A Mother's Love: An Actor's Legacy

The great actor Ahn Sung-ki passed away earlier this year. But my, what an impressive body of work he left behind. Who can forget him as the master archer in Kim Sung-su's thrilling Musa - The Warriors (2001) or the heavy drinking journalist in Jeong Ji-yeong's moving White Badge (1992) or the nomadic monk in Im Kwon-taek's brilliant Mandala (1981)? Strictly random examples from the latter part of his career! Looking further back, we realize that Ahn was nearly as good as a five-year-old actor in Yang Ju-nam's weepie A Mother's Love (1958) as he was as a 60-something legend in Kim Joo-hwan's pulpy The Divine Fury (2019), decades later.

The earlier film is pure melodrama: Ahn plays a well-behaved young boy dropped off by his ailing mother (Lee Kyoung-hee) at the home of his married dad (Lee Min) who knocked up his mom during a one-night-stand during the war. Daddy's new wife (Jo Mi-lyeong) isn't immediately taken with her new potential charge, even if she's been unable to have any babies herself. So will she abandon the child at a neighborhood playground or a nearby orphanage? Will she let him stay at the house then depart herself as a divorcee? If she's got any sense, she'll keep him close and stay put because Ahn has an amazing future ahead. Trust me. I've seen a good swath of it.

Good News: Tripped from the Headlines

The central incident in Byun Sung-hyun's gorgeously shot Good News is based on a true historic incident: In 1970, the Red Army Faction, a radical communist organization, really did hijack a Japanese plane with the hope of getting to Pyongyang. That's the kind of source material that has unquestionable appeal. It's easy to imagine it turned into a nail-biting thriller like Argo, a sociopolitical satire like Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven or even a weird, revisionist testosterone-fueled comedy like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. And Byun flirts with each idea, with each direction without every committing to any of them. Because of that, Good News is a series of promises unfulfilled, an ambitious epic people with fascinating characters given half-developed narrative arcs undermined by a major miscaculation on the creator's part: Too much time is spent in the war room deliberating how to deal with this hostage crisis and too little time, on the actual plane.

What a pity. Because on the hijacked 727, Byun has assembled a a film-worthy band of terrorists: an inexperienced leader (Sho Kasumatsu), an unstable second-in-charge (Nairu Yamamoto), even a young boy whose barely out of short pants. They're balanced by a pair of wise-cracking pilots (Kippei Shiina, Kim Sung Oh) supported by a woefully underutilized, in-flight crew. What a movie they would have made! But instead, Byun focuses on the politicians and the negotiators, going so far as to include a preening first lady (Jeon Do-yeon) and a mysterious character named Nobody (Sul Kyung-gu). The hero of Good News turns out to be a lieutenant (Hong Kyung) who comes up with the brilliant idea to reskin a South Korean airport so it looks like North Korea. When that doesn't work as planned, I kind of wondered whether he was the hero after all.

Beasts Clawing at Straws: Survival of the Wicked

"The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means." So quipped Oscar Wilde. And while Wilde clearly didn't have Beasts Clawing at Straws in mind, the 100-something-year-old epigram definitely applies to Kim Yong-hoon's enjoyable thriller. Which says a lot because there are so many bad guys vying for that Gucci bag of cash. Many are psychos: the madam (Jeon Do-yeon), the guilt-ridden lover (Jung Ga-ram), the loanshark (Jeong Man-sik). Others are more like infuriating foils: the foul-mouthed grandma (Youn Yuh-jung) and the jerky manager (Heo Dong-won). Some are just complicated: the indebted call-girl (Shin Hyeon-bin) and the shady customs official (Jung Woo-sung). The only good people seem to be the naive janitor (Bae Sung-woo) and his cleaningwoman wife (Jin Kyung).

If this sounds like a lot of characters, you're not wrong. And they're hardly the only memorable ones. For instance, there's also a cannibal hitman (Bae Jin-woong) who never speaks, and a dim-witted best friend (Park Ji-hwan) who you may quickly write-off as doomed. Yet despite the huge cast, Beasts Clawing at Straws is never confusing or confounding. To his credit, Kim has crafted an intricately plotted crime pic in which your alliances are constanty changing and in a weird way, justice kind of prevails. Granted, in a very twisted manner. Side note: One of the production companies credited at the top is called Artsploitation and Beasts Clawing at Straws more than lives up to that description.

Sword in the Moon: Let Your Guard Down

Fans of Dragon Lee specifically and cheesy Korean martial arts movies in general may complain that they don't make B-movies like those anymore. How wrong they are. For while Sword in the Moon, Kim Ui-seok's new millenium action pic, may have a larger budget, it's clearly hacked from the same cloth. Its plot of palace guard intrigue doesn't have much to impress but who needs meaningful dialogue when you've got swordplay, archery, horseback-riding, breath-holding contests, medieval torture racks, and decapitations alongside screaming, snarling, grunting, bleeding, and glaring. There's even a suicide and gratuitous nudity, although not simultaneously.

This is the kind of movie where if you really like it and are asked why, you might get stuck blabbering about the period costumes (quite good, especially the hats), the cinematography (uneven), and the fact that there's a masked avenger who turns out to be a woman. I definitely thought the scaly leather worn by the soldiers was cool but that hardly enough for me to tell a friend, "You have to see this movie on Tubi!" If however, the Korean producers staged a reenactment weekend and we got to don the ornate battlewear, I'd happily show up for the festivities. Packets of fake blood included.

Tomb of the River: Paid in Blood

This movie has too much stabbing for my taste. There's also plenty of — somehow more acceptable — men wielding pipes but these secondary gangfights always build to a stabbing so the pipe-brawls feel like they're basically teasers for what's yet to come. As to who's killing whom in Yoon Young-bin's jopok joint Tomb of the River, I don't know if it matters. Everyone's playing king of the hill here: power-grabbing Min-seok (Jang Hyuk), slow-witted if loyal Gil-seok (Yu Oh-seong), eternal second banana Cheong-seop (Lee Hyun-kyun), traitorous Mu-Sang (Kim Joon-bae), and the archetypal godfather (Park Jeong-hak) because where would a movie like this be without him. Most of these thugs are going to take one to the heart (via multiple stabs, regardless of rank). Interestingly, the best standoff ends up being a fistfight between two secondary henchmen. Kapow!

After the majority of ToTR's riffraff gets offed, the central conflict looks as though it might shift from gang versus gang versus gang to dirty businessman versus dirty cop. No such luck. The primary detective (Park Sung-Geun) has verbal swagger but can't walk the talk. A sleazy businessman (Song Young-kyu) enters the game late and leaves early. Stab, stab, stab. The body count is high. The final face-off takes place between exactly whom you'd expect: two well-dressed hoodlums. The underlying question turns out not to be whether the good bad guy or the bad guy is going to come out on top. It's whether there's really any difference when you're building Asia's biggest casino right before the next Olympics.

The Great Flood: Rain, Rain, Go Away!

An asteroid has hit earth. There's flooding. There's rain. There's less panic then you might expect. Will anyone survive? Weepy Dr. Gu (Kim Da-mi) has a shot since the robots are focused on rescuing her and shooting her into space. But if humanity must depend on this scientist to survive then we might be better off extinct. Gu has been doing work on implanting emotions while the robots have been working on making human bodies. Time for teamwork, in theory. But how empathetic is our heroine? When disaster strikes, she seems pretty quick to pass by other people to save her child which is, as she knows, a robot. Other kids in need? Pretty much a passing concern. An elderly couple in an apartment? Not even worth a second thought. Looks like Gu is ensuring the future of robotkind, not mankind. Valid to some.

The robot child (Kwon Eun-sung) isn't esppecially endearing. The special effects, I mean the tsunamni-level waves, look unlikely to survive. Not that this is real life. It's a movie. Or a video game. Or an apocalyptic fantasy (with antiquated walkie-talkies) intended to appease the A.I. overlords? Their representative here, bossy — none-too-bright Hee-jo (Park Hae-soo) — has been sent by some agency to ensure she survives, or maybe to ensure they survive, or maybe to forge a bond. He claims he can't feel emotions so I'm unsure how to interpret his irritability. System malfunction? Or how so many people can hold their breath underwater for so long. Or how a cellphone can survive extended time underwater. Or the idea that guns are the answer. Or how many lives I'd have to live to get it right. (It's a relevant thought related to Kim Byung-woo's loopy scifi movie that I won't explain because... Spoiler: Deja vu.)

Recalled: Amnesia - Past, Present, and Future

In the movies, it never bodes well when a rich woman (Seo Ye-ji) wakes up in a hospital with amnesia and doesn't recognize her dashing, mysterious husband (Kim Kang-woo). When you find out this married couple is planning to emigrate from South Korea to Canada very soon, your suspicions are heightened. This man is not to be trusted. When he says to his wife, "You didn't take your pills," you want to scream at her: "Do not take that medication, girl!" When he says, "Let's forget everything and leave," you want to say, "Run, bitch, run!" And yet you can't. So she's left to her own devices, while having intense visions that leave her deeply shaken.

Are they delusions? Premonitions? Remembrances of her own damaged past? Neither we nor she can be sure. Two detectives (Park Sang-wook, Bae Yoo-ram) investigating the potential domestic violence flagged by the team at the hospital from which she was discharged are uncovering the truth as quickly as they can. Can these two cops work fast enough? Can she put the pieces of the puzzle together herself? Writer-director Seo You-min wants to keep us guessing: Who did it? What did they do? Why did they do it? Where is this going? And what kind of medicine's been prescribed? Is being psychic a side effect? Side note: I gather she's an heiress... but to what? Where are her people? Surely, she has a personal assistant who could provide some moral support and a reality check...or pencil in any time traveling.