Saturday, April 28, 2012

TOP 10 Romantic Korean Movies


 1. Windstruck (Nae yeojachingureul sogae habnida)
Windstruck
Directed and Written by Jae-young Kwak
Starring Gianna Jun, Hyuk Jang and Su-ro Kim
Year: 2004
Windstruck starts with Gyeong-jin (Ji-hyun Jeon), a hardworking and tough police officer who takes no mercy to criminals. One day as she was chasing a purse snatcher, he ended up with a wrong man, a highly revered high school Physics teacher named Myung-woo (Hyuk Jang). Everything cleared up but because of Myung-woo's chagrin, he decided to take part of Gyeong-jin's patrol program. After being handcuffed to Gyeong-jin, he found himself helplessly smitten by the young and beautiful police officer. They got closer to each other and Myungwoo was not able to repulse the strange but pure nature. He fell in love with her. One day, when Kyungjin was chasing a notorious criminal, Myungwoo helped her again, however, not knowing that what would happen that day changed their relationship forever.

This movie was sad, funny, and totally heartwarming!It had a little of everything!  This film was a major success that it had ranked as the 8th-highest grossing Korean film of 2004. I really reccomend!

Connections to My Sassy GirlWindstruck shares the same leading actress and director as an earlier popular South Korean film, My Sassy Girl. As a result, Windstruck contains several subtle references to the previous film. For example, a photo of Jun Ji-hyun from My Sassy Girl is visible on Kyung-jin's piano (while playing the piano). Plus the final scene of Windstruck, in which Kyung-jin meets her new soul mate (played byCha Tae-hyun, the male lead from My Sassy Girl) on a train platform, is similar to the beginning of My Sassy Girl and her character from My Sassy Girl is distraught over the death of her true love.Also, when Kyung-jin is chasing Sin Chang-su she tells a random citizen to act as a steppingstone to climb over the wall just like when she accidentally steps on a runaway soldier (played by the same actor) when she and Tae-hyun visited the amusement park during her birthday.Jun Ji-hyun plays the piano in both movies.However, "Windstruck" is not a full 'prequel' to "My Sassy Girl" in the literal sense of the term.--wikipedia :))

 2.  My Sassy Girl (엽기적인 그녀)
My Sassy Girl

Directed by Kwak Jae- Yong
Starring Jeon Ji-hyeonCha Tae-Hyun
Year: 2001
My Sassy Girl is the smash hit of 2001.This story is  based on a series of true stories posted by in the blog of Ho-sik Kim on the Internet describing his relationship with his girlfriend. These were later transformed into a best-selling book and the movie follows the book closely.

As the film opens we are introduced to Kyun-woo, a kind - hearted but at times naive college student who seems to keep getting into trouble. On his way home one night he encounters a beautiful but completely smashed young woman who causes a scene in the subway, calls him "honey", and then passes out. With the eyes of the other subway passengers upon him, he has little choice but to take responsibility for her. Thus begins his relationship with the at-times charming, at-times violent damsel who steals his heart.

Much of the film is structured around the bizarre antics of Kyun-woo's newfound girlfriend. After she passes out yet again, Kyun-woo looks at her blissful face and promises to himself that he will save her, and right whatever it is that troubles her. This proves to be much more of a challenge than he expects.

Fate is a building bridge of chance for your love .. I really love this movie. It was fun and will also make you cry at the same time. I highly recommended even though it was 10 years ago.. This make me believe that if you are really for each other.. It will always find a way :)


3.  Humming (Heo-ming)
Humming

Directed by Park Dae-Yeong 
Starring  Lee Cheon Hee and Han Ji Hye
Year: 2007
 Jun-seo and Mi-yeon have been dating for a long time. Jun-seo grows tired of his girlfriend's unfailing love, and volunteers to do research work in Antartica. One day, Mi-yeon visits him but he runs away, only to find out that she had been injured in a car accident the day before. Did she really come to meet him after falling into a coma? Jun-seo realizes her love and preciousness by retracing her steps.

Of all movies I have watched, this is the most heartbreaking one. It made me cry a river.Letting go the person you love the most is really painful specially when you know that you cannot see her anymore in this word.





4. Crazy First Love (첫사랑 사수 궐기대회)

Crazy First Love
Directed by Oh Jong-rok
Starring Cha Tae-Hyun, Son Ye-Jin
Year: 2001
SON Tae-il(CHA Tae-hyun) is a super problem child of Kang High. He has an incredible IQ of 148, but, unfortunately, he's only interested in marrying his first love Il-mae(SON Ye-jin). When Tae-il demands marriage with Il-mae and strays farther away from school, Young-dal(YOO Dong-geun) and Il-mae come up with a proposal to 'bring Tae-il back to the right track.' He openly declares that he would allow Tae-il to marry his daughter Il-mae if he could raise his rank up to top 3, 000 nationwide from his current status of 300,000.

Tae-il accepts the ridiculous proposal without a second thought. And 2 years later, he does pull up his rank up top 3,000 nationwide and is admitted to the Law School of Seoul National University. However, fooled by Young-dal's skillfully touching(?) performance, incorporating tears and snots, Tae-il gets softhearted and promises Young-dal that he'll keep Il-mae 'pure' until he passes the judicial examination. A man's words weigh and worth as much as thousand gold! From then on, Tae-il's ultimate mission is to protect Il-mae from all the sleazeballs who approach her~!

Tae-il's new job as Il-mae's personal bodyguard has begun. However, his double-duty of studying for the judicial examination and monitoring Il-mae's whereabouts is keeping him awake 24-7. On the other hand, Il-mae, who wants to enjoy her college life and date boys, gets frustrated watching Tae-il, who only focuses on his study and even rejects Il-mae's approach to kiss him. What she doesn't realize is that he's doing all this to be with her.

After countless night of no sleep and nosebleed, Tae-il finally passes the 1st level judicial examination. However, at his congratulatory party, Il-mae drops the bomb by confessing her love for another man. Tae-il can't believe his ears. Tae-il was angry that he almost burned all of his law books and he blamed all that's happening to  Il-mae's father.He tried all of his best to get Il-mae back on his side but Il-mae didn't want to and proceed to her wedding.It was then when Tae-il found out that Il-mae is really sick. At the end of the movie, they get married and shout at the end that he will instead become a doctor to cure Il Mae

I suppose melodrama fans are supposed to eat this up, but when such a tried-and-true formula is executed so haphazardly without any regard for the audience's patience, it's hard not to get a little insulted by the inept filmmaking involved. With or without the terminal illness angle, Crazy First Love could have easily been a film about an immature punk who finally grows up and learns the meaning of true love, a father who discovers it's time to let go, and a daughter who finds out that she's got the right to be strong and independent. Maybe all that's buried under the mountain of crap called Crazy First Love, but you'd have to look really hard to see it. 

5. A Moment to Remember

Directed by: Lee Jae Han
Starring Son Ye Jin, Jung Woo Sung 
Year: 2004
Kim Su-Jin, a 27 year old fashion designer, being spurned at the train station by her lover, a colleague who is also a married man. Depressed, she goes to a convenience store where she bumps into a tall handsome man with whom she has a slight misunderstanding. Following that, she returns home and receiving the forgiveness of her father, decides to start life afresh. One day while accompanying her father, who is the head of a construction site, in making his rounds, she coincidentally meets the man whom she earlier bumped into at the convenience store. He is Choi Chul-Soo, the construction site's foreman who is also aiming to become an architect. Chul-Soo may appear like a rough and dirty construction worker initially, but he does exude sheer masculinity in its most basic physical form and is pretty handy when it comes to carpentry or house repairs. Su-Jin instantly takes a liking to Chul-Soo and in what is a refreshing change, actively courts Chul-Soo. There are many sweet events that take place in the event of their courtship which eventually lead to their marriage. From here though, things quickly go downhill. Su-Jin soon finds that she has contracted AlzheimerÂ's disease and the rest of the movie depicts how she slowly and painfully loses bits of her memory until she totally cannot remember anything. Even more painful is seeing Chul-Soo agonise while watching the wife he loves dearly forget even who he is. The ending is bittersweet one but at least offers a glimpse of hope. 

 6. Daddy Long Legs (Kidari ajeossi)

Directed by Kong Jeong-sik
Starring 
Year:
Young-mi (Ha Ji Won), is a young woman who has lost her parents and struggling to fend for herself. She receives the assistance of a stranger who pays her university fees and sends her gifts. She affectionately nicknames her benefactor “Daddy-Long-Legs”.
After completing her studies and initially struggling for work, Young-mi eventually obtains her dream job as a program writer in a nationally-syndicated radio station. On top of this, it has been arranged for her to stay rent-free in a nice house that the owner vacated due to health reasons. Young-mi believes that her good fortune is the work of her “Daddy-Long-Legs”.
One day, Young-mi receives an email from the owner of the house. The email was date-stamped to arrive at the house's computer on that specific day, though it was written and sent a year earlier.
The email details a love story written by the unseen owner of the house. The writer confesses that she has secretly been in love with a guy since her school days. In order to be near him, she worked hard to obtain a place in the same course at the institution he was studying in. Although she didn't have the courage to introduce herself, she was happy to see him every day. The writer explains that when he got a job at a radio station, she followed him there. But then she was diagnosed with a terminal disease which would cause her to lose her memory and then die. The writer's greatest fear is not of dying, but of losing her memory, which is why she wrote the email to be sent to herself in the future.
Young-mi is deeply touched by the story and decides to air its contents via the national radio program to locate the young man with whom the owner of the house was in love. The story is serialized and dramatized on the air, quickly becoming an audience favorite.
Meanwhile, Young-mi meets Kim Jun Ho (Yeon Jung Hoon), who works as a librarian in the radio station. They spend time together and Young-mi begins to fall in love with him. Young-mi then discovers that Jun Ho is the love interest mentioned in the email. Young-mi decides to end their relationship, guilty with the knowledge that someone somewhere out there has been in love with him for years.
Young-mi also investigates her “Daddy-Long-Legs”, eventually learning that her current job and accommodations were the decisions of the radio station's director. She confronts him, but it turns out that the director was only acting on behalf of his younger brother, who chose to provide Young-mi with her school fees and asked that she be given her current job and his house to live in. It turns out the director's brother is Jun Ho, who is also the writer of the email. Jun Ho had switched genders when writing the email, and lost all of his earlier memories of Young-mi when they were students together and he loved her from afar; when they met in the radio station's library, it was the first time for both.
Young-mi is devastated by this news. She reconnects with Jun Ho and they spend as much time together before his illness relapses and he dies.


7. Daisy
Directed by
Starring 
Year:
Daisy is an urban melodrama about an elite Interpol agent Jeong-woo and a ruthless hitman Park-yi, both stationed in Amsterdam and are in love with the same young woman, Hye-young. Hye-Young is a simple sidewalk artist, with dreams of one day holding a real exhibition in a real gallery. Her pure love will draw these deadly men into a spectacular showdown in the process, revealing Hye-Young's hidden past. With a twist that is bound to make its audience think about their own perception about love, the film was shot entirely in The Netherlands, for the most part in the capital of Amsterdam, Haarlem and Epen.










8. My Girlfriend is an Agent
Directed by Sin Tae-Ra
Starring Kim Ha-neul , Kang Ji-Hwa
Year: 2009
My Girlfriend Is An Agent is the story of two spies who have been assigned the mission to stop a Russian crime group from stealing an advanced chemical weapon. While one of them is a sexy secret agent who is a master of martial arts and envied by her comrades, the other is a rookie known to botch up every mission he's ever been on. Interestingly, they were once deeply in love but neither is aware of the other's real job. The two try to work out their complicated relationship while trying to save the world.


9. He Was Cool
He Was Cool
Directed by Lee Hwan Gyeong
Starring Song Seung-Heon , Jeong Da-Bin
Year: 2004

The story is about a cheerful high school student named Han Ye-Won. She is a sweet, clumsy and warm girl. On the other side, there is Ji Eun-Sung , a student from a vocational school and a well-known bully. He is hot-tempered and rude but deep inside he is longing to be loved.
One day, clumsily, Ye-Won leaves a message on the school website to reply to Eun-Sung's impolite message. She is shocked when someone calls her mobile and threatens her. Gradually, her best friend, Lee Kyung-Won, tells her who Eun-Sung is. He sends Ye-Won a message on her mobile: He will wait for her in front of the main gate. She is so scared that she and Kyung-Won decide to jump over the school wall. Unfortunately, the moment Ye-Won jumps, Eun-Sung is standing exactly at the other side of wall. She falls on him and their lips meet accidentally. Raising his voice, Eun-Sung asks her to take responsibility; she is astonished. His friend explains that Eun-Sung has never even held hands with a girl. Since she is the first girl who kissed him, as a consequence, she must marry him.
The story continues very fast. At the beginning, Ye-won does not have any feelings for Eun-Sung. She even rejects his invitation to come to his birthday party. Unknowingly, Eun-Sung has fallen in love with her; but he is not the kind of guy who knows how to express his inner feelings. He is jealous when Ye-Won is approached by other guys but he does not know how to be with someone he loves.
Although he is rude and bad-tempered, Eun-Sung always pardons Ye-Won's faults and clumsiness. However, he can't bear it when he finds out that Ye-Won went out with Kim Han-Sung, an older student he hates a lot. The broken-hearted Eun-Sung decides to leave Korea and follow his mother to the USA.
A year later Ye-Won is seen with Han-Sung, discussing whether she is scared for her college entrance exams. It seems that they are in a relationship at this point. During her exams, the hearing portion of the exam brings up a quote from Romeo and Juliet bring Ye-Won back to the memory of her and Eun-Sung in the park in front of the telephone booth where, no matter what, they would re-unite at the first snowfall. At this point Ye-Won stops what she is doing and runs to the park. She waits there as the scene rolls back to the fantasy she had a year ago and she starts to cry as Eun-Sung is not there. As she turns around, a rabbit is hopping towards her, the same rabbit she gave to Eun-Sung. She looks up and Eun-Sung is there. She yells at him saying "Why did you leave without saying goodbye?" And Eun-Sung replied "True love requires no words."
The film ends with Eun Sung's childhood memory of some opening event of an elementary school where the only kid that would kiss Eun-Sung was Ye-Won. An interesting aspect to this is that earlier on in the film, Ye-won uses Eun-Sung's cellphone to make a mini-video of her bedroom. There she captures footage of an old photo from when she was little, showing her and a friend. It turns out that this friend is actually the little Eun-Sung, hinting at the connection between the two. When Eun-Sung watches the video on his cell phone towards the end of the film, he is surprised to see himself and remembers that Ye-Won was that little girl.


10. Innocent Steps
Innocent Steps
Directed by Park Young-hoon
Starring Moon Geun-young,Park Geon-hyeong
Year: 2004
Moon Geun-young, star of the hit romantic comedy My Little Bride, takes the lead role in Innocent Steps, romantic comedy from director Park Young-Hun. The teen idol plays Jang Chae-Ryn, an ethnic Korean living in China, who finds herself to be a complete fish out of water after being transplanted abroad to South Korea. When her sister bows out of a dummy marriage to a champion dance instructor, Chae-Ryn decides to travel to Seoul herself and impersonate her sister. Once in South Korea, she meets Na Young-Sae (Park Geon-Hyeong), who has agreed to the sham marriage for the sole purpose of locating a new dance partner.
It seems he's looking to replace the one he lost to his rival, the dastardly Jeong Hyeon-Su (Yoon Chan). But when Chae-Ryn's secret and her lack of dancing experience is revealed, Young-Sae wants to send his new bride back. Eventually, however, he has second thoughts and decides that his only hope is to train this wide-eyed novice himself. Of course, the practices start off as purely professional, but as Chae-Ryn begins to dedicate herself to the art of dancing, a connection between the newlyweds begins to take shape. Chae-Ryn's youthful exuberance and folksy way of speaking eventually charms Young-Sae's hardened heart. A subplot follows two immigration officers who seek to expose the couple's secret, but eventually end up rooting for the two to stay together

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Why blog this topic?

I recently created this blog thinking that I can share to everyone what I've been seeing all this time. My favorite movies and dramas are really from Korea. I was in high school when I first watched a horror film (Wishing Stairs) and then I got addicted. The way the movie/drama flows is kinda unique unlike here in the Philippines, which are known as "TELENOVELAS" because you can easily predict what could be the ending. In here, I will give you summary and reviews of the kdramas/kmovies so that you can also watch them.