Shoot for the Stars (2002/3, SBS drama special)

By temperament I find it very painful to watch self-defeating characters. I can't watch slasher films because of the "Okay, everybody stay together!" trope -- the cue, of course, for the characters to wander off alone into the jaws or blades of the killer. Shoot for the Stars is a romantic drama, with hardly a drop of blood shed, but it's structured like a slasher film, and before long I was climbing the walls.

Ku Sung-tae (Jo In-sung, Something Happened in Bali), a handsome aspiring young actor, has a dark secret: he's illiterate. But he can memorize almost anything on one hearing, so he relies on his managers, Han So-ra (Jeon Do Yeon, You Are My Sunshine) and her older brother Han Ba-da (Park Sang-myung, My Wife Is a Gangster), to read his lines to him. That means they have to stay with him constantly when he's working, but of course, to keep the story moving they keep wandering off alone. Then Sung-tae is confronted with a written text he can't read, he panics and runs out, and is told he'll never work again. He and his managers bow and scrape to the director and promise it'll never happen again. Sung-tae then exults: he'll become a big star and find his long lost adoptive family, from whose loving bosom he was torn at the age of six. And all is well, more or less -- until the next episode. Well before the midpoint of the series I was rooting for the monster, as I do when I have to watch a slasher film: get him! finish her off! rip them all to shreds!

The monster here is the model/actress Jung Yae-rin, who had been managed by Ba-da until she decided to hitch her rising star to Kim Do-hun (Lee Seo-jin, Since We Met), Ba-da's former partner and So-ra's former fiance. Do-hun swindles Ba-da out his life savings to buy his way into a CEO job with a production company, and dumps So-ra brutally. Yae-rin then blackmails Do-hun into taking her with him. Yae-rin is played by Hong Eun-hee, who went on to play the wicked stepsister character in My Love Patji. Her trademark is a mean, smug little smile whenever she's working her evil, the kind of smile you want to wipe off her face with a two-by-four. (Yae-rin has a dark secret of her own: she was a bar girl before Ba-da rescued her and took her under his ample wing. Known for his stinginess, Ba-da likes to brag that he never gives anything to anyone, but in fact he's almost pathologically generous to lost sheep like Yae-rin and Sung-tae.) As an added complication, Sung-tae and So-ra fall in love with each other, which has to be kept secret from Ba-da the overprotective big brother, and from Sung-tae's adoring fans.

Ba-da, So-ra, and Sung-tae keep lying to each other, for their own good of course, and withholding important information from each other, to protect them from being hurt of course, and every time it just makes things worse. But they never, ever learn, and can hardly wait for the next crisis, so they can lie again. The saving grace of the series is So-ra's old friend Lee Mi-ryun (Byun Jung-soo, Man in Crisis), a hardboiled hair stylist who always tells the truth and sees through every problem, often getting the others out of trouble when no one else can. (When Mi-ryun beats up Yae-rin, about halfway through, it's immensely satisfying.) But even she can't dig these losers out of their morass. Despite their best efforts at failure, though, they thrive and the series ends happily -- this is a TV drama, after all.

Despite all this, I couldn't stop watching Shoot for the Stars. One night I watched three episodes in a row (on DVD). The cast are all very good, making their doofus characters believable and sympathetic, even lovable. Jeon Do-yeon stands out, which is no surprise, but Park Sang-myun and Jo In-sung are right behind her. The setting is parts of Seoul that I know, and want to return to; the sight of snow falling in Myungdong, the skyline of Seoul seen from a rooftop at night, made me ache with nostalgia. The writing is tight and mechanical, like a windup toy that churns along mindlessly, with the actors giving it a heart. (Review by Duncan Mitchel)
source:koreanfilm.org