Seoul Searching

SEOUL SEARCHING is not a great film about Asians. It's a great film, period.

I stumbled on this film browsing Korean movies on Netflix and thought I'd give it a shot. It's an 80s teen comedy that follows a group of Koreans who have grown up in different countries, coming together for a "culture camp" of sorts to learn about their Korean heritage.

As one born in the same year as Director Benson Lee and having been raised in the west coast of the United States, I fully appreciated the homage to John Hughes films and the BRILLIANT soundtrack. I was positively thrilled/comforted to hear it, especially the Jesus and Mary Chain, Erasure, and that long lost song by Q Lazzarus.

Think Breakfast Club meets American Pie meets Korean drama. Silly but surprisingly able to pack in a lot with good amount of heart.

Based on true events, Seoul Searching appears to be a film full of 80s tropes and wild teens, but becomes much more through the telling of writer and director, Benson Lee's, own experiences at a camp in Seoul. With a serious introduction that is quickly forgotten as the characters are introduced, the movie seems like simple drama surrounding teens' antics, but there's more than the bad boy and Madonna-crazed girl.

Seoul Searching uses a trusty America formula for crude and silly comedies: a bunch of misfits are forced into a summer school where they start off misbehaving and end up sorting out their deep-seeded issues (especially parental resentment). But it takes place on a backdrop of Korean history, as the country transformed from a battle-bruised state bent on industriousness into a generation that's more welcoming to Western culture.

This movie was so good that i literally just created an imdb account to rate this move. Wish more people knew about this movie.

I've seen a lot of bad Korean movies but this one is very very good.

In an attempt to have foreign-born teenagers become reacquainted with their native culture, the South Korean government developed a summer camp program complete with lessons in language, calligraphy and martial arts (to name a few). Based on a true story, director Benson Lee introduces us to the 1986 class of misfits comprised of the punk (Justin Chon), the princess (Jessika Van), the ladies man (Esteban Ahn), the conservative (Teo Yoo), and the racist military brat (Albert Kong), all of whom are under the guidance and supervision of Mr.