For Rachel

Oh yeah. B)

Like a Surgeon

I saw Andrew watching this last night.

Given that I know someone in Med School currently doing surgery related stuff…

Like a Surgeon, cutting for the very first time.

My Sassy Girl

A couple months ago I watched a Korean movie that went by the title of My Sassy Girl.  Soon after I saw there was an American remake of the movie coming out in August.

Now, I had found the movie rather good overall, but there were some parts that were a little over-the-top in terms of drama.  As the majority of the movie was comedy, those parts just didn’t really fit.  However, there were some important plot bits in those sections.

I hoped that the remake would do some cutting and shorten up the drama sections while keeping the comedy sections intact.  Maybe a little smoothing.  I wasn’t hoping for too much, this is Hollywood we’re talking about, but I thought they could make a better movie with a little trying and almost no mucking.

As long as they didn’t add anything, they would be fine.

I picked up the remake from Blockbuster on Monday.  I watched it yesterday.

First, the good.  They really didn’t add anything.  There were a couple of relatively inconsequential things added.  First: sexual comments.  Now, I don’t know if it was just the translation I had, but the Korean version had very little in the way of sexual comments and jokes.  The addition of that made the American version more juvenile.  The second thing I noticed was that the guy in the American version had a goal in life, while the Korean guy didn’t.

This really didn’t make much of a difference until they got to the year break.  In the remake the guy dumps his life goals in order to ‘live’.  In the Korean version they guy gets direction and makes something of himself during that same period.

The bad, they cut the good stuff.  All the best scenes were missing.  The closest they got was when I was sure they would do the shoe switching, and then pulled out.  In the original the girl insists they switch shoes (she’s wearing high heels) and the guy trys to get out of it, but is forced to walk around the college campus wearing her shoes getting stared at.  It’s classic.  In the remake it just ends with the girl wearing the guy’s shoes and the guy carrying her shoes.

Bleh.

And then, in the Korean version, they go and change into their old high school uniforms and hit up a bunch of bars and night clubs.  Which was cut entirely.

The remake weakened the scenes where the guy gets thrown in jail.  In fact, he only gets jailed once as opposed to twice.  And completely got rid of the mobsters who shared his jail cell.

The worst part was the soldier scene.  In the original it was weak, in the remake it just failed.  It had the advantage of being shorter, but that made it less believable.

And there were quite a few more scenes that I liked that suffered like that.  Either cut entirely or just cut down in size to make it just not work as well.  The time frame of the movie was also cut down severely.  The original took place over about half a year, then had a 2+ year break before the ending.  As opposed to 1 month and then a 1 year break before the ending.

Finally, here’s the 10 rules scene from the original: