http://movies.yahoo.com/shop?d=hv&cf=info&id=1807879956&intl=us

Director Jeong Jae-eun's debut feature, TAKE CARE OF MY CAT, is a
slick but sensitive portrayal of girlfriends on the cusp of
adulthood. Hollywood films about recent high school grads tend to
focus on sex, partying, and planning for college. These Korean girls
have their share of fun, but they have critical life issues to deal
with, and the film presents them in a painstakingly realistic way.
The fashionable Hye-joo (Lee Yo-won) is focused on her career at a
brokerage house. She's making a decent living, but her co-workers
look down on her. Tae-hee (Bae Doo-na) is sick of living under the
thumb of her domineering father.

She spends her time doing volunteer work for a poet with cerebral
palsy. Sullen Ji-young (Ok Ji-young) lives in poverty with her
grandparents and struggles to find work. The girls, close friends in
high school, find themselves drifting apart as their adult lives
begin to take shape.

Jeong gets flawless performances from her young cast, as her film
shows how clashing values effect friendships as one grows older.
Visually, she makes original use of onscreen text (and ubiquitous
pagers and cell phones) to shrewdly emphasize the prevalence of
technology in the girls' lives.

This film was included in the 31st New Directors/New Films 2002
series presented by The Film Society of Lincoln Center and The
Department of Film and Media of The Museum of Modern Art in New York
City.

Release Date: October 18th, 2002 (NY-Quad Cinema).

Starring:
Doo-na Bae Yo-won Lee
Ji-young Ok Eun-shil Lee
Eun-joo Lee Tae-kyung Uhm

Director: Jae-eun Jeong
Producer: Gi-min Oh
Screenwriter: Jae-eun Jeong
Cinematographer: Young-hwan Choi
Composer: M&F
Editor: Hyun-mee Lee

--------

Take Care of My Cat (Goyang-ileul Butag-hae)
Sep. 11, 2002
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hollywoodreporter/reviews/article_dis
play.jsp?vnu_content_id=1677985

By Kirk Honeycutt

TORONTO -- Toronto International Film Festival

The South Korean film "Take Care of My Cat" takes the measure of five
female secondary school graduates adrift in the outskirts of Seoul
and the port city of Inchon.

Dissatisfaction lurks in each one's soul, but options and
opportunities appear limited. Unfortunately, the tedium of their
daily existence is all too well expressed in the film's lack of
dramatic urgency and its insistence on scrutinizing the quotidian
with labored intensity. This "Cat" will undoubtedly make further
festival appearances, but commercial appeal outside its native turf
will be slight.

To her credit, first-time director Jeong Jae-eun focuses a youth
picture on young people's hopes, dreams and despair rather than giddy
romance or easy-to-sell violence. But a melancholy tone and
deliberately drab milieu make the 113-minute film a tough sit. Relief
comes mostly from her five actresses, who give strong performances
that expose sharp differences among a circle of close friends.

Fashion-conscious Hae-joo (Lee Yo-won) gets caught up in the busy
turmoil of her job at a brokerage firm. Only gradually does she
realize that she mostly fetches coffee and is advancing nowhere.

The group's moody loner, Ju-young (Ok Ji-young), who first discovers
the kitten that gets passed among the young women, lives with parents
in an aging apartment that is literally crumbling around them.

Pert and somewhat naive Tae-hee (Bae Doo-na) mediates any differences
among her set of friends, but seems lost after high school. The twins
Bi-ryu (Lee Eung-sil) and Ohn-jo (Lee Eun-ju), who are Chinese, are
most cheerful and the least ambitious of the group, seemingly content
to sell trinkets on the street.

Jeong picks apart the young women's lives with gentle but surgical
skill, locating the most telling moments and details to express their
discontent -- a discontent of which they may not always be aware. Yet
a sluggish pace and lack of genuine narrative hem the movie in every
bit as much as life hems in the spirits of these young women.

-------------

TAKE CARE OF MY CAT

By V.A. MUSETTO
October 18, 2002 --
http://www.nypost.com/movies/49414.htm

DIRECTOR Jae-eun Jeong's film opens with five women posing for photos
on the waterfront in the dingy Korean seaport city of Inchon.

Friends in high school, the women are taking their first, tentative
steps into the adult world.

One (played by Yo-won Lee) is off to Seoul, where she's landed an
entry-level job in the corporate world. The others are staying in
Inchon.

Jeong follows the women as they keep in touch via cell phone,
gradually finding that they have less in common than they did in high
school.

The episodic film makes valid points about the depersonalization of
modern life. But the characters tend to be clichés whose lives are
never fully explored.

In Korean, with English subtitles. Running time: 112 minutes. Not
rated (nothing objectionable). At the Quad in Manhattan and the
Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington, L.I.

------

'TAKE CARE OF MY CAT'
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?
f=/c/a/2002/12/06/DD164809.DTL#cat

Drama. Directed and written by Jae-eun Jeong. (Not rated. 112
minutes. In Korean with English subtitles. At the 4 Star and Elmwood
in Berkeley.)

.

In the Korean film "Take Care of My Cat," five young women,
inseparable as teenagers, start defining themselves as adults. In the
process they stumble, make mistakes and lose the closeness they once
depended on.

It's a universal passage, and one that first-time director Jeong Jae-
eun directs with style, an eye for detail and a keen understanding of
female growing pains. "Take Care" is nicely performed by a quintet of
actresses, but nonetheless it drags during its 112-minute length.

Jeong opens her film in the drab port city of Inchon, where the girls
wear the matching uniforms of their school. When one celebrates her
birthday party, the five convene in a glitzy club and then play their
version of "Happy Birthday" by synchronizing the music option on
their cell phones.

Cell phones, in fact, are the primary motif here. There's barely a
moment in these young women's lives -- at work, in bed, on the town --
that isn't disrupted by a ringing phone. It's Jeong's metaphor for
distraction and fragmentation -- social factors that finally pull
them apart -- but we've seen variation on cell-phone overuse in
countless films, and Jeong milks it to death.

Gradually, the Inchon posse splits apart. Hae-Joo (Yo-won Lee) moves
to the capital of Seoul and finds work in an upscale brokerage firm.
Poor girl Ji- young (Ji-young Ok) turns mute after a family tragedy,
spunky Tae-hee (Doo-na Bae) tries vainly to keep the gang intact, and
the airhead twins (Eun-shil Lee and Eun-joo Lee) seem content selling
trinkets on street corners.

Doo-na Bae is the bright spot here. She's the most accomplished
actress of the lot, and she strikes most of sparks in "Take Care of
My Cat" -- which, with "The Way Home," is one of two films opening
today directed by Korean women.

-- Edward Guthmann