Fridates with Kamote is an online support group born to provide encouragement in this time of pandemic. This aims to lighten up the burden of each member by affirming what has been felt all through the week and motivating each other to keep fighting, to keep living despite and in spite of.
Traveling has always been my personal means of escaping the hassles of work and naggings of life. Weekends were my ‘me time’ – a time to recharge, to eliminate the toxics of my life, to connect with nature. But the onset of the coronavirus pandemic has left me constrained within the four-walls of our house, surrounded by concrete buildings, chained by regulations forbidding any geographical movement.
My mind has become a gruesome battlefield for almost four months of quarantine now.
The King: Eternal Monarch is an epic comeback drama of Lee Min Ho after getting discharged from the military. It tells the story of two parallel universes: the Kingdom of Corea where King Lee Gon (Lee Min Ho) rules and the Republic of Korea where Detective Jung Tae-eul (Kim Go-eun) lives. Thanks to the mythical bamboo flute called “manpashikjeok”, Lee Gon gets to cross the barrier to the other realm and meets Tae-eul whom he recognized as his childhood savior during the assassination of his father.
Reply 1988 tells the story of five friends who have been raised together in the small neighborhood alley of Ssangmun-dong in Seoul. It unfolds a timeline that begins in 1988 and the succeeding years after until 1995 including some snippets of selected characters in 2016. Compared to other dramas that centers on a single character, Reply 1988 gravitates around the five families whose lives are so intertwined with each other.
Right now, I should be happily strolling around Beijing and Shanghai – learning about our cultural differences, exploring cityscapes, and finally savoring the fruits of a year’s worth of workload.
But I’m not. Instead, here I am at home, writing all these predicaments. Corona virus pandemic has changed everything that we so long planned for this year. Everything.
We all have our fair share of stories of being stood up by friends who committed to join a trip then backs out the last minute. But what happens if the one who invited you does not show up on the day of the trip and you are already in the meet-up place? Would you push through with the plan or… go back home?
Itaewon Class is problematically titled. It’s not your regular high school teenage love story but a rather serious drama that portrays power struggle amidst diversity, prejudice, and discrimination. But what really troubled me all through its sixteen episodes is the battle for the leading lady role. At first glance, it’s easy to spot Cho Yi-seo as the main lead of Itaewon Class. However, there is an overlapping build-up of emotion towards her and Saeroyi’s first love, Soo Ah. Which gets me asking: who really is the second lead of this drama?
Once upon a time, my boss told me that I need an alpha to tame me so that I could get married. I believe otherwise. I don’t need an alpha. In a world of patriarchs, it’s difficult to be a woman. But this drama pointed out how a single woman could create ripples into others. To empower others to makes choices for themselves – to choose themselves first – denying society of what it wants to dictate. The World of Married Couple helps us reevaluate the women around us, the decisions that they have to make, and the struggles they silently battled with.
Murakami’s Blind Willows, Sleeping Woman is a collection of 24 short stories randomly pieced together to make your head ache. Unlike the many short stories that we’ve grown with, each story does not give a resolution, rather, they would unexpectedly get off track when you’re almost at the end – leaving you with a knotted forehead and infinite list of questions that will never be answered.
Ang Huling El Bimbo tells the timeless tragic story of the song itself made relevant with socio-political issues chronicled through the cleverly pieced together tunes of Eraserheads. It follows the joyful years of four friends – Joy, Hector, Anthony, and Emman – back in college and the ugly and unresolved issues they had over the years.
Dakilanglaagan 