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Review
by Kozo: |
Idol movies
live with Attack on the Pin-Up Boys, an agreeable
trifle of a film aimed squarely at the teeming masses
who find the thirteen members of Super Junior to be
the height of huggability. That's right: the group
has thirteen members. The popular Korean boy band
could easily run their own five-on-five basketball
game with a three-man referee crew if they so desired.
However, despite one of them being an ace at hoops
(or so the film purports), sports are not their main
thing. Their main thing is dancing and singing like
packaged idols should, and the boys have good looks
and an admirable willingness to make fun of themselves.
How do we know this? Because in Attack on the Pin-Up
Boys, at least four of them have feces thrown
in their faces, and at least three more openly desire
for the same treatment. A movie where pin-up idols
jockey to become victims of a feces facial? Super
Junior, you rock!
Confused which Super Junior
member plays who? Matching the names to the faces
can be quite a chore for the uninitiated, since there
are thirteen members of Super Junior, but only twelve
appear because one of them, Cho Kyu-Hyun, was hurt
in a car accident. Even then, figuring out which twelve
guys is an issue, because perhaps only eight are obvious
members, with the rest being figured out through process
of elimination. Thankfully, the filmmakers help by
having every actor play a character with their exact
same name. Is this a meta-reference, or just pure
laziness? You can decide, but it's an understandable
and even agreeable detail. After all, this is a movie
that's meant for fans. Do they really want to think
of the Super Junior boys as anything but members of
Super Junior? And besides, using their real names
means less memorization for the probably overworked
Super Junior boys, who can now call their buddies
by their actual names instead of arbitrary made-up
ones. A note to the filmmakers: both the fans and
Super Junior thank you.
The film kicks off with the
first Pin-Up Boy Attack, when orange-haired prettyboy
Sung Min gets a face-full of crap from an unknown
assailant. The crap-throwing mystery culprit struck
on February 14, and each month thereafter on the 14th,
he or she strikes again. The next victims are the
basketball playing Han Geng, followed by rock band
frontman Ye Sung. Brainy, glasses-wearing Kim Ki-Bum
of neighboring Neulparan High School theorizes on
his website that the next victim will be a person
from his high-school, which leads to three possibilities:
dancing fool Kim Hee-Chul, local Judo champ Kang In,
or class president Choi Si-Won - who perhaps is better
known to non-fans of K-pop as the prince from Andy
Lau's Battle of Wits.
Ki-Bum's online theories
make his website exceptionally popular, as everyone
and their brother is apparently anxious to know who
the next victim of an attack is. The kicker is the
guys who were previous victims all became much more
popular post-feces facial, so before too long the
three candidates all desire to become the victim.
There's a built-in amusement to this thinly veiled
media satire, and placing the whole thing in such
a ridiculous arena as high school politics makes it
even more witty. Add that to the film's more silly
details, like the fact that Choi Si-Won can apparently
use Dark Jedi-like Force Lightning, and Kang In sometimes
practices his Judo moves on a bamboo-eating panda
(played by some guy in a patently fake panda outfit),
and you have a movie that doesn't take itself seriously,
and proves sometimes fun because of that.
Not that Attack on the
Pin-Up Boys is the next coming of A Hard Days'
Night, because it most definitely is not. There are
plenty of ways in which the film does not succeed,
among them its laggy second-act pace as the suspense
over the next Pin-Up Boy Attack goes from acute to
flaccid to irrelevant. Also, the film has time for
pointless existentialism where characters talk about
their purpose in high school, and how the Pin-Up Boy
Attacks bring extra meaning to the dog days of their
high school existence. That stuff would be great for
parody, but the film doesn't treat the stuff as either
earnest emotion or as a parody of typical youth film
fodder, resulting in the moments coming off as nothing
more than boring filler featuring pretty guys talking
to one another. Once you get past the mild media satire,
amusing manga and anime storytelling techniques, and
self-deprecating attitude of the boys, there isn't
much to talk about. The film doesn't succeed at making
the boys distinct beyond their basic types, so it's
doubtful that Attack on the Pin-Up Boys will
necessarily create any new Super Junior fans. It'll
just satisfy existing ones. The existence of a climactic
musical dance number should make the purpose of this
film clear: it's not for your average moviegoer, much
less one who thinks Oldboy is the zenith of
the Korean film industry.
What attraction, then, would
the film hold for non-fans? Cultural curiosity, perhaps.
Getting past internationally-approved film genres
and trying out culture-specific content would help
many a western-oriented Asian film fan appreciate
the differences and/or similarities in pop culture
moviemaking worldwide. Basically, this movie is a
total marketing gimmick, and the lack of attitude
and the genial, lowbrow playfulness of the proceedings
makes it easier to deal with than, say, a movie starring
the Spice Girls. Seeing the antics of cute boys in
school uniforms can also allow the viewer to make
a connection between the popularity of shojo manga
and the proliferation of boy bands in Asia. What else
is this but agreeable live-action representation for
Yaoi fangirls worldwide? And doesn't North America
have pre-packaged boy bands that stoke the fantasies
of pre-teen girls? When you break it down, the basic
culture inherent in Attack the Pin-Up Boys is present everywhere, and not just in Korea. That's
the true value of this movie: it's a universal pop-culture
case study that brings the world that much closer
to together. Okay, that's probably an overstatement,
but we shouldn't forget about the pandas and poop
jokes. Everybody loves pandas and poop jokes, and Attack on the Pin-Up Boys gives us both. Super
Junior, we thank you. (Kozo 2007) |
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