Fabricated City: Player One Ready or Not

A compulsive, unemployed video game player (Ji Chang-wook) gets framed for a murder. Sounds fun! Except Fabricated City also has a nasty prison rape and terrifying jailhouse beatings as well. Too real for you? Well, our falsely convicted young man is a former Tae Kwon Doh champ who can MacGyver a dart-thrower behind bars and protect his pressure points when under assault — as one sympathetic murderer keenly observes. Too preposterous? Okay, then you're really going to recoil when our ill-fated hero gets visited by the dead! As for me, Fabricated City is my kind of movie!

Strategic self-mutilation, ingenious jail-breaks, alternate online identities, intricate crime syndicates, and (finally) a cop who isn't trigger-happy... The juicy details keep piling up, including an adorable black couple who have come to Asia to backpack and bless the fugitive with a "shit car" before getting on a plane for happier trails. Yet for all its gloss, director Park Kwang-Hyun's crime thriller isn't mere escapist fare. Screenwriter Park Myeong-chan — an early collaborator of Park Chan-wook — has crafted a script that's making critical commentary on gender roles, universal surveillance, institutional power, and technology with every twist of its incredibly twisted plot. The final comeuppance is over-the-top, beyond the scope of the believable, even ludicrous, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Fabricated City is a fantasy of retribution (executed by a sweet group of misfits) against all the systems that routinely fail us.

Turandot: Popera From the East

The Korean movie Turandot has infinitely more to do with Broadway musicals than Puccini operas but it does call to mind those PBS specials (of both realms) in which live productions are recorded then televised for mass consumption. As such, choruses stand around idly when the principals sing; leads also hold poses in anticipation of their first lyric when a song begins. As someone who's spent a good amount of time in the theater, I don't mind these static moments but someone expecting an experience akin to Chicago or Cabaret might easily feel otherwise. But for those game for a Live From Lincoln Center-style experience...

Turandot (Bae Daehee) is a princess who heartlessly reigns in a kingdom of darkness; Prince Calaf is the heir of a neighboring realm brought to this doomed land by the search for his missing father. How Ping (Lim Choon-gil), Pang (Kim Dae-han), and Pong (Park Jung-pyo) came to be there, I've no idea. There are riddles to solve; marriages to propose; and ballads to croon or belt as the situation requires. The singing is universally strong. A little research suggests that South Korea has a deep interest in musical theater and with former K-pop stars Bae (Vanilla Lucy) and Yang Seo-yoon (The Pink Lady) among the cast, writer-director Kim See-woo's production has no shortage of vocal talent. I enjoyed some of the sparkly crowns as well.

The Witch: Part 2 - The Other One: Here We Go Again

I was thoroughly entranced by The Witch: Part 1 - The Subversion, a crazed mashup of evil scientists, ruthless assassins, and rebellious teens whose adolescence has been uniquely challenging. Yet even though The Witch: Part 2 - The Other One has all those elements to a degree, they're neither as prominent nor as playfully done. Writer-director Park Hoon-jung basically assumes we already know that Dr. Baek (Jo Min-soo) is a mad scientist; that the protagonist (Shin Si-a) is the counterpart to prior heroine Koo Ja Yoon (Kim Da-mi); and that a whole military industrial complex is funding the creation and the elimination of these two women warriors. What The Witch: Part 2 is missing, frankly, is a reason for being outside the introduction of a new character.

Luckily for us, this cinematic universe remains pretty entertaining. Once again, the set-up is a Davis versus Goliath story. Our poor nameless waif is being chased down by genetically engineered and genetically enhanced bounty hunters who are thirsty for mutant blood. There are a couple of narrative snags, like why go after your prey with weapons you know she's survived in the past when you could increase your chances of overpowering her if you simply doped her during one of her many food-binging episodes? But the history of humankind abounds with people making obvious mistakes over and over and there's nothing to suggest that the characters in The Witch: Part 2 are smarter so much as faster, stronger, and wilder than regular Joes. The people of the future are total animals.

CCTV: Someone's Always Watching

Now that we carry our phones wherever we go and sit at desks topped by computers with built-in cameras, our activities and whereabouts are pretty much monitored from dawn to dusk. Is paranoia inevitable? Or has this technologically invasive element turned us into performers 24/7? Either way, the news crew in CCTV is having a particularly rough go of it this particular day because their on-the-job recordings are being invaded by a murderous spirit, recalling the station's sordid past. Which seems to have little influence in inhibiting them from committing various distasteful acts within the workplace, supernatural be damned.

Indebted to The Ring (possessed videos), The Blair Wood Project (found footage), Poltergeist (soul-swallowing televisions), The Exorcist (demon possession), The Sentinel (whited-out eyes), and Terror Train (New Year's Eve setting), writer-director Kim Hong-ik's low-budget horror flick can come across like a skeleton assembled from random bones. The action — appropriately perhaps — takes place in some in between time where staffers work on cell phones and paper notepads with nary a laptop or USB drive in sight. And despite the murders piling up in the newsroom, everyone's hesitant to call the police. No one trusts authority. Not in this building! How can they when there are so many backstabbers around that you're hardly surprised when one character (Kwak Do-won) gets stabbed in the eye. The takeaway: Trust no one. Even if they've got the evidence on a VHS tape. (Which is another way of saying, I didn't buy this movie's late-in-the-game whodunit explanation.)

Seire: Murphy's Law for Babies

In Seire, superstitions aren't necessarily true but believing in them certainly shapes behavior. The big taboo in Park Kang's horror flick is doing anything unusual or untoward in the first few weeks following your baby's birth. Apparently, going to a funeral or — heaven forbid! — a burial can have disastrous consequences: Every apple you slice in half will be rotten to the core; your infant is going to get a sudden fever; you're going to start committing petty crimes — even stooping so low as to rob a homeless man in the streets. And then there are the nightmares.

Seire isn't exactly frightening but it does disturb. Because you sense that our antihero (Seo Hyun-woo), the young father who disregards the old school houserules of his wife (Shim Eun-woo), treated his last girlfriend (who he got pregnant) pretty abominably. I wouldn't go so far as to say that the suffering his infant child undergoes is karmic justice but you don't feel bad that the man's life is going to seed. Seire doesn't make the supernatural feel real, even if the presence of twins does conjure up our sense of natural wonder — especially when they look so alike they have to be played by the same actress, Ryu Sun-young. Instead, it makes a suspected power palpable... which can make for a good movie, too. Can you build your plot around suppositions, hallucinations, and bad dreams? Based on Seire, I'd say, "If you like."

My Name Is Loh Kiwan: Tough Life

You think you have it rough? Consider the life of Loh Kiwan, a North Korean refugee (Song Joong-ki) who flees with his mother to China, only to flee again on his own to Brussels where he's got no friends, no family, and very little money (which he loses soon enough). To stay he's going to have to prove his nationality but how do you do that exactly when your country of origin doesn't share birth records and your first second home has its own bureucractic complications compounded by the fact that you were — by necessity — living a secret life. There's more. You can't get a legal job. You don't know the language so you can't argue on your own behalf. The first non-governmental person you make that also speaks Korean is a pretty drug addict (Choi Sung-eun) with a criminal history and a massive debt tied to it. Still think you've got it rough?

I've lived in a bare-bones SRO with not much money to my name; I've survived off a diet of hotdogs, cornflakes and alcohol but I've never been this alone, this dependent on the kindness of strangers, this out of my element. Thankfully, there are some kind strangers out there: a Chinese-Korean meatpacker (Lee Sang-hee) and the father (Jo Han-chul) of the woman who stole his wallet then his heart... Sure, they're flawed and make his life worse at times but when there's so much bad in this life that taking the bad with the good isn't so bad because at least it comes with some good. My Name Is Loh Kiwan made me appreciate my life. It also made me appreciate some people's ability to salvage a stylish wardrobe from the discard bin.

Moon: True Blue, Not True

As of March 2024, South Korea has yet to send a spaceship to the moon but given that other countires have — the U.S., China, Russia, Israel, and India — I don't know if I'd classify Moon as science fiction so much as a speculative drama. In short... What if Korea sent three men in a rocket intended for a lunar landing but then it exploded? Then what if history repeated itself again, except the second time one (Do Kyung-soo) of the astronauts was the son of one of the old ones? As an added twist, you could always have the primary advisor (Sol Kyung-gu) be associated with the earlier disaster, too.

Director-writer Kim Yong-hwa doesn't stop there either. For drama, he adds meteor storms, a moonquake, an unhelpful, unsympathetic clique at NASA, and an arty bloody nose in which red globules float around the space capsule, gravity-free. The dialogue is largely descriptive: the astronauts describe what's happening as we see it; the space team on earth describes what they're seeing; the news reporters describe what's just happened. A Korean-American administrator may emerge as the closest thing this movie has to a hero; the white guys are definitely the enemies. It's hard to like people who have to be told, "Forget his nationality for now!"

Escape from Mogadishu: North and South Alliances in Africa

Aside from BTS and Bong Joon-ho, most Americans probably don't consider South Korea a major player on the world stage. As for North Korea, they've been designated as a longshot threat run by an insane leader with a hot temper and nuclear weaponry. I don't know if such hierarchical political views of the earth do us well. We all occupy the same planet and wars between two nations can assume global importance soon enough. Israel and Palestine, anyone? In truth, the conflicts, genocides, uprisings and dictatorships concern us all. As Toni Morrison once put it: "The function of freedom is to free someone else." If we're not moved my the decimation in the Middle East, the Democratic Republic of the Congo or the Ukraine, how civilized are we really? And so, a movie like Escape from Mogadishu, about South and Korean diplomats working together to find safe harbor amid a civilian rebellion in Somalia has plenty to say about governance, negotiations, police brutality, children with guns...

As the South's Ambassador Han, Kim Yoon-seok is morally slippery but well-intentioned. His stoic ounterpart Ambassador Rim, Huh Joon-ho brings a respectfulness not always accorded the neighbors from the North. (Each has a hot-headed assistant played by Zo In-sung and Koo Kyo-hwan respectively.) Once the two sides team up (seeking assistance from Italy and Egypt, not the U.S. and China by the way), Ryu Seung-wan's historical drama really gets cooking. I don't know whether the fleeing Koreans really wrote blood types on their children's arms or bulletproofed their cars by duct-taping hardcover books on the hood but it sure leads to one of the most exhilarating getaways in recent memory. Which isn't to say the survivors have escaped everything. Not by a long shot. And that acknowledgment makes Escape from Mogadishu not just good but very good.

Sinkhole: The Kids Are Far From Alright

Kim Ji-hoon's Sinkhole is a disaster comedy with one serious problem: The script introduces two children among the various residents who live in a doomed tenement about to get swallowed up by the earth then, like the other characters sharing their subterranean fate, abandons the kids for too long. I, for one, spent a lot of time impatiently waiting for the building's super (Cha Seung-won), the newest tenant (Park Dong-won), and two housewarming guests (Lee Kwang-soo and Kim Hye-jun) to stop griping about cell phone service and mud-covered chicken and to start searching for the two forgotten young boys, trapped in the basement parking lot with a senile grandma.

And unlike this director's previous — and highly gratifying — disaster pic The Tower, Sinkhole in undermined by jokes that never click, a love story that feels contrived, and muted tension buried under terrible CGI. Also, I realize that you have to cheat a little with lighting in a movie in which a half-dozen people find themselves submerged, miles below the earth's surface as few sun rays or moonbeams would reach them. But do you have to have your imperiled survivors scrambling around on what looks to be a multi-story stage-set? In which case... "Curtains!"

Past Lives: Seeing Yourself on Screen

Much is made of representation in the media for gays, women, POC, et cetera but you don't hear about it so much when it comes to interracial couples. And it's not like I can't think of examples in film: Anna Deavere Smith and Bill Irwin in Rachel Getting Married; Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner in The Bodyguard. Neither of those movies explored the relationships in racial terms, however. The ones that do — Loving, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner — often do so to the exclusion of everything else. Which makes Past Lives something special. For while the relationship between playwright Nora (Greta Lee) and her husband Arthur (John Magaro) isn't the central story, writer-director Celine Song does take the time to show the frictional sparks, related to the cultural divide as experienced by this married couple.

But Past Lives is much more than that. Something akin to a parable about what happens when your childhood crush (Teo Yoo) reappears in your life not once (digitally) but twice (the latter, in person). As you might guess, the results are poignant, passionate, and ultimately painful. For confronting the past (which inevitably contains the dreams of youth, and a look at our earlier, less corrupted selves) isn't easy. Any adult, whose done the internal work, isn't going to throw everything over to try to recapture what never came to be. But there's a cost that comes with this maturity, one which Past Lives details exquisitely.

Indian Pink: Bloodstains on Your Collar

It's not hard to tell something's up with unscrupulous businessman Dong Seok (Kim Hyun-joong) early on in Indian Pink. He's irritable on the phone with his best friend; he squeezes a glass shard until his hand draws blood. Then in case we haven't figured it out, he unsuccessfully drowns his sorrows in drink. What follows, for the first third at least, is really a one-man show, a monologue (with phone calls) masquerading as a movie, a nightmarish mishmash of regret — nay, remorse — for a tragic action that only the slowest of filmgoers won't figure out. Even the false, fantasized memories that constitute the flashback in the second act are easy to dispel, in part because ex-girlfriend is not particularly believable. Perhaps that's intentional?

Once all the cards are laid on the table, writer-director Kim Seewoo doesn't have that much more to explore. Nefarious business deals still get made; a friend/associate becomes complicit in the crime; suicides are attempted and aborted; bodies must be disposed of; and our villainous protagonist is already on the hunt for a new girlfriend. So why does Kim Seewoo's psychodrama feel more lukewarm than chilling? Despite all the bloodstains on white linen in Indian Pink, this flick doesn't make much of a mark.

Deadly Kick: No Good Ninja Goes Unpunished

The best parts of director Ko Young-nam's and star Lieh Lo's martial-arts pulp-pic Deadly Kick are definitely when it gets strange: the scenes in which the anti-hero channels/hallucinates animals during battle; the plucking out of eyeballs or intestines; the blind woman's fight-training sequence replete with superhero uniform and a girl with directional sleigh-bells. In the long stretches between those bits of weirdness, the movie leaves us with little: a pair of overactive eyebrows and absurd moments like when one guy holds a pair of panties to his nose then comments "smells better than whiskey."

Outside of that, the action — which ranges from convoluted syndicate machinations to drunken nipple-nibbling — is infrequently amusing, frequently preposterous. What should make for drama, does not. Take the film's airborne assassins who can't quite hit the one moving car with their machine gun or their hand grenades. Not even when the car runs out of gas. Not even when its passengers are on foot. Because then helicopter runs out of gas, too. And if the movie itself isn't quite a gas, what it does have is one delicious fake mustache (on Bobby Kim, once known as the "Oriental Charles Bronson") and a couple of "school project" torture devices. At least, it's set in the '70s so there are aviator sunglasses for everyone!

Badland Hunters: Ma Dong-seok Survives the Apocalpyse

Everytime I see the words "co-produced by Netflix" (or words to that effect) in a Korean movie's opening credits, my heart sinks a bit. Having worked at a TV network that meddled detrimentally with their shows, I feel qualified to detect inept input — often about making things a little less strange and a little more generic. In martial artist-turned-director Heo Myeong haeng's Badland Hunters what might've been an above-decent zombie movie arrives instead as a fright flick that looks like a video game. And so, like most shooter games, this action pic reveles in bullets to the head, exploding skulls, blood splatters, and bones cracking. Players — I mean, characters — recover from injuries in record time while most of the people onscreen are scenery.

I don't know whether to blame leading man Ma Dong-seok (a.k.a. Don Lee) or bless him for Badland Hunters. He's definitely the film's saving grace, dominating every scene with a prime Bruce Willis persona that relates equal parts worldweariness and bemusement. He's also, like the title of his earlier film, Unstoppable. Whether his opponent is a body-regenerating mutant or a mad scientist with a machine gun, this loveable lug never blinks an eye. They have an arsenal, he has a butter knife? No problem. He's going to make them sorry they thought they had a chance. The human-testing in the post-apocalypse ends here!

Jazzy Misfits: Unbound Relations

Director Nam Yeon-woo's decision to pair an accomplished older actress (Jo Min-soo) with a TV rap star (Cheetah) pays off big time in the wonderfully silly mother-daughter comedy Jazzy Misfits. For while Jo chews up the scenery as a volatile, negligent, alcoholic mother who comes out of the woodwork only after her younger other child (Choi Jisu) robs her of the rent, Cheetah (a.k.a. Kim Eun-young) more than holds her own — outside her effectively deadpan reactions — via extended cuts of her crooning in the nightclub and at the recording studio. As such, these two convey deep emotional realities in different mediums: acting and music.

They're surrounded by a rich cast of characters, too: the mom's former suitor (Jeong Man-sik) who's now a policeman; the local food courier (Terris Brown) who's crushing big time on the singing daughter; and a random white tourist whose unexpected parkour skills hilariously come into play in the movie's best chase scene. With drag queens, lesbian girlfriends, gay tattoo artists, a trans bar owner, a sexy, shirtless downstairs neighbor, and a crewcut Heo Jung-do (from the addictive Kdrama My Demon) as a cheerful sound mixer in over his head, Jazzy Misfits is never anything less than ebulliently screwball.

The Last Princess: Elevating Royalty

There's a pretty powerful disclaimer at the start of The Last Princess: "Incidents and persons portrayed do not reflect historical facts." So then what are we to believe about Yi Deokhye, the subject of this biopic? Was she a royal rebel who bravely snubbed the Japanese emperor's dress code and rallied fingerless Korean workers to rise up against their Japanese oppressors? Did she try to escape her gilded cage and get back to Korea as an act of solidarity with her countrymen? Was she the first to discover the assassination of her father, the king? In truth, much of Hur Jin-ho's costume dram is conjectural; it's a pro-dynastic movie posing as a pro-resistance message. Considering the history we do know, for now I'm okay with that.

And Son Ye-jin makes a convincing princess, struggling to balance her patriotism with her desire to survive. She's got few people in her corner: an adoring servant (Ra Mi-ran), a couple of ineffectual brothers, and a soldier-spy (Park Hae-il) who also doubles as her devoted, sexless romantic interest. She's also got an evil Korean Benedict Arnold (Yun Je-mun) whose sole mission in life is to be her foil, derailing every attempt she makes to escape, to evade, to exalt. As fantasies go, if The Last Princess has any faults, it's that this heinous henchman never gets his just desserts. Director Hur may see this dark detail as a bitter dose of reality. Since so much is already made up, I'm not gonna quibble here. Finally, if Hollywood were more open to performances in foreign tongues, Son's lead turn would definitely have qualified as an Oscar-bait — as she ages from 20s to 70s while screaming, crying, looking fashionable, looking nervous, and ultimately going insane. I was crazy about her in the best way possible.

My Paparotti: Sing Out, Louise

Who you watch a movie with — or who you encounter any type of art with — can have a major impact on how you experience it. I remember hearing a casette of "Everything That Rises Must Converge" with my mother in the car after a particularly tense exchange between the two of us and let me tell you, Flannery O'Connor's bleak short story about an estranged mother and son has probably never had a pair of more attentive listeners — destination forgotten. Happily, my viewing of Lee Jong-chan's feel-good comedy My Paparotti was a less emotionally wrought exchange. To the contrary, this cinematic success story proved effervescent when seated beside by boyfriend who corrected subtitles, mimicked opera singing, and encouraged all my sentimental reactions.

So let others roll their eyes at this underdog saga of a young thug (Sung Yoo-bin) whose passion for singing provides a way out of "thug life" and under the prickly warm tutelage of a disillusioned teacher (Han Suk-kyu) whose music career was derailed by some ill-timed tumors on his vocal cords. And for anyone ready to dismiss this film outright as fantastical nonsense, know this: My Paparotti is based on a true story! Characters like the bossy high school principal (Oh Dal-su), the kooky love interest (Kang So-ra), and the brotherly, middle management mafioso (Cho Jin-woong) may register as pure cartoon but real life has a place for exaggeration, too, especially when it makes you feel this good.