The importance of this movie is that it is one of the few romance movies for men. Also, it is a story about the life of a print writer, when everything is going online. Be aware that there is an imaginary character who shows up sitting next to the leading man in an airplane and the character has a guitar theme song to introduce him in the movie. Do not be thrown off by all of the imaginary scenes in the movie. The "real" characters are all re-cast in the leading man's imagination.

No one's written a review yet, so I'm compelled to. The Korean film industry has turned out some great stuff in recent years. Though "Love Fiction" doesn't go at the top of my list (that's reserved for "My P.S. Partner," with the inimitable Ji Sung),it's still a smart, quirky, funny film.

We get to know the characters well--a writer with a serious romantic streak and the woman he falls for at first sight. They're original characters, though we don't get to know the heroine (played by the awesome Gong Hyo-Jin) as well as the hero. We follow the beginning and first year or so of their relationship in a meandering way. Sometimes the unfocused plot delivers marvelous, hilarious scenes, like a really unforgettable funeral service and the best discussion of female underarm hair ever. Other times it doesn't seem clear where we're going or if we're going anywhere. And perhaps we aren't: the denouement is abrupt and feels inconclusive.

The hero is a writer whose detective story protagonist sometimes appears and converses with him. This conceit works well, especially since this imaginary mentor has a habit of quoting the great European writers of the nineteenth century. (Werther comes up a lot. How can I not like a movie that keeps mentioning Young Werther?) What works less well are the scenes set entirely within the hero's hard-boiled detective novel. Luckily, the visits to imagination-land are short.

The mood of "Love Fiction" is more comic than romantic. The unusual secondary characters and the laid-back style give it a slice-of-life vibe. It doesn't deliver an emotional punch or much narrative tension, but you'll remember the oddball characters.

This is an ok film. When I was young I used to find movies like this very cool, I would have loved it. But now that I'm old I can only see it as pretentious nonsense, it tired me to watch and the sheer banality of the self centred musings of a pretentious writer made my blood boil. I guess I'm tired and impatient. To be honest I don't like writer characters, it's been done. Naturally the young Gong Hyo-jin is majestic and beautiful, but she's limited here to be the pretentious writer's muse who happens to embody the girl in the (writer of the) writer's imagination, a pretend girl that acts and says her lines on cue as the foil for his clever ripostes. I apologise. So it seems eight stars is too much but its merits warrant eight - because it's hardly fair to review a film years after it was made and for Gong Hyo Jin's appearance, it's interesting how she seems to have assimilated a few of Ha Jung-woo's delivery mechanisms and made then her own to great effect in other works (or maybe it's the other way round, he copied her?) - based on this movie alone, I guess they were an item (Googles out of curiosity... yes, probably).

P.s. Is under-arm hair a taboo in Korea, what's the big deal?