There’s a large number of new releases this week, although only a handful of them are Korean and even fewer than that are likely to make any kind of impact at the box office. Going by current projections, the Tom and Jerry movie will be the likely winner this week. If you didn’t even know there was a new Tom and Jerry movie coming out, well, it’s an HBO Max release. The advertising for it in South Korea has been fairly robust, and the characters are reasonably well known. Stateside, Tom and Jerry is one of those cartoons that seems to get rebooted every few years, so when I write reasonably well known, I mean more among the target audience of children than I do the country overall, since the reboots appear on South Korean cable.
A completely different kind of appeal to children comes in the form of Jungbrre’s Animal Diary, which is airing as a CGV exclusive. In this case, the titular Jungbrre is a minor YouTube celebrity. He’s a real-life zookeeper who has a fairly robust following making nature videos. His channel is here, although I can’t promise you’ll understand very much of what’s going on since his stuff isn’t English-subtitled. There’s just lots and lots of animals. I’m not expecting Jungbrre’s Animal Diary to set the box office on fire, but simply having a more professionally edited version of his videos available will probably improve Jungbrre’s prospects in the domestic nature documentary market- most of those air exclusively on television.
For more adult fare this week, there’s Plus Nine Romance. Alley Cat was so kind as to send me a press screener, although my review won’t be out until Friday. By adult fare, I mean that Plus Nine Romance deals with adult romantic relationships. The title is a reference to the four lead characters all being twenty-nine years old. They’re also women, so girl talk predominates regarding their four interlocking plotlines of boyfriends of differing quality. Plus Nine Romance is a pretty serious relationship movie, in that similarities to your own failed relationships may well seem inevitable. At least I certainly felt that way, the whole project feeling like a pendulum swinging from oh, she’s being too mean to him, to sheesh! She is putting up with way too much from him! All depending on which couple is currently in focus.
Women’s films like this aren’t common in the South Korean market. Although let’s be honest, they’re not really common anywhere. To this day Sex and the City is probably the main genre standard people think of, despite that show being so old at this point that it’s comically outdated, with characters acting dismissive toward such newfangled technology as e-mail. Sex and the City is also, somewhat confusingly, somehow even more sexually charged than most relationship-centric drama produced today, with little to no emphasis on the emotional aspect of relationships compared to the sexual ones. I am, you can probably tell, not that big a fan of the franchise.
Years ago, when Venus Talk was released in the South Korean market with explicit pretensions of engaging in similar storytelling, I was critical of it for many of these same reasons. Venus Talk ultimately lacked much cultural impact in the South Korean market because the themes were already passe, and often done better in cable television dramas anyway, I Need Romance coming to mind as an obvious example. As for Plus Nine Romance, I actually liked it quite a bit because the movie’s open more about relationships than it is sex, though the sex is still important, and also more romantic than erotic. The woman who directed it is my age, and possibly completely beyond the influence of Sex and the City at this point. Good for her, even if best case scenario Plus Nine Romance will probably be stuck playing to a fairly limited audience over streaming.