After a resounding flop with his second film Asako in Ruby Shoes in 2001, director E J-yong has taken French novelist Choderlos de Laclos' Les Liaisons Dangereuses and moved it not forward in time -- as with the 1999 Hollywood film Cruel Intentions -- but laterally to the other side of the planet to Korea's Chosun Dynasty.

Watching this sucker-puncher of a movie in the venerable-but-revamped Hollywood Theater in Seoul, I felt like an old safari hand gazing in a mixture of ecstasy and awe at a Manchurian tiger sauntering out of a bamboo grove and locking its yellow-green eyes on mine.

Adaptations of internet-based novels have become a new trend in Korean cinema, following the success of the famous My Sassy Girl in 2001.

The hero of Save the Green Planet is a mentally-unbalanced young man on medication who believes that aliens are plotting an imminent assault on the planet Earth. After much research, mostly through viewing B-grade science fiction films and reading some very non-mainstream books, he determines that the head alien in charge of leading the invasion is already on earth, masquerading as the successful CEO of a large conglomerate.

A super-terrorist Kang Ki-taek (Pak Sang-min, star of the Son of the General series) is planning to hijack a Seoul subway line. A maverick cop Jang Do-joon (Kim Seok-hoon, Legend of the Gingko) is apparently the only one in the entire Seoul police department who is onto Kang's crackpot scheme.

Südkorea ist nach wie vor eines der gesegnetsten Kinoländer. Und oft wünsche ich mir, es möge aus anderer Nationen Filmkultur ein ebenso kluger Mensch ebenso regelmäßig und verlässlich berichten wie Darcy Paquet.