Boys of Tomorrow: Brothers With Issues Galore

It's the first day of shooting. Your cinematographer is there. So is your production hair stylist. So is your cast, including hotshot Ahn In-yoo (who's been building a rep on TV) and co-star Kim Byeong-seok (who you worked with on your last movie). The catch is you're missing the latest draft of your script. You'd planned on having the actors learn their lines quickly to get an improvisational feel but now you've realized that the pages you've brought along with you are a very much earlier version. You decide to forge ahead. Then at the end of the day, you watch the dailies and think, hmm, this is interesting. Not good or bad so much as odd. You're intrigued. You decide to continue with this undeveloped material. Admittedly, the female characters are woefully underwritten. Sure, the dialogue is absurd at times like when a prostitute is asked to describe a ring, and answers, "It's round." But there's something about the misshapen aspect that intrigues you. At least for awhile.

About halfway through the film (which you've titled Boys of Tomorrow, in part because the two leads look like they're ready to join a K-pop band), you realize that this isn't really working. That part about a guy losing his testicle because he got kneed by his brother as a kid... Preposterous. That church scene during which the hyper-religious mother begs the mobster who stole her home to stop employing her mentally unwell son... Implausible. But what can you do? Will you resurface the subplot involving the older brother's dream of being a drummer who plays on the beaches of The Maldives? Can you possibly get any additional traction out of the younger brother's obsession with buying a real gun with bullets? Tough questions.

Plus, the sad fact is that this particular early draft was abandoned for a reason. There's no third act, so to speak. So what are you going to do? Well, there's always that urinating motif that's surfaced a few times. You could bring that back in the climax in a really denigrating way and then make one more reference to it in a kind of "road movie" coda. You recognize, it's not a great idea but you just want to finish this movie and move on. At least that's how it felt to me. Then again, I'm not writer-director No Dong-seok.