that, that it did get a happy ending!  

Other: 
Apparently the show got some mixed attention for using Huskies to play the wolves. I didn't personally have any feelings on the matter either way. I did find the sound effects they used for the "wolves" to be poorly implemented (corny, eyeroll, cringe).

Happy Ending Factor? 
It was like being drug through broken glass to get there, but there was a happy ending. Barely, but once we got there it was good.

(SPOILER SECTION! SKIP to Final Summary if you don't want to know how it ends!) 
So many characters really tug the heartstrings in this one! Mi Mi's sister loves her very much despite her own struggle with feeling like she was only born to be a donor to potentially cure an incurable illness Mi Mi is afflicted with. The uncle is a mess, hating, hurting, fearing, and regretting at the same time! Zhe Ming's poor sweet mom who has been hoping to find him for all these years and even after he's found she has to wait still because the bad Uncle won't tell her the truth. :'( I even feel bad for Mi Mi's rejected suitor Hao Wei who just got the short end of the stick on pretty much everything his whole life, and still chose to be an honorable person in the end. 

Final Summary: 
I know it sounds like I hated it from my intense whining about the frustrating-ness of Mi Mi's character inconsistencies and the related drama-drama in the second half, but I actually didn't hate it. I love me a good fantasy. If I ever watch it again though, I will probably watch the first 10 or 11 episodes and then watch the last 3 episodes to spare myself the frustration of the episodes between when Mi Mi leaves and the long awaited resolutions and happy ending. That was just too many episodes of everything going wrong for me to handle. 

Check out Prince Of Wolf on Viki!
Check out Prince Of Wolf on HotPotTV!
Check out the Prince Of Wolf OST on Spotify! 

(Above links based on US availability. Dramas may not be available on certain sites for certain countries. It depends who acquired the license for a specific drama for your country and who did not. Drama may be available on Netflix in your country but not even show up in mine, so check there if you have a Netflix acct. Click HERE for a list of legal Kdrama streaming sites and what countries they work in.) 

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He Is Psychometric (Korea, 2019) [사이코메트리 그녀석]

♥♥♥♥/ ♥   TITLE:  He Is Psychometric [사이코메트리 그녀석] ORIGINAL AIR DATE:  3/11-4/30/2019   WIKI:  http://asianwiki.com/He_is_Psychometr...