Ha Ji-won in 100 Days With Mr. Arrogant

FINDING A PERSONA
At the same time, in other films, Ha seems to have been moving toward the sort of roles that have since become her bread and butter, even if the pattern has only emerged with hindsight. She had a starring role in the hit comedy Sex Is Zero (2002), that has been described as a Korean take on American Pie — hard to imagine, sight unseen, although in a semi-follow-up, the enjoyably raucous 100 Days With Mr. Arrogant (Naesarang ssagaji, 2003), she seems to be having a great time playing, with rubber-faced overstatement, the high spirited "shrew" who is never quite tamed by a sleek BMOC fashion plate. Sharp-eyed 20-somethings may spot a resemblance to the 1999 American high-school hit 10 Things I Hate About You (which stars a young and grungy Heath Ledger); there a few mild doses of gross-out humor but most of it is Archie Comics cranked up to 11.

HA JI-WON AS A TWO-FISTED DREAM DATE
The pugnacity of Ha's turn in 100 Days becomes the main, and, in fact, almost her only note in Duelist, but in her top ten hit of 2007, Miracle on 1st Street (1Beonga-ui gijeok), Ha finds a way to make the hair-trigger toughness that is occasionally grating in that film into something not only charming and admirable but emblematic of something central in the Korean self-image. In several parallel sub-plots the film portrays ordinary working-class Koreans as people who get back up and keep on fighting no matter how often they're knocked down. Ha plays a never-say-die female boxer whose picturesque ruin of a mountainside Seoul neighborhood is about to be bulldozed to make way for a condo complex. The portrait of the area and its eccentric citizens has some of the flavor of a vintage screwball comedy. Miracle has the look of a film carefully assembled around the star persona Ha Ji-won has finally established for herself, a mark of how far she has come since her chilly peek-a-boo entrance on that metal morgue table. And now that she's had so much success swinging a sword (in Damo) or her fists (in Miracle), one doubts anybody would be interested now in a sugary or helpless soap ingénue version of Ha Ji-won. This could be a good example of a character type an audience was ready to embrace, and a performer with the perfect qualities to embody it that just happened to come along at the same time.

TOO LATE FOR THEATERS?
An ironic footnote to the story of Miracle on 1st Street is that it was one of the films playing earlier this year at the M Park 4 when I first visited this recently opened theater, located on the third floor of a department store on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles's Koreatown, just a few blocks from my apartment. The idea was to write a short introductory piece on the theater for the Weekly, and thereafter to begin covering their subtitled screenings for the paper regularly. The plan was torpedoed, however, by the fact that none of the Korean pictures then screening at MPark had subtitles. The friendly young manager explained that this would not be not a priority in the future, either, because they were making so much more money on their Korean-subtitled prints of American blockbusters like Spider Man-3 and Shrek the Third — those were apparently the movies that even the local Korean-American audience really wanted to see.

Early next year, the giant Korean company CJ Entertainment is set to open a multiplex branch of their CGV theater chain in the ritzy new MaDang the Courtyard development on Western Avenue near Wilshire, supposedly to showcase both Korean and American movies with subtitles. With the MPark4, the CJ venture suggests that Korea is soon to be, with India, the only Asian movie industry whose theatrical presence in the U.S. is anything but a distant memory. The conventional wisdom is that the once-flourishing Japanese and Chinese theater chains in the U.S. were done in first by the increasing assimilation of the younger generation, and then by the advent of home video. It will be interesting to see if the Korean circuit, which looks so promising now, eventually wanders off down the same dead-end trail.