Worth watching??

i have to agree with you on all points. i saw this two nights ago at the new york korean film festival and although there were moments of slice of life comedy, i wasn't impressed overall. i think this may be a korean counterpart to a pearl harbor here. it simplifies everything and the characters lack any depth. lately, i've been starting to see this trend of overplaying the slapstick style actors in korean films. for example, the cab driver and his customer becoming friends throughout the course of the movie. but man, they can really tone down their acting. at least the main actor was good at the subtle comedy. in something like a king and the clown, these kind of stereotypical stock characters can work (and it did), but here, it just makes the behind-the-scenes people seem amateur. by my post, people may think this is a comedy about war. i think the funny slice-of-life scenes serve a similar function to that of another movie i saw last year called "once in a summer" with lee byung-hoon. it lightens things up in the beginning so you can grasp the contrast once things get really sour, which makes it all the more powerful. unfortunately, didn't quite work in this movie. when the killings started happening, i just couldn't get invested. it's too bad really, in that i mean a very mediocre film shouldn't downplay a tragic event that's clearly important to south korea still. tae guk gi may have been a korea-hollywood style blockbuster flick, but it was done quite well despite its lack of any real complexity story-wise. i'm not too knowledgeable about korean films but other great war/conflict movies are letters from iwo jima, downfall, the lives of others, das boot, and sure i'll throw in children of men even if it's fictional =)