Lovely Rivals

A teacher attempts to lure his handful of students in a small, rural school to Seoul so that he can move on to a better school. His efforts backfire however, and his school becomes one of the highest ranked in the nation.

The movie depicts the three months before Choong-nyung (the future Sejong the Great) becomes king. The Annals of the Joseon Dynasty, which follows the history of the Joseon Dynasty between 1413 and 1865, leaves out records of this crucial period. While future generations would come to know him as King Sejong, the legendary figure who created the Korean alphabet and advanced the country’s scientific research and law, Prince Choong-nyung was originally dismissed as a reclusive bookworm. When his older brothers Yangnyeong and Hyoryeong fail to impress their father King Taejong, the king makes a royal command for Choong-nyung to become the next ruler of the kingdom instead.

A success-hungry lawyer meets a young sister and brother suffering from domestic abuse and digs into their case.

Cho Chun-sam and Noh Dae-gyu, now both in their thirties, are old friends who went to the same elementary school. In their school days, Chun-sam was always the ambitious class president, while Dae-gyu had to settle for a role as vice president. Twenty years later their roles are reversed: Chun-sam is now a humble farmer who has assumed the post of village chief in his hometown, while Dae-gyu is the newly elected county magistrate. At first, Chun-sam asks his old friend for favours regarding the development of his village, but these requests are turned down. Later, when Dae-gyu proposes building a nuclear waste disposal facility in the county, Chun-sam leads demonstrations against the plan, turning old friends into bitter rivals.

Within the past ten years, Korean film industry has taken a huge leap in both quality and volume. There were hugely successful blockbusters as well as other features with vast range of subjects. Fun Movie can be considered a culmination of Korea's hugely successful film industry in so far that it solely offers parodies of Korean big screen hits. The film revolves around the 2002 Korea-Japan World Cup. Japan's ultra right-wing group, the Million Men Patriots, are setting up a plot to disrupt an up-coming historic soccer match. After going through severely harsh training, the Patriots finally select Murakami and a cold-hearted sharp-shooter named Hanako as leaders of the World Cup sabotage team. The clandestine group is dispatched to Seoul to launch their evil operation, but of course, things do not at all work out as planned and soon the luckless criminals even run out of sabotage money...