Romance and other guilty pleasures

I'll get right to the point -- I hate romantic movies! I hate the melodrama, the long shots of man and woman gazing longingly at each other through traffic/forest/war, etc., the soft fuzzy camerawork, but especially the strings -- that 101 strings, syrupy sound that is supposed to make things get all mushy. But what really gets me is that movies have developed, through trial and error, the idealized notion of romance, and that this has somehow filtered into our subconscious and has become our notion of what a relationship should be, even though reality is much different. That's why I appreciate dreck like Return of the Living Dead 3 -- boy meets girl, boy loses girl, girl becomes a zombie, does some incredibly nasty things, boy has to make things right, girl bites boy, and then boy joins girl in zombie heaven in double suicide. Stuff like that is not only improbable in real life, but silly as well. It's a movie, damn it. It's not real. And I know when I go out with someone situations like that will never arise.

Seriously, I have seen a lot of Korean romance movies. Comedy, action, whatever, and while they do tug as many emotional strings as any other film industry, I find myself somewhat engaged, and yes, once in a while, entertained by what is offered. Such is the case of Romance, a bland title for an interesting movie. Jo Jae-Hyeon plays a cop who saves a woman (Kim Ji-Soo) from killing herself from an oncoming truck. She is married to a politician (Eom Hyo-Seob), who is making a bid for the presidency the following year. And he's nuts. Everything in his household is fine, wealthy, executive, and stifling, and his wife is suffering from the lack of freedom and the love that has soured. It's a one way street, all his. Jae-Hyeon has issues too -- a hard boiled troublemaker in the force, whose wife and kid have left him, and he's struggling. So they meet, date, tango, go to a motel, compare scar tissue (they are both beaten up -- her by her husband, he by 'enforcing the law'),and fall in love. All in 20 minutes. Cue the 101 strings. What I found interesting was that every time the story seemed to lean towards conventional romantic melodrama, it gets knocked back into place by the evil machinations of the husband, who, having found out about the affair, really goes nuts! In a quiet, passive/aggressive yet sinister way. Like having his henchmen beat the stuffing out of him and kidnapping the wife to a hospital to "cure her," that is, brainwash her with a bunch of drugs. The cop survives, and the rest of the film is a rescue operation, hostage situation, and shootout. Forget the last ten minutes of the movie -- too much of a cliché, but the other hour and a half is really engaging. The acting is solid from all the principal characters, the direction tight and well paced, the camera work a bit uneven in style -- washed out a la contemporary Spielberg in the beginning ( I guess meant to evoke romance but it doesn't feel that way), then film noirish for the rest of the film. Thumbs up, worth a rental, especially for guys who have endured one too many chick flicks -- you can sneak this in the rental queue. Or for the ladies who know they have put their guys through one too many chick flicks, but will not concede to them renting Aliens vs Predator. There's enough schmaltz to get the hankies out.