A girl makes a promise to get closer to a boy that her best friend is in love with. The best friend is sick and needs a heart transplant, which means she has to travel to the USA. Meanwhile, the protagonist gets closer to the boy her friend is in love with, but then she falls in love with the boy’s best friend. And that is just the start of this mess.
I enjoyed this movie for a while, where we follow the protagonist, a little goofball who is easy to like. But it’s hard to like South Korean boys wearing lipstick. Yuck! Those red, disgusting lips are like a magnet to me. I can’t stop watching those red lipstick-covered lips on boys or men. Yuck!
So while I had to sit there and feel nauseated by the lipstick boys, I tried to focus on the story and the charming protagonist. There’s a cute story here with the goofball protagonist, but the actress is awful when she pretends to be upset, and her crying is as bad as the lipstick boys. But other than that, she is charming and cute. I have to say that the actress who plays the sick friend, Roh Yoon-seo, is much better, especially after seeing her in the TV series Our Blues (2022). I wish she could have played the lead role, but that’s too late now, you know!
But it’s not just the disturbing lipstick boys that are nauseating. The movie has that bright-light cinematography that made me check if I was watching a heavenly movie. It’s disturbing when it looks like the two boys wearing lipstick are angels because of the ugly bright light. It’s like watching the scenes through an ugly filter. It’s not the first time I have experienced that in a South Korean or Japanese movie.
The story doesn’t offer anything new either. If you’ve watched a lot of these romantic South Korean or Japanese movies about school, love, and friendship, you will feel at home with this movie. But at the same time, a movie like Hana and Alice (2004), you know, the Japanese movie, is a much better one with a more interesting story about two friends who fall in love with the same boy.
20th Century Girl takes a nosedive and hits the pavement in the last 25 minutes. The ending is awful, and it feels like they ran out of ideas and didn’t know how to end the movie. The ending is so lazily done. It was like I had wasted two hours watching a movie with a rushed ending. If you know how many of these South Korean and Japanese movies end, well, you will not be satisfied with this lazy conclusion. It never stops. These movies are so much alike in the way they tell their stories, so the ending is really important. But how do these movies usually end when time passes and a central character is silent? What do you think? TELL ME!