DVD Review: My Sassy Girl

When I heard they were turning the Korean romantic comedy My Sassy Girl into an American movie, I had mixed feelings. First, I was excited because I highly enjoyed the Korean original. But I was also skeptical because it seems many Asian movies translated into an American version simply aren’t as good. Either way, I knew just had to see My Sassy Girl.

Bring It On’s Jesse Bradford and The Girl Next Door’s Elisha Cuthbert are Charlie Bello and Jordan Roark. Yann Samuell directs in what appears to be his American directorial debut. Victor Levin took on the task of crafting an English screenplay based on the original film’s screenplay by Jae-young Kwak. The story is based true stories Ho-sik Kim posted online before compiling the relationship woes into a novel.

My Sassy Girl is the tale of the first and last time Charlie Bello falls in love. From their initial meeting, trouble is the name of the game. Imagine an amorphous mass of dating disasters and you get an idea of the relationship between the young couple. Some mysterious force with the strength of gravity between two planets must be at play between Charlie and Jordan as the relationship truly makes no sense on the surface. Everything seems pitted against the two of them. Things suddenly come to a halt when the two write letters confessing their love for each other. Agreeing to meet a year later to read the love letters together, Charlie and Jordan go their separate ways.

I won’t ruin the end of the movie for you – whether they end up together or miss each other reading the letters by a day. You will just have to rent the movie to see how the story ends. There is, however, a strong message behind the romantic woes — a tale of destiny. We can’t sit and wait for destiny to happen, but we must build the bridges ourselves.

The film is certainly similar to its Korean counterpart. The storyline is the same, with a few details changed to make sense in a different culture. The intro matches that of the original movie, but in a less creepy sort of way. Whereas the Korean movie has an animated intro with weird babies suckling at their mothers’ breasts, the American movie shows a montage of events with bright, yet simple sets to illustrate Charlie’s life to this point.

It seems the only thing that doesn’t fully translate into the new movie is the humor. My Sassy Girl is touted as a romantic comedy, and the Korean version very much is. The mishaps are construed in a way to be charming. However, they lose some of the funny appeal in the new film. Not that the movie is a complete bore, it just seems somehow more tragic.

My Sassy Girl has a direct-to-DVD release in late August 2008. While I wouldn’t tell anyone to rush out to rent it, the movie is definitely worth picking up on a rainy day.

Movie Review: Crazy First Love

Crazy First Love (Cheotsarang sasu gwolgidaehoe) is a Korean film following Son Tae-il's love for Joon Il-mae. He met her while being breastfed and has loved her ever since. The opening is a cartoon version of how Tae-il and Il-mae were breastfed together and sort of set the tone for this less than stellar film. Oh, and yes, cartoon nipples are disturbing.

The rest of the film isn't animated and opens with Tae-il yelling about his pubic hair and how Il-mae's father broke a promise. The promise, apparently, was that Tae-Il could marry Il-mae once he started growing pubic hair. I think his chances of winning her heart should have stopped there, as a male yelling in front of all my friends, his friends, and my father and shaking his pubes for all to see isn't my idea of being wooed. Judging from her reaction, it isn't exactly Il-mae's idea of romanticism either. But Il-mae's father, who happens to be Tae-il's teacher, gives him a quest that would guarantee he could marry Il-mae: improve his grades to be in the top 3,000 nationally. He does this and Teacher requests that Tae-il go on to go to college, law school, pass the bar, and numerous other tasks before he'll grant Il-mae's hand in marriage to Tae-il. In the meantime, the boy tries to guard Il-mae's purity and protect her. As annoying as Tae-Il is, he sure is persistent; I'll give him that.

Blah, blah, blah, gag, blah, right? A tedious plot that doesn't know when to move on is further frustrated because Son Tae-il is either crying or screaming everything he says, and sometimes both. It's loud and annoying, making you think he's quite wimpy and probably undeserving of the young woman's heart anyway. And you start to wonder why Tae-il doesn't realize the public fits of screaming and crying isn't going to win Il-mae's heart, and why the movie doesn't come with a warning that you will need to take Advil every five minutes to fight off the headache from the loud whininess.

The main actors are all experienced, but their talents cannot make up for poorly written characters in a bad script. Oh Jong-rok's directorial debut does have a bit of originality going for it though. Unlike many romantic comedies where the young man would go around the parents' wishes to win the girl's heart anyway, Tae-il consults Il-mae's father every step of the way. This results in an interesting bond forming between Tae-il and Teacher. But it also ends with Tae-il and Teacher crying and screaming to each other more than anyone cares to witness, let alone in less than two hours. And it makes you wonder if Korean men are capable of a somewhat normal tone.

Like many somewhat decent films, Crazy First Love doesn't seem to know when to end. If it were an hour-long film that ends with Tae-il passing the bar exam, it would be a somewhat charming movie. But as it continues, you begin to stop caring if the boy will ever get the girl. To be honest, you don't even care if he were to cry himself to death. And when Il-mae starts whining, you just want the movie to end so the crying stops. As a romantic comedy, it forgets to add the comedic aspects and results in a film that is more embarrassing for the characters with a few - very few - laughs thrown in. While a marriage contract isn't in the plot, there are plenty of other deals thrown in that it can follow that generic Korean film plot. Plus, it adds the random terminal illness halfway through the movie, making Crazy First Love 108 minutes of bad Korean cinema.

If you aren't familiar with Korean films, or are looking for a good Korean romantic comedy, Crazy First Love is definitely not the movie you are looking for. However, if you want to watch a random movie that isn't great but has a guy stabbing a girl in the thigh with a chopstick, Crazy First Love might just satisfy that desire.