My Tutor Friend: Teacher's Pet Is Also Her Pretty Boy Peer

My Little Bride. My Mighty Princess. My Sassy Girl. You'll find no scant supply of possessively titled rom-coms in the K-pop movie canon. So consider Kim Kyeong-hyeong's My Tutor Friend part of a tried-and-true tradition. Here's how the films work: On one side, you've got a bossy, egocentric rebel. In this case, it's Ji-hoon (Kwone Sang-woo), a dreamy flunky who's too busy primping and punching to pass 11th grade despite his 21 years. On the other side, you've got a self-effacing brat who'll act as his unknowing mentor and unlikely love interest. For this installment, her name is Su-wan (Kim Ho-neul) and she's got a thing or two to teach that young man about respect, verb conjugation, and idiomatic expressions in the English language. Rich boy, poor girl. Cool kid, square chick. Once these two learn to deal with his catty girlfriend (Kim Ji-woo), the school bully (Kong Yu) and the local gang, they'll drive off into the sunset on his motorcycle. But there's mayhem and misfires until then plus an improbably erotic scene in which she bandages the knife wound on his six pack abs as if they were making love and another queerly sexy moment in which he licks the blood off her paper-cut finger. Why kiss when you can nurse each other's wounds?

She's on Duty: High School's Undercover Lovers

No one wants to relive their high school years, least of all Jae-in (Kim Seon-a), an undercover cop whose single accomplishment then may have been to head up an all-girl gang on the playground. But duty calls, so she'll have to put her personal feelings aside in order to infiltrate the student body and cozy up to the shy daughter (Nam Sang-mi) of a mobster (Kim Kap-su) who the police hope to get under their protection so he can rat on the head of a crime ring that promotes dog fights and enslaves Korean girls as prostitutes for the Japanese. That she'll fall in love with a fellow student (Kong Yu) -- who is equally good at Taekwondo and also happens to live next door -- complicates her assignment and confounds her ethical code. All that confusion probably fuels the rage that comes into play whenever she gets in a fight with school bullies, sparring partners in gym or run-of-the-mill thugs in the abandoned backlots where so much crime takes place worldwide. A woman warrior to be sure, Jae-in can singlehandedly overpower gangs of all ages, sizes and gender to jig music no less. Park Kwang-chun's She's on Duty is no masterpiece but it's an enjoyable after school special that teaches girls rock, smoking is bad, and listen to your elders.

S Diary: Love Is Tragic, Love Is Funny, Love Is Something Else

Sheesh. S Diary is one strange hybrid. Half romance, half comedy, the movie doesn't congeal as a romantic comedy because it tends to keep its genres separate. The first half is lightly serious stuff: a doleful tale of a young woman (Kim Seon-a) out to make boyfriends of three men she's perhaps not suited for. And as she gets closer to something deeply romantic, the movie gets slightly heavier with each subsequent rejection carrying with it a deadlier, more debilitating sting. By the third heave-ho, this unlucky lady is a real casualty of the heart. That's also when the writer-director Kwon Jong-kwan defies expectations and jumps tracks by turning what was a melancholic romance into a humorous revenge fantasy. Gone is the sat-upon sad sack unable to get a guy; in her place is a willful nut job determined to get financially recompensed for the emotional expenditures visited upon her by the choir master (Lee Hyeon-woo), the cop (Kim Su-ro) and the graffiti artist (Kong Yu). Kwon doesn't leave the weightier first half behind entirely though. There's a nice coda too in which our protagonist, a budding authoress, learns that you can't rewrite your past and that love is something best experienced in the moment. Try as we might to define our lives, we're better off just experiencing them.

Spygirl: The Pleasure That Causes Shame

Don't listen to those liars!!! I would never recommend Spygirl to a friend under any condition. It's just a silly romantic comedy filled with pretty young things doing pretty dumb things at the Burger King. (This young cast is so cute that the notion that the "new girl" is the real beauty doesn't actually make any sense. This is what happens when you don't cast ugly people, folks!) Furthermore, you'd have to hold a gun to my head to get me to admit that I laughed at all the stupid antics of the central doofus or cried an actual tear when this selfsame guy massaged the feet of his love interest instead of jumping her in bed. Far from endorsing Spygirl, I'd say this was a slight, reckless piece of entertainment that perpetuates dangerous romantic comedy myths like stalking is cute, klutziness is adorable, and boring people will win you over if they simply persist long enough. That you might see the names of director Park Han-jun, screenwriter Ha Won-jun or teeniebopper Kong Yu in upcoming posts is simply a coincidence. My taste is much more sophisticated. Watching an attractive woman practice her martial arts on bourgeois boors might be fun but it's not enough to make a movie great.