The Korean Mode of Blockbusters and My Sassy Girl

Reclaiming its position as something in between Hollywood and the Asian and the Korean cinema industries, South Korean film in the post-IMF era has received the most unexpected but welcome gift. It is the pan-Asian success of Korean popular culture known as the Korean wave (hanryu). Amid hanryu, there emerged a movie entitled My Sassy Girl that has become a pan-Asian hit. After My Sassy Girl's rather surprising popularity in various Asian countries, its female lead, Jeon Jihyeon (Gianna Jun), has been promoted as a pan-Asia star, appealing to audiences in Hong Kong, China, Japan, Vietnam and Thailand.

Sassy? Grotesque? Barbarian?

My Sassy Girl is a film about two college students who act like teenagers and their difficulties in growing up and living up to gender roles in heterosexual relations. The comic effects are derived from gender reversals. What yeopgi in the Korean title Yeopgijeogin geunyeo indicates is bizarre and grotesque.

My Sassy Girl was a box-office success in Korea but hardly gained any serious critical attention. Its star, Jeon Jihyeon, was perceived as a cute actress of the type typically found in commercials. As it has become popular in other countries in Asia, it retroactively demands a critical view that should be attentive to the local, the inter-Asian and the global reception. My Sassy Girl is a popular text that is connected to Japanese cartoons and intricate intertextuality with local internet-based youth subculture known as yeopgi sites. Around the time of its production, the expression yeopgi was very popular. It signifies the bizarre, the horrible, the grotesque and the strange. Beyond the dictionary-based usages, yeopgi is attached to emergent youth subculture formed on the internet.Yeopgi culture in 1990s was provoked partly by the snuff sites and a translation of Ito Zunji's horror cartoon collections into Korean.