My Little Bride

[CaptainVideo]

I watched this movie the last time it aired and had forgotten whether or not I liked it or not, so I watched it again this time around. Then as I began watching, I remembered why I was amibivilent about it. I found the premise very implausible, and the acting very farcical, but just as before, something made me continue watching, but I think that it was more than my craving for Korean drama/movie experience because I have access to many things via the interweb.

What I discovered as the movie came to the climax, I began to feel compassion for the characters and really believe the story. This is unlike many dramas I have watched, which started out very promising, only to have the writer lose vision and resort to endings that seemed cobbled together from some generic primer on screenwriting, or worse, chosen through pasting the most far fetched scenarios to a dart board and choosing by impaling the lucky winner with a random dart throw.

I'm glad that I spent the time to watch again, but as the credits rolled, I began to see what bothered me about my previous viewing experience, and it had nothing to do with the original movie..... Instead, I got to view clips from scenes that I had no recollection of having viewed in the previous 2hrs., leading me to believe that there had been some heavy editing going on without regard to continuity of the storyline. Funny thing, I just checked and the running time was listed at 115min, so perhaps those scenes were just outtakes. Oh well, it was a good theory while it lasted. Anyway, a pretty decent movie.

[ajk]

I stuck with it too, CV. Like you I was curious to see how everything would resolve itself in the end. But that was the only reason. Apparently a lot of people liked this movie—Wikipedia says it was the second-most popular Korean film of 2004. But I didn't like it at all, for two reasons. One, it was a comedy but I laughed exactly once in the whole two hours (the bucket of water on the hotel balcony). Comedy is subjective, of course, so there’s no right or wrong, but I just kept thinking, This must be a lot funnier in Korean culture than it is to a clueless American. The other reason is that the girl seemed no older than 13 or 14, same with her classmates. Didn’t buy her as anywhere near 16, and the whole idea of her having to marry that particular guy, ugh no thanks. But I may be completely off base about that too.

One of the dads, I recognized the actor—he played a dad in The Road Home. But I didn’t recognize the girl lead, not even from just two weeks ago: she was the little sister in Lovers’ Concerto! Anyway...Have any of our Korean members seen this movie? I'd be very interested to hear other reactions to it and what made it so popular in Korea.

P.S. CV, I think you're right about those being deleted scenes during the credits. That confused me too.

[ginnycat5]

I watched it last night and enjoyed it more this time around, for the most part. However, I don't know how parents could let their high-school-age daughter get married. I don't see why they let the couple live together. After all, the grandfather wouldn't (and didn't) go to visit them, so they could have made it less of a real marriage.

Getting an apartment and furnishing it was a much bigger deal in other dramas we've seen. Here it was done in a flash and we didn't even see it happen.

Also mothers in other new marriages have brought over food regularly, but we only saw that once, and not right after the wedding. So it seems the parents just accepted the marriage as real, right away, despite the husband's father telling him not to touch his bride. There were no money problems* or chore disputes. Their squabbling looked real, though. LOL. (She pantsed him!?)

*With this being a 2-hour movie, we didn't even get to see what jobs the parents had. Awww. I miss the long dramas.

It was sweet at times. This time I noticed the husband telling his students, who brashly asked him to talk about his love life instead of art, about his first love being the only one who visited him while he was in the army. Aha!

[TheBo]

Actually, I thought if they had simply brought up that army-visiting thing waaaaaay earlier, and all the other flashbacks of their past together, it would have removed a lot of the ick factor for me. They didn't seem to have a history until the end of the movie.

Bo

[ginnycat5]

May 7, 2011 11:48:58 GMT -5 TheBo said:

Actually, I thought if they had simply brought up that army-visiting thing waaaaaay earlier, and all the other flashbacks of their past together, it would have removed a lot of the ick factor for me. They didn't seem to have a history until the end of the movie.

Bo

There still would have been a big age difference, but if they behaved the same as in this script, they would have been pretty distant and well-behaved. So I guess the grandfather did them a favor with his faking illness?

It might not have turned out not so well if there had been alcohol on the scene, even once. Remember the cartoonist and his young date? He was in his thirties, though, so there was even more of an age difference. Just takes once to get pregnant. The grandfather must have thought he knew them pretty well, to set such a scheme in motion. (Eh, I think all the adults were oblivious and lucky, really.)