Yellow Door: '90s Lo-fi Film Club: Bong Joon-ho's Beginnings

The greatest artists don't necessarily come out of the academy: Shakespeare didn't go to college. Nor did Basquiat. Nor did Beverly Sills. As for movie director Bong Joon-ho, he may have been enrolled at Yonsei University but his major was Sociology, not Cinema Studies. For his education in his chosen artform, Bong credits the Yellow Door Film Club, a ragtag group of cinephile students who pirated classic movies on VHS and put out their own humble version of Cahiers du cinema. Bong was a member. So was Lee Hyuk-rae -- the director of Yellow Door: '90s Lo-fi Film Club -- who has graciously orchestrated a heartwarming virtual reunion 30 years after the group's demise.

Three decade is a long time but the Yellow Door Film Club clearly had a lasting impact on all its participants, not just those who went on to become directors like Bong, Lee, and Choi Jong-tae or actors like Woo Hyeon and Ahn Nae-sang. Whether they're describing the viewing of Bong's stop-motion short Looking for Paradise or the pirating of classic VHS tapes like Raging Bull, Breathless, and Bicycle Thief, each former club member clearly sees their time with the Yellow Door as a cherished period of their lives. No one glorifies their part in this shared experience. To the contrary, they giddily poke fun at their youthful pretensions and marvel at their scrappy can-do spirit. The collective ethos that informed their efforts may do much to explain why they all look back at the Yellow Door with such fondness. For me, Lee's documentary is more than a portrait of Bong's indie roots. It's also a tribute to those instances during which nerds come together to share a passion and an obsession, without shame.

Walk Up: An Experienced Cast Takes It to the Next Level

What do you look for in a Hong Sang-soo film? Hypernaturalistic acting? Zigzaggy dialogue that feels wholly improvised? Art about artmaking that gets unapologetically meta? A short list of specific actors whom you recognize as auteurial go-tos? A barely veiled unflattering self-portrait of the prolific director himself? If these are your must-haves then Walk Up is a must-see. This episodic movie sketches the lives of the occupants of a duplex by way of a recipe with those exact ingredients.

As a cougar landlady with a predatory vibe, Lee Hye-yeong turns in an especially riveting performance. She's practically licking her chops as she courts a semi-retired film director (Kwon Hae-hyo) -- with whom she may have had an affair -- to be her new tenant; her disdain for his fretful daughter (Park Mi-so), an interior designer apprentice, is no less visible for being nonverbal. All three of these performers have been in a couple of Hong's previous films and their familiarity with his material shows.

Subtext is what makes Hong's movies work. Actors who realize it's not just a matter of delivering the lines in front of a camera that's unlikely to move and start playing the interior world hard, and piling on motives perhaps not in the script, and being in the scene to the max... these are the type of actors who elevate Hong's material to unexpected heights. Fellow Hong alums like Shin Seok-ho as a boytoy and Song Seon-mi as a floundering restauranteur understand the assignment too. When you're willing to commit fully, you'll creatively creatively thrive on camera in a Hong Sang-soo pic.

Introduction: Hong Sang-soo in Brief

Easily one of Hong Sang-soo's shortest features (running 105 minutes), Introduction nevertheless feels distinct within Hong's oeuvre with its black and white footage, relatively large cast, and slightly more active camerawork. Which isn't to suggest that this doesn't bear his hallmarks. It's just that most scenes despite the single shot POV feature more zooms and pans, and even occassionally splice in other material. Introduction also has a young protagonist: a former actor (Shin Seok-ho) with intimacy issues on camera and relationship issues off.

His girlfriend (Park Mi-so) has problems of her own. She's relocated to Berlin to pursue a degree in fashion, her mother (Seo Young-hwa) is a bit of an underminer, and she's been recently diagnosed with uveitis. Unless that last part is a drunk dream experienced by her beau after too many drinks with his mom (Cho Yun-hee), an old actor (Gi Ju-bong), and a cigarette-bumming best friend (Ha Seong-guk). Neither has an easy road ahead. Maybe his acupuncturist father (Kim Young-ho) can help, although he's been known to forget clients with inserted needles behind the curtain. Better to seek assistance from the new roommate (Kim Young-ho) who -- behind the scenes -- is also serving as still photographer, production manager, and script supervisor.

The Novelist's Film: Auteur Means Author

Considering how ubiquitous face masks were during the pandemic's early years, how strange that more movies don't reflect that reality. Were filmmakers afraid of normalizing masks or hoping they'd disappear or fearful a mask would date their movie. Well, their unaffected presence in Hong Sang-soo's The Novelist's Film makes this one feel both more real and more historic; his choice to shoot in black and white only furthers that time capsule aspect. And so because of the masks, The Novelist's Film doesn't feel dated. It feels honest, artsy and archival, a moving counterpoint to the head-in-the-sand approach employed by nearly every other filmmaker. In other ways, however, this flick is typical Hong Sang-soo: The action is grounded in awkward reunions, this time between a writer (Lee Hye-yeong) and a bookstore-owning friend (Seo Younghwa) then that same writer and a movie director (Kwon Hae-hyo)then the writer and a poet (Gi Ju-bong) who used to be a drinking buddy.

The film gets most engrossing once the writer meets a famous actress (Kim Min-hee) but Hong also keeps us engaged by repeatedly throwing in a third character: a sign-language student (Park Mi-so); a visiting cousin (Ha Seong-guk); a non-speaking little girl (Kim Si-ha) who stares through a window. Everything's made fascinating by the masks, too. Remember when we wore them below our chins to talk? or when we couldn't decide whether to wear them? or when we were the only ones wearing them in our group? or when we wore gloves? As a snapshot of history, Hong gets these details right. Eventually, things gets pretty meta, thanks to the entrance of a famous actress (Kim Min-hee). But from start to finish, The Novelist's Film an effective reminder that feature films can reflect life without ever pretending to be documentaries.

In Our Day: Actors in Search of Something

Hong Sang-soo's In Our Day has two parallel storylines: in one, an aspiring actress (Park Mi-so) comes to visit a successful one (Kim Min-hee) who's staying with the latter's possibly alcoholic friend (Song Seon-mi); in the other, an aspiring actor (Ha Seong-guk) drops by the apartment of a newly sober poet (Gi Ju-bong) who's being filmed by a young documentarian (Kim Sunghyun) for a school project. But as the poet states himself: "Life seems to go on without any connection to those reasons." Like many other Hong films, there's a lot of loosely connected dialogue delivered in profile by two characters facing off so sometimes having a triangle of players lends itself to more dynamic exchanges and tableaux. Even an early scene between two friends benefits when a big fluffy cat named "Us" enters the frame.

In that first scenario, the drama finally escalates when Us suddenly disappears, sending the two main women into a panicked despair. In the second storyline, the poet descends back into bad drinking habits when his admirer runs out to get two bottles of soju. As in his other recent pics, Hong takes on the roles of cinematographer, director, writer, composer, and editor. Is it my imagination or as a result is there less music, less cuts, and less varied angles? The result lands somewhere between Andy Warhol and John Cassavetes, with maybe a little of Woody Allen at his more philosophical thrown in — a static pseudorealism that's neither antidrama nor heightened naturalism. For Hong, one of the most prolific Korean auteurs, "maintaining a clear vision may be the hardest thing in the world." He's right. Just ask the poet.