Finito of Mi Ahjussi – General comments

I’m so happy to report that I loved it to the last drop and I wanted a second cup immediately!!! I truly came to enjoy each and every character (well with one or two exceptions), because each one was so well written and so well acted that I couldn’t help myself!!

Of course Mr. Voice always brought a pleasant smile to my lips in the past when I thought of the actor and I enjoyed him in his other dramas like Pasta but here I LOVED him. I thought he finally found a character that he could inhabit – sink his teeth into and make memorable and I won’t soon forget Dong Hoon.

IU was also a great surprise. I was on the fence with her –though I liked her more than some other actresses who were in her category – but she totally absorbed herself in this character and made it work beautifully. It seems like she also finally found the right package of meaty character and the right leading man to make her shine.

With this calibre of drama I have a huge regret that we weren’t able to watch this together and discuss it episode by episode. There was so much contained within each one and there was so much I wanted to say and share and of course the next episode was the same and I’m left with many thoughts unexpressed! I did see that there were many discussions on the forums and really excellent analysis and mild disagreements too. It was that kind of drama; the best kind that bring out well expressed but different reactions in many of us.

I will wait to see your final comments Robin… I miss it already and it will be nice to visit again!!

#iu, #lee-sun-kyun, #my-ajusshi, #my-mister

#my-ahjussi

Robin N 2:21 pm on July 10, 2018

I finally had a chance to finish this one as well and I agree with you wholeheartedly – this was an exceptionally well-done drama, complex, well-written, and obsorbing. Feel free to revisit actions or themes from it in subsequent posts and we can be sure to mark them with spoilers using the ‘after the break’ function.

This was definitely a character-driven story and if it had been less deftly cast I think it could have sunk under the weight of it all. There are many depressing elements to it so it’s easy to imagine how one could get so overwhelmed by the negatives that you could walk away because you don’t want to spend so much time down in the dumps with the characters. That is, unless you have talented actors like Lee Sun-kyun who bring such a depth of heart and soul to their characters that you get caught up by wanting to know more about them, to see if there is hope in their future. I was touched deeply by Dong-hoon, but I think it was mainly because Lee Sun-kyun made him such a mensch. I believed that he was depressed and lonely and frustrated by the distance between his wife and himself, and that his work took too much from him to allow him to be supportive of his wife (what were her 10s or 100s of reasons for her affair, cheating on a man like Dong-hoon with a jerk like Do Joon-young?) I think he missed his son, away studying in the US (and how lonely is that for a child and his parents?) I think his inexplicable transfer to a position within the company that was beneath his skills was a source of frustration and anxiety, but he was bound and determined to do his best with what he’d been assigned. I can’t forget the climate of mistrust and spying that went on at that company; it could make anyone crazy… or paranoid!

I think he responded to Ji-an’s resume with her “talent” or hobbie of “running” because I think there is nothing that he would rather do most days than to run, run, run away from his many burdens. Every sigh that Ji-an heard, every unvoiced worry that she could hear (and pretty damn remarkable eavesdropping audio that was, when you think of what it should sound like if your phone is in your pocket…) was something that resonated with her as if to say, “Ah… someone else is as lonely and troubled as I am.” The fact that he persevered without losing his decency made him a worthy role model for her. I think he was grateful to her for being someone he needed too – someone he loved (but not as anything more than a parent/child or brother/sister) and because she needed him to be a protector and a shoulder to lean on (figuratively speaking).

I don’t think that Ji-an loved him as a woman does, at least not in a fully-fledged way, but she certainly understood his value as a man worthy of love and respect. To her it is inexplicable that anyone would betray his trust, or denigrate his value in any way. I particularly liked her retort when under that weird cross-examination (was it some sort of mediation that was undertaken in the police station?) with Do Joon-young and his lawyer about how it was some sort of bad thing to appreciate someone like Dong-hoon, as if he was a bad person.

There were times I would liked to have seen IU show a little more fire in her performance, but I can completely understand that she made a choice to have Ji-an be the kind of person who’s like a ghost walking amongst people, never raising her voice, not calling attention to herself (usually), hiding in oversized clothing, etc. It was a challenging role for her and she’s made progress. I did not care for her at all in the remake of Bu Bu Jing Xin because she felt like a child in dress up opposite Lee Junki, but her petiteness and wardrobe worked in her favor here. (Though during the wake scene she once again looked like she was drowning in the traditional clothes!) I think this was a very smart choice of role for her because she was working with a terrific cast from whom she could learn many valuable lessons, and with a production team as talented as any top-level film team. Good for her; I look forward to her next project.

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Finito of Mi Ahjussi – General comments