TKDLion8
This movie was better than I expected. The premise is not entirely original but it didn't feel old as I got into the movie.They made a couple of interesting decisions about how to end the movie which I will not talk about too much in case you are reading this and haven't seen the movie yet. I'll just say that the ending is left open ended. That works really well for some movies but it kind of bothered me in this case. I was too worried about what the outcome would be to be really satisfied by the ending.There was a really bad decision made by the distributors to make the gangsters talk with a New York Mafia style speech pattern. I got really tired of this and switched it to Korean with English subtitles. Sadly even the subtitles are written this way. It wasn't as annoying as the audio though.The first two thirds of the movie was great but the last third was only okay.
kalendradee
This movie is one of my favorite Korean romantic comedies. Living in Korea I've gotten to see quite a few. I saw this on TV at first, but it was so amusing that I had to go buy it. Brian Thibodeau has a pretty good synapse of the story. Geek is forced to see more in a gangster princess. It's quite amusing and the language is a bit rough, which I think adds to the humor of the situation Dae-suh finds himself in.The side bit of the eldest mob brother is pretty ridiculous but without it the movie would lose a lot of appeal and we'd not get to know the characters as well. I absolutely love it. In my heart I want to give it a really high mark, but I have to be realistic. Unlike western romantic comedies there are no public displays of affection and yet you still get so much out of the film. I'd say it's almost an 8 in my book.. but this is my favorite genre - upbeat with a bit of romance, not too much thought involved for the viewer and the possibility of a happy ending ;)
Brian Thibodeau
MARRYING THE MAFIA (2002) D: Jung hung-sun is a somewhat-above-average romantic mob "Jopok" comedy, made at a time when such films were in vogue (see MY BOSS, MY HERO, MY WIFE IS A GANGSTER, and SAVING MY HUBBY, among others) in which a straight-laced business executive Dae-suh (Jung Jun-ho of MY BOSS, MY HERO) and a somewhat mousy lab tech Jin-kyung (an absolutely charming Kim Jung-eun) wake up in bed together with no recollection of how they got there or what they did. They part company in a rather disgusted huff, but he's soon visited by her three brothers, low class members of a local crime family, who inform him of her family lineage and forcibly encourage him to pursue the relationship with their sister...or else!Meanwhile, the relationship proceed in fits and starts with neither Dae-suh or Jin-kyung aware of the behind-the-scenes machinations that are drawing them ever closer to true love.High-concept, if conventional, story is somewhat undermined by an uninvolving side-story detailing older brother Park Sang-wook's attempts to woo a pretty schoolteacher, as well as the increasingly ubiquitous need in Korean gangster comedies to have a nasty rival gang with which the good guys are forced to wage bloody, baseball-bat-swinging war, this time at a dance club and climactic family event. The situational humour shines through, though, particularly in a scene where Dae-suh's parents meet their soon-to-be in-laws, in another where Jin-kyung confronts Dae-suh's sneaky ex-girlfriend and in various vignettes in which the three brothers go to great lengths to create ideal "romantic situations" to help further the relationship. Overall an enjoyably cute comedy with not-unexpected sidesteps into moderate violence and an overly contrived climax, but also an interesting take on the common Korean filmic theme of "constructed relationships," hardly surprising, once supposes, in a country where arranged marriages were for many years the norm:essentially this film and many like it simply dress up old-school thinking in new clothing, but with a winning wink-wink sensibility. This was the top domestic movie of 2002. Beware the Hong Kong DVD release, which deletes a substantial amount of footage. I give it a 7.
