New Year Blues: More Than a Couple of Romances

At first, New Year Blues doesn't look like your typical, traditional, ensemble romcom: When paralympian snowboarder Kim Rae-wan (Teo Yoo) proposes to horticulturist Han Oh-wol (Choi Sooyoung), he pulls out one of the ugliest engagement rings I've seen in quite some time. And yet... maybe that's intentional. After all, flashy diamonds aren't what love's all about. Travel agent Oh Yong-chan (Lee Dong-hwi) and his Chinese bride-to-be will learn that when his company's embezzled by a new employee. Divorced Detective Kang Ji-ho (Kim Kang-woo) will learn that while enforcing a restraining order for physical therapist Lee Hyo Young (Yoo In-na).

In true fictional feature fashion, all the stories are interconnected: Lee is Kim's rehab go-to and Kang has been assigned to Oh's criminal case. Even the one outlying story involving the recently dumped Min Jin-ah (Lee Yeon-hee) who flees the country for a last-minute holiday trip to Buenos Aires has loose ties to the other stories. Are their narrative narrative improbabilities? Of course. Would a Korean tourist in Argentina really hop on a Vespa driven by an old man who just happens to play the washboard in a cafe band? I doubt it. But I still shed real tears as everything started to come together in the end. There's something lovely about a man getting a pep talk on relationships from his exwife and a bad google translation bringing two future sister-in-laws together. (Nice work, Yeom Hye-ran.) And it's hard not to embrace the feel-good sentiment underlying director Hong Ji-Yeong's final images. "Next year let's be happier than this year."

Holy Night: Demon Hunters: Aerobic Exorcise

"My honey loves his exorcisms," my bofriend says to me. And he's right. I'm an easy one to please when it comes to movies about spirit possession. Which means I'm definitely the target audience for Holy Night: Demon Hunters, a film in which Ma Dong-seok (b.k.a. Don Lee in Hollywood) clobbers Satan's minions with well-aimed punches and his sidekick videographer played earnestly by Lee Da-witt faithfully records the fisticuffs for posterity. The true hero of Lim Dae-hee's directorial debut, however, is the silver-streaked Sharon (Seohyun of KPop sensation Girls Generation) who can instinctively smell out evil and has mastered the tried-and-true rituals for getting those nasty devils to leave their human hosts, without ever damaging her manicure.

Per usual, holy water stings, voice registers drop, youthful faces decompose, and rooms turn ice-cold as Sharon frantically works to get the parasitic spirit to confess its name in order to banish the ghoul back to hell. Also per usual, a loved one -- in this case, the devoted sister (Gyeong Su Jin) of the victim (Jung Ji-so) -- almost foils all these efforts as she battles her own personal biases as a neuroscientist and her naivete as a bewildered sibling. Even the subpar special F/X feel on brand, although simply turning the camera upsidedown is more silly than scary. As a fan of the ridiculous, I have no notes to give. And my boyfriend watched the whole thing with me, suggesting some simple pleasures have a diabolically broad appeal.

Even If This Love Disappears From the World Tonight: Heart Memory

Initially, Kim Hye-young's Even If This Love Disappears From the World Tonight seems remarkably like Adam Sandler's 50 First Dates: A peppy, upbeat young woman (Shin Si-ah) with anterograde amnesia embarks on a romantic relationship with a nerdy young man (Choo Young-woo) despite her being cursed with a memory that gets reset every morning. Naturally, since this soapy sad romance is from the land of K-dramas, the Korean version of this story has a major additional complication: The nerdy love interest has a life-threatening heart condition!

In short, this isn't going to build to a conventional feel-good romantic ending. Memories are made: a trip to the aquarium, a cruiseship under the fireworks, an afternoon of spicy noodles. But will any of those memories last? Sure her best friend (Jo Yoo-jung) is saving all the videos, photographs, and diary entries but can a recording ever be a true substitute? How about a sketchbook full of pencil drawings? Well, as the boyfriend's chronically depressed dad (Jo Han-chul) puts it "As time goes by, everyone's memories start to fade but what remains in your heart never changes." He's a widower so he should know.

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.