K-Crock

iTunes is playing: It's Only Love - The Beatles - Anthology 2 - Disc 1

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.