Sirk's trademarks were bright primary colors, often framing his stars in bright colors against bright cyan skies.

He kept the lighting neutral, not often using it for dramatic effect, thus forcing the drama and focus to always be on the actors and their voices. His plots always centered on possibly real people of different classes and backgrounds attempting to co-exist and survive and a world that didn't care what you were or what you might become.

Sirk might well be totally forgotten today, his 3 major hits occasionally turning up, but in the 80's a brash, strident playwright wrote critical pieces on Sirk, considering his films to be the epitome of the film art, and film to be the epitome of art.

Fassbinder's writing was so persuasive and the films he would subsequently make so potent that he was responsible for the term "Sirkian" entering the lexicon.

Fassbinder made some of the great films of the 80's, all of which cadged extensively from Sirk both thematically and in style.

One of Fassbinder's best films, "Ali: Fear Eats The Soul" was merely an adaptation of Sirk's, "All That Heaven Allows". The major telling point in both being the way a family and the community reacts to an older woman seeking sex and then love, a love that appears, at first, to be an empty product of sex. (You need to remember that, as it is also a central theme in "You Are My Sunshine".)

Regrettably I can't read Korean. Even being a native Angelino with a lot of friends in Koreatown, can't give me any insight to why, from the outset, Korean movies so carefully ape the films of Douglas Sirk. In a few of the gangster films like "Old Boy" and "Bittersweet Life" there are strong hints of Fassbinder but overwhelmingly most Korean movies are eerily Sirkian!

"You Are My Sunshine" is a good movie, atypical in a lot of ways. It explores similar themes to "Christmas In August", "Birdcage Inn" and even "Spy Girl". The only irksome thing about it was the sudden rush to proclaim this a true story. If a film director can't convince me that a story is real then why should I bother watching?

"You Are My Sunshine" almost seems like another remake of "All That Heaven" allows, but retold for a more modern audience and for a different culture.

Aside from the readily apparent similarities (the iconography of the two giant yellow balloon men and the vivid primary colors worn by the actors until they descend into hell) there is one scene that truly jumps out, when the farmer calculates out how much he figures a coffee shop girl makes in a month and then goes and delivers the cash to plead with her to not make anymore deliveries, the camera angles used are identical to the ones used by Sirk when Dorothy Malone confronts Robert Stack in "Inherit the Wind" and the scene is played in tone to equate to Fassbinder's self starring "Fist: Right To Freedom" when he tries to buy the cute rich boys love with his lottery cash.

The similarities are too close to the surface to be happenstance but so ingrained and organic that it just conceivable that Sirk and Fassbinder had converged with the Koreans on to the universal best way to tell these sort of stories.

Aside from the film history lesson this is a good movie. Highly entertaining and giving a brilliant insight into human relationships, into humanity.

The climax is soul searing but the denouement side steps some important issues, which seemed odd in a film that until then had been so committed to exploring the whole truth.