Mini fest offers best
of Korean films

As a precursor to this October's 25th anniversary of the Louis Vuitton Hawaii International Film Festival, the festival and KBFD-TV (managed by new festival chairman Jeff Chung) present its own mini-festival of the best films from the new wave of Korean cinema, all released earlier this year.

The seven films of the inaugural K-Fest at the Honolulu Academy of Arts' Doris Duke Theatre run from romantic comedy to family drama, war, horror and melodrama.

Advance tickets -- $9 general; $8 seniors, military and students; and $7 festival members -- can be bought from the festival's Web site at www.hiff.org, up to 24 hours before any particular film's screening. Will-call tickets and the purchase of tickets at the door will be available at the theater one hour before the film's first screening.

For more info, call 550-8457 between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m.

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Festival Schedule

Friday

» 7:30 p.m.: "She's on Duty": It's the U.S. premiere of a movie described as "Sexy schoolgirl Serpico fights the yakuza!" Or a Korean "Miss Congeniality" meets "21 Jump Street." Kim Seon-Ah, star of the Korean drama smash of the year "My Lovely Sam-Soon," shows off once again her comedic talents in this action comedy. She plays a hot-headed cop who gets little respect in her male-dominated precinct. After foiling a yakuza sex-trafficking ring, she is soon roped into an unusual undercover assignment: pose as a student in a local high school and attempt to become best friends with the daughter of a reformed crook in hiding who is the key to a major mob case.

Saturday

» 1 p.m.: "Dance With the Wind": It's the feature film debut of Park Sol-Mi, star of the TV serial drama "Winter Sonata." Like the previous film, she plays an undercover cop, this time in pursuit of a handsome and charismatic foot enthusiast who gets drawn into the world of ballrooms and cabarets. His journey from a mousy salaryman to a refined gigolo and a seducer of married ladies, all in his desire to hone his craft of dancing, is hilarious and can be compared only to one of a martial artist from a Shaw Brothers movie.

» 4 p.m.: "My Brother": Popular actors Shin Ha Kyun and Won Bin team up in this heart-rending Korean hit about an underachiever whose slightly handicapped older brother is favored by their mother and acquaintances alike for all his sincere efforts. Filial jealousy, competition over a pretty girl and years of sought-after acceptance drives a rift between the two brothers. As the years pass, the two brothers lead increasingly separate lives, and their lingering conflict goes unsettled.

» 7:30 p.m.: "R-Point": A huge hit in Korea, this supernatural chiller casts an otherworldly pall over the battlefields of Vietnam. The year is 1972, and a mysterious distress call from a battalion of men long thought dead has just come crackling over the short-wave radio. Lt. Choi and his men are ordered to a remote area of the war to investigate. Finding nothing but gravesites and ominous warnings etched in stone, the platoon makes camp in a decrepit French villa where, as nighttime falls, they begin to fear that something far more terrifying than the Viet Cong is lurking in the shadows. As soldiers begin disappearing, Choi must face his own history of violence before he too falls victim to R-Point, where the ground is soaked in generations of blood and the dead refuse to stay down.

South Korea has been struggling to deal with its own Vietnam War legacy and writer/director Kong Su-Chang uses this to his advantage, adding a layer of real-life anxiety to his atmospheric tale of lost patrols, vengeful spirits and the horrors of the past.

Sunday

» 1 p.m.: "Someone Special": This hit romantic comedy springs its schmaltz in the first couple of minutes: Dong Chi-Seong (Jeong Jae-Yeong) is a baseball player who has never fallen in love, and now he's been diagnosed with cancer and told he has two months to live. But this flick is a send-up of the conventions of Korean romantic comedy. Dong wanders around asking everyone he meets what love is (their answers are uniformly ridiculous), he goes out to get drunk but he has no tolerance, he meets a young bartender (Lee Na-Yeong) but passes out before they can talk. When he wakes up, he discovers that she's a withdrawn shut-in who can't muster much more than a sub-verbal mumble. Intensely lonely, the two team up like some kind of loser Batman and Robin, but once they're together, they're clueless about what to do next: Go on a date? Move in together? "Someone Special" gleefully sends up sports movies, romantic comedies (one of the highlights of the movie is when our leads go to watch one of the worst romantic comedies ever made) and Korean melodramas.

» 4 p.m.: "The Twins": In this comedy, Jung Jun-Ho plays two brothers, while born just minutes apart, couldn't be more different from each other. Graduating at the top of his small-town high school class and headed to Seoul University to study law, the younger, shy, bespectacled Hyon-su seems bound for greater things. And his mother, who runs a hole-in-the-wall restaurant near a train station, is willing to do almost anything to ensure his success. That "anything" seems to mostly involve older brother Myong-Su.

A rough and tough middle-school dropout with little ambition, Myong-Su works as a bouncer at a nearby whorehouse while helping out at his mother's restaurant. Beneath his rough demeanor, however, Myong-Su turns out to be a softie, and can't refuse when he's asked to switch places with his more civilized brother whenever there's trouble.

» 7:30 p.m.: "Innocent Steps": It's an international premiere, with Korean teen idol and ingenue starlet Moon Geun-Yeung in a romantic fable about Chae-Rin, an ethnic Korean dancer from Yangbian in northeastern China. She has a dancing-queen sister, who is set to participate in a national sports dancing championship in Seoul. When the sister cannot join the event, Chae-Rin comes to Seoul on her sister's passport as a replacement.

The only problem is that she doesn't know how to dance.