Choo Chang-min (추창민)

Love, loss and lucid cinematic silence

Source | 2006/05/16 | Permalink |

"Lost in Love" is a confession of fear, be it fear of love, of regret, of loss or of saying the wrong things out of indifference or ignorance.
The film follows the emotional paths of two college friends, Yeon-su and Woo-jae, over their 10 years of friendship.
Yeon-su (Song Yoon-ah) has long had a crush on Woo-jae (Seol Kyeong-gu), an athlete on the school crew team. But she's not bold enough to say it, and he's not attentive enough to sense it.
She instead chooses a safer route by trying to create seeming coincidences that might give her an opportunity to move the relationship forward.
For instance, when the last bus to Seoul is about to leave the terminal during her visit to his military base, she intentionally waits in the bathroom for the bus to leave, hoping it will give her a natural excuse to spend a night with Woo-jae.
He doesn't get it, though: He yells out to her from the waiting room and holds onto the bus driver to keep him from leaving. She gives up. And on her way bac...| More

'Lost in Love' depicts lovers lacking courage to tell truth

Source | 2006/01/26 | Permalink |

She has a crush on him. But she cannot ask him out because she's timid and shy. Worse, she helplessly observes how he suffers from a broken relationship with another woman. She is always close by him, but he thinks of her as just a good friend, not a woman for a deeper relationship. After all, love is elusive, isn't it?

"Lost in Love" (Sarangeul notchida), directed by Choo Chang-min, is about people who have difficulty in telling the truth and lack courage when it comes to relationships. The subject is familiar with Koreans (or other Asians) because cases of being unable to reveal true feelings abound due to the cultural tradition of cherishing reticence over garrulousness.

The pain of failing to talk about affectionate emotions is best showcased in "Love Letter", a Japanese romantic film by Shunji Iwai, which still mesmerizes Korean fans. The surprising revelation at the end of the 1995 classic is so irresistibly moving - even by today's enhanced filmmaking standards - that it s...| More

'Lost in Love' goes beyond drama stereotyping

Source | 2006/01/03 | Permalink |

'This is a film that needs an actor who can act like [both] a 20-year old and a 30-year old


Even though you know it's unwise to judge a film before watching it, sometimes stereotypes, gleaned from press releases, run so deep with regard to certain films that you find yourself immediately disliking a movie.
That might be what happened to the film critics who assembled for the screening of the film, "Lost in Love". With their arms crossed, they sat cramped in a theater in Jongno waiting for a melodrama to open up the first working day of the New Year. A tough audience.
It was only after watching the film that most realized that this movie was certainly not the shmaltz fest they had expected.
Despite the director's reputation for making macho-comedy films, and probably because of the actor's image from his previous film as a Korean version of Sylvester Stallone, the film drew out loud applause from the surprised audience for telling a very subtle love story.
Indeed, Choo Chang-mi...| More

Film industry suffers from stars' fee dispute

Source | 2005/07/05 | Permalink |

A dramatic dispute between film directors and film stars highlights how soaring guaranteed payments for actors could cripple Korea's film industry -already struggling with a shrinking share of the domestic market - and taint the image of the Korean Wave, an Asia-wide surge in the popularity of Korean culture.

Not long ago, Korean filmmaking was touted as a thriving business, with locally made high-quality films outsmarting Hollywood blockbusters at the box office and grabbing awards in the world's major film festivals. Korea's film industry is valued at 717 billion won and boasts an 18-percent annualized growth rate, but in recent months, the market share of Korean movies has declined amid an overall slump in ticket sales.

Korean movies' share in the local box office hit a new low of 43.6 percent in June, down from 59 percent in May and 69.8 percent in April, according to the Korean Film Council and IM Pictures. The figure is respectable compared with other foreign cinema marke...| More