Everybody Has Secrets 누구나 비밀은 있다 [movie]

love is what you make of it.   ...or whatever Lee ByungHun tells you it is.

The first quote used in the movie was “only the last love of a woman can satisfy the first love of a man” – Balzac. I know it is a quote from a literary figure and all that, but I’m going to change it to “only the first love of a woman can satisfy the last love of a man”, as it makes more sense. I really think they should’ve used “Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.”  - Oscar Wilde seen as it is more appropriate that way round. But never mind.

Anyway, I didn’t start this review off terribly well did I?

Main Cast:

SuHyeon – Lee ByungHun

         [a bittersweet life, iris, the good the bad and the weird]

MiYeong – Kim HyoJin

         [five senses of eros, marrying the mafia 2, marry me mary]

SeonYeong – Choi JiWoo

         [winter sonata, beautiful days, now and forever]

JiYeong – Chu SangMi

         [the city hall, my woman, love and ambition]

So in drastic contrast to my last post, this film is light hearted and funny with an adorably devious main character playing around with three very different women.

The three sisters become entangled with this man when MiYeong (the cold fickle heartbreaker) meets and falls in love with him.

The second sister to fall prey to his charms is SeonYeong, a 27yr old virgin, bookworm, and generally shy and unfulfilled girl waiting to find someone to excite her.

Then we have the eldest sister JiYeong who is in a sexless marriage with a gynaecologist, she also eventually loses all sense of reason and falls into bed with him.

Now, actually there is an adorably cute reason for all this and I really think it has more to offer as a story than just a man playing three girls off one another.

It is funny and cheeky, but also I think kind of moving. There is more to this story than anyone realises for a good long while – in the end, no-one really ever knows the full story; secrets are indeed the point, but it isn’t harsh or cruel – it is actually really quite awesome.

ByungHun rocks my universe; we know that by now, I won’t go on about it, but he is as great as he ever is and I do love to see him play light hearted characters for a nice change to the usual heavy chaotic hell breaking loose type that normally graces my screen.

SeonYeong was my favourite character, so cute, full of pent up sexual frustration – she was not only adorable but the most amusing out of the bunch. And to be fair, Choi JiWoo is so beautiful I love to watch her be all scatty and adorable. I really like the pairing of ByungHun and JiWoo and their *ahem* bed scenes were really funny.    

There is really nothing of the film to explain further. It has a good cast and the story line is not as format as it seems at first. Worth watching for the silliness alone, but definitely a nice take on what love really means.

promo stuff:

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I saw the devil 악마를 보았다 [movie]

intense, grotesque, beautiful. a quiet afternoon in with Kim JeeWoon.

Kim JeeWoon and Lee ByungHun had previously worked on three projects together: The good the bad and the weird [2008] a bittersweet life [2005] and the segment memories from three extreems [2002].

Kim JeeWoon is responsible for jump starting my love of korean cinema with tale of two sisters and a bittersweet life (which is in my top 5 favourite films) and i guess without him i may never have developed this unwavering adoration for Lee ByungHun [Iris, jungdok, everybody has secrets, a bittersweet life, bungee jumping of their own, once in a summer, i come with the rain, G.I. Joe, beautiful days, hero, do i need to go on?] as the combination of this director and actor could well be the best thing to ever happen to the world. well, my world.

I really loved memories and the good the bad and the weird. and it really should go without saying by now that a bittersweet life is phenominal. So i was interested in this movie when i saw they had teamed up again late last year.

I dont know why i have only gotten around to watching this now at the end of 2011 but never mind. as expected it was worth the wait. watching i come with the rain and G.I. Joe yesterday reminded me that there was still a Kim JeeWoon - Lee ByungHun film on my hard drive to watch. (i come with the rain was really amazing by the way. ByungHun and Kimura Takuya's second movie together. someone somewhere loves me.)

This movie was going to be hardgoing - I figured that from the blurbs and reviews everywhere saying 'not for the faint hearted' and such. I saw it had been editted a bunch of times for release due to its insanely graphic violence but I just couldn't turn it down. I have to admit i did spend rather a lot of the film wincing away from the screen - and i have a fairly strong stomach for sh*t like that - so yeah i guess i would agree that it is pretty damn violent and gross.

It is about psycho killers and completely insane horrible people so you expect and indeed find a great deal of torture and sexual violence (thankfully the later of which was not particularly graphic) with added cannibalism and god knows what else. yup, it is full of all manner of nasty things that just make you hate humans and their sick ways. But obviously this is not some american slasher gorno flick, there is depth to all the characters and a real progression in the story line.

To outline the plot for you; psychopath (a real one who feels no pain, fear, remorse etc) kidknaps tortures and kills people in his big ass horrible house remeniscent of some hillbilly torture barn in the middle of southern america, complete with guillotine, steak knives, endless supply of sheet plastic, you know the sort.

So this guy is an actual psychopath, not just getting his rocks of to nasty stuff - he is clever, thinks the world owes him everything, really strong and fearless, but above all heartless. This is important, many films' bad guys have been driven insane by some crap sh*t that happened in the past making them flawed and ultimately fragile, but this is a text book psychopath who has no fear of pain or loss. This guy is played by Choi MinSik [oldboy, lady vengence,] who better to convey all this savage disconnection from human emotion than a fantastic actor like him?

Ok, so he is one side of the coin, the other side is a secret agent who is the husband of one of the slaughtered women, played by ByungHun. After the death of his wife, agent SooHyun vows to take revenge and a manhunt outside of the police force begins.

SooHyun plays with his prey like a cat, catching him and torturing him like his own victims, then letting him go to catch up with him again, hounding him at every corner. It becomes sadistic and intense, and as you can imagine it indeed spirals out of control.

ByungHun, as i have said many times before, has the most emotive eyes and you just can't ever help getting drawn into how his characters are feeling. This movie holds no exception to that, you follow SooHyun with the distress and remorse he feels, and understand that there couldn't possibly be any other way to ease his pain than to inflict suffering onto the man who killed his wife, however morally conflicted by that thought you may be.

So the cast is brilliant and this movie is directed by a guy with such a beautiful eye for the perfect shot and the perfect pace that it not only offers the action, blood, and gore that many people may want out of a film like this, but it also delivers the beauty, grace, and heartbreaking emotional presence, found in all Kim JeeWoon movies. Always a bittersweet confliction of the savage and the beautiful.




I wouldn't say this was an easy film to watch by any stretch of the imagination. But i do think it is worth it. Right to the very last stunning soul destroyingly sad scene this movie offers more than just a angry cop tracking a nasty killer and taking matters into his own hands.

It shows the nature of human actions and reactions, laying them out bare like exposed nerves in freezing cold biting air, and the intense twisted reality of heavy grief and remorse, and also the savage consequences of having neither of the those two feelings.

Movie posters:

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My Sassy Girl 엽기적인 그녀 & Windstruck 내 여자친구를 소개합니다 [movie] [movie]

...And... yup, my heart just broke.

The reason I am putting these two films together is that they are essentially a pair. Kwak JaeYoung wrote and directed these two movies as well as Cyborg She 僕の彼女はサイボーグ , classic 클래식 , my mighty princess 무림여대생 starring Shin MinAh, all with very strong characters and stories full of warmth and purity. He has become one of my favourite writer/directors if I can really bring myself to say that considering how many Korean directors I am eternally emotionally indebted to... but I do need to not gush so much and get on with the review.

Basically these two films together are linked by Jun JiHyun playing the female lead in both, also the characters in both films are kind of connected too but in an abstract way which should not be ruined by an explanation. The beauty of these films not only lies in their individual stories but also of the two together – My sassy girl comes first, then Windstruck second.

Towards the end of Windstruck you will be brought full circle back to the beauty of the first film and it pays homage to the point of My Sassy Girl as the relationship between the two movies is exposed in a nice way as if to say “I know this was heartbreaking so you’ve been crying for the last hour while watching this movie, but here, have some extra overwhelmingly emotional sh*t to cram into your heart.”

My Sassy Girl 엽기적인 그녀

There is a huge vein running through these two films (as with the others too) of love and fate. There are some ridiculously sad moments in both but for My Sassy Girl there is also lots of humour and in general it is a pretty easy film to watch.

This movie stars Cha TaeHyun (hello ghost) as the male lead who finds himself accidentally in a relationship with a girl he met when she was drunk on the train and causing havoc. After being jailed, beaten up, held hostage by an army deserter, and forced to chase his girlfriend around campus while wearing her heals, you would think he couldn’t do any more for his headstrong girl, but as he suspects, she is indeed troubled by something and all he can do is try to heal her pain by being in her life.

This is a beautiful funny movie, that does stand alone as a generally great romantic comedy (I hate that term though). It gets very sad and all y’know, sat on a hill reading a letter with some random old dude telling stories about a tree... but it is still a pretty fluffy film so don’t worry too much. Save your tears for Windstruck. You will need them.

Ok, so Cha TaeHyun is lovely to watch, I’m not sure what it is about him that works but he just has a nice quality that he brings to his characters. One of my favourite scenes in when GyunWoo gets repeatedly hit in the face with the squash ball – I nearly died laughing so hard.

Jun JiHyun is not only beautiful but she delivers her strong, feisty, almost boyish actions with grace and poise – even when she juts out her chin, widens her eyes and snaps “do you want to die?”

I can’t fault this movie really, the two of them were cast spot on, the story is sweet, and the movie is shot beautifully. It is usually most people’s favourite of the two films, and I guess it is mine two but to be fair they are very different in the sense that one is a story on its own and the second has more meaning once you have seen My Sassy Girl already.

Windstruck 내 여자친구를 소개합니다

Ok, so on to Windstruck. I was thinking near to the end of the movie that it maybe wasn’t worth the last absolute heart wrenching hour of tears, but if you have come to love the characters from My Sassy Girl it will be worth it as the two movies together create a whole beautiful picture of love and fate and all the in betweens that tangle us to one another. 

Windstruck has a similar format to My Sassy Girl where the female lead is a headstrong and slightly thoughtless woman who demands and commands without hesitation. This time she is a police officer called KyungJin and through her odd attempt to catch a bag thief she meets MyungWoo (JangHyuk) who becomes handcuffed to her and led around into a gang shoot out – among other things. Their relationship is more than just eventful as MyungWoo becomes involved in her attempts to catch criminals and the two also have a car accident that almost kills him.

By almost exactly half way through the movie you start to feel an impending sense of dread that something terrible is going to happen, but also once terrible things have happened there is still a long way of the film to go so do be prepared for the story to not be paced in a familiar way.

In the same way that Korean dramas often pick you up then drop you then pick you up again, Korean movies often blow apart all the fluffy good moments and leave you devastated in pieces waiting for the bit where it all turns bright again only to then be so utterly moving that even a happy ending still makes you cry so much your heart feels like it is going to turn inside out. Happy endings are rarely straightforward and actually happy in Korean movies, they are usually brilliant, but not how you would tie it all up pain free if you had the power to. I like that most Korean films of this nature seem to show that life is layers of happiness and pain and happiness and pain, one on top of the other.

  

I have fallen into the trap of ranting about Korean movies again instead of just talking about this one. Never mind. That is the feeling this movie left me with. So I can’t help but linger on it.

I’m not really sure how to round this post up.  

My Sassy Girl is a film most people could find something in, Windstruck may be a little emotional for some people and viewing situations, (If you just want a nice easy fun movie then maybe don’t go for that) but I do think they are both worth watching.

Here are more promo posters for both films below:

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