“Nothing Much Prepared,” season four
Kim Rieun: You outgrow everything eventually. Lee Young Ji was 19 when she started “Nothing Much Prepared,” and now, seemingly overnight, she’s 24. The drinking talk show format, once a big new trend on YouTube, has since become familiar territory. Just when the show needed to find a way to keep things fresh without losing what made it special, “Nothing Much Prepared” pivoted, filming new episodes at Lee’s grandmother’s house, full of memories from when the host was in her teens. Unsurprisingly, guests end up bringing gifts not just for Lee but for her grandmother too, who takes a nice staycation at a hotel during filming, and they show a fondness for an older woman they’ve never met as they observe small details around them like barley tea kept in an old Del Monte juice bottle and a mother-of-pearl cabinet. The fantasy at the heart of “Nothing Much Prepared”—that you’re looking in on a hangout, not watching a show—feels just as much at home in the home full of memories that serves as the set for season four.
Lee Young Ji’s ability to steer a conversation with ease, even though she’s younger than most of her guests, and to express her admiration for her guests using exactly the right words, has always been the strength of “Nothing Much Prepared.” The fact that she intentionally raises her voice or dances unabashed just to cut through the awkwardness despite her introverted personality, and subtly works what she already knows about a guest into the conversation, shows just how much consideration she has for them. But the more closely Lee looks at her guests, the more closely they start looking back at her. LEE JUN YOUNG, worried about his drunk host, claims he’s drunk too and suggests they take hangover medicine together, while SEVENTEEN members MINGYU and THE 8 have nothing but complimentary things to say about her every time she steps away. In one episode, Lee Young Ji asks Han So Hee, who keeps the conversation light throughout, what she’d do if she could go back to her 20s, and Han answers, “I’d probably live a little more for myself,” then adds, “So you should live for yourself.” These people sending strength Lee’s way are the same ones who’ve found solace in the way she’s become so comfortable with reading people for so long.
You can’t be 24 forever, and likewise, “Nothing Much Prepared” has come to an end with its fourth season. Lee penned a song for the finale, in which she sings, “They don’t know me like I know you / But I wish you the best.” She was always a girl who’s open to the world, setting the table for whoever came to dinner. Now, she can look back and confidently declare she “made lots of friends through this program.” If growth isn’t about holding onto a wonderful time but loving something fully and then letting it go, all we can do now is rewatch the episodes of “Nothing Much Prepared” left to us and wait to see what Lee Young Ji does next. Because you outgrow everything eventually.
“Coming of Age”
Nam Sunwoo (“CINE21” reporter): The first thing I did after watching director Jeong Seung-o’s second feature-length film, “Coming of Age,” was run a search. I wanted to check whether the name of the child in the movie matched the one in the director’s debut film, “Move the Grave.” It didn’t take long to confirm my memory was right. Both boys shared the same character name: Dong-min. Part of why I had to look it up is that neither character has much screen time, but also because you don’t need to notice the connection at all to follow the story. “Coming of Age” centers on an elderly man battling cancer with his daughter by his side, while “Move the Grave” is about five siblings trying to relocate their father’s resting place. So who’s Dong-min, then? In “Coming of Age,” he’s the ailing man’s great-nephew. In “Move the Grave,” he’s the eldest daughter’s son. Laid out like this, the connection between the two films looks awfully thin.
Even so, it’s hard to write off the shared name as mere coincidence because each boy gets a scene that mirrors the other’s almost exactly. Both Dong-mins have a scene where they distance themselves from the commotion of the adult world and end up becoming absorbed in a plant, staring at it intently. While tied up in the wider theme of nature, it’s also about how neither can survive fully without continual care. In director Jeong’s world, blood ties work exactly the same way. That’s why the two Dong-mins come across as passive bystanders to the plot and as something of a stand-in for Jeong at the same time. In both “Move the Grave” and “Coming of Age,” you get the sense that someone’s working through their family issues by way of a fictional family because they can’t be free from their own. With the Chuseok holiday coming up, it’s a good time to sit with that impulse. Even with theaters packed with blockbusters over the holiday, I recommend spending some time with Dong-min for a little while.
“Infinity Shakes” (Oan Kim & the Dirty Jazz)
Kim Hyojin (music columnist): Half Korean, half French. A musician, a photographer, and a film director. Oan Kim’s multifaceted identity lives within Dirty Jazz. Jazz, indie rock, folk, contemporary, noise—these disparate styles are mixed and matched all throughout his music. Rather than plucking out one aspect and erasing the rest, each holds onto exactly what makes it unique. Tension, frisson, vibration—it all surfaces in the friction between these contrasting parts.
Most of the songs off “Infinity Shakes” share the texture of indie rock in common, but each one starts from a different place. Some lean jazz, some indie rock, others classical or Indian music. There’s a subtle spin on the aria “Habanera (L’amour est un oiseau rebelle)” from Bizet’s opera “Carmen,” and, taking Indian music as inspiration, the song “Infinity Shakes” constructs a sense of spiritual space with the resonance of the instruments as its tools. “Garbage Truck” has a rock sound that recalls Talking Heads and the Velvet Underground, while “This Life of Mine” layers guitar as bright as dawn over drums that pulse like a heartbeat, with saxophone that captures all the thrill of being alive. The result is a raw sound, never smoothed over, that keeps every texture of its many sources intact, one that ends up calling to mind life itself—the accumulation of individual choices made over time.
Some say life is a series of choices, but, ironically, choices don’t give us any solid ground to stand on. Even after you’ve picked one, life remains a shaky, uncertain affair. Maybe life, then, isn’t so much a process of narrowing choices down one by one to find a direction to follow. Maybe all the different parts that make you who you are all coexist, infinitely shaky, never really going away. “Infinity Shakes” puts music to life in the midst of all that wobbly uncertainty.