Tag: romantic comedy

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YMCA Baseball Team
(YMCA Yagudan,
YMCA야구단)

Director – Kim Hyun-seok – 2002 – South Korea – Cert. – 104m

***

In 1905, as the Japanese take over the running of their country, a small group of Koreans form a baseball team to defeat the Japanese – from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2025 which runsin cinemas from Wednesday, November 5th to Tuesday, November 18th

A lightweight sports comedy loosely inspired by historical events, this is set in 1905, by which time the Japanese were moving to occupy Korea. Lee Ho-chang (Song Kang-ho) is playing soccer on a local plateau when the ball goes off the edge and into the local YMCA missionary compound below. While retrieving the ball, he is confronted by US-schooled baseball enthusiast Min Jung-rim (Kim Hye-soo).

Much comedy is derived (albeit not that successfully for Western audiences) from Ho-chang’s taking a romantic liking to her, even though she has not the slightest interest in him, preferring (when he turns up later in the narrative) Japanese-schooled Oh Day-hyun (Kim Joo-hyuk) who is already highly skilled at baseball, which arrived in Japan in 1872, some 30 years before it came to Korea. Also in the team is bespectacled Ryu Kwang-tae (Hwang Jung-min), whose bureaucrat father is collaborating with the Japanese administration.… Read the rest

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Timestalker

Director – Alice Lowe – 2024 – UK – Cert. 15 – 90m

*****

A reincarnated woman falls for the same man in different, historical time periods – hilarious romantic comedy of errors is out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 11th

Agnes (Alice Lowe) is a woman falling madly in love. Sadly, the object of her affection Alex (Aneurin Barnard from Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan, 2017) isn’t really interested. And her attempts at forming relationships seem to always end badly. Although not in the way you might expect – for instance, with her head being lopped off. Yet all is not lost: in the world of the Karmic cycle: you die one day only to be reborn in another time the next. However, Agnes seems destined to make the same mistakes over and over again, consistently falling for Alex the wrong man in each of her different lives at different times in history.

The whole thing plays out like a series of repeated cycles by the same characters in different generations. In that sense, it’s not entirely unlike The Beast (Bertrand Bonello, 2023), a serious art house science fiction costume drama mashup. Timestalker isn’t necessarily in the same league as that film, but then again, The Beast isn’t a comedy and Timestalker is really, really funny.… Read the rest

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The Shop
Around The Corner

Director – Ernst Lubitsch – 1940 – US – Cert. PG – 99m

*****

Two store employees argue constantly, unaware they are perfect for one another – out in cinemas on Friday, December 3rd

It’s quite a shock to see an old Hollywood classic for the first time and realise that you’re seeing one of the greats of which you’ve somehow never heard, but that’s exactly what happened to me watching this extraordinarily charming film which is likely to appeal to anyone who loves the much more familiar It’s A Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946). Both have stories that culminate at Christmas, both star American everyman James Stewart, and both give off what you might call a generosity of spirit. But in other ways, they’re two very different films.

For a start, this is not set anywhere in the US but rather in Europe, specifically the Hungarian capital Budapest. And then, its subject is not so much a town and the people who live there as a department store and the people who work there. There are no rich people dubiously making money by exploiting the poor: certainly there are bosses and workers, but the former treats the latter well and might reasonably be described as benevolent.… Read the rest