Letter #2: Vincenzo

Good morning, Erin. 

As even the mere presence of this letter implies, I finished Vincenzo, last night...and--goodness me!--did I have an absolute blast with this show. (And I didn't end up staying up until 3 AM sobbing into my couch! Bonus!) 

I'm going to do my best to skip past the preamble hemming and hawing that made its way into my Hotel Del Luna thoughts (and of just about everything I write (or say out loud)), but I do want to start by saying you apparently have some perhaps preternatural insight into my tastes, because, if your goal was to get me to join the ever-growing legion of K-drama fans, you started me out with two shows that could not have been more tailored to me as an audience: first, with Hotel Del Luna, which absolutely appealed to my instincts as an anime fan; and, second, with Vincenzo, which was not only HILARIOUS but ended up being so very much like my absolute favorite TV show of all time, Burn Notice. (If your third suggestion somehow manages to have Iron Man in it, I'm going to start thinking you've just been sneaking peeks at my diary.)

So, getting down to business--my notes, in no particular order:

1. What an incredible cast. Just delightfully bizarre--all of them. Great acting, but specifically the writing for these characters was fantastic. All of them were so exaggerated but still completely believable. Which probably comes down to the slow build of natural zaniness to the world of the show. Which you'd think would be the last place for a hardboiled vigilante series to set up shop, but...here we are.

2. Ms. Hong (the main girl) was my absolute favorite character. I thought she was just hilarious. Bratty, self-congratulatory, selfish (...I'm starting to see a pattern in my #BestGirl picks), and ultimately just rad as hell. The actress was brilliant--particularly her physical comedy. I mean, I loved all her wacky outbursts and expressiveness, but I think I was laughing literally every time she moved. I particularly loved her little hop-strut as she walks. I don't know if this was an affectation of the character (like, that Ms. Hong was deliberately being a strange kind of sassy) or if the actress just, y'know, walks that way (or maybe sort of had to walk that way because of her outfits)--but, whatever the reason, I'm...how do the cool kids say it...ah, right: I'm here for it. 

2A. ...do the cool kids say that?

3. I'm impressed with how well Evil Intern (the guy who was the actual evil chairman) speaks English! I don't mean that it's impressive that he speaks it--though knowing more than one language is still pretty impressive. No, I mean how well he spoke it. Virtually no accent. Totally natural use of casual language. I did not expect it. I know the character stayed in America for a long time, but still--kudos to the actor. Clearly he's more than just fluent in English. And I think his lines actually sounded more natural than the ones spoken by the actual Americans they imported to play the American couple who were originally going to the art gallery. 

4. I'm terrible with names, so I tend to give characters nicknames (see Evil Intern, above), but my nickname for the evil ex-prosecutor lady wasn't anywhere near as good as Ms. Hong's for her: Zumba Snake? Frikkin' brilliant. And then she never called her that again. What a waste. Good thing I'm terrible with names, because it will live on through me!

5. I love that every character is given a chance to shine, as the show goes on. No one's just a disposable joke. Which they absolutely could have been.

6. Okay, I said Ms. Hong was my favorite, but...I'd be lying if I didn't say I just about died every time Undercover Cop Guy was on screen. Holy crap--everything he did was so outrageously over-the-top. Dude was a comedic genius. And I loudly declared it to the screen after every one of his scenes. So, in a way, he's also my favorite. 

7. ...except then there's Piano Girl. Who is also my favorite. And my new crush. I mean, she was as funny as every other tenant, of course, but...look, I'm allowed to be shallow about this. It's in the bylaws. 

8. Being new to Korean shows, I am also new to hearing Korean being spoken. And I want to mention that, while I was watching Hotel Del Luna, my brain kept trying to figure out where to sort the sounds, because Korean (to me) seems to shift between sounding like the soft-staccato of one of the Romance languages and Mandarin. (Or, put a simultaneously much more and much less direct way, it kinda sounds like Italians speaking broken Chinese while inconsistently affecting Russian accents.) I mention this only because there were times when Vincenzo would jump between Korean and Italian, and, unless I recognized the Italian words, I usually wasn't able to tell the difference, just based on sounds. 

9. Holy cow--I almost forgot to mention how much I loved that Ms. Hong had no sense of direction. I mean, they sort of drop that detail, in the first half of the show, but, while it's there, it was one of the top things I loved about her. 

10. This was actually a pretty complex story to balance, with there being a bunch of different factions working against each other and then people within those factions with their own motivations. Again, nothing but good marks to give, here.

11. Speaking of storytelling, though, there are A LOT of things--especially the further we get into the series--that are conveniently handwaved away or simply left unexplained (such as the seeming infinite amount of resources and money and convenient ability to swap in members of the good guy team for who should absolutely be a regular dude who works in a building somewhere)...and I just don't care. Because, as someone who looks at storytelling as a magic trick, as something that needs to distract me from asking questions and then wow me with the payoff so that even if I notice something isn't quite right I will give it a pass because the payoff was worth it. This show has that in spades--particularly with how satisfyingly the stakes keep getting ratcheted up with each episode.

12. One of my favorite touches is how, early on, Evil Intern's so smitten with Ms. Hong that, were it not for her association with Vincenzo sparking his jealousy, he'd probably have just let her skewer his company in dozens of ways just to make her happy. It's such a great, telling detail--about how much he likes her, yes, but also about just how little her initial assaults actually matter: she's fighting skirmishes while he's overseeing a war. 

13. And how frikkin' badass is that massive guitar riff whenever something awesome is about to happen?

13A. And, of course, this show also did that thing I love where they use the same soundtrack over and over and over. Which, y'know...great. 

14. Here's another one of my favorite details: Vincenzo's hair. He's got it slicked back in his cool Mafia look for most of the first half of the show (and then it comes back when he goes on his revenge rampage, in the last few episodes), but, after the section where he's trying to pretty-boy seduce the bank president dude, he continues to wear his hair in the casual style he used for his role as seducer. That is, he symbolically continues to do as Ms. Hong says, allowing her to influence him more and more and taking much more of a personal interest in the other tenants, as well. (They do something similar with Evil Intern and his Puppet Brother, with each swapping from slicked to casual or casual to slicked hair as their roles morph from one thing to another.)

15. The product placement in this show was fantastically unsubtle. I loved it. 

16. HOLY F*** THE SCENE WHERE THE PIGEONS SAVE HIM!!!

17. I really enjoyed that, as a villain, Evil Intern is actually a combination of Vincenzo's ruthlessness and Ms. Hong's wackiness--a sign that the good guys can really only defeat him by working together. 

18. Lots of Cadillacs, in this series. And a bizarre lack of Hyundais. (And, as someone who has only ever owned--and loved--Hyundais, I am aghast at this oversight. Or, more likely, very lucrative sponsorship deal.)

19. I don't know who the translator was, but someone needs to sit him down and explain the difference between historic and historical. Because very little that happened was historical (as in, concerned with the realities of the past), but they sure kept saying that it was.

19A. ...I want to make a similar comment about the use of Mafia, in that everyone keeps calling Vincenzo "a Mafia," which is inaccurate but actually totally appropriate for everyone to keep saying since it's a foreign term and, therefore, should be something everyone gets wrong. (Kinda like how people keep calling him "corn salad" instead of consigliere.) But one of the episodes starts with one of those recap scenes that ended the previous episode, and the translation comes across as "Mafia" in the earlier episode and then as "mafioso" (which is the accurate term) in the recap scene. And, perhaps even more confusing, it's literally the only instance of the term "mafioso," so I was scratching my head for two reasons, with that. 

19B. Um, sorry, I was an English major. 

20. They SHOULD NOT have gone after his mother. I honestly can't believe they were so stupid. 

21. Oh--I loved that the former thugs who tried to kick everyone out of the building just became tenants. What a great choice. 

22. Are there little statuettes of these characters, like they sell with anime? Because I totally want a Ms. Hong statuette. 

23. That thing they kept doing where we'd get a flashback to what happened in a given scene after the camera switched to another part of the story should have been annoying and overused...but it wasn't. It was just too much fun to be annoying. 

24. That the tenants were all basically just a vigilante superhero team in waiting was ridiculous--in the best way possible. Because the story did a sloooooooow rollout of that fact, waiting until the story was appropriately wacky enough for this bizarre contrivance to be perfectly believable. Loved it. 

25. It was terrific that, even to the Koreans, the "Italian hand gesture" is a recognizable stereotype. Hilarious. 

26. Thank God Mr. Lee didn't die. I thought they went through with it. And I'm thrilled I was wrong. 

27.Speaking of deaths: Zumba Snake's was great. Vincenzo was telling the truth: he let her "dance" all she wanted, in the end. 

28. The Russian mob is called the Bratva. Just...as a point of fact. 

29. So, wait, did...did not everyone get some of the gold, in the end? How was that ultimately resolved? Did Piano Girl sneak some of it into her piano on the sly? Is Ms. Hong just holding onto the stash (minus the Buddha statue) forever? Or...?

30. And why can't Vincenzo and Ms. Hong just get to be together, in the end? I ask for so little, show! You can't just let my ship sail sweetly into the night? Really? I THOUGHT WE WERE FRIENDS!

And...yeah, that's probably enough. Can’t wait to see how many pages this one will turn out to have been. I’m assuming less than the three pages of Hotel Del Luna notes. 

[pastes into Word]

…oh, God, she’s gonna think I’m a lunatic.

So, if I somehow failed to make it clear, I loved the stuffing out of this show. I had such a good time. And thank you so very much for recommending it. 

Excited to see where you send me next.

--Daryl

 

^me, yesterday evening, waiting for my dinner to heat up before the Vincenzo finale