Soo-ji (Kim Ha-neul) and Jae-joon (Kang Ji-hwan) attempt to save the world and maybe salvage their relationship in MY GIRLFRIEND IS AN AGENT
IT’S A FINE ROMANCE: MY GIRLFRIEND IS AN AGENT (7KEUP KONGMUWON) (Shin Tae-ra, 2009)
Tribeca Cinemas
54 Varick St. at Laight St.
Tuesday, March 27, free, 7:00
Series runs every other Tuesday through April 10
212-759-9550
www.koreanculture.org
www.tribecacinemas.com
A box-office blockbuster in South Korea, Shin Tae-ra’s My Girlfriend Is an Agent is a goofy but fun mosh-up of Mr. and Mrs. Smith and the television shows Get Smart and Mission: Impossible. As the movie opens, the weak-kneed Jae-joon (Kang Ji-hwan) is threatening to leave Soo-ji (Kim Ha-neul), tired of her many lies. What he doesn’t know is that she is actually a secret agent working undercover for the government, but she is not allowed to tell anyone, instead claiming she is a travel agent to explain all the time she spends away from him. Three years later, they accidentally meet up again — Soo-ji recognizes his, um, member in a men’s room while he is relieving himself at a urinal and she is pretending to be a cleaning lady — but now Jae-joon is a secret agent for a different department, working the same case but from another angle while telling her he is an accountant. Crazy hijinks ensue, including plenty of mistaken identity, a wacky car chase, and a shootout in an amusement park, with Soo-ji and Jae-joon continually bumping into each other as they get closer and closer to the international terrorists seeking to gain control of a lethal virus that could wipe out much of the country. My Girlfriend Is an Agent, which is getting the Bollywood treatment in a remake directed by Bosco, is screening on March 27 at 7:00 at Tribeca Cinemas as the second installment of the free Korean Movie Night series “It’s a Fine Romance,” which concludes on April 10 with Kim Jeong-hoon’s 2010 chick flick, Petty Romance.
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No way around it; this is one funny movie. Written and directed by Mel Brooks (who won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay), The Producers stars Zero Mostel as Max Bialystock, a once great Broadway producer now relegated to wooing old ladies for their checkbooks. Gene Wilder earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor as Leo Bloom, a by-the-book accountant who figures out that it could be possible to make more money from a bomb than a hit. And the bomb they turn to is the extraordinary Springtime for Hitler, featuring a great turn by Kenneth Mars as a neo-Nazi. Brooks, Mostel, Wilder, Mars, and the rest of the crazy cast — which also includes Dick Shawn, Lee Meredith, Estelle Winwood, Christopher Hewett, Renee Taylor, Barney Martin, Bill Macy, and William Hickey — don’t just play it for laughs but for giant guffaws and jaw-dropping disbelief in this riotous romp that was turned into a very good but overrated Broadway musical and a terrible film version of the show, both starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, neither of whom can fill Mostel and Wilder’s shoes. The Producers is screening March 23 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “15 for 15: Celebrating Rialto Pictures” series honoring the fifteenth anniversary of the art-house distributor founded by Film Forum programmer extraordinaire Bruce Goldstein; upcoming films include Jules Dassin’s Riffifi, Claude Berri’s The Two of Us, Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, and Jacques Becker’s Touchez pas au grisbi.
Based on the novel by Keith Waterhouse (which he also adapted into a play with Willis Hall and which later became a musical), John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar is a prime example of the British New Wave of the 1950s and 1960s, which features work by such directors as Lindsay Anderson, Joseph Losey, Ken Russell, Nicolas Roeg, and Karel Reisz. Tom Courtenay stars as William Fisher, a ne’er-do-well ladies’ man who drudges away in a funeral home and dates (and lies to) multiple women, all the while daydreaming of being the president of the fictional country of Ambrosia. Billy lives in his own fantasy world where he can suddenly fire machine guns at people who bother him and be cheered by adoring crowds as he leads a marching band. Reminiscent of the 1947 American comedy The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, in which Danny Kaye dreams of other lives to lift him out of the doldrums, Billy Liar is also rooted in the reality of post-WWII England, represented by Billy’s father (Wilfred Pickles), who thinks his son is a no-good lazy bum. Shot in black-and-white, the film glows every time Julie Christie appears playing Liz, a modern woman who takes a rather fond liking to Billy. The film made Christie a star; Schlesinger next cast her in Darling, for which she won the Oscar for Best Actress. Billy Liar is screening March 23 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “15 for 15: Celebrating Rialto Pictures” series honoring the fifteenth anniversary of the art-house distributor founded by Film Forum programmer extraordinaire Bruce Goldstein. “When I first encountered Billy Liar in the early 1970s, I’d never heard of it,” Goldstein wrote in a 2011 Criterion essay. “I’d somehow acquired a 16mm panned-and-scanned print, and was intrigued by both the title and cast. I certainly knew who Julie Christie was, and I vaguely remembered Tom Courtenay in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, so I ran it. I then ran it a second time. And then again and again, until I fell in love with it.”