Welcome to 25 for 25 my project to watch and eat my way around the world in 2025 with 25 movies from 25 countries matched with 25 country themed dinners. Today’s entry is South Koreabut you can see the full Masterlist to watch and cook along with me.
Country: South Korea
Movie: 바르게 살자 [Going by the Book]
Director: Ra Hee-chan
Year: 2007
The Elevator Pitch: The newly promoted chief of the Sampo City Police makes the department stage a fake bank robbery wherein Do-Man, a by the book cop, gets selected to play the robber. His commitment to the role causes chaos.
How Was the Movie?: This was a surprisingly cute film. I actually thought it would be a lot more action but it was mostly a “bottle episode” until the very end. The film is never boring though, there’s quite a lot of colorful characters and jokes are liberally sprinkled throughout. I wasn’t super impressed with the film in that I don’t feel like there was a lot to take away from the film but that might be because it’s a remake of a Japanese film.
The worst part of the film is that the man character does not particularly get developed. Despite us spending the majority of time revolving around him I still managed to feel like I didn’t really understand him at all. Almost all the characterization for him comes from other people telling us what he is like while we watch him pretend to be someone else and I don’t think this is super effective actually. In a more careful script that could be interesting but in this one the main character ends up as a kind of odd empty vessel for other peoples ideas of how a good police officer should be.
The music in this is also terrible. It had a couple of really notably bad spots where it was so bad I thought about muting the movie. And it trades in a lot of stock characters and stereotypes.
Despite all that I would probably recommend this film for a really light watch, it’s silly and easy going but the number one thing it did is make me want to watch the original because Korean and Japanese police have very different issues and methods. This wasn’t ever going to be a movie that drilled down into the issues with the police force in South Korea but I wouldn’t have minded at least some lip service to that instead of this. Oof, this accidentally sounded very negative, I swear this was a very cute movie!
What was for Dinner?:
We are so lucky to have two actually very good Korean takeout places in Tallinn and I’d never tried this one before but I’m super glad we did! We got Cheese Chicken Galbi, (Chicken) Jeyuk Bokkeum, kimchi and danmuji. Personally I’m not a huge fan of cheese chicken galbi because I find it oddly sweet and a little weird but I do love jeyuk bokkeum which is just the right mix of sweet and spicy with just enough kick that you can’t eat it forever. I don’t like kimchi because I find it too sour and bitter but my husband loves it. What I do love is danmuji (which I think of takuan still, sorry Korea). I don’t like regular pickled radish anywhere near as much but danmuji has a better balance of sweet and salty, it’s nowhere near as acidic as most pickled things.
Obviously this was all delicious and there was some japchae on the side as well. I feel like in the future I’ll have to make jeyuk bookeum myself because it’s easy and delicious 🙂
For dessert I made hotteok which are fried yeasted pancakes filled with brown sugar and nuts and there is nothing, absolutely nothing that humanity likes more than a fried bread or a filled dumpling and this is basically both at the same time and a dessert so it was absolutely fantastic. I would definitely crush the almonds I used much finer next time but this was super easy and delicious and the recipe actually made only 6! A manageable amount for two people! These were really good heated up in the microwave the next morning so that the filling got gooey again.
That’s it for South Korea, see you next in Serbia!