That was an excellent one.

recommended

I have absolutely never seen anything like this movie before. You have to see this movie.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Friend This is the course of friendship over a twenty year period. Beginning in 1975 we watch as four friends spend some time on what appears to be a summer vacation. Their future looks bright. A few years on as school and life takes its toll the dynamic between them changes and re-changes again as the have to deal with growing up, shattered dreams, decent into crime and drugs and the friendship itself. This is a dark little film that reminded me of some of the work of Martin Scorsese. Life often beats on these guys, from cruelty from their teachers to murder making it hard to get by. The course of these boys lives is not clear nor does it always turn out how we, or they think it will. The cast is excellent from top to bottom. Definitely worth seeking out, though be warned some of the violence has a tough edge to it.

I am surprised and encouraged by the quality films I've seen out of Korea. Chingoo is a touching first-person story about 4 boyhood friends and the way their lives unfold from carefree boyish cluelessness to the inevitable.There are flashy, chaotic,violent films like Pulp Fiction which become instant cult classics because they are not chaotic at all, but crafted immaculately. But the characters in Pulp Fiction are just that- unreal, comic-book lowlives who inadvertently display a few human characteristics while going about their destructive, pulp-fiction lives.Chingoo comes from the other direction, although it too is crafted superbly. No flash. Instead of the cool junkie Vincent portrayed by John Travolta, Joon-suk ably evokes a glimpse of the personal hellworld of addiction...and later wryly comments that he found the will to clean up after he saw he was losing ground in the gangster corporate hierarchy. Very much the CEO material. Yes, he coulda been a corporate contendah….and 500 years earlier he would have been the Korean equivalent of a Samurai daimyo…if only..These are real human characters growing up in a society that is rigidly disciplined, yet dynamic- and their paths take them literally on an escalator of fate to adulthood with just a whimsical struggle of will by Joon-suk, the protagonist, the main toughguy. He evokes the late Lee Strasberg's famous line from The Godfather, "These are the lives we've chosen," in the stolidity with which he accepts the horror of being a gangster. But he's a better man than the Godfather or the Pacino Godfather. He shows loyalty goes both ways.Thirty minutes after Pulp Fiction, you're hungry- in fact, there's no story to digest at all. It's a fairytale as it intends. Chingoo sticks to your ribs (spoiler pun) by building real characters and taking real themes and hinting at issues that torment great men. Unfortunately, the film is true to the clime, and there are no great women characters. I suppose that's true of the Godfather too. Gangsters just aren't chick-flick material.Chingoo delivers a supposedly autobiographical story by the director which tells me yet again that life is stranger, realer, better than pulp fiction. Well worth viewing.

Last year, "Chin goo (AKA Friend)" became the highest grossing film in Korean history, surpassing the highly acclaimed "Joint Security Area" and "Shiri". Many observers were curious as to the secret to its success. Was it because of the gangsters? the actors?The main reason for this movie's phenomenal success was the fact that is was a very good movie about male friendship. In Korean culture, friendship between guys is a very strong relationship. Especially in the city in which the movie is set - Pusan - loyalty and sacrifice for friendship is seen as a very important part of honour.In this movie, friendship is tested to the limit from beginning to end, as the movie's two main leads (Yoo Oh Sung and Jang Dong Gun) grow from being teenage rebels to big-time gangsters. The catch is, when they grow up, they become very different types of gangsters. One becomes a JOPOK - equivalent to the Korean Mafia, respected by the Korean people for sometimes punishing bad people. And the other becomes more of a thug gangster who kills and steals for fun.The direction is excellent, but the acting is the element which holds the film together as a whole. The two leads are two very different actors. The first, Yoo Oh-Sung, plays the Mafia gangster and has a very tough-as-nails look and uses method acting skills. The second (arguably Korea's most popular actor right now) chews scenery with Chow Yun Fat-like charisma and striking looks.if you enjoy gangster movies or movies about friendship, this will be a dream movie for you

Epic tale of paths that diverge only to be reunited again at some critical moments, "Chin Goo", or "Friend" was a blockbuster at homeland Korea, and one can tell why. The story is attractive: the choices that four friends take on their lives, and the way we end up paying dearly for our mistakes and weaknesses. The construction is somehow western, which has attracted the audiences, all I can say is that I have not seen this movie, but felt it within me. Great comic timing, moving and powerful moments, great, great, GREAT actors, and master directing by an emerging director, Kwak Kyung-Taek, which shows signs of great potential in the future. Loved it all the way, hope to get the DVD as soon as possible.