K-Crock

I’ve changed my mind about Wind­struck. It is still a dumb movie, but it war­rants a lit­tle more talk­ing about. If you’ve spare time and are really not impressed with other box office offer­ings (or have a huge crush on Jeon Ji-Hyun), then this is the movie for you. The open­ing half hour draws you in. The slap­stick has heart. You gig­gle along. You think it’s a romantic-comedy-melodrama and you’re strung along, lik­ing the char­ac­ters along the way. Then the knives are out. Direc­tor Kwak Jae-Yong is ruth­less in stick­ing it up every genre Korean audi­ences (and lovers of K-everything) treat as sta­ple: Roman­tic melo­drama (Titanic); Roman­tic com­edy with super­nat­ural ele­ment, k-style (My Sassy Girl, inci­den­tally, Kwak’s own film); Gang­ster flicks (Friend); Teen gang­ster flicks (Vol­cano High). The ref­er­ences are delib­er­ately painful too. Kwak seems to enjoy killing you softly with k-melodrama, over and over and over and over again in the last half hour of the film till you want to swear your­self off ever watch­ing another Korean film, whether or not Ji-Hyun’s in it.

Bum­bling, good natured feller meets tough as nails pretty chick, meets with an acci­dent, helps out as some super­nat­ural force… voila, K-Film box office success!

In other news, every­one else around me seems to be hav­ing rela­tion­ship prob­lems, which I’d write about if I could make sense of them with­out get­ting the ingre­di­ents of their trou­bles mixed up. Seems to be the time of the year for these Trou­bles. So fash­ion­able even those not in a rela­tion­ship seem to want to dis­play the anguish of hav­ing the Trou­bles too. To those, I say, stop the non­sense right now. I’ve enough on my plate. I’ve had friends telling me stuff till the cows have come home, set up a cot­tage indus­try and left again on a global fran­chis­ing push, and there’s still no appar­ent solu­tion to their woes. I can choose not to lis­ten, but you’re just too loud. So, bug­ger off, I can buy my own tea.

Teh Ice. Spize Restau­rant. River Val­ley Road.

Part­ing shot: Why Becks did what he did at Euro 2004.