JugendWolf

JugendWolf t1_iye4bl0 wrote

Reply to Korean movies by TrueMacedonian

My Sassy Girl! I tried to describe it to someone a few months ago, and this is what I wrote:

This was the first South Korean film I’ve ever seen 15 years ago and it opened up a whole new world to me. Not only the exciting world of South Korean cinema, it also opened my mind to what films are allowed to do. My Sassy Girl is a romcom, but it’s also a drama, includes action movie parodies, becomes a hostage thriller for ten minutes, plays with chronology and cinematography, and even might have a stealth sci-fi time travel plot, and also features a fun „find the quintuplets“-game. I wasn’t aware that mixing tones and genres like this does not turn your movie into an incomprehensible mess, but can add to its charms. It’s weird to call a film charming when it’s about a relationship I would call abusive in real life, but somehow it manages to heighten the comedic bits in a way that I can’t take the abuse heaped upon poor Gyen-woo by the girl seriously, and yet when we get to the explanation for her behavior it breaks my heart and in the end I root for them as a couple. It's wild and messy, sometimes even mean, but most of all, it is likable. And that is what I love about it.

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JugendWolf t1_iye2hnj wrote

Reply to Other Movies like(The Boy In Strip Pajamas) by Narrow_Emergency_669

Very underrated: 1948's The Search. It's about a boy who survived the Holocaust but got separated from his mom. She also survived and both are looking for each other. The boy gets help from a young GI played by Montgomery Clift in one of his first roles, he got an Oscar nomination for it (the film won two Oscars, one for "Best Story" and one special award for the best child performance). A lot of scenes were filmed on location in the bombed out ruins of Germany and it doesn't shy away from depicting the PTSD of all those displaced children, but it's ultimately a hopeful film with some moments of levity.

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