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 cialis brand only 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, viagra canada purchase publisher, producer, acquisitions executive for Severin Films and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. She is the author of Cockfight: A Fable of Failure (2024), House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012/2022) and A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (2007) and has been an editor on numerous books including Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive (2021) and Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015). She wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021), cheap discount levitra and produced the acclaimed blu-ray box sets All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror (2021) and The Sensual World of Black Emanuelle (2023).
