Musa (무사). A group of delegates from Korea is sent to the Ming Dysnasty in China as diplomats. Instead of being welcomed into the palace, they are accused of being enemies and are taken off to the desert for exile. And thus began their trecherous and exciting attempt at returning back to Korea. On their way, they meet a group of Yuan (Mongol) warriors with a Ming princess as hostage. The leader of the Korean diplomats decide that they rescue the princess and return to the Mings to redeem themselves as real ambassadors. But the Mongols won’t let that happen, and so follows a string of glorious and epic battle scenes. I really enjoyed watching the battle scenes, all that gore and all those costumes, the setting, basically all the technical aspects of the film. Beautiful and fantastic production! The story was interesting enough. However, the way its screenplay was written made the movie dragging. The film clocks in at a little more than two hours and a half. But then and still, I didn’t get too bored. It being an epic with fantastic battle scenes made me like it however long the movie ran. My rating: 8/10

Windstruck (내 여자친구를 소개합니다). From the same director as My Sassy Girl and The Classic comes Windstruck. The same actress who played the lead in My Sassy Girl plays a similar tomboy-ish character in Wundstruck. Girl falls in love, like in My Sassy Girl, to a meek clumsy guy. The first scene shows the girl committing suicide by jumping off a high-rise. Before she hits the ground, we hear a male voice-over who begins narrating the events that transpired beforehand.

One review is right. After the first half of the movie, you should already know how the rest of the story will unfold. Therefore, it’s a drag to continue watching. It tries to redeem itself by giving a funny twist in the end, but it came off as corny to me. My rating: 6/10

Public Toilet (人民公厕). It was apparently shot on digital video, and the cinematography has a realist approach, parang documentary. The movie was shot as if it was happening in real life. But then, it has a couple of very unrealistic elements like… a baby doll used to play as a real baby (what was the PD thinking?), and then there was a boneless mermaid. Many of the reviews I’ve seen around the net dismiss this movie as crap. Too many unrelated and confusing plots and characters, and the only thing that binds them together is the motif being the toilet. Actually, on the surface, it is. Boring and confusing. But I found the movie beautiful, intriguing and meaningful. The type you’d want to watch again just so you’d pick up more of what it’s trying to say. My rating: 7.5/10

My Teacher, Mr. Kim (� 생 김봉두). Teacher Kim Bong-du is a lazy-ass elementary teacher in some Seoul school. He’s not only lazy, he’s also corrupt. He coaxes parents to give him bribes so that he’ll give special treatment to their children. Eventually, he gets into trouble and is reassigned to a very small rural school, so small that five students comprise the entire elementary department. However, his reassignment don’t change his ways. He still coaxes the parents to give him money (subtlely of course), but instead, they being in the countryside, he gets vegetables and free food. He so dislikes being in the countryside that he comes up with a plan to hasten the closing down of the rural school so that he and his students will be transferred to the city. In the end though, we find Teacher Kim softening up and actually caring for his students. The movie attempted to be funny, but it only got a few smirks from me. But still, it was kind of inspiring. My rating: 6/10

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