A Crazy-Ass Story

This is a story I heard recently, and one of the rare instances where life smacks us all in the face with its ability to write a romance story. In this case, life proves that it can write a better romance story than Nicholas Sparks any day of the week, minus all that "I write for Jesus," and, "I look like a smart motherfucker on the tee-vee" asshattery. Nature just does it because it goddamn well can.

The year is 1978. The place is South Korea. Actress Choi Eun-Hee is kidnapped by North Korean agents, and her estranged and famous director ex-husband, Shin Sang-ok, goes to look for her and is kidnapped as well. Four years later, in 1982, the new "president" (read: dictator) Kim Jong-Il reveals the impetus behind the pair's kidnapping: to make a pro-communist Godzilla-esque monster propaganda movie.

Now, Best Korea jailing citizens from other countries for who-knows-why and doing god-knows-what to them for fucking-how-long!? is actually pretty common (as far as insane dictatorships go). Most recently in the bad PR record of Dear Korea is the 140-day captivity of Laura Ling, sister of news anchor and national treasure Lisa Ling, for nothing other than well fuck Laura Ling. And if history has taught us anything, it's that evil dictators are not above farming out their propaganda to famous infidels at gunpoint.

The end product of this would be a film called Pulgasari, where a girl bleeds on a doll, which comes to life because, she uh, has magical blood or something. The monster eats metal and grows to biblical size, defeating an evil king in the process. But the monster just can't stop eating metal (iron is to giant monsters as M&Ms are to that chubby kid from The Goonies, apparently). The seemingly lovable creature capitalizes on the metal owned by the peasants it just released from the bondage of serfdom, and finally must be destroyed.

Capitalizes, get it? Like, American capitalist pigs!


If that metaphor was hard to grasp, let's remember that a man who builds gold statues of himself in major cities and has decreed that all citizens refer to him as "Dear Father" wrote and produced the damn thing.

But wait! There's more: the story of the director and his wife doesn't end there, and the tale in whole would make for a fucking insane movie.

Sometime before Pulgasari went into production, Shin and Choi decided to escape, were caught, and punished severely by being throw into solitary confinement for five fucking years. By Sang-ok's account, at times he was forced to eat grass and tree bark just to avoid starvation. Being separated, each decided the other was dead, only to find they were both very much alive when they were taken from solitary and told - forced, sometimes at gunpoint - to finish their movie.

The estranged spouses decided that a life already way too crazy to pass as a movie was a sign from the heavens that they were meant for each other. During a flight layover in Vienna, Austria, the pair tried to escape again and succeeded, complete with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom car chase. Now re-married, Shin and Choi ended up in Reston, Virginia, where they met with the CIA and turned over valuable information on and insight into one of America's most hated and veritably crazy rivals. Shin reportedly said, "There's a lot less censorship than most people think."

On, and did I mention that after all this, Sang-ok went on to a stint as curator of MoMA, judged Cannes in 1994 and directed Three Ninjas under the pseudonym Simon Sheen? Total. Insanity.

Sang-ok died in 2006, and the love of his life lives to this day in Seoul, South Korea. And a last tidbit: why was Super Korea so angry with Sang-ok to being with?

He made a film where a man kisses a woman, thereby introducing the kiss to Korean cinema. Holy fucking shit!

This is the kind of story that deserves the big screen, and I would see in it a heartbeat. Provided Nicholas Sparks doesn't shit all over it first. Or worse yet, if it's directed (read: buttfucked 'til next Thursday) by Tyler Perry.