SOMEONE SPECIAL (Korea, 2004)
Directed by: Jang Jin
Starring: Jeong Jae-Yeong, Lee Na-Yeong

Someone Special is a lot of things — a Korean remake of the 1939 Bob Hope flick, Never Say Die; and a starring vehicle for Lee Na-Yeong who was the super-klutzy and super-cute star of last year’s Audience Award Winner, Please Teach Me English — but most of all it’s the best romantic comedy from Korea in 2004. Korea can make romantic comedies in its sleep, but in the past year the industry has started cannibalizing itself: every romantic comedy feels like every other romantic comedy and there hasn’t been a breath of fresh air since 2002’s My Sassy Girl. This is the exception.

Someone Special springs its schmaltz in the first couple of minutes: Dong Chi-seong (Jeong Jae-Yeong) is a baseball player who’s never fallen in love, and now he’s been diagnosed with cancer and told he has two months to live. Cue the heartstrings. But this flick is a send-up of the conventions of Korean romantic comedy. Dong wanders around asking everyone he meets what love is (their answers are uniformly ridiculous), he goes out to get drunk but he has no tolerance, he meets a young bar tender (Lee Na-Yeong) but passes out before they can talk. When he wakes up he discovers that she’s a withdrawn shut-in who can’t muster much more than a subverbal mumble. Intensely lonely, the two team up like some kind of loser Batman and Robin, but once they’re together they don’t know what to do: go on a date? Move in together? They’re clueless. Ridiculing sports movies, romantic comedies (one of the highlights of the movie is when our leads go to watch one of the worst romantic comedies ever made), and Korean melodrama, Someone Special is the least-fuzzy, least-optimistic, least-insulting romantic comedy to come out of Korea in a long time.