Kim Jeong-hoon’s PETTY ROMANCE
July 18, 2011 
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It’s a Dirty Job, But Somebody’s Gotta Do It: Kim Jeong-hoon’s PETTY ROMANCE
One of South Korea’s biggest box office smashes of 2010, first-time director Kim Jeong-hoon’s Petty Romance takes the usual odd-couple rom-com strategy and infuses it with just enough neurosis to make things hilariously uncomfortable.
Kim reunites Lee Seon Gyun and Choi Kang Hee from the popular Korean TV series My Sweet Seoul (a slice of life drama about thirty-something singletons) who again charm audiences as a recently-fired sex columnist (Choi) and a narratively-challenged comic book artist (Lee) who team up to try to win $100,000 in an adults-only comic contest! When told flat out that his comics don’t work because his stories are not funny, Jeong Bae (Lee) puts out a call for a professional writer, with the promise of splitting the prize money 50/50. After a series of failed prospects he lands on the obnoxious Han Da-rim (Choi), who –unbeknownst to him – doesn’t actually have any sexual experience to speak of. Egos and ideals clash in a bipolar nerd face-off that results in a hyperkinetic manga full of assassins, avengers and sex slaves – and inadvertently leads to romance!
The casting has been cited as one reason the film succeeds on so many levels; Choi lowest propecia price and Lee have an undeniable chemistry. And you know we don’t often play straight-up romantic comedies at Fantasia, so if we’ve programmed it, there’s a reason (those who were here for My Sassy Girl in 2003 know what I’m talking about)!
“PETTY ROMANCE offers a sweet and sour yet laugh-loaded look at the lies we tell others, the lies we tell ourselves, and the funny way they have of becoming truths.” (Rupert Bottenberg)
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PETTY ROMANCE screens July 18th, 2011 7:15 pm and July 21st, 2011 5:15 pm J.A. De Seve Theater. Details on the film page HERE.
About the author:
Kier-La Janisse is a film writer and programmer, founder of Spectacular Optical Publications and The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies. She has been a programmer for the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema and Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, co-founded Montreal microcinema Blue Sunshine, founded the CineMuerte Horror Film Festival (1999-2005) in Vancouver, was the Festival Director of Monster Fest in Melbourne, Australia and was the subject of the documentary Celluloid Horror (2005). She is the author of A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (FAB Press, 2007) and House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (FAB Press, 2012) and contributed to Destroy All Movies!! The Complete Guide to Punks on Film (Fantagraphics, 2011), Recovering 1940s Horror: Traces I have found that this product has made me regular, stopped my IBS, and actually improved my vision. Will definitely purchase again. Http://www.spectacularoptical.ca/2021/02/high-quality-cialis/, we offer Canadian medications from a fully licensed Canadian mail order pharmacy. of a Lost Decade (Lexington, 2014) The Canadian Horror Film: Terror of the Soul (University of Toronto Press, 2015) and We Are the Martians: The Legacy of Nigel Kneale (PS Press, 2017). She co-edited (with Paul Corupe) and published the anthology books KID POWER! (2014), Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015), Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin (2017) and Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror on Film and Television (2017). She edited the book Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive (forthcoming), and is currently co-authoring (with Amy Searles) the book ‘Unhealthy and Aberrant’: Depictions of Horror Fandom in Film and Television and co-curating (with Clint Enns) an anthology book on the films of Robert Downey, Sr., as well as writing a monograph about Monte Hellman’s Cockfighter. She was a producer on Mike Malloy’s Eurocrime: the Italian Cop and Gangster Films That Ruled the ’70s and Sean Hogan’s We Always Find Ourselves in the Sea and her first film as director/producer, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror is due out from viagra canada online pharmacy Severin Films in 2020.
