Spy Girl

Spy Girl (Geunyeonleul Mooleumyeon Gancheob/그녀를 모르면 간첩) is a 2004 Korean romantic comedy featuring a female North Korean spy and a goofy, head-over-heels guy. It starts Kim Jung Hwa and Gong Yoo. The synopsis is as follows:

Go-bong has a huge crush on Gye-soon who works at a fast food restaurant. He puts her photo on their internet and she becomes the hottest girl in town. But she is frustrated because she is a spy from North Korea to catch a betrayer...

I was browsing around and next thing you know, I spot someone and my first reaction was, "Is that the dude from Coffee Prince??" My second reaction was, "I thought he just got back from the army!" haha, then I saw the date the movie was released and it all made sense. Anyway, I was hoping it would be one of those cool spy movies, but not quite; I don't know why I even had that expectation anyway, considering the fact that it's a romantic comedy. Kim Jung Hwa plays this kick-butt spy who displays a mix of innocence and a separation from everyday things. I don't know if they're trying to say something about North Koreans and how cut off from the rest of the world and sheltered they are, but there you have it. I particularly liked the paint balling scene that she treated as a shooting exercise. Then you have Gong Yoo's character. He's a rather goofy guy that's pretty average; he couldn't get into college because he slept during the entrance exam, is constantly teased by old high school friends, and he has this humongous crush on the girl of everyone's dreams. The good thing is that they're eventually together, the bad thing is that she only did it in order to get his friends to take her photos off the net. In the end, you see her slowly becoming fond of him and it's rather sweet, but it's not your traditional relationship. In a way, that made it even better because it was something different, even though they couldn't truly be counted as officially together until the very last bit. Even then, I still wonder.

It was pretty funny and entertaining, though I couldn't help but see it as a bit dramatic and generic; some moments (the fighting scenes) reminded me of anime - or old kung fu movies. It's also pretty interesting to see this new side of Gong Yoo after I was used to seeing him in Coffee Prince as someone who's suave and is talented (when he puts it to use).

You can watch it here, but keep in mind that it's out of order (or at least it was when I watched it), so watch it in this order: Part 2 -> Part 3 -> Part 4 -> Part 5 -> Part 6 -> Part 1.

Daremo Shiranai

Daremo Shiranai (誰も知らない), or Nobody Knows, is a 2004 Japanese film that's based on a true story of a group of children who were abandoned by their mother. It stars Yagira Yuya, Ayu Kitaura, Hiei Kimura, Momoko Shimizu, Hanae Kan, and You. The summary is as follows [taken from here]:

In Tokyo, the reckless single mother Keiko moves to a small apartment with her twelve years old son Akira Fukushima and hidden in the luggage, his siblings Kyoko, Shigeru and Yuki. The children have different fathers and do not have schooling, but they have a happy life with their mother. When Keiko finds a new boyfriend, she leaves the children alone, giving some money to Akira and assigning him to take care of his siblings. When the money finishes, Akira manages to find means to survive with the youngsters without power supply, gas or water at home, and with the landlord asking for the rental.

Like the synopsis says, the story was about a group of half-siblings who end up getting abandoned and having to get by on their own. I thought it sounded like a good plot, especially since it's based on a true story - but it's not as sad as the true version, odd enough (movies tend to overexaggerate things). When I watched it, I constantly compared things to the real story so the movie didn't seem as sad as what really happened. It went through from the beginning until the end and nothing is truly hard to take in - besides the fact that the oldest child is around 12 years old and he needs to take care of the bills and his siblings. There's a scene where he gives into his own needs but you easily see the growing hardship they go through and though it ends rather ambivalently, it's not as if they're dying from malnutrition.

I say it was a pretty good movie depicting a water-downed version of what could happen if children were left on their own with only limited funds. The kid actors and actresses played their parts well and you could see the struggle between their own child-like needs and what is necessary for life.

You can watch it here.