oh... my...
wow...
i can't believe i didn't get to see this in the cinema... i don't even have words for this film...

i cried at the end.

did anyone get to see it in the theatre? i hadn't even heard of this film until a friend at work talked about renting it then i went to the rental place got it and it sat on my desk for nearly five days before i watched it and now... i don't even know how to describe it... just... i'm blown away.

This...was in theatres?

yeah, i'm also surprised, cause everybody i know understands and speaks japanese fluently.

Well, it's a korean movie.



And yeah, I saw it in theaters. I preached its greatness to everyone for 3 weeks.

Yeah, It's a Korean movie. It came out while I was over there, though I didn't have a chance/haven't had a chance to see it yet. I've heard it was amazing though. It got really good reviews in Korea also.

Tae Guk Gi is the name of the Korean flag, though I can't remember what it means for the life of me now.

The trailer certainly looked very cool (and had a great music playing in the background). It would be nice to see this movie some day.

Taeguk = Yin-Yang, Ki = flag.

It was a good movie, but I was dissapointed... it didnt live up to the expectations I had for it after hearing all the praise for it. I thought it was a bit of a Saving Private Ryan rip-off, especially with the whole movie being a flash back, and you not being sure exactly which character the old guy from the beginning is. I would've rather seen a Korean War movie that focused equally on all the members of a squad or a platoon, than a drama that was set during the Korean War and focused entirely on the two brothers. I think the first was what I was unfortunately expecting, and when the I got the latter, I was a bit dissapointed.

Don't get me wrong, I still really liked it (gave it a 9 out of 10 on IMDb) but for me it just didnt live up to the precedents of other war movies such as Band of Brothers, Black Hawk Down, etc.

Also, on a side note, apparently the actress who played the older brother's fiancee, and whom was executed for being a traitor recently committed suicide.

Thats not the full name of the movie. For some reason, they shortened it in the American version. The full Korean name is "Taegukgi hwinalrimyeo." I have no idea what that means though.

yeah, the "hwinalri" part means "waves, flutters, or flaps," as a flag would do in the wind and the "myeo" part means "and, or, while, as, at the same time, etc"

DS: Actually i liked this film more than SPR...
SPR is a situation in the war and Tae Guk Gi is a story about people living through it and how it changed them.

of course, i watched the movie with no preconceptions of what it was about. i just heard about it from a friend then picked it up and read the box then popped it in thinking "I'll watch 30mins of it then hit the sack" (I ended up watching the whole thing in one sitting... kind of rare for me to do)

I knew very early on which brother it was because when the old man is on the phone he asks "Could it be my brother Jin-tae?" and then you find out their names very early on in the flashback.

since we seem to have some Korean speakers here what is the word for "promise" ?
i kept seeing that in the subtitles and hearing "yakuso" or something like that... in japanese a "promise" is "yakusoku" so it seems like there may be some shared words between Korean and Japanese. *shrug*
(Also, what Korean word is used for "Japan"? I thought i heard them say "Nihon" when talking about "This war is completely different than our fight against Japan" but i could be mistaken)

Nihon.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=nihon

[In that I mean Nihon is actually another name for Japan]

The Korean word for promise is yaksok. Korean and Japanese share many similarities, as well as Korean and Chinese. Korean, like English, uses many words derived from many other languages. The Korean word for Japan is irlbon. If I was at home, I'd type them in Korean and save them as a graphic, so you could see, but I don't have the option to do so here at school.

BrianTheSith: awesome, thanks for the info

LV: yeah, Nihon (or the old "Nippon") is the japanese word for Japan... thus calling japanese "Nips" during world war ii.
(i've been studying japanese language for a while...)

korean sounds like a pretty challenging language... hmm

Not a problem. Korean is fairly easy to learn to read, and not too hard to speak sound wise (as there is no intonation) but it is hard to speak in the fact they have A LOT of words that all mean the same thing.

Yeah, after reading Cryptonomicon, it's hard to think of the Japanese as Japs instead of Nipponese, or Nips. Of course, both Japs and Nips are extreme racial slurs.

haha, japanese is the same way... lots of extra words and tons of homonyms! "hanashi" (story) and "hanashi" (speak) and then "hanase" (present tense active "speak") and "hanase!" (let go!)

so confuzzing

but then i'm sure that asians feel the same way about engrish... heh

Yeah. My aunt (who speaks Japanese -and- Chinese) was working on her English with me once. She kept telling me how annoying it was to have the word "plain" mean so many different things.

I've been studying Japanese for a while, too. It's... an interesting language. I dunno anything about Korean.

Japanese is dope.

There are a loooot of similarities between korean and japanese and chinese. Japanese has quite a few things derived from chinese (though spoken quite differently most of the the time .. the kanji (chinese character) for "kanji" are the chinese characters for "chinese characters" (HAH.) But pronounced entirely different.) and many Korean words are similar to japanese words, or romanized words.

Yeah, Koreans use a lot of romanized words, just spelled out in korean. Konglish, as it is called, is pretty prominent. Computer, for example, is the same word said with a korean accent.