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Al Mar (Spanish) [The Sea]

This movie was just plain weird. I really went in wanting to like it, but the whole pretentious, overly poetic vibe, combined with this choppy editing that keeps hopping back and forth in these tiny five to ten second bursts, just made it feel dragged out for no real reason, way too self indulgent if you ask me. Honestly this could've been trimmed down to a fifteen minute short and lost nothing. And I still don't get what the deal was with women dancing along the beach while some overwrought, flowery narration plays over the top. The plot creeps along at a snail's pace, slowly building toward some confrontation that you can see coming from a mile away and that just gets duller the closer it gets. By the time it actually happened I'd totally checked out as a viewer, even with two genuinely good looking guys leading the film. The setup itself is pretty basic. Lorena and Diego are trying to settle into a new life in a small town by the coast, both nervously starting fresh ...

Yesterday (Thai Series)

I've got pretty conflicted feelings on this one. It kicks off strong with all the mind games and manipulation, but somewhere along the way it turns into such a confusing, repetitive slog that I started checking out mentally. On top of that, the whole BL angle ends up feeling like an afterthought compared to the bigger story the show's actually chasing. Instead of playing out as a standard romance, it goes for something much darker, building relationships around trauma, power dynamics, and serious emotional imbalance. I can see this concept working if someone really committed to making it a proper drama, but for me personally, my patience ran out. Each episode also clocks in around seventy minutes, which is a lot to ask of anyone, and the whole series runs ten episodes total.

Our two main guys are Vier and Kelvin. Vier's the confident heir to the VPG group, polished, calculating, and used to coming out on top. Kelvin's on the flip side, the ignored son from a rival family, constantly having to outmaneuver his own relatives just to survive, stuck with a father who shows him no love and an older half brother who treats him like hired help. Kelvin doesn't just develop feelings for Vier, he studies him, predicts his moves, gets fixated on him, and eventually pulls him into his web. You can tell early on Kelvin's got something planned. Neither guy is fully what he appears to be, and that underlying tension ends up carrying the whole story. The show bounces between the present and a year earlier, showing how Kelvin and Vier originally teamed up in business and slowly started falling for each other. Some business situation goes down and Vier relocates to Chiang Mai. Then in the present timeline, he wakes up to find he's been kidnapped and locked away by Kelvin, who has zero intention of letting him go. From there the cast just keeps expanding, Kelvin's older brother Ken shows up, along with his wife, plus this business deal, the wife's secret girlfriend who's covertly working for Vier, then the wife's brother who has another brother who happens to be close with Vier and has gone missing. Why Vier's being held prisoner, what Kelvin's actually planning, why Vier had to run in the first place, all the back and forth business dealings, that's basically what fuels the whole show.

Unfortunately, by around episode four, I completely lost the thread of what was actually happening. Kelvin's whole character runs on obsession and warped emotions, and watching that play out is both gripping and genuinely unsettling. The show fully commits to this dark romance angle that deliberately crosses moral lines, and that choice ends up shaping everything about the experience. The central relationship never gets romanticized, and honestly a lot of the time it feels more rooted in control, dependency, and emotional damage than any real affection. But that also made it really tough for me to stay engaged with the show at all. Here's the thing, I watch a ton of these Asian BLs expecting the romance to be front and center, so a show like this, with a legit storyline but barely any actual romance, ends up feeling like a bait and switch. Honestly it felt like there was way more GL content than BL. The show's biggest problem though is how it's structured. Constantly jumping around between timelines does way more damage than good. Rather than pulling you in with mystery, those jumps mostly just wreck the pacing and muddy up the emotional beats. You can follow what's happening on the surface, sure, but actually feeling any of it is hard when there's no continuity holding it together. The actor playing Kelvin has this permanent exasperated expression going on, and I just never connected with the character. Vier meanwhile came across as so clueless that I kept wondering how this guy runs an entire company. Both characters go through major arcs, but a lot of it doesn't feel earned, so their choices end up feeling like the plot needed them rather than anything organic.

The core problem really is the story itself, it just falls apart under its own weight. The plot gets weak and inconsistent, making it tough to stay invested emotionally. And even though the two leads still bring some charm, their acting definitely needed more polish, especially in the heavier scenes. I'd say this one's skippable. (4/10)

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