Kidarida michyeo

In South Korea, young men have compulsory military service for two years (24 months). This is the story of four separate men who leave their girlfriends behind, and then worry about what will happen to their relationships.

The soldiers return on leaves, and the girls occasionally visit the platoon where they're stationed.

The movie is promoted as a cute comedy, but plays more like an ensemble romantic drama. There are no sexy displays of affection like I've seen in other Korean flicks. Only one of the relationships could be considered comic.

I found the plot confusing because of the quick inter cutting of the different threads, but the acting was realistic enough and the writing was perceptive. There's no hard-hitting message, and overall the movie was an interesting insight into Korean youth culture.

The music was really good too, and at one point you find yourself concerned about whether the fledgling rock band will survive the turmoil.

Here's a scorecard to help you keep track.... In the beginning, these couples are together:

Min-chul (rocker) & Han-na (rock singer)

Eun-suk (college student) & Jin-ah (student & part-time lab tech)

Won-jae (an immature romantic) & Hyo-jung (physiotherapist, six years older!!!)

Hur-wook (certified a--hole) & Bi-ang (house-sitting leech)

also involved are Bo-ram (rock keyboardist) and Ki-sung (one guy's "best friend")

When I was so young, I often lost the direction in love, or more precisely lost in without romantic man-woman love.

This kind of man-woman love to me is much harder than the molecular biology, chemistry, I could understand mRNA, the 4 bases in DNA, and how it expresses to various protein, etc., but I just didn't know the "love".

Fortunately, those wonderful Korea Movie creative talents, script writer, story writer, actors, actresses, director, and whole production crew, made this wonder "Crazy Waiting". In just 2 hours, it solved most of my questions about that kind of "man-woman" love.

Many thanks indeed. So, I supposed, if you happen to be at this moment "lost in love"? Hope this 2 hours would help you a bit. Blessing : )

Apparently, kids in Korea have to attend a mandatory 24months stints as an army, where they have to be away from their girlfriend, friends and families to live in a boot camp during the stints. This film is a portrayal of the kids and about their relationship with their girlfriends. About the changes when they were away from each other for that long period of time.

This film has no central characters, but instead is a collective stories of many characters, intertwined in a jumbled up story. However, this isn't a very hard story to follow, it's pretty simple to grasp the gist of the film, but one may feel like it lacked something because instead of pushing a conviction to the audience, the film left the viewers to relate the story to themselves and how they would want the film to unfolds.

This film shows a glimpse of the youth culture of the Koreans. However, whether is it a true culture or rather just a hyped up culture meant to make this film more interesting, I do not know.

It's hard to give a rating for this film, though. Giving it a high rating would mean that I like this kind of genre, but to give it a poor rating would not justifiable because this film has many strong points, especially the great casting and the mixture of good laugh and sad moments.

It's a personal preference, some may like it, some may not.

South Korean movies are usually quite amazing, regardless of the genre. But of course such a streak is bound to fail, and boy did it fail with "Crazy Waiting" (aka "Kidarida michyeo") alright. I did indeed go crazy waiting for something to happen and for the movie to become interesting.

But it just never happened and I just caved in and gave up 45 minutes into the movie. I turned it off in order to Watch something worthwhile, because this was an epic snoozefest of untold proportions.

The storyline was unfathomably boring with very little happening, and the characters were one-dimensional cardboard cutouts. There was nothing appealing to be found anywhere in this movie.

"Crazy Waiting" was a wide swing and an even wider miss for the South Korean cinema, and this movie will fade into oblivion in a blink of the eye. And I can't claim to say that director Seung-jin Ryoo managed to impress on any accounts with this movie.

From what I managed to see of the movie up until I gave up warrants a mere three out of ten stars rating. And I have no plans to return to finish this snoozefest of a movie.