Ae-ja / <애자> 2009

Directed by: Jeong Gi-hoon / 정기훈
Release date: September 2009

Ae-ja has always been a 청개구리 (green frog, ask a Korean) and she is in constant conflict with authority, including her high school teachers and her mother. Part of her rebelliousness may be because of her mother’s favoritism for Ae-ja’s brother, who has a slight disability. Ten years go by and Ae-ja is now a struggling writer living in Seoul and is as contrary as ever. When she comes home to Busan, she disrupts everything, including her brother’s love life and wedding. When her mother collapses and ends up in the hospital, Ai-ja and her mom are thrown together again and must now re-define their relationship, but it is not a smooth road as her mother shows her chung-kae-gu-ri side as well.

Ae-ja and her mother make amusing characters to watch, especially Ae-ja who constantly shoots herself in the foot but just can’t stop being the head-strong individualist that she is. The hospital scenes got a little repetitive. My take: C

Matchmaker, friend Hyeon-jin, and Ae-ja’s mother peruse

photos of potential candidates for groom for Ae-ja, while Ae-ja sulks

(uncredited, Sa Hyeon-jin, Kim Yeong-ae, and Choi Kang-hee).

A Reason to Live / <오늘> 2011

Directed by: Lee Jeong-hyang, 이정향
Release date: October 2011

The film focuses on the topic of forgiveness. Da-hae lost her fiancé in a motorbike accident and, following the demands of her Catholic faith, she forgave the 15-year-old boy who was the driver in the hit-and-run accident. A year has gone by and she is making a documentary on forgiveness by interviewing a series of victims who have “forgiven” the perpetrators of the crimes against them or their loved ones. She begins to realize that forgiveness may not be such a simple, one-shot done deal. Meanwhile, her “adopted” little sister, Jimin, is suffering at the hands of a violent and abusive father and is having her own issues with forgiveness.

A very talky film. There is little action, beyond the climbing of a long flight of stairs, and some rather ugly violence when Jimin is being beaten up by her family. I found the heavy infusion of Catholicism, the struggles of victims to get closure after granting “forgiveness”, and the heavy violence of Jimin’s family depressing. There was a lot of repetition of themes and scenes, and a lot of bopping back and forth between past and present and dream scenes. The talkiness of the film, a lot of it being the interviews for the documentary being made, did not capturing my interest. My take: DD

Jimin and Da-hae, with all Da-hae’s film gear, set off to do an interview.

Boy Director / <소년 감독> 2008

Directed by: Lee Woo-yeol / 이우열
Release date: October 2008

Sang-gu lives in a peaceful village deep in Kangwon Province surrounded by murals painted by his now-dead father. When the village decides to tear down the decorated buildings so a company can construct a training institute, Sang-gu first protests then heads to Seoul, with his canine sidekick, to find out how to capture the murals on film before they are destroyed and to look for the mother of his good friend, Min-hee, a Russian mail-order bride who deserted her husband and daughter. Sang-gu begins to discover pieces of his father’s past—it’s an unusual one as his father had studied to make documentary films himself.

The director clearly had aspirations of making an art film, along the lines of Why did Bodhidharma go to the East? <달마가 동쪽으로 간 까닭은?> or Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... And Spring <봄여름가을겨울 그리고 봄>: with the vague storyline of the first and the grittiness of the second. The first highlight of the film was the dog … what an actor! Spoiler: the dog ends up as boshintong. The second was the repartee between the director of the film school and his assistant, played by veteran actors Yoon Je-moon and Choi Yeo-jin … what a hoot! My take: C

The dog (uncredited), Sang-gu (Kim Young-chan), and Min-hee

(Rhonda Lee Zakutney) watch Sang-gu’s father’s

documentary footage on an ancient projector.

Fair Love / <페어르브> 2010

Directed by: Shin Yeon-shick / 신영식
Release date: January 2010

Fifty-year-old Hyeong-man is solitary by nature and still a bachelor. He spends his time running a camera repair shop and out taking photographs. An old friend who is dying of cancer requests that Hyeong-man keep an eye on his daughter, Nam-eun. When Hyung-man later meets Nam-eun, she is a pretty twenty-something college student but with definite mental and emotional problems. She develops a romantic fixation on him and, with some starts and stops, their May-December romance blossoms. But things will not always go smoothly.

An overly long (117 minutes) and rather purposeless film. The filmmakers were interested in a May-December romance but, beyond that, there was not much plot or much else in the film to catch my interest. The film could be seen as a character study of an interesting person—the reclusive and introspective Hyeong-man—but within the context of the romance, the film didn’t really go anywhere with that. The cinematography was awesome and the music interesting but the song-and-montage sequences went on and on and on. My take: DC

Hyeong-man (Ahn Seong-gi) makes his first

visit to his old friend’s daughter (Lee Ha-na).

Fortune Salon / <청담보살> 2009

Directed by: Kim Jin-yeong / 김진영
Release date: November 2009

Tae-rang has a high-paying job, a plush house, and an expensive car, and she is intelligent and beautiful to boot, but so far she has been unlucky in love. She is the daughter of a shaman and a shaman herself and fate has set for her to marry a certain man, someone who she has not met yet—all she knows is his birthdate. When she finally finds him, Seung-won proves to be ill-mannered and unattractive, and trying to follow her fate does not prove to be easy.

Another film about a guy who is a creep (or creepy, as in Hello Ghost) but, by the end of the film, has the girl fall for him. A depressing film, with little successful humor.

My take: DD

The exquisite Tae-rang (Park Ye-jin) and the

scruffy Seung-won (Im Chang-jeong) go on a date.

The Classic / <클래식> 2002

Directed by: Kwak Jae-yong / 광재용
Release date: January 2003

Ji-hae and Su-kyung attend the same university and have a crush on the same man, Sang-min. At Su-kyung’s request, Ji-hae writes love letters to Sang-min for her friend and, touched by the letters, he takes up with Su-kyung, leaving Ji-hae unhappy and alone. Ji-hae stumbles upon a box of old letters of her mother, Ju-hee’s, and discovers her mother had a first love before marrying. Oddly enough, the mother’s secret love, Joon-ha wrote letters to her on behalf of his friend, Tae-su, the boy her parents had arranged for her to marry. Time and events intervene—student protests, the war in Viet Nam, and Ju-hee’s and Joon-ha’s love is not to be … but it seems fate has something else in store for Ji-hae and Sang-min.

The film is long (more than two hours) and the story is clichéd and only mildly interesting. I got bored and kept thinking, "This scene could have been cut ..." Son Ye-jin's bleating her lines got on my nerves, too. It seems this film was wildly popular among Korean men! Go figure. My take: D

 

Teenagers Ju-hee (Son Ye-jin) and Joon-ha (Jo Seung-woo)

get caught in a downpour and take refuge in a won-du-mak …

shades of “Sonagi”, anyone? Notice Ju-hee’s pink skirt!

(“Sonagi”, a classic 1953 short story by Hwang Soon-won).

My Mom / <친정엄마> 2010

Directed by: Yoo Sung-yup / 유성엽

Release Date: April 2010

Growing up in the country, Ji-sook sees her father constantly abusing her mother until she goes away to Seoul for college and for work. Her mother’s treating her like a child gets on her nerves but her mother is always there for her, too. Finally married and with a daughter of her own, Ji-sook makes an unexpected trip to the country, is it just because she wants to see her mom, as she claims, or is there something wrong?

This film is a celebration of Korean motherhood, without a whole lot of plot, but I found it interesting in an anthropological sort of way. I found the mother’s overt favoritism for one child over the other disturbing, albeit that Korean mothers most usually have it reversed, favoring their sons and ignoring their daughters. The colors in the film were interesting: warm yellows and golds until Ji-sook delivers her shocking news, then blues and grays take over. The technologies of communication—from pagers to computers—used to indicate the passage of time were interesting, too. The mother’s role was acted a bit over the top, I kept reading things into her words that weren’t there. My take: C

At Ji-sook’s insistence, the daughter and mother

take a day trip to see the autumn leaves and have

a fancy lunch out  (Park Jin-hee and Kim Hae-sook).