Asian Film Festival: PLEASE TEACH ME ENGLISH (Korea, 2003) June 27, 2004

112 minutes, 35mm, in Korean with English subtitles
Directed by: Kim Seong-Su
Starring: Lee Na-Yeong, Jang Hyeok, Angela Kelly, Na Mun-Heui

From Kim Seong-Su, the director of the action films Beat and Musa: the Warrior comes a story of the most heart-pounding and tremendously impossible battle ever to be waged in the history of mankind. On one side is Na Yeong-Ju: government clerk. She is a minimum wage employee. She wears glasses. She is not very smart. Her secret weapon is laziness. On the other side is...the English language. It is complicated and hegemonic. It is difficult to pronounce. It has no secret weapon, except its ability to spread across the planet like a virus from outer space.

Now, in her darkest hour, Yeong-Ju will need flashcards, vocabulary drills, and a pig that can count to overcome the greatest enemy ever: English.

A total change of pace for director Kim, after his blockbuster action hits, PLEASE TEACH ME ENGLISH is a romantic comedy that satirizes the current Korean English-learning craze. Yeong-Ju enrolls in an English class taught by Australian thesp, Angela Kelly (who turns in what may be one of the only actual performance by an Anglo in an Asian film ever), and populated with a host of hapless oddballs. One of them is "Elvis" Park Mun-Su (played by Jang Hyeok, star of Volcano High), a slimeball romantic who works in the shoe department of a department store and who understands that the way to a woman's heart is to massage her feet. Naturally, Yeong-Ju falls for Mun-Su, who has already fallen for the teacher, and she'll have to endure some of the most humiliating situations ever devised before she can land her man. And she'll have to conjugate verbs.

A hit when it was released in Korea last year, PLEASE TEACH ME ENGLISH manages to sling heaping plates of comedy and romance at the audience without missing a beat. Every frame of this manic romantic comedy is crammed with sight gags, puns, strange references, misunderstandings, and barbed dialogue (which the subtitles do a great job of translating). The movie broadens into a true romance in the last reel, but not before generating enough manic energy to power a small city.

TICKETS - http://www.subwaycinema.com/frames/nyaff04tickets.htm