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MEMORIES_OF_ALHAMBRA

                                              July 16, 2020


If you die inside the game, you can die for real!

Does that sound like an exciting story premise to
you?  Then you might like to watch "Memories of
Alhambra" and read no further.

Many things in Kdramas often make
very little sense-- there's the
improbable coincidental connections,
the amnesia that cures itself by
authorial fiat, the villainous         Then there's, in my opinion, a funny
machinations that look remarkably      inconsistency in the consensus reality
reckless and unlikely to work, the     of these shows involving mobile
good guys who can't be bothered to     phones: are they a reliably private
think one move ahead...                communications channel, or are they
                                       tracking devices the police can access
As tiresome as these can be,           at will, with logs the police can
I can treat them as genre              access easily (perhaps even without a
conventions, accept them and           subpeona?).
move on...  usually.
                                            I mention these issues, because
"Memories of Alhambra" accesses             the computer-age technical
depths of incoherence rarely                geniuses in this show don't seem
plumbed in these shows-- I guess            to have heard about them...
it's not quite at the level of
dumb of the "Hotel King"... but
on the other hand, maybe it's
worse in many respects.  Beyond a
certain point, such comparisons
of odiousness are even more odious.

Just to pick one, here's something that
pops up late in the story: at the end of
the grand quest, there's a widget in the     Or consider that a sword fight
game that can be used to delete all the      in this game would lack any
bugs in the game-- but it *fails*!           haptic feedback whatsover:
There's a bug in the bug deletion            really everyone jumping around
process!  Oh my god, if only they'd          and clanging swords together
realized, maybe that would've thought        would continually swing them
about deleting those bugs earlier!           right through each other,
Like, before they got people killed.         because there are actually no
                                             swords there.

    Then there's the psychic (?) link
    to the computer servers that some
    people appear to be afflicted with      And how about the CEO of
    so that the game continues even         the company obsessed with
    after they get rid of their lenses      playing the game because
    or glasses.                             "I've got to level up!"
                                            You could call your tech
                                            guys and tell them to
                                            jack the little number in
                                            the database where your
                                            level is stored, you know?


              I could go on
              describing other
              stupidities, but
              let those stand
              for them all.       I'm beginning to wonder if this is
                                  endemic to "netflix original" kdramas--
                                  a trendy hip premise (games! social
                                  media!), but a complete absense of any
                                  logic.  "Love Alarm" was much like this.



    This show remains watchable, but only
    barely, largely because of the star
    power of the cast-- Park Shin-Hye and
    Hyun-Bin both have the acting ability--
    or more precisely, I think, the *stage
    presence* to carry this show, but it's a
    struggle even for them.  The writers
    don't give them much help, there's
    barely anything here for them to work         Strange though how little
    with... their developing romance is one       "chemistry" is evident
    of the things you need to shrug-off as        between the two...  There
    "genre convention". The character             are some scenes where I
    Hyun-Bin plays is far too big of an           wondered if they were
    obnoxious jerk to attract the attentions      really acting opposite each
    of even the most co-dependent...              other-- maybe they couldn't
                                                  schedule them both at the
                                                  same time, and edited the
                                                  two halfs of the
                                                  conversation together?




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