On October 8, the 14th Pusan International Film Festival, or PIFF, opened in Busan. (Yes, the city takes a different official spelling than the film festival. Blame inconsistent Romanization.)

As the largest film festival in Korea, it drew a large list of attendees, as you can see from the long list of red-carpet walkers. It was definitely a star-studded opening night, and even included one familiar Hollywood face (Josh Hartnett).

This year’s PIFF features its largest lineup to date, screening 355 films from 70 countries, and closes on the 16th.

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Joining the club of 2009 blockbusters is the currently screening film Take Off, also called Ski Jump or National Athlete [국가대표]. The sports comedy starring Ha Jung-woo, Sung Dong-il, and Kim Ji-suk has been buoyed by favorable word-of-mouth buzz and has pulled in over 7 million viewers since its July 29 release. It also picked up six awards at Saturday’s Chunsa Film Festival, including Best Picture. This is director Kim Yong-hwa’s follow-up to the romantic comedy 200 Pound Beauty, a sleeper hit that brought in 6.6 million viewers.

Such is its success that it has also announced a re-edited version (akin to a director’s cut), also to be released in theaters, with material that promises additional fun and laughs that been cut out of the original. (That’s not surprising, since the original run clocks in at 137 minutes.) These added parts feature 15 more minutes of Ha Jung-woo’s storyline involving his search for his biological mother and his memorable first encounter with the eccentric Lee Jae-eung, as well as a new-and-improved version of the film’s opening Olympic sequence with enhanced graphics (7 minutes longer than the first version). The new version is called Take Off: The Complete Version and opens on September 10. (This creates the somewhat unusual scenario of an original and its re-edited version screening in theaters concurrently.)

Meanwhile, the Ha Ji-won and Sol Kyung-gu disaster film Haeundae, which opened the week before Take Off, has now brought in more than 11.1 million viewers, beating Silmido (11.08 million) on the list of biggest box-office Korean films of all time. Its performance to date puts it into fourth place behind The Host (13 million), The King and the Clown (12.3 million), and Taegukgi (11.74 million).

Via Star News, Yonhap News

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Back in 2006, Jang Geun-seok was a baby-faced, 2119-year-old actor transitioning into more adult roles in the hit KBS sageuk drama Hwang Jini, which starred Ha Ji-won as the famous gisaeng. (Okay, he’s still baby-faced.) Three years later, he has admitted to an old crush on his noona co-star back when they played mutual first loves in that drama.

He made the confession at the taping of an upcoming episode of KBS’s Entertainment Weekly, in response to the question, “Have you ever fallen in love while filming?” He answered yes, saying, “When I was filming Hwang Jini, I had a one-sided crush on Ha Ji-won noona. … She’s so beautiful and kind that a person can’t help but fall for her.”

He also named Lee Byung-heon as the actor he’d most like to be like, explaining, “I’m envious of Lee Lee Byung-heon, who displayed such unforgettable acting in the movie Bittersweet Life.”

The segment airs on the August 29 broadcast of Entertainment Relay. Jang Geun-seok’s latest film, Itaewon Murder Case, opens on September 10.

Via Now News

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“With Lou Gehrig’s disease, your conscious mind remains active while your muscles deteriorate, but for me, I found that as I kept losing weight, my consciousness became equally paralyzed.”

Actor Kim Myung-min recently took on the challenge of portraying a patient gradually worsening from ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, in the upcoming melodrama film My Love By My Side [내 사랑 내 곁에]. On August 24, the cast of the movie gathered at the CGV cinema in Apgujung for a press conference.

Much has been made of Kim’s dramatic 20kg weight loss (mostly accomplished while he filmed the movie, losing the weight to correspond to his character’s deteriorating health). Kim admitted what he found the most difficult aspect of filming: “In the latter half, I had to become increasingly immersed in the emotions of the character, but because I was constantly exhausted, it was difficult to become absorbed in the acting.”

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Wow. We’ve already heard that Kim Myung-min (Beethoven Virus) would be losing a significant amount of weight as he filmed his latest movie, My Love By My Side [내 사랑 내 곁에], but the end result is even more startling than previously noted.

You can see how gaunt he is in these new posters for the movie; in order to play a convincing Lou Gehrig’s disease patient, he lost more than 20 kilograms over the course of filming, which translates to approximately 44 pounds. And considering that his normal starting weight was around 160 pounds, that makes his final number under a worrying 120 pounds.

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