K-drama Extracurricular on Netflix shows the darker sides of teenage existence
- In the lead role, Kim Dong-hee plays an unpopular but excellent student who embraces the underworld when not at school
- Although the plot might require some suspension of disbelief, the series makes for a compelling thriller
Kids these days, huh? You just don’t know what they’ll be up to next! Take secondary-school star pupil Oh Ji-soo, for example, described by his schoolmaster-counsellor “an obnoxiously good student”. But he’s also a loner, a loser with no social life and zero prospect of winning any playground popularity contests.
Still waters run deep, however, especially when they come with an inbuilt criminal element. Ji-soo (Kim Dong-hee) maintains a whiter shade of bland in the personality stakes, all the better to keep quiet the business he runs anonymously on the side: a prostitution ring that features at least one of his classmates, who, like everyone else in town, is clueless about the identity of the sex-ring kingpin. Ji-soo is a sort of diabolical Korean “Charlie”, a pimp who oversees a team of materialistic, bitchy girls instead of “Angels”.
This, by name and by nature, is Extracurricular (now streaming on Netflix), because when school’s out it is straight back to work for the girls and for Ji-soo, seemingly an orphan who lives alone and whose nighttime entrepreneurship will ultimately pay for college.
With the help of some voice-scrambling smartphone software and plenty of physical intimidation from his enforcer, Ji-soo keeps the cash pouring in. Until … another tough-talking girl, but with a radically different skill set, derails his self-possession and leaves his heart all a-flutter. Bao Gyu-ri (Park Ju-hyun), also a classmate, is destined to be CEO of the family company, already rich, rebellious and not averse to a touch of blackmail.
Now suspend your disbelief for a moment. Because no matter how tech-savvy, it’s unlikely any schoolboy swot left tripping over his own raging hormones by his first crush would have the wherewithal, or moral turpitude, to set up a call-girl service and run it without detection. (Or is it? Today, who can tell?)
But with disbelief safely unplugged, Extracurricular makes a robust case for recommendation as a compelling thriller. Ironically though, television for younger teens this is not. Confusingly billed in part as “teen drama”, it has enough sexual violence, blood, beatings and suggestions of warped, niche “interests” to take it off many a viewing syllabus.
Mark Ruffalo takes on twins in HBO’s I Know This Much is True
From The Incredible Hulk to the incredible bulk: Hollywood A-lister Mark Ruffalo loaded on 13.5kg to play a leading character in HBO series I Know This Much is True – and it wasn’t muscle.
But the result is a “flabulous” virtuoso performance in the roles of fictional twins Dominick and Thomas Birdsey, Ruffalo filming the thinner twin’s scenes before spending five weeks fattening himself up for the second part of his solo double act.
Nor is this six-parter without gore: it’s not long before paranoid schizophrenic Thomas, bloated by prescription drugs, is indulging in a violent act of self-mutilation that he considers an anti-war protest. To “normal” Dominick, this is merely the latest, although most horrifying, in a lifelong procession of acts of defiance and appeals for help.
Yet as their parallel stories diverge and converge, it transpires that Dominick, the protector, isn’t quite the level-headed, regular guy he often appears – even though he’s not the one suffering religious delusions, condemning the American obsession with cheap oil or claiming, “we’re just wallowing in our greed and spiritual filth”.
The brothers seem damned to suffer one catastrophe after another, and even if this is ultimately a story of redemption any tension relievers take a while to arrive. So enjoy, in the meantime, a gloriously unhinged Juliette Lewis. HBO and HBO Go, Mondays at 9am; re-runs at 10pm on HBO.
