Korean Grindhouse

Yoga Hakwon: Horror Stretches in an Expected Direction

2012-01-28T17:12:00.001-05:00

I've always found it infuriating when people carp, "I love yoga except for the spiritual part. I wish they'd get rid of that chanting." But maybe I just didn't understand. Maybe it wasn't the God stuff that was bothering people. Maybe it was yoga's Satanic undercurrents. Yoga Hakwon has now set me straight. A horror movie about a secret yoga practice that promises one lucky student per class the gift of "ultimate beauty," the movie cannily targets the superficial people who take yoga for vanity's sake, not for their soul's salvation. You want a soulless version of yoga? You got it, bitch!

To be the prettiest graduate in this particular week-long intensive, however, is going to take serious work. The five women enrolled at Mi-hee's seclusive, exclusive studio -- as well as their enimgatic, dictatorial instructor Na-ni (Cha Su-yeon) -- are all really pretty and really limber. Plus they're going to be asked to make some major sacrifices right off, like relinquishing their cell phones, refraining from snack foods, and not looking in the mirror every other second for seven days. They must also resist the impulse to take a hot shower within an hour after their last class. Sound easy? Well, it's not. We're talking impulse control, habit breaking, and downward facing dog.

Inevitably, everyone will succumb to temptation in one form or another. Binging will earn the twitchy one (Jo Eun-ji) boils all over her body; a poorly timed shower will drive the arrogant one (Kim Hye-na) to deepthroat a snake. The youngest two (Hwang Seung-eon and Park Han-byeol) are dragged offscreen, presumably to Hell, because they can't stay away from their own reflections. Ah, youth! As for Hyo-jeong (Kim Yoo-jin), the cell-phone user who's just lost her job as a home shopping spokeswoman for lingerie, she's let off easy. She actually graduates and meets the institute's ageless beauty Mi-hee (Lee Hye-sang) -- a former actress who's career ended with the talkies but who still looks absolutely fantastic. Yoga is the key to eternal youth, you know...if you combine it with Devil worship.

Director Yun Jae-yeon's Yoga Hakwon has a pretty cool ending. After struggling to escape the institute and reunite with her adorable if underpaid boyfriend (Choi Daniel) who happens to be making a documentary about Mi-hee's longtime director Kang Hee-jong (Jeong In-gi), Hyo-jeong finds herself released from the institute and walking through a subway station where she encounters rival students that she's were dead. Is she crazy? Is she possessed? Is she stuck in an alternate world that's basically hell? Only a sequel could tell us for sure.

Turn It Up to 11: The Rise of Galaxy Express and the Ruin That's Tobacco Juice

2012-01-21T18:43:00.000-05:00

This movie belongs to the losers. Which isn't to say that that anyone who watches the rockumentary Turn It Up to 11 will think that Tobacco Juice, the talented punk outfit constantly sabotaging its opportunities, is a better band than the infinitely more successful Galaxy Express. They're not. There's a reason why Galaxy Express went from being a house band in a small club in Incheon to winning the Best Rock Album of the Year for Noise on Fire at the Korean Music Awards in 2009. They look better, sound better, and rock a hell of a lot harder than Tobacco Juice. It makes sense that they'd be the ones to make it big. If someone told you that national sales of guitars shot up by 16% after Tobacoo Juice first appeared on television, you'd roll your eyes. When the same is said about Galaxy Express, you don't doubt it for a second.

Even so, your heart goes out to Tobacco Juice because there's something about the "almost made it" story that feels a lot more familiar, a lot more human, than the "breakthrough into fame and fortune" story that's being told right alongside it. The broken dream is the common dream. Reality isn't glamorous. Throughout Turn It Up to 11, Tobacco Juice's smaller successes feel a lot more poignant if a lot less exciting. Consider the closing moments of their CD release party (which takes place at the Ruby Salon nightclub that also launched Galaxy Express) which attracts just 100 people. At the concert's end, the group's lead singer and inveterate drunk Kwon Ki-wook bows down and rests his head on the floor of the stage where he bursts into tears. That's really an astonishing reminder of how much it takes from your soul to even be a failure in the world's eyes. Shortly after that, the film flashes back to Tobacco Juice recording a secret track for their CD, a private performance that may be the most heartfelt bit of singing in the pic. You wish Kwon and his bandmates the best. Galaxy Express doesn't need your sympathy!

The irony is that the film, which presents the guys of Tobacco Juice as sloppy, lazy and immature (by their own admission), is directed and shot by the group's own drummer, the nearly invisible Baek Seung-hwa. Given how uncomfortable these guys often look on camera, you get the feeling that they know full well that Baek isn't the type to flatter them or make them look any better than they actually are. If anything, he's cultivating their image as rejects. "The evil king of losers," producer and Ruby Salon owner Lee Gyu-young says of the band. Hey, if you can't rule the world, aim for something smaller. Your cult following today could turn into millions tomorrow.

Yongary, Monster From the Deep: Godzilla Looks Korean, Speaks English

2012-01-14T22:51:00.000-05:00

If you saw the end of the world was at hand, what would you do?

A. Drink yourself into a stupor.
B. Thrash wildly in a lasciviously lit nightclub.
C. Gorge yourself on barbecue.
D. Run down the street with a panicked crowd while balancing a steel bucket upon your head.

Yongary, Monster of the Deep presents all these options but personally, I think when Armageddon arrives, I might just stay home and watch a trashy monster flick. If there's anything that uplifts my spirits and makes me feel slightly superior, it's a good, old-fashioned B-movie with a giant lizard rampaging through a built-to-scale model city devoid of people and populated only by toy tanks, toy cars and toy helicopters. That it's dubbed in English, speaks to the universal need we feel to find simple answers to world-class problems. And what a number of solutions present themselves! Which leads us to our next question...

How would you combat an unstoppable, ginormous reptile that spits fire, shoots laser beams and growls like a dinosaur?

A. With missiles that look like big tubes of lipstick.
B. With an ammonium precipitate concocted in my private lab.
C. With a laser beam that's both a toy and quite deadly.
D. I wouldn't. I'd leave that to my boyfriend and watch him kill the silly old thing!

While each of the above approaches is used, a ten-year-old brat named Isho is actually the one who figures out Yongary's Achilles' heel through careful observation, made peeping around corners or from under manhole covers after running through the city's sewers. He's also the one who feels some sympathy for the creature when Yongary comes to a spastic, bloody end. You see the two have bonded through the magic of dance. Young people understand what's really universal. As to Yongary, here's the final question...

What's the difference between Yongary and Godzilla?

A. He's Korean.
B. He's got a horn on the tip of his nose.
C. He drinks oil and gasoline for his energy drinks.
D. All of the above.

Muoi: The Legend of the Portrait: Seeing the Bad Side of Things

2012-01-07T17:08:00.000-05:00

Way back when, some time before the widespread use of electricity but after the invention of acid, Muoi (Anh Thu) -- the tenth-born child of a very poor family -- had the great misfortune of falling in love with a man named Nguyen (Binh Minh), a handsome, young swain with a gift for portraiture and a talent for womanizing. Both skills came into play when Nguyen decided to seduce Muoi while painting her picture. One mission accomplished (the seduction), he abandoned the other (the picture) and hurried off to resume his romance with a richer, former love. Back home, this original girlfriend (Hong Anh) caught wind of Muoi and decided to break her rival's ankle and throw acid in her face, as a way to let her know "You don't mess with my man!" Muoi took revenge by killing herself then returning as a ghost with a bone to pick. Nguyen then tricked her ghost into becoming an artist's model again so he could finish her portrait. Then some priests entered banging on gourds and Nguyen stabbed the picture to trap the evil spirit inside. End of legend.

Unlike me, the character Yun-hui (Jo An) thinks this story has the makings of a really good novel. Her last book, a thinly-veiled pseudo-memoir called Lies and Secrets, did pretty well but not so great that she's worried that Seo-yeon (Cha Ye-ryeon), the friend who she mercilessly defamed in it, would have read it since moving to Vietnam. So Yun-hui stays with Seo-yeon and asks her to help research the book. Hallucinations follow as part of the creative process. Eventually, Yun-hui realizes that even if you've betrayed your friend, who far from being a slut was videotaped -- being raped -- by the guy you have a secret crush on, you still have to kill your friend if she's possessed by a demon.

How does she knows there's a ghost at work? Well, a doorbell rings in the middle of the night right after a shower goes on mysteriously. That's one sign. Wallpaper uncurls off the wall in her bedroom, and lights flicker when there's a storm outside. Those are two others. Admittedly, they're not conclusive evidence, but fueled by the gossip of Seo-yeon's co-worker (Hong So-hee), who's half-Korean, half-smirk, Yun-hui doesn't let loose logic or a lack of lucidity get in the way of her mission. Her ex-best-friend may not be the kleptomaniac slut that she made her out to be in her mud-slinging roman a clef, but Seo-yeon did have the nerve to dance with that passably attractive white guy at the bar who Yun-hui had her eye on. Some betrayals can't be forgotten, no matter how many shots of Black Label you consume. Bring out the daggers!

Sweet Sex and Love: To Penetrate Is To Bore in Softcore

2012-01-01T01:30:00.000-05:00

I admit it. I just watched a porno movie. Mind you, Sweet Sex and Love doesn't know it's pornography. It thinks it's an art film because it never shows genitalia and has its two main characters come to a melancholic end. (Grief would be too dramatic!) But any flick that shows this much pheromone-sweating skin in this many Kama Sutra positions is a skin flick. Let there be no bones about it. So while there's execrable dialogue between the various bonks in bed rooms, living rooms, kitchens, public and private restrooms, and cars with sunroofs in the middle of a rainstormy night, plot still takes a back seat to penetration and product placement for underwear.

As to the steamy story, apparently the big hump that the two horn-dogs have to get over in their relationship is her resistance to anal sex. Well, some problems even a good handful of lube will never solve. I suppose when your bond is built on fornication, that inability to take it like a man is as good as any reason to throw in the towelette. Being forced to swallow someone's ejaculate on a long bus ride could be another. Cheating with an ex-boyfriend who's about to get married would be a third.

It's easy to see why these two aren't destined for the quaintly creaky S&M dungeon of a brothel-turned-retirement-home. Their attraction may be intense -- and physically rewarding -- but it's also completely superficial. When the tough times rear (and "tough" means sex getting more coercive and post-coital dialogue growing more passive-aggressive), the only memories they have to fall back on inevitably grind on each other's nerves. Visions of your partner's butt are unlikely to keep you invested when your lover turns out to be a pain is the ass. "I'm a sex machine and hung like a horse," says Dong-ki (Kim Seong-su). "I'd grown bored with his penis," says Shin-a (Kim Seo-hyeong). "People this hot and this shallow simply shouldn't be happy," say I. With me, director Bong Man-dae seems to agree.

Despite its racy, just-shy-of-XXX nature, Sweet Sex and Love tarnished neither of its lead actors' careers nor typecast them as sluts. Kim Seo-hyeong went on to major roles in reputable scary pics like Black House and Voice, while Kim Seong-su resurfaced in even better fare: The Red Shoes and Monopoly. Not art exactly. But much closer. Does anyone know if Korean film has a casting couch?

The Best Korean Movies of 2011 (Sort of)

2011-12-27T23:08:00.000-05:00

For me, 2011 was a year of thrillers, providing me with at least one heart-pounding high per month. But since this is a top ten list, not a top twelve, thrillers that could've made the cut (Tell Me Something, My Friend and His Wife) got axed, especially since Im Kwon-taek's small-moments, big feelings Hanji and Kim Ki-duk's oddball musical Breath refused to be elbowed off. Herewith the top ten Korean movies I saw in 2011...

1. The Man From Nowhere (2010): It's not a better movie than Lady Vengeance -- nothing is -- but I was so deliriously happy watching The Man From Nowhere (hot loner protects young kid) that I can't stop myself from granting it the top slot. Me = Irrational. Movie = Sensational.

2. Lady Vengeance (2005): Watch a Park Chan-wook revenge fantasy, experience Korean filmmaking at its best. As a brilliant vigilante racked by guilt, Lee Yeoung-ae gives the most memorable performance of the year in the role of a lifetime.

3. Going by the Book (2007): A heist movie that isn't a heist movie -- it's a comedy about a bank robbery simulation gone awry -- ends up the smartest heist movie you'll ever see. For me, a star was born in Jeong Jae-young who plays the muddle-headed mastermind.

4. Another Public Enemy (2005): Deep inside I have a secret need for martial arts movies. Another Public Enemy takes care of that need while also delivering a top-notch police procedural drama. In short, director Kang Woo-suk, lets you get your combat fix with good plot.

5. I Saw the Devil (2011): To catch a serial killer you have to think like a serial killer which means you end up just as crazy as a serial killer. In this case, you might even have to get a little crazier, since those serial killers can sometimes work in tandem. I saw it. I loved it.

6. Hanji (2011): Could anything be more boring than the process of traditional paper-making? Hey, don't judge so quickly. Im Kwon-taek's drama about the seismic shifts that happen in people's lives when they brush with the historic is nothing short of sublime.

7. Secret Love (2010): Pure, unadulterated noir, from its kinky sexed-up storyline -- a woman in love with identical twins -- to its final denouement -- one sibling survives against all odds. What starts like a woman's movie ends up as everyone's guilty pleasure, especially mine.

8. Blades of Blood (2010): No one does this kind of sweeping, Shakespearean medieval tragicomedy like director Lee Jun-ik. Blades of Blood might not be as good as The King and the Clown but it's a perfectly entertaining fable nevertheless.

9. Breath (2007): Oh, Kim Ki-duk, you never cease to surprise me. Here, you're experimenting with the musical by having a jilted spouse sing karaoke to a man on death row that she doesn't even know. Somehow, it works!

10. A Better Tomorrow (2010): John Woo's original pic about two brothers and a best friend who fight each other and bad guys is a classic of Hong Kong cinema. Time will tell whether Song Hae-sung's remake emerges as a classic for Korea, too.

Click here to see the top ten Korean movies I saw in 2010.
Click here to see the top ten Korean movies I saw in 2009.
Click here to see the top ten Korean movies I saw in 2008.

Rainbow Eyes: A Gay Thriller That's Not Gay Soon Enough or Thrilling Long Enough

2011-12-26T16:30:00.000-05:00

I've seen a number of great thrillers this year, which puts Rainbow Eyes at a disadvantage. For while it's gorgeously photographed, energetically edited and possessed of a sensationalistic storyline that starts off with the murder of a gym owner (who may or may not have been gay), Rainbow Eyes falls short of the high-wire tension that ultimately makes a great thriller so thrilling to watch. It's just good! Part of the problem is the way the gay subject matter is handled. While much is made of the secret sex lives of some characters early on, Rainbow Eyes initially feels a little shy of peeking behind closed doors, even as it flashes every dirty detail it can of the actual crime scene. So while the quick slicing of fingers off a hand will make you gasp, the constant repetition of "Is he or isn't he?" will leave you exasperated. Rainbow Eyes would be a hell of a lot better off stating outright, "He is!" then going for broke with gratuitous displays of homoerotic antics in the locker rooms, steam rooms, and weight rooms. Talk about a series of lost opportunities!

Although prudishness ultimately gives way to salaciousness (thank God!), the shift is shockingly quick. It's like we go from a murder mystery about closet cases in a secret society to a transgender revenge fantasy acted out against a military backdrop with gay prison rules. Far be it from me to underestimate homophobia in the armed forces or the persecution of the LGBT across many subcultures -- Hey, I've been bashed myself -- but the way Rainbow Eyes relates oppression to sexuality causes me to raise a well-plucked eyebrow. No one really thinks homophobia in the army is caused by closeted gay men who leave their fatigues behind to run queer nightclubs. No one thinks transgendered people pursue sex changes to work out vigilante fantasies either. Racy? Yes, Rainbow Eyes is that! It's campy too with a priceless performance from Oh Ji-yeong as Mi-sook, the nightclub singer who always looks like the cat who swallowed the canary. In its own weird way, as out of touch with reality as Rainbow Eyes may be, it does feel as though it were written by a certain type of gay man who thinks every hot man is a repressed homosexual, every out gay man is a flaming queen, and every sympathetic woman is a fag hag. Naturally, the most beautiful lady in the room is a man in drag with a manicure destined to blow her cover.

But if Chelsea boys are writer-director Yang Yun-ho's intended audience, this movie needs more sweaty exposed flesh at the gym and some humping of the non-heterosexual variety, ideally involving eye candy Kim Kang-woo, who'd look best brooding out of uniform...completely.

Missing Person: The Unreal World of a Real Estate Agent

2011-12-25T07:19:00.000-05:00

For the heck of it, let's look at Lee Seo's sharp-as-a-dagger indie pic Missing Person in canine terms. For what is Won-yeong (Choi Moo-Seong), the bullying, gum-snapping real estate agent, around whom much of the action swirls, if not the quintessential alpha male dog. He's got a pack of obedient mutts awaiting his commands at the office and three bitches -- his wife (Kim Seon-yeong), his mistress (Kim Ki-yeon) and an underage groupie (Baek Jin-hee) -- available for mating purposes. And to continue the metaphor, there's also a mongrel lurking at the periphery of his pack: Gyoo-nam (Kim Gyoo-nam), a clearly undomesticated dog, kind of looking for a master and kind of not.

Gyoo-nam -- who with his eerie, dead stare, emaciated face, and diminished IQ really does feel more animal than human -- is this movie's wild card. At first, he comes across as a heartbreaking, low-level masochist, willing to let Won-yeong leash him and beat him, eating dog food from a dog bowl with his own dog at home... But that isn't the whole picture. Sure, Gyoo-nam identifies with his four-legged friend, but in one troubling, almost-but-not-quite-comic scene, he extends the role-playing a creepy bit further by hand-feeding some dried pellets to a young boy who's part of a gang of kids who've been harassing him. That unsettling interaction is the first indication that Gyoo-nam isn't just the town idiot with a subservient complex. He's a cagey creature, studying his master, and looking to create his own pack, which he's actually doing pooch by pooch by assembling together dogs he's kidnapped and found in the woods and on the street. Won-yeong may not take Gyoo-nam too seriously when he coaches him in perfecting the killer stare and the art of baring his teeth, which for the record are rotten, but Gyoo-nam does. He takes it very seriously.

In the quirky subculture of dog owners, people know each other by their dogs' names. I mention this because some of the characters in Missing Person are as easy to remember by their pets' names as their own. Bok-soona's owner, who loses her spaniel while doing a hula hoop in the park, never really gets an identity outside of grieving pet-owner, while In-ae is as much Suji's mistress as she is that of Won-yeong. When these two women lose their dogs, they're understandably devastated. It goes without saying that dogs can quickly become part of a family. In a way, Missing Person warns us that in a dog-eat-dog world, you treat your fellow man as a dog at your own risk when you forget that dogs are human, too.

The Recipe: None of the Ingredients Needed for a True Romance

2011-12-24T10:19:00.000-05:00

Is it really that unusual for a man, about to be executed for heinous crimes, to long for a simple dish like a bean paste stew in his final moments? Choi Yoo-jin (Ryu Seung-Ryong), a none-too-bright TV reporter at DBS, evidently thinks so he pulls out all the stops -- favors from his friends at the police force, extensions of deadlines from his rightfully skeptical boss, even conferences with the dead -- in order to find out the recipe behind this mystical dish. For the record, the ingredients are pretty specific: soy beans that have been grown with pig manure and spring water found under a lacquer tree to name but two. And Choi is committed to getting every single one of them, even when they get esoteric (like the vibrations of crickets) and sickeningly sappy (like tears).

Those tears are caused by the foiled romance of two cute-as-a-button artisans: stew-maker Hye-jin Jang (Lee Yu-won) who reeks of soy beans and wine-maker Kim Hyeon-soo (Lee Dong-Wook) who stinks of booze. Together, rumor has it, they make a delightful smell. Or at least they did when they were alive. Sadly that memorable combination of odors is no more as these two lovebirds never got to get married and make a sweetly scented baby to carry their patented mix of soy and wine forward into the next generation. You see, he got whisked away for an arranged marriage in Japan just as she was going to cook him up something sweet and tasty to eat. If you didn't get a whiff of what's coming next, let me tell you straight: He ends up drowning trying to get back to her by ship; she gets killed in a car wreck that's one of the stranger instances of euthanasia on record. Just try to sniff back the tears.

I'm not sure what the big pay-off is here for Choi. He neither makes a bowl of orgiastic soup that tastes of nirvana on earth nor has a ratings-smashing special turning him into a food network superstar now that he's uncovered the story behind the dish. It's hard to picture him finding true love for himself with the batty shop-owner (Lee Yong-nyeo) who's always wearing curlers. It's equally hard to imagine him getting promoted at DBS. Maybe he sells the story to director Lee Ann so she can spoonfeed the sentimental dreck to us here while he runs off with one of that movie's extras, a pretty young actress more concerned with trinkets and baubles than a bowl of fermented soy that smells like flowers and childhood and ultimately, poop.

Going by the Book: A Heist Movie in Theory

2011-12-18T07:10:00.001-05:00

I've seen actor Jeong Jae-young in a handful of movies -- as a crafty merchant in the epic The Divine Weapon, as a determined vigilante in the jailbreak romp Righteous Ties, and as a fiercely woman-hating boyfriend in the underrated grrl-powered neo-noir No Blood, No Tears. He's always good but Ra Han-chee's Going by the Book is the pic that can be credited for making me a Jeong Jae-young fan.

I'm still puzzling over why I like him so much now. But I do. He's not sublime or emotionally raw or spellbindingly histrionic or drop-dead gorgeous. What he is is consistently watchable because Jeong is an actor who never relaxes internally. Even when his face is a blank (a look he's certainly perfected), his eyes aren't frozen with emptiness, they're stuck in a holding pattern that awaits more instructions from inside. Jeong's characters are thinkers, not philosophers or scientists so much as people with limited capacities pushing themselves to their limits. In my book, that he can convey overload without overacting can't be praised enough. And his talent is on full display here. As Do-man, a diabolically exacting cop who follows the letter of the law when called upon to play the part of a bank robber, Jeong is at the top of his game.

The staged crime that's cast his character as its lead player is meant to illustrate the police department's effectiveness in light of a rash of crimes plaguing the city. But since Do-man is as conscientious a criminal as he is a cop, this publicity stunt ends up highlighting how incompetent the police force actually is. Much to the dismay of the new police chief Lee Seung-woo (Son Byung-ho), Do-man (who's good behavior in the past has done nothing but get him demoted) outwits the boys in blue -- as well as a SWAT Team that wants to get in on the action -- at every step. Hostages are roughed up. Cops are killed. Pleas from the robber's mom go ignored.

Not that Do-man goes so far as to actually hurt someone. This is a simulation (and a comedy), remember, so when Do-man "rapes" one hostage, he executes a series of pushups; when he "shoots" a cameraman, he points his gun and shouts "Bang!" Part of the joy in watching Going by the Book, is getting to see a heist movie in which playacting adds another layer to the crime. Two stories unfold simultaneously: one is an elaborately conceived heist; the other is a terribly mismanaged bit of self-promotion. Both are enthralling tales because Jeong knows how to keep it real even when he's pretending.

Secret Love: Help! My Twin Brother Is a Sexaholic

2011-12-14T00:24:00.000-05:00

There's something about the first half of director Ryu Hoon-i's increasingly, cumulatively fantastic Secret Love that reminds me of a Douglas Sirk film. Ryu's movie feels like a woman's picture, albeit a kind of nutty one, in which the wilting flower Yeon-yi (Yun Jin-seo) struggles to reconcile the conflicting responsibilities that come with having a recently comatose husband Jin-woo (Yu Ji-tae) who needs daily caretaking and hosting his twin brother Jin-ho from abroad as a houseguest, a brother who unfortunately for her is both hunky, and hyper-horny. Yu is impossibly dreamy as the sexed-up sibling so you know resistance on Yeon-yi's part is going to be futile. What you might not know is how hot it's going to get once he manhandles her in a hatchback car and literally screws her out of her depression. He's like Prozac with a tongue.

It's not the only steamy sex scene in Secret Love either. There's another quick grab-and-grope on a hospital gurney, an emotionally charged coupling in a therapeutically oversized bathtub, and a wildly raunchy romp -- knife included but discarded -- on the living room floor. (Throughout, there's the deliriously preposterous suggestion that these two guys sense each other's orgasms, even when miles apart; in fact, one brother's deeply-felt happy ending wakes the other brother from his coma!) As to whom Yeon-yi is getting it on with in each make-out scene, that may be a mystery to her by the end of the movie but despite both brothers getting identical trendy haircuts and sharing the same casual wardrobe in what turns out to be a delectably gripping noir, Secret Love is never that confusing thanks to the masterful script co-written by Ryu and Kwon Ji-yeon. Diverting but never distracting or detracting subplots include a funnily poignant, budding affair between Yeon-yi's pining mom (Lim Ye-jin) and a broad-shouldered, flirtatious priest (Jeong In-gi) and the tale of a unnamed rival soulmate (Oh Woo-jeong) who's impossibly smitten with one of the brothers. Which one she loves is also a bit of a mystery!

Impeccable casting extends from the lead roles right on down to the bit parts with enjoyably campy turns by Jin Seo as the gossipy Nurse Kang, and Sung Ji-ru as a B&B owner who loves to take pictures. No secret about this one: It's one terrific thriller! If I gave out stars, I'd give Secret Love five out of five. If I gave a thumbs up, I'd put a condom on my finger.

White: The Melody of the Curse: Girl Group Gone Dead

2011-12-11T20:18:00.001-05:00

When Pure, the sassy, pre-fab all-girl group, kicked off White: The Melody of the Curse, I became a ridiculously excitable mess, an overeager believer who knew he'd stumbled upon one of the great films of 2011, a contemporary masterpiece of the horror genre, a fright flick combining infectious pop tunes with cleverly executed deaths, and one that -- just maybe -- traipsed out some dance moves that truly killed it, as they say. Then The Pink Dolls took the stage and I underwent a severe reality check. Dressed in frilly Bo-Peep outfits and looking as lost as that famed maiden's sheep, this followup act crashed where the other burned, and fizzled where the other dazzled. As the paid audience on-screen obediently checked their Androids and iPhones and acted bored, I did the same in real time while wondering what the hell was going on. Were the writer-director-brothers Kim (Gok and Sun) really going to put this less-compelling foursome in the spotlight? Yes, my friend, they really were! My immediate assessment would have to be retracted.

Now I get how The Pink Doll's being so awful is part of a dramatic structure that needs to show these ladies at rock bottom in order to make their rise to the top of the charts that much more thrilling but what I don't get is why they'd put the camera on a cruddy quartet when they've got another band that's bubblegum pleasure. Why can't the girls of Pure discover a cursed DVD that will catapult them to pop stardom then slam them each in their graves? And, for that matter, why can't the curse originate with the ghost of an angry composer-lyricist instead of an embittered dead singer so we won't have to hear the same hit tune time after time, backwards and forwards, and with different women taking the lead? Regardless, that's not the movie the brothers Kim have written.

As to the movie they have made, here's what works: a stylishly dyke-y manager (Byeon Jeong-su) who feels like she might be part of the initial tragedy that generated the curse; the cranky little breakdancer Sin-ji (Maydoni) whose glares suggest she might be behind all the near-fatal accidents; the brief cameo of Lee Kyu-han as an unscrupulous backer who makes the casting couch look pretty inviting; the bloody end of lead singer Eun-joo (Ham Eun-jeong) who's trampled to death by her panicked fans. The list of what doesn't work is longer so let's just say that having two bandmembers -- the pretty Je-ni (Jin Se-Yeon) and the talented Ah-rang (Choi Ah-ra) -- be friends-turned-rivals was a good idea, as was the side story involving Soon-yi (Hwang Woo-seul-hye), Eun-joo's sister who once had pop stardom dreams of her own. I'd welcome a better sequel.

Hello, Schoolgirl: Older Man Likes Barely Legal Girl (But at Least He's Cute)

2011-11-24T15:46:00.001-05:00

The problem with Hello, Schoolgirl is succinctly illustrated in a cafe scene during which the two main characters announce their ages: Yeon-woo (Yu Ji-tae) is 30; Soo-yeong (Lee Yeon-hee) is 18. A moment later, the meal continues only now he's replaced by an 18-year-old version of himself and she now looks like she's six. That brief, momentary fantastical transformation clues you into the disparity if you missed it when they said it out loud. He's way too old for her. Now you could argue that she's mature for her age (if she were but she isn't) or that they're consenting adults (if they were but according to Korean law she's not). I get where I'm supposed to make concessions. But despite its twee attractions, Ryu Jang-ha's romantic comedy kept me thinking that there's something wrong with a 30-year-old guy dating a young girl just shy of womanhood. Well, at least the Koreans have the decency to make him really cute instead of an out-of-shape, balding slob. I say, if you're going to go for older, go for hot. (I wish she'd gone for smarter and richer, too. Sadly, he's neither.) What else has he got working in his favor? He's a pleaser! The old couple who own the dry cleaners love him; the realtor who helped him to get an apartment finds him charming, too. Now if he can stop courting underage girls via sexting, maybe he can stay out of prison.

There's a secondary plot involving 29-year-old jaded photographer Ha-kyeong (Chae Jeong-an) being pursued by a 22-year-old masochist named Sook (Kang In). He likes her because she's pretty. She tolerates him because he wears the same shirt every day. That's it. It's all about superficial attractions here. In a way, Hello Schoolgirl is about two kinds of predators: one lurks; the other stalks. And if you think I'm imposing a creepy interpretation, take a look at the skulker's depersonalized, nearly empty apartment that reeks of smoke, or the discomfort he displays when the girl's mom sees him holding hands with his student-love, or the lack of outrage he show when his friend asks him if it's statutory rape. There's something wrong with this guy. But then, I often feel that way with romantic comedies. I'm not so easily convinced two people are soul mates who need to defy society's constraining conventions.

Maybe Hello, Schoolgirl is secretly funded by an Asian branch of NAMBLA, the North American Man-Boy Love Association. (SAMBLA?) Although the main couple is a man and a girl, this rom-com is definitely asking us to question the age of consent, and while the spook factor on this one is really hard to overcome, you have to admit this cast exudes so much charm you hate to not let them all end up as couples. She'll be a child bride. And by the end of the movie, she's of age. Start throwing the instant rice.

Visitors: When a Filmmaker Works in Charcoal, This Is What Happens

2011-11-20T19:36:00.001-05:00

The three films in Visitors are best described as discarded sketches. By which I mean, they come across as both unfinished and unwanted. The first, Japanese director Naomi Kawase's "Koma" definitely feels as though she's testing out ideas for a bigger film, more than making an actual short movie. Characters are underdeveloped, and the story -- about a young man who comes to pay his respects to his grandfather's former employer only to find himself seduced by a crazy woman who may be misinterpreting him as her spirit bridegroom -- is skeletal and would require more fleshing out to be compelling. Watching "Koma," you definitely pick up on Kawase's background as a documentarian, what with its stories within stories, and its personalization of history, even its use of nature photography as segue. But what is she documenting exactly? An aborted creative process? Dunno.

Next up: Hong Sang-soo's "Lost in the Mountains." It's the most successful of the bunch but it's also the most disappointing because it seems to end halfway. Hong, on familiar ground to be sure, relates the woes of a young writer (Jeong Yu-mi) who keeps plotting her own disappointments: first by popping in on her best friend unexpectedly, then by calling up the married professor (Moon Seong-geun) with whom she had an affair, and then by sleeping with her humpy ex-boyfriend (Lee Seon-gyun) whose career has outstripped her own. A chance encounter involving all four has her tossing aside a coffee cup belligerently and driving away but you feel that the story is really only beginning. This is Act I. Where is Act II? Come to think of it, don't most movies have three acts? I think so!

The final entry is "Butterflies Have No Memories" by Lav Diaz. It's hard to believe that Diaz, like his counterparts here, couldn't find better actors ("stilted" would be kind) or a better cinematographer ("murky" would be generous) or a composer to add some drama where little is found but even if he had, no supporting talent could've rescued this script which is really a second draft. "Butterflies..." might be too short to qualify as a feature film but even so it takes a good third of the movie to even introduce the plot. Quasi-political, the central action concerns some poor guys who decide to don conquistador masks and kidnap their better-off Canadian cousin as a way to make money. This is an instance where you wish Diaz had been invited to a writer's lab at Sundance to refine his tale of the downtrodden losers out to make a quick dime. Was his international application rejected? Who knows?

I think what frustrates me most about Visitors, though, is that both Diaz and Kawase -- Kawase especially -- have chalked up some serious awards yet as an introduction to their work Visitors left me feeling that maybe the awards were misprized. If a short anthology is designed to give a quick taste of a few artists, then Visitors has left me looking for a meal elsewhere. May I see another menu?

A Better Tomorrow: The Beauty of Not Being Original

2011-11-15T22:48:00.000-05:00

Art movements have their renaissances, theaters have their revivals, neighborhoods have their rebirths. But movies, movies have their remakes. As re-creations go, this is certainly the least glamorous of terms. And after watching Song Hae-sung's A Better Tomorrow, the Korean remake of John Woo's landmark film of the same name, it got me to wondering: Why do movie remakes -- also called rehashes -- get immediately stigmatized? It certainly isn't as if we generally leave most movies, commenting "How original!" Isn't it enough to come away from a movie saying, "How excellent!" That's how I felt after watching Song's A Better Tomorrow. But then I'd never seen the original.

But should I have? Would I have enjoyed the film more? And are remakes made simply as byproducts to compare to their progenitors? Is it wrong to re-make a movie because a director thinks the material might speak to a different generation or to a different culture or have something in it that now has something new to say? Should you chastise that director for not optioning a wholly new script, and instead choosing a really good story dying to be retold? When you look at the parts of the first A Better Tomorrow, it's not as if they're pioneering ideas either. We're all familiar with the story of two conflicted brothers -- one a cop (Kim Kang-woo), the other a criminal (Ju Jin-mo). We've all heard the one about the sleazy backstabber (Jo Han-sun) who rises to the top of the mob through nefarious means. We've also cheered on the anti-hero (Song Seung-heon) whose luck runs dry as he goes out in a blaze of well-amunitioned glory. Woo's script -- from which I'm assuming this draws heavily since Woo is credited as both producer and co-screenwriter -- isn't good because it's got new ideas. It's good because it's well-constructed. It makes sense to use it again.

Song's pic updates the recipe somewhat. (How much, I neither know nor care so I'll just make educated guesses.) Now the two brothers are North Korean defectors; their tough-love aunty figure (Kim Ji-yeong) runs one of those eatery tents that I've never seen outside Korean movies and scifi pics with an apocalyptic bent. Let traditionalists deride Song's remake as a retread and those who prefer this A Better Tomorrow celebrate it as a snazzy re-invention. For me, it's just a really good mafia movie tackling all the expected themes of family, betrayal, devotion, greed, redemption and respect amid a deliciously bloody fantasy of gunfire. You watch the one-man vigilantism of the righteous partner or the high-adrenaline final shootout between the self-chastising brother and the thug who's trying to kill his younger brother then tell me whether you care whether it's ever been done before. I sure don't. More likely, you'll be repeating what I wrote earlier: "Excellent! Excellent! Excellent!"

Blades of Blood: The Look of Medieval History

2011-10-29T15:32:00.001-04:00

What I like best about Korean epics set in the middle ages are the men's hats: wide-brimmed stovepipes made of black mesh that diffuses the shadow cast on the face; overturned, blue or earthen-colored bowls embellished with topknots and attached to the head with a strip of fabric secured in the back like a bandana; towering royal cones that look collapsible and slyly suggest the instability of any and every empire... Having been raised on the knit caps and baseball visors, the earmuffs and do rags of the late 20th century, these antiquated, grandly executed headpieces speak mysteriously, intriguingly of hidden meanings that have nothing to do with designer labels and sports franchises. Back then a hat had meaning! It defined your class, your rank, your identity in a way that today's tiaras and aviator hats do not. Talk about ridiculously aspirational. Well, Blades of Blood has hats aplenty. And aspirations too. And for that I thank director Lee Jun-ik (since I don't know the name of the costume designer). With this historic drama documenting eternal futility more than temporal reign, he's parading out a veritable fashion show of medieval formal- and sports- wear between and during the sword fights.

But clothes alone do not make a movie any more than they do a man. And at the center of Blades of Blood are actually two shabbily attired men: One, a blind samurai wearing a patched-up version of the stovepipe mentioned above; the other, his bare-headed apprentice with a robe as bland as a navy sportscoat. They're both hell-bent on revenging the man who killed Pil-joo (Lee Hae-yeong) -- friend of the former, father of the latter. And they have to trek by hundreds of people infinitely better attired to do so. It's a classic tale with the two men acting out a Star Wars-like mentorship as the elder -- a blind fool named Hwang (Hwang Jeong-min) -- teaches the younger -- a hot-tempered bastard named Gyeon-ja (Baek Seong-hyeon) -- the finer points of swordplay and hand-to-hand combat with plenty of head clobberings as reprimand. If the Foley soundtrack is to be believed, those hits to the head sure hurt! And it's not the only form of pain suffered throughout Blades of Blood. (it may be the only pains that continuously cause a laugh though.) For serious injury early on, Gyeon-ja gets stabbed right through the abdomen by his nemesis Lee Mong-hak (Cha Seung-won) and is given up as dead (as if that's the way movies ever worked). That hurt! And many of Lee's cohorts end up seeing the end of Lee's sword come out their other side, without coming back to life. As to other aches, there's Baek-ji (Han Ji-hye), lover to both Mong-hak and Gyeon-ja. That's gotta hurt for both men. How the love triangle happens is one of life's great coincidences. How it resolves itself is one of the film's greatest achievements. The whole thing's not quite as magical as Lee's masterpiece The King and the Clown but it's still an entertaining romp in the past. I say, hats off to them all!

My Girlfriend Is an Agent: My, My, My! That's a Stereotypically Good Korean Comedy

2011-10-25T07:20:00.001-04:00

Evidently, Americans aren't the only ones out there who make cheesy comedies in which evil Russians conspire to get hold of a deadly virus that could destroy the world, their diabolical strategy pursued not for political reasons but for personal ones. You know, there's one thing about those heartless Communists. They hold grudges like nobody's business. But do Koreans typecast just like we do? Not really. In fact, I'm trying to think of a single sympathetic portrait of a white person in a Korean film (comedy or not) and nothing comes to mind. Even great films like The Host, Antique Bakery, and Lady Vengeance all make use of Americans, Europeans, and Australians for comic relief at best. Know of a Korean film with a major Caucasian character who's a fully formed person? Please, let me know! Which isn't to say I didn't get a big kick out of the Russian baddies in My Girlfriend Is an Agent. The poorly acted, over-exaggerated nemesis is really a staple of comedy.

And My Girlfriend Is an Agent is a pretty good comedy. I'm an unexpected fan of the Korean "My" comedies -- movies like My Mighty Princess and My Sassy Girl. Generally speaking, rom-coms are not my cup of tea. But because this particular variation of the romantic comedy inverts traditional gender roles, I'm all for it. I like to see the man be the pretty sidekick and the woman be the muscle. In My Girlfriend Is an Agent, the nerdy part is Lee Jae-joon (Kang Ji-hwan), a bumbling undercover rookie with kissable lips and just enough smarts to justify his slapstick mistakes. The kick-ass part is Ahn Soo-ji (Kim Ha-neul), an infinitely more skilled martial artist who also works undercover (and who favors wearing her hair parted on the side... "Tomboy!")

He's trying to be taken seriously despite his lack of field experience; she's out to whoop ass, even if that means pursuing criminals while dressed in a bridal gown and driving a jet ski. Naturally they love each other. Just as naturally, they can't stop butting heads. You see, neither knows that the other one is actually working in the same field as a secret agent -- albeit for a different agency. Which means they're constantly lying to each other to hide their professional identities. He's out to track down a Russian cooperative but posing as an accountant; she's committed to saving the planet from a killer virus while pretending to be a custodial worker at a hotel. Their Confucian insistence of being good citizens first, good lovers second speaks volumes of a work ethic I personally admire. And the fact that love wins out in the end truly does make a good movie.

Considering what a light touch is evidenced throughout, it's strange to think that Shin Terra is the same director who did Black House, a serial killer thriller that isn't the least bit funny at all. But he did.

Daisy: She Loves Him Even Though He's Not Really Him

2011-10-16T13:57:00.004-04:00

Are director Lau Wa-keung and his trio of screenwriters aspiring for super-heightened-naturalism with his romance-turned-spy-caper Daisy? Their movie sure takes the old maxim "Truth is stranger than fiction" at face value. For with nary an ironic wink or a melodramatic scream, this one keeps getting stranger and stranger as its story gets more and more complex. How did this happen? On their own, the characters are plausible if incompatible.

First up is Hye-young (Jun Gianna), a street artist who paints daisies as her humble homage to Van Gogh's Sunflowers. She lives with her grandfather at an antique shop in Amsterdam, favors the knit hat and layered clothing that proclaims "Bohemian," and sketches charcoal portraits in the town square despite having access to an enormous warehouse for painting oils and a date set for her (first?) solo gallery exhibit. If she lived in Paris, she'd smoke Gauloises; if she lived in NYC, she'd have needle-marks. You know the type.

Next up is Jeong-woo (Lee Seung-jae), an Interpol cop who's committed to busting crime rings at any cost. He's what you might call a noble opportunist. And so he uses Hye-young as a cover for monitoring drug trafficking. Then he seizes his chance to seduce her when she mistakes him for someone else. He's not a cad per se. But it feels as though he's in an espionage pic, not a romance, even after he confesses all after she's lost her voice from a gun shot wound that he blames on himself. (Since she can't speak, it's hard to say whether she accepts his apology.)

Finally, there's the assassin (Jung Woo-sung): Jeong-woo would love to catch him; Hye-young would love to marry him. Except for one thing... He's neither the target of Jeong-woo's investigation nor the lover of Hye-young's dreams. He's one of those stalker-boyfriend-criminal types, the guy who watches his prey clandestinely, courts her secretively, coerces her into a relationship by making her get into his car when she's mute, then ends up causing her death inadvertently. An ideal he is not. And then there's his profession: killing people. Need we say more?

For a good long while, Hye-young believes Jeong-woo is the secret admirer who's actually the assassin then she thinks that her lover-assassin has killed her lover-impostor. She's wrong on both counts. If she hadn't forfeited learning sign language and opted to spend the rest of her life communicating through index cards with common phrases on them, maybe she would've figured out her reality faster. Maybe she wouldn't be dead. And Jeong-woo wouldn't be dead. Maybe the assassin wouldn't be single either and left with a painting now splattered with his loved one's blood.

Animal Town: A Double Dose of Doom and Despair

2011-10-01T12:31:00.001-04:00

Some movies radiate destitution as if life's inner light shone that much more brightly when comfort's lampshade was unceremoniously snatched off. Other films relate utter misery by flattening existence. Here, characters are like so many cardboard cut-outs, experiencing the day-to-day without even the hope that there might be a way to re-experience three dimensions again. In the first category, pain is electric; in the second, the battery is dead. I'll be the first to admit that I prefer the former type of movie, films like Stray Bullet or Bad Guy, where the tragedy before us makes us somehow miraculously feel more desperately alive. But surely there's a place for the uglier approach, too; those movies that only depress you, movies like Jeon Kyu-hwan's Animal Town, for instance, which may reflect the world around us, but steamrolls reality to make its point.

In the desaturated palette that comes from a secondhand video camera, Animal Town shows a bleak slice of life in which two protagonists -- a downtrodden pedophile (Lee Joon-hyuk) who's lost his job and an inert businessman (Oh Seong-tae) having a spiritual crisis -- seek a way out of the doldrums, which happen to be plastered with cheap, yellowed wallpaper and covered with low-grade upholstery. Oddly enough, you may find your sympathies lie with the paroled pervert, a man so ostracized his relatives shun him, his friends are non-existent, and his only way to prevent becoming a repeat offender is by heavily medicating himself into a stupor. Every time a child appears on screen -- especially one particular little girl who comes across as somewhat brain damaged -- you cringe with apprehension. But when there's no kids in sight, this big dumb lug is a heartbreaking mess as he tries to create a life for himself with a monitoring bracelet on his ankle and an apartment in the shadow of the wrecking ball.

It takes a lot longer to learn what's got his co-star so upset. Sure, his wife is a nag and his always-offscreen daughter sounds like a brat, but he's at least got religion and if not religion, at least the community of the church, and if not the community at least his own business, and if a failing business, at least a business that's still got a chance of turning around. His counterpart has no chance. He's doomed. And while the final "shocking" moments of this movie are really a cascade of contrivances, and Animal Town can feel like it hates life, Jeon's descent into despair at least has enough heart to pity the rejects and the victims.

Hanji: Paper! Paper! Read All About It!

2011-09-27T23:06:00.001-04:00

It's a good thing, I didn't read the synopsis of Hanji in the MoMA Korean Film Festival brochure beforehand. I never would've gone to the theater. A film about the challenges, setbacks and rewards encountered by a local government official helping to revive the traditional method of papermaking hardly promises the stuff of high drama. And funnily enough, within this movie itself, are snippets of what appears to be the dreaded documentary we'd expect from that description: a clunky primer on the fine art of Hanji that pans reverentially over intricate antiques while a droning voice-over puts us summarily to sleep. Crafting a new copy of the Annals of the Chosun Dynasty may be a momentous occasion to scholars but most of us are not going to perch on the edge of our seats, desperately waiting to see if the undertaking succeeds. Will they master the old craft? Who cares! Director Im Kwon-taek does a little, perhaps, but at the same time that's not the story that he's set out to tell with Hanji either. Im's sublimely understated film is based on a real story but doesn't relate history so much as it distills reality. (That's much more interesting!) His Hanji quietly conveys how the lives of people of no historic note are deeply impacted by something as unexpected as a well-meaning civic restoration project.

The movie's central character is Pil-yong (Park Joong-hoon), a womanizing bureaucrat incapable of advancement and burdened with a wife (Ye Ji-won), whose severe disability was caused in part by his last extramarital affair. As he works to incite the masters of the local paper-making community to participate in the project, he strikes up a friendship of sorts with a divorced female film director (Kang Soo-yeon) who makes the aforementioned documentary, in part because she can't get funding for a feature film. No major love triangle emerges. Throughout Hanji, conflicts are small; treacheries, minor. What distinguishes Hanji is not its ability to extract tragic consequences from a historic footnote but rather its acknowledgment that a story with little razzle dazzle can nevertheless be the biggest thing to happen in some people's lives. Im's blunt depiction of cubicle culture, stroke rehabilitation, and petty crime as nothing but a part of daily life, any life, every life, underscores that the familiar and the pedestrian can still be quite deep. There's a beautiful passage in Hanji during which one character talks about the moon being a source of light that you can stare at continually without danger. Like the moon, most of us will not be as radiant as the sun but our insignificant lives are no less worthy of uninterrupted, loving attention.

Garden of Heaven: She's Dying to Fall in Love for the First Time

2011-09-17T16:57:00.001-04:00

Let someone else with a nobler sense of right and wrong deride Garden of Heaven for its oversimplified protrayal of hospice patients. I, for one, found its shameless depiction of the terminally ill to be jaw-droppingly hilarious. There isn't a cliched representation overlooked or underplayed from the cute kid who crayons self-portraits on the wall so his mom won't forget him to a carefree young woman who insists the doctor himself is her most effective painkiller. That blithe spirit is played by none other than Lee Eun-ju, the incredibly talented actress who went on to give a brilliantly harrowing performance in The Scarlet Letter before committing suicide shortly thereafter. You'd never know Lee was suffering from depression from watching Garden of Heaven because there's nothing self-pitying in the way her character baldly states that she's an orphan who's never been in love and who wants to be held by "someone who cares" in her final moments. That Lee is able to relate such treacly sentiments in a such a matter-of-fact manner turns what might've been soapy stuff — of which there's still quite a bit — into something that's a little less corny. She often disarms you and never depresses you. You may even assume that she's a little more complex than she is when, in one particularly fatuous plot twist, she parlays her cancer into a modeling gig for an unintentionally hysterical television advertisement for life insurance. But she's no scam artist. She really is dying.

Her co-star Ahn Jae-wook isn't quite as nuanced as paramour-savior Dr. Choi but at least he shares Lee's complete lack of concern with tugging heartstrings, despite their being endlessly ready for plucking. Ahn appears to have turned his charisma down for Garden of Heaven. The quartet of nurses who worship the ground he walks on are inexplicably blind to the cruel rebuke he levels at a mother who's just lost her child ("Let's get the death certificate now!") and his complete disregard for professional ethics as he falls for the prettiest patient on the ward. A rather tearless tearjerker, Garden of Heaven pushes the expected buttons in the disease-romance genre without triggering the de facto response. Think of the fundraiser near the end of the movie: A filmmaker who's dying at the hospice makes a short documentary about Dr. Choi that lauds him as an Angel of Death then a lineup of patients play a melancholic tune with handbells that create sounds that don't sync up with the soundtrack. That constant sense of something off make Garden of Heaven something you should turn on.

The Anarchists: The Nicest Terrorists You'll Ever Meet

2011-09-09T22:55:00.017-04:00

On the eve of the tenth anniversary of 9/11, it's more than a little weird to watch Yu Yong-sik's The Anarchists (a.k.a. Anakiseuteu Anarchists) because this historical bromance about Korean terrorists who assassinate Japanese oppressors in 1920s Shanghai is so little about politics and violence and so much about brotherhood and youthful aimlessness. With a screenplay by none less than Park Chan-wook, The Anarchists isn't shy about slaughter. Men are stabbed, shot repeatedly, slit in the throat... Even women get tortured. But most of the time, this movie's all about male bonding, how young revolutionary Sang-gul (Kim In-kwon), once rescued from the gallows, comes to love and respect his mentors in the revolution. They're a likable bunch: a nihilistic opium addict named Seregay (Jang Dong-gun), a hotheaded prankster named Dol-suk (Lee Beom-su), a bespectacled didact named Myung-Gon (Kim Sang-jung) and a wannabe radical named Geun (Jeong Jun-ho) who never really seems to have his heart in the cause even as he's willing to sacrifice his life to it. Though the characters never break into a chorus of "Friendship / Friendship / Just a perfect blendship," you do get the feeling that they're humming it when the camera pans away.

Platonic loyalty is hardly unique to Park's canon. Think of the absurdly devoted women in Lady Vengeance or the extreme devotion among the soldiers in J.S.A.: Joint Security Area. But the camaraderie shared by characters written by Park but directed by others always feels more palsy-walsy than sealed in blood. In both Yu's The Anarchists and Lee Mu-yeong's The Humanist, the extremism that defines unconditional love is tempered, leaving something more like chumminess in its place. Admittedly, few directors can match Park's ability to glamorize violence without losing its grotesqueness. De Palma and Scorsese immediately come to mind. And Yu, admittedly has one scene that comes close: A slow-mo bit in which Seregay gets a bullet hole in the head then falls backwards, his descent captured at various camera angles heightening the surreality of the cigarette still smoking between his now-dead lips. But that's an isolated moment. Most bloody encounters in The Anarchists are a little too tamely respectful of the audience to actually achieve something that would earn the audience's wildly undying respect.

White Valentine: When a Love Story Isn't About Love at All

2011-09-03T10:02:00.008-04:00

I find Yang Yun-ho's White Valentine incredibly frustrating. And not just because Lee Eun-kyeong's meandering screenplay has its characters needlessly talking in code or telling each other "Don't tell me!" when the hidden truths don't even seem that earth-shattering. I won't even blame the twee hypersensitivity so execrably conveyed by Jun Gianna as a female high school dropout with a passion for drawing and Park Shin-yang as a widowed pet store owner obsessed with damaged pigeons. I've seen poorly written screenplays poorly acted before. They tend to bore more than irritate me as a rule. What truly sucks about White Valentine, however, is the way it keeps pretending to be this sentimental love story about two drifting rejects who can't find a way to set sail together, because they're too timid to reveal their true selves.

They meet in a park. They write each other anonymous notes sent via carrier pigeon. He keeps pining for her even as she stalks him. He can't see the obvious and she won't announce her identity — maybe because she can't comprehend why he can't pull together all the freaking clues she puts in his way. After awhile, you get the feeling in White Valentine, that this morose duo isn't unlucky so much as they're unsure. Sure, they're stunted beings unlikely to take big risks. But maybe, just maybe, they're also circumspect cynics who are looking at each other and thinking, "Hmm, maybe this one isn't what I"m looking for." On that count, they may both be right. She's able to turn her inner frustration into a piece of kiddie lit. He turns his angst into a coffee table book of bird photographs. Can you really fault love lost when it gives you each a book deal? And when, years later, he discovers the children's book that she's illustrated and recognizes the cover artwork (and the truth that comes with it: It was HER after all!), does he race to find his secret sweetheart? No. He moseys over to the store that her just-as-evasive grandfather (Jeon Mu-song) once ran then shuffles outside the train station where she's about to embark to other climes. When suddenly he makes a mad dash for the tracks, I, for one, was left fantasizing that he'd thrown himself on the tracks. I can't imagine eternal bliss for these two. I see a house filled with melancholia. Boo-hoo and then boo.

Marine Boy: One Man Goes Underwater Just So Someone Can Get High

2011-08-30T23:08:00.008-04:00

I'm trying to remember if it's ever actually specified, what kind of drug is being trafficked in Yoon Jong-seok's enjoyable crime pic Marine Boy. Is it heroin? Is it cocaine? I know it's a contentious white powder that has rival gangs and cops all vying for its possession but, for all I know, it could be talcum powder, a product which also strikes me as worth fighting for given the recent advent of cornstarch within the Johnson & Johnson empire. There is some mention early in the film of benzodiazepine, I believe, in relationship to the film's femme fatale Yuri (Park Si-hyeon), a nightclub singer who likes to croon in Paul McCartney's "No More Lonely Nights" in English and clock men with her surprisingly lethal purse. But since we never see anyone pop pills, shoot up or snort lines, Marine Boy almost feels like a stylish agit-prop piece against drugs filmed in a country where depicting drug use on the big screen is illegal.

And it's not the only vice under attack here either: Former swimming-champ-turned-drug-mule Chun-soo (Kim Kang-woo) never would've gotten involved with the backstabbing world of black market narcotics if he hadn't incurred a gambling debt by misreading an ace for a four in the mirrored surface of an opponent's lighter. Has he been framed? Can he escape? Is there anyone to trust among this den of thieves that surrounds him? Or is the only way out to shove a sausage full of the aforementioned but unspecified drug up his butt and then to swim underwater from one ship to another in the un-patrolled waters between Japan and Korea? Well, at least he looks good in a rubber wetsuit. Really good. And if he's fallen for Yuri, despite having seen her last boyfriend beaten to death by her surrogate father, frenemy and drug kingpin Kang (Jo Jae-hyeon) who also just happens to be the man pimping out Chun-soo's large intestine as a storage locker, maybe that's because he knows that if Yuri sees him often enough in that wetsuit, she'll double-cross anyone who stands between the two of them and their fantasy getaway on the island of Palau. Don't be jealous of two beautiful young people who end up shacking up on a picturesque beach front property with quick access to world-class surfing. Neither has enrolled in a 12-step program for gambling or drug addition yet.

Breath: Kim Ki-duk Makes a Musical (in His Own Strange Way)

2011-08-21T01:44:00.014-04:00

I used to hate musicals. But that's because I used to think musical meant Oklahoma, Cats, My Fair Lady and Xanadu. But once I broadened my definition a bit, and started to think of any movie with a number of songs sung by the cast as being a musical, I realized that I actually liked some musicals very, very much. In that spirit, I'd call Kim Ki-duk's Breath a musical. Sure, there are only four songs -- and they're all sung by Yeon (Gang In-hyeong), the depressed sculptor who courts imprisoned murderer Jang Jin (Chang Chen) after she finds out her husband (Ha Jung-woo) is cheating on her -- but each of these numbers is integral to the story and three of them involve special costume changes and strangely elaborate sets. Since this is a Duk film, you can bet your bottom dollar that these conventions are executed in an unusual way. (Think less Busby Berkley and more performance art.) And since every Duk film has at least one mute character, you can also guess who is listening attentively while Yeon is belting out her pop tunes.

The first three numbers are set in the prison's visiting room where Yeon has painstakingly papered the walls with colorful scenery enhanced by well-chosen props like a vase of flowers, a fan, and a boombox which she uses as her karaoke machine. Her final song -- for which she's joined in a sing-a-along by her reformed, now-harmonious husband -- is performed in a car (the site of many an impromptu duet) and doubles as the soundtrack for Jang Jin's strangled death at the hands of three cellmates, including one who appears to have deeply passionate feelings that rival those of Yeon, who earlier tried to kill Jang in coitus but failed. In the immortal words of singer Pat Benatar (who really should write a musical), "Love is a battlefield."

Click here to see a list of Kim Ki-duk's Top Ten Movies.

Chawz: Like Jaws But Less Scary and More Hairy

2011-08-15T15:42:00.015-04:00

The following statement was issued on behalf of some wild boars subsequent to the release of the B-horror movie Chawz:

"For Immediate Release: Alert! Writer-director Shin Jeong-won is demonizing us in his porcine version of Jaws. We are hereby compelled to proclaim that we are omnivorous beasts who feast on berries, grass, bugs and small lizards (but never to the point that we weigh 400 lbs.). Furthermore, human beings are not a part of our daily diet. In fact, should we attack people, we aim only to dismember or maim. We are peace-loving animals. If we should tusk your ass (as in Chawz), it's because you're irritating (as in Chawz). Like the title character, we are indeed seeing red!"

A second anonymous statement quickly followed purportedly from a member of the local police precinct, though this one too was unsigned:

"Dear Mr. Shin, Having just seen Chawz, we would like to remind you that we devote our lives to protecting the public and therefore deserve respect, not ridicule. Why do you make us out to be a bunch of Keystone Kops? It's one thing to satirize the law; it's another to show cops spilling down hills, shirking duties, and running away from adversity at every turn. Couldn't you make us fearless? If not, couldn't you make us funnier? What gives?"

While we are unable to trace either letter to its source for further comment, we did watch the creature feature in question to evaluate the expressed concerns. This is our assessment and reply:

"Boars: Fret not. The steroid monster in the pic causes more giggles than screams. You're safe from instantaneous extinction by frightened Koreans. Boys in blue: Relax. In Chawz, you're no dumber than the local farmers and only slightly less resourceful than the Jane Goodall wannabe (Jeong Yu-mi). As to fellow Netflix subscribers, Chawz is a novelty, a quirky little fright flick that teeters on being truly funny and never really tries to be really scary. You almost wish that the boar was twenty times bigger and the local cops ten times dumber. As it is, Chawz feels like it sort of wants to be real, despite the kooky characters. It's weird that way."

Windstruck: He Died Then Went to Heaven on a Breeze

2011-08-06T15:51:00.016-04:00

When you watch movies via websites like Mysoju, Todou or YouTube, they're often broken up into chapters, which alters your viewing experience for better or worse. With Windstruck, writer-director Kwak Jae-young's 2004 romance, serialization works in its favor. Here are eight mini-reviews encouraging you to view this feature as a web series.

Episode 1: First Encounter
Kooky cop Kyung-jin (Jun Gianna) mistakes Myung-woo (Jang Hyuk) for purse-snatcher then hauls him to station to charm coworkers by sketching portraits. Kyung-jin's clobbers Myung-woo then schoolkids. Love blooms

Episode 2: Hand in Hand
Handcuffed, Kyung-jin and Myung-woo land in middle of huge shootout. Back at the police station, Myung-woo goes ballistic, pretending to be crazed criminal to save Kyung-jin's rep. Love to the rescue!

Episode 3: Sudden Changes
Kyung-jin and Myung-woo become boyfriend and girlfriend while carrying groceries upstairs. While playing house, she reveals that she's an identical twin and her sister is dead. Meals are shared. Love deepens.

Episode 4: Drive
Myung-woo gets a jeep so they can bond to oldies music. Kyung-jin relates origination story of the pinky swear. An avalanche sends jeep into deep waters where Myung-woo drowns and Kyung-jin cries. Love's tragic.

Episode 5: Baby, Come Back
By pounding (in frustration) on his chest, Kyung-jin revives Myung-woo. When he's shot again as she's chasing bad guy Chang-soo (Jeong Ho-bin), Myung-woo dies again. Kyung-jin considers suicide. Love defies death.

Episode 6: Punk to the Rescue
Two runaways convince Kyung-jin to treat them to pizza instead of killing herself. She tries suicide afterward by jumping off a building yet survives. A paper airplane announces Myung-woo's soul. Love knows no boundaries.

Episode 7: A Second Chance
Kyung-jin tracks down Chang-soo then gets shot. Myung-woo's ghost re-appears minus one lung. He instructs her to go on without him. She agrees because she believes in reincarnation. Will love be reborn?

Episode 8: Wind
In a house filled with pinwheels, Kyung-jin and Myung-woo's ghost say good-bye so she can meet a new cutie (Cha Tae-hyun) on a subway platform. Love, baby, love!

Shotgun Love: Arranged Marriages and Deranged Pregnancies

2011-07-31T15:12:00.018-04:00

Here's what I have to say in favor of Shotgun Love. It hits most of the right notes for a well-made melodrama. Here's why that doesn't matter. This isn't a melodrama. It's a romantic comedy. Here's what I like about actor Lim Chang-jung. He isn't afraid of portraying the unlikable aspects of his character, an emotionally underdeveloped infomercial actor who falls head-over-heels for his cold-blooded co-star. Here's what I don't like about him. Just about everything else. Here's what I appreciate about Kim Gyu-ri, the actress who plays the pregnant lingerie model that serves as Lim's love interest. Hmm. Let me get back to you on that one. While I certainly wouldn't go so far as to call Shotgun Love unwatchable, I would say that it's constructed like a comedy without ever managing to become one.

With a subplot involving a gay Elvis impersonator (Park Min-hwan) and a stocky transvestite (Kim Jin-soo) dressed up like Marilyn Monroe, this movie certainly isn't asking anyone to take it overly seriously. Yet while there's outlandish behavior and preposterous role reversals ad infinitum, writer-director Jung Rain approaches his material as if it were a soap opera with a couple of kooks thrown in. Kim Su-mi as a braying mother makes picking hair off the floor with packing tape funny while Lee Ah-rin, as Kim's roommate, constantly looks as though she's about to say something amusing but never does. Ahn Seok-hwan hams it up as the one-eyed food tent-owner but he too never gets a truly good one-liner or a scene that builds up to hilarious slapstick. Which leaves me with a big question mark as to why Jung decided to shape his material as a comedy in the first place. Here's my guess. Sometimes you come up with a funny idea. Then you come up with a number of supporting ideas that are kind of funny. Then when you try to string them together, you get all serious because you're trying to make it work. You lose your sense of humor and that seriousness never leaves you when you're casting the roles and directing the movie. So what started off as a funny bit is now a workmanlike product. In Shotgun Love, the serious idea is this: Shallow people can only discover deeper feelings through personal tragedies. Here's what I think about that. Could someone please make it funny?

Miss Staff Sergeant: Attention! Demotion! Diversion!

2011-07-31T05:49:00.017-04:00

Don't go into Miss Staff Sergeant thinking you're going to see a laudatory biopic of Lee Yu-mi, the first female soldier to make it through combat training in Korea's marine corp. The movie is actually an improbably entertaining almost-insult, that's sort of unable to believe that a woman could succeed as an elite soldier without resorting to feminine wiles. Lee doesn't screw her way up the ranks but as a platoon leader who gets her promotion by colluding behind closed doors, she does get her troops to bond by giving them fancy cookies followed by a pep talk on the importance of team spirit. Played by junior-model-of-an-actress Lee Ah-lee, this bootcamp Gidget hits all her military postures as if they were dance moves and shouts out orders like a squad captain for cheerleaders. Because of this unflagging perkiness, Lee feels inappropriately ambitious. Is she aiming for a stripe on her uniform or a varsity letter? After her efforts towards greatness are sabotaged by a platoon leader (Lim Won-hie) comically obsessed with her ass, she fights her way back into the corp by demanding solitary confinement then running around with a backpack until someone takes her seriously.

And what does Lee get for all her camouflaged efforts? The privilege of singing a misogynist marching song while being surrounded by shirtless men; the honor of defending the reputation of a slimy back-stabber who's getting the promotion she deserves; and a sense of self-respect rooted in the fact that she didn't get discharged like her daddy once did. That might sound like awfully depressing stuff but in actuality, writer-director Jo Myeong-nam has an incredibly light touch and this chipper movie is so tongue-in-cheek about sexism that you'll likely find yourself succumbing to the feel-good aspects of his underdog story. It's a tough cookie who won't route for Ms. Lee — both the actress and the real life woman she plays — as she overcomes each obstacle in her way. When the lady-in-uniform picks up a surrogate father in Sergeant First Class Kang Cheol-in (Son Byung-ho), you realize anyway, this isn't about the real struggles that accompany breaking through the military industrial complex's glass ceiling. It's a silly, sentimental, sweet-natured story inspired by a real trooper who deserves more than a little respect.

My Tutor Friend 2: LMAO Not, Because You Can't Learn the Same Thing Twice

2011-07-29T22:10:00.011-04:00

I kind of liked the original My Tutor Friend. It didn't matter to me that it was totally formulaic. Or silly-stupid. That lightweight, by-the-book rom-com had modest goals then achieved them effortlessly. Yet when I decided to watch the follow-up My Tutor Friend 2, I didn't expect to see something equally good. I was prepared for the law of dwindling returns. This time, I figured, perhaps a few less laughs, perhaps some recycled gags, perhaps some reused footage. How bad could it be? Answer: Pretty bad. Because My Tutor Friend 2 doesn't even deliver the small, shameful glories of a shameless retread.

Yes, the movie has a tutor but that's pretty much where the similarities end. Gone are the romantic leads. Gone is the central class struggle. Gone are the protagonist's aspirations for a better, more meaningful life. What you get in My Tutor Friend 2 instead is a lovestruck Japanese student (Lee Cheong-a) who goes abroad to stalk a cute guy but ends up finding a sourpuss soulmate (Park Gi-woong), a boxer who all-but-killed his last opponent and now fights with everyone, verbally at least. She doesn't resist being tutored; he doesn't want to teach. How they end up together is that she's renting a room from his dad and he's been coerced by his father into helping her study. Not that he ever teaches her anything useful, just a lot of ghetto speak that alienates her from her teachers and her peers.

Why she ends up falling for him I'm not sure. Maybe the movie's one fantastical sequence which illustrates slang by having characters at a cafe literally "hit" phones, "catch" customers, and "shoot" the bill is supposed to be some sort of shared hallucination that only these two can see... much like the shooting stars they end up catching in their shot glasses one crazy, drunken night. But even that magical night of revelry leads to hangovers not lovemaking. What should've been the great turnaround — a contest for foreign exchange students that comes with a 300,000 won prize — doesn't reveal how his unconventional teaching methods have led to unexpected payoffs so much as it points out his complete nincompoopery and her newfound potty mouth. To use the parlance of the My Tutor Friend 2's foul-mouthed tutee, this movie is "crappy."

Death Bell 2: Bloody Camp: Stop! You're Killing Me!

2011-07-08T23:24:00.015-04:00

I'm still trying to figure out why, after the gratuitously grisly murders commence in director Yu Seon-dong's Death Bell 2: Bloody Camp, none of the movie's summer school students tries to exit through a window once it's discovered that the doors are locked and a killer's on the loose. I'm not discounting that extreme panic can stop a person from thinking rationally, but in a classroom of gifted and talented, a classroom where one wall is basically made of glass, does it not occur to anyone — from the valedictorian on down to the class clown — to hurl a desk or a chair through the window? Does no one consider smashing a way out to freedom? Is there no one here good at multiple choice quizzes?

All that studying until midnight has clearly dulled the wits of the braniacs. And unlike the maniac in the first Death Bell movie, the sequel's mass murderer is not self-congratulatorily clever: He doesn't set up a cruel riddle for the students to unravel to save their lives. His "clues," if anything, only make them feel stupid and hopeless: "memory" stitched into a young girl's face; a series of jumbled letters spelling out "memento mori." You can almost hear these youngsters worriedly saying to themselves: Okay, I'm supposed to remember something in order to survive... but what? As hints go, these pointed shocks are hardly helpful. As much as terror has muddled the minds of its victims, resentment has stifled the killer's creativity. His evil-genius machines-of-revenge are uninspired: a motorcycle rigged with blades on its tire; an automatic nail gun aimed at a single target; a vial of lethal hallucinogenics... And while they'd never figure it out if this killer's clues were all they had to work with, what eventually comes to light is that a former classmate, now dead, was the victim of an attempted rape by a gaggle of giggling peers. How they were supposed to remember this, considering that they were neither present nor aware of its existence, is just another prime example of the unrealistic demands often made by the criminally insane. Speaking of crazy, Death Bell 2 has one of kookier outtakes on record for its final credits: multiple shots revealing the film's hero histrionically rehearsing CPR on a dummy. Get ready for Death Bell 3: Bloody Bloopers.

Lady Vengeance: And the Lord Sent Down an Angel of Justice

2011-06-25T00:33:00.009-04:00

I've often said that Oldboy, that perverted whodunit, is my favorite Park Chan-wook film, and sometimes my favorite Korean film period, but after re-watching Lady Vengeance, I'm not so sure. Park's final entry in his vengeance trilogy — the first being Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance; the second, Oldboy — is definitely a masterpiece in its own right, too. A mystery within a mystery within a mystery, Lady Vengeance begins as a revenge fantasy of which we know neither the crime nor the perpetrator, segues into a well-orchestrated murder plotted out at a women's prison where grrl-power informs a secret society, then returns to its original crime only to reflect it in a fractured mirror. One child's death unveils many; one woman's pursuit of retribution from a serial killer is set aside for a form of mob justice.

At the center of it all is Geum-ja (Lee Yeoung-ae), a conniving ex-convict wrongfully imprisoned for kidnapping and killing a little boy; a guilt-ridden woman willing to chop off her finger as penance for the crime she abetted; a sorrowful mom out to reunite with daughter Jenny (Kwon Yea-young) who she gave up for adoption to Australians long ago; and a guilt-free Cougar having an affair with the inexperienced teenager (Kim Shi-hoo) who works with her at the local bakery. If that sounds like a lot for one character, one actor, don't worry, Lee is totally up to the task of playing one of the more complex characters in Park's ouevre with a surprisingly light touch.

By turns haunted, crafty, bewildered, tender, and enraged, Lee underplays what another actress would overact in the hopes of taking home an acting trophy. There's no prolonged scream of rage or cry of horror from Lee. Instead, she conveys everything with a cool detachment. There's a great scene late in the movie, right after the central revenge has finally come to fruition, where the camera catches Lee smiling in a way that literally bridges grief and happiness. Unlike most performers who'd segue from laughter to tears as two kindred extremes, Lee rides the middle ground, with a quivering smile that hovers between sadness and joy for so long that you'll start thinking Mona Lisa's smile isn't so complicated. Park's touch is similarly light and ambivalent. Keeping the violence largely off camera, Lady Vengeance ends up extreme in one sense only: extremely delightful.

Kim Ki-Duk's Best Movies

2011-06-18T20:55:00.020-04:00

Is it a top ten list when you've only seen eleven movies? A valid question. But I guess I'm cheating a little because I'm thinking of this list as a dynamic one which will eventually contain all good movies once I've seen some more of Kim Ki-duk's films. For now, I admit movies nine and ten kind of suck — watchable but preposterous. I'm actually really curious to learn which of Kim's films you like best too so please let me know in the comments section below. Thanks!

1. Bad Guy (2001): This creepily welcome antidote to Pretty Woman is one of the most disturbed love stories about a pimp and a hooker that you'll ever see. A really compelling mind-bender.
2. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring (2003): A Buddhist monk's coming-of-age is complicated by sex. Who can't relate to that? A beautifully told tale of how knowledge changes as we age.
3. The Isle (2000): Love really is an extreme state when you think about it but the quiet, pragmatic prostitute at this lakeside vacation resort takes her expression of devotion to a "oh, no she didn't" extreme that you'll likely never forget.
4. Time (2006): How much of who we are is what we look like and would we have the same relationships with people if we suddenly looked completely different? Kim explores the topic thoroughly with the help of plastic surgery.
5. The Bow (2005): Sure, it ends violently but this summer-winter romance between an old fisherman and the orphan girl he adopts (and trains) is probably Kim at his most gently philosophical.
6. Breath (2007): Probably as close as Kim will come to making a musical, this one's about an affair that blossoms between a killer in jail and a sculptor who becomes a performance artist.
7. 3-Iron (2004): The silent character is a signature of Kim's film and here he gives us two. The doubled symbol heightens Kim's idea that the most important things in life aren't expressed in dialogue and lessens the dramatic tension. A fair trade.
8. Samaritan Girl (2004): "Love thy enemy" gets a new spin when a young woman decides to screw then refund all the johns her best friend tricked with before she jumped out a window and died. Strangely enjoyable.
9. Address Unknown: (2001): Kim at his zaniest presents three lost souls skirting with tragedy in the hinterlands as they attempt to bond with each other only to self-destruct. Funny, though unintentionally so.
10. The Coast Guard (2002): In this implausible drama, a horny young woman and a gung-ho soldier slide into madness side by slippery side. When Kim doesn't deliver a great revelation, the violence in his films feels mean. Case in point.

Also by Kim
Real Friction (2001): This early effort from Kim — about a performance artist whose medium is murder — feels like a first film because it's overflowing with ideas immaturely explored.

Address Unknown: Blinded by One Zany Sight After Another

2011-06-16T19:45:00.017-04:00

Does Address Unknown mean something to anyone besides its edgy director Kim Ki-duk? I mean, besides a hilariously good time for movie buffs who equate "super weird" with "super wonderful"? Is there a message here amid the escalating madness? Do these symbols symbolize something or are they simply strange images without intended meaning? (Interpret at will!) Is there something deep to be gathered from watching kidnapped dogs get brutalized then sold as stew meat or of from seeing an acid-tripping, half-blind girl (Ban Min-jung) get courted by an unstable American soldier (Mitch Mahlum) who wants to fix her bad eye then carve his name on her chest? Can sociopolitical interpretations be drawn from the mean-spirited story of a half-breed son (Yang Dong-kun) who systematically slices the breast of his unhinged mother (Bang Eun-jin) every time she goes off on her neighbors by shouting insults in English? What can we lean from the behavior of the morose young man (Kim Young-min) who shoots down his enemy after being taught the art of archery by his self-aggrandizing father (Myeong Gye-nam)? For that matter, what are we supposed to make of Address Unknown when the three main characters all end up getting blinded in their right eye or when one of them gets propelled head first off his motorcycle to a muddy slapstick death, buried up to his hips with his legs sticking out in the air? Are we supposed to take that seriously? Seriously? Is it okay to giggle? Because I sure did.

Address Unknown has a portentous tone yet as the movie gets crazier and crazier, you suspect that Kim took some of the LSD pills that the American G.I. is carrying around. Under the influence, he's forgotten to take more care in casting his characters (the American actors are particularly horrible) and crafting the dialogue. It's no relief that Kim chooses to have three largely silent characters instead of one. What we have in place of the silent enigma is a trio of mopey dopes suffering from depression. Which isn't to say that Address Unknown is too depressing! Far from it, it's actually often unintentionally funny. I wouldn't go so far as to call Kim's 2001 film his first comedy. But then again, maybe I should. Watch it, and you tell me!

Run 2 U: Pop, Pop, Pop Music; Flop, Flop, Flop Movie

2011-06-11T20:54:00.022-04:00

There's a point midway in Kang Jeong-su's Korean-Japanese hybrid Run 2 U, where bisexual singer-songwriter Hitoshi (Kazuya Takahashi) and his hooker-turned-pop-star female lover Kyeong-a (Chae Jeong-an) scream frustratedly at the ocean to explain why their lives are so frickin' hard. It's ridiculous, as is much of the movie yet it's also oddly poignant, as the rest of the movie is not. A spot-on depiction of youthful exasperation at a world that won't let your dreams come true post haste, this anguished cry at the universe also unintentionally echoes the internal wail of viewers foolishly sitting through the entire film. Though filled with unexpected plot twists, like a tragic gay love story involving a trigger-happy thug (Tetsuo Yamashita) who likes to check out his buddy's buns in the gym shower, Run 2 U really has a lousy storyline and should've been made as a 90-minute music video, not a needlessly bilingual film.

Dramatic closeups — a finger pushing an elevator button, a hand holding a white telephone receiver — could've played out as hyper-meaningful symbolism apropos of VH1 and MTV. It's easy to picture Kyeong-a strutting around in her turquoise fan-plastic raincoat and rapping about drugs, pimps and poverty. Considering that two of the main characters are singers, the R&B treatment would've allowed Hitoshi's inner monologues, here whispered like Barry White intros, to build to soulful meditations on love — found, lost, and reborn. Why Run 2 U never actually crosses over to kinetic pop is a mystery. Seductions at the disco. High speed races on the freeway. Even a music video shoot! Does anybody else see major opportunities for a groovy soundtrack and some lip synching? I'm not sure how to deal with Massako (Maju Ozawa), the mafia daughter in love with the gay boxer, except on the editing room floor. Considering how bad she is, revamping this movie as a hip-hopera means having a legit reason to cut her part. That's what they did in the music video recap that's an extra on the DVD. And yes there really is one. And no, it's not very good either.

A Blood Pledge: Sisters Are Screwing It Up for Themselves

2011-06-04T21:59:00.015-04:00

There are many misfortunes that can drive a young girl to suicide. For Soy (Son Eun-seo), it's an unwanted pregnancy caused by a rich pretty-boy (Choi Min-seong) who insists she get an abortion. For Eun-yeong (Song Min-jeong), it's an abusive dad who repeatedly punches her in the face whenever she's less than perfect. For Yoo-jin (Oh Yeon-seo), it's falling grades, an unsympathetic nun, and a boyfriend who cheats. And for Eun-joo (Jang Kyeong-ah), it's a way to reconnect with a former friend who once gave her an MP-3 player. The last reason is hardly the strongest but it may go to explain why the ghost of Eun-joo is so pissed off at the other three girls when they fail to live up to the suicide pact that inspired her to jump off the parochial school roof in the first place.

Because her eternal bond with Soy hasn't been sealed in the hereafter, this bitter young lady is furiously seeking retribution from the two other means girls who stole her gal pal then her life in short order. That she's not equally angry at Soy is symptomatic of classic jealousy — like the wife who hates the woman who has stolen her husband, while disregarding the fact that it's the man who has betrayed her. When you're screwed by someone you love and you want to reunite with him, you need a target for all that rage. Lucky for Eun-joo, she has two. And so she terrorizes Eun-yeong and Yoo-jin by stalking them across the school grounds, up on the roof, in the bathrooms, inside the gymnasium, over their computers, and in their dreams. She's not a pretty sight either as her steady hand reaches out from the other side to choke, grab, and drip blood. Plus, her violence is hardly restricted to personal revenge. At one point, she causes the doting mother of the guy who impregnated her bosom buddy to spontaneously combust in a stalled car that then proceeds to drift backwards before crashing off-screen to cover up the crime. Now that's angry! A Blood Pledge is the fifth installment of the Whispering Corridors series, a horror franchise united by its all-girl high school settings and its Catholic school uniforms. More interestingly though is that the movie is helmed by writer-director Lee Jong-yong who co-wrote Park Chan-wook's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance.

Running 7 Dogs: Everyone's Chasing Everyone But Nobody's Getting Anywhere

2011-05-28T11:20:00.009-04:00

In an intro to an anthology of his avant garde plays, Richard Foreman writes how he most enjoys the beginnings of movies before you can figure out what's going on. Once the plot becomes apparent, the film becomes less engaging. At least, to him. In that case, he'd probably love Running 7 Dogs because the first half of the movie bounces so quickly from scene to scene and introduces so many characters before any one of them is truly established that you really aren't sure who's who and what's what for a long, long time. Even after you've deduced the basics, Running 7 Dog's logic still challenges passive viewing because it so often strains credibility.

What do you do when someone has sex with your girlfriend? You hire someone to chainsaw his leg off then buy her a ranch. How do you respond if someone asks to see your police ID? You hit him in the head with a cue ball. Where do you go to meet the love of your life? The restroom of a gas station, not just once but twice. Admittedly, this movie doesn't improve after you've learned the personal histories and current motivations of its various characters but at least it does make clear that writer-director Kim Joo-man does have a story to tell. This isn't experimental filmmaking; it's just convoluted.

Indebted to Pulp Fiction with its extreme violence and central flashback, Kim's movie has to do with a cabbie (Jeong So-yeong) who accidentally has a hit-and-run accident that has little effect on his blase attitude toward life but suddenly puts him in possession of hundreds and hundreds of American hundred dollar bills. As he struggles to figure out a way to exchange the money for Korean currency, he leaves the cash with his girlfriend (Lee Jee-hyeon), a pretty tough convenience store clerk who doesn't take flack from her customers, her co-workers or any of the criminals she meets at the checkout counter. Working day after day under fluorescent lights hasn't dimmed her sense of self-righteousness. She might not be a master of tae kwon do but she's a fighter, a woman who's not afraid to bite your ear off if you try to rough her up. No wonder her boyfriend likes her so much. She's resourceful, loyal, forward-thinking, and looks good in a polyester uniform. That's not easy. At the end of Running 7 Dogs, you hope she takes all that money and buys herself a smashing new wardrobe. She deserves it!

H: When Anti-Abortionists End Up in Jail, They Impregnate Their Ideas in Others

2011-05-21T12:38:00.011-04:00

H, Lee Jong-hyuk's moody procedural drama about an imprisoned serial killer who remains unstoppable even behind bars, isn't particularly hard to figure out. You quickly discern that Detective Kang (Ji Jin-hee) is involved in the slew of murders at the movie's center and that the clues pointing to other suspects are just there to throw you — and his fashionably crossdressing female partner Detective Lee (Yum Jung-ah) — off the trail. Lee, like you, is not so easily fooled though. Unlike the lead police duo's main sidekick — fat, jolly and admittedly none-too-bright Detective Park (Sung ji-ru), she's smarter than your average man-in-blue; she's a circumspect investigator who gains more by thinking hard while coolly smoking a cigarette (that never shortens over time) than she would get by grilling her perp Shin-hyun (Cho Seung-woo) in an effort to find out what's driving him to slit the throats and cut off the ring-fingers of young, sometimes lesbian, pregnant women. She'll leave that task to Dr. Chu (Kim Sun-kyung), the enigmatic and questionably ethical psychiatrist who respects her client's privacy more than the safety of random, future victims.

From the looks of the turnout at the lecture she gives on the modus operandi of serial killers, she probably has a book in the works too so she doesn't want to taint her research just to solve a crime. What I still can't figure out is whether her book is on sociopaths or anti-abortionists. As message movies go, H is one of the oddest anti-choice movies on record. The killer is motivated by a deep-seated memory of being an abortion that didn't work. (He can still recall the feel of the cold forceps.) The victims are primarily unwed pregnant women who, in theory at least, don't want their babies. A single virgin dies, too, though that's explained away as "confused thinking" on the part of the killer but given said killer's psychic powers, a more logical answer is that he was able to pick up on a deep-seated desire to get laid and not have a baby no matter what. And who hasn't felt that? If this all strains credulity for you, then H definitely isn't your kind of movie. If you're fine with experiencing suspense primarily through a well-crafted soundtrack (with some excellent '70s-style noir tracks from composer Jo Sung-woo), than H will be alright for you.

I Saw the Devil: It's a Bittersweet Life That's More Bitter Than Before

2011-05-14T13:34:00.013-04:00

I Saw the Devil is a high-octane thriller that's got something to teach if you can hear it over the accelerated beating of your heart. The lesson is this: A successful revenge is a Pyrrhic victory. When undercover agent Kim Soo-hyeon (Lee Byung-hun) decides to play cat-and-mouse with serial killer Kyung-chul (Choi Min-sik) who raped, murdered then dismembered Kim's wife (Oh San-ha) and many others, he has to deal with some casualties along the way. For each time he releases his prey only to stalk him again, some innocent bystander is likely to get hit, stabbed, or choked. (If you're really unlucky, you'll suffer all three.) Soo-hyeon also submerges himself in a heretofore unconsidered freaky-scary world where mass murderers crop up time and again as if a whole underground network of interconnected sociopaths existed just below society's surface. (David Lynch would have a field day with an American remake!) So while, Soo-hyeon's got high connections within the police force — his father-in-law is Squad Chief Jang (Jeon Gook-hwan), he's going to need to draw on more than those resources to beat Kyung-chul at his own game. You see, Kyung-chul's got powerful allies too, especially one old buddy — a good-natured cannibal (Choi Moo-seong), with a violent girlfriend (Kim In-seo) — who enlightens Kyung-chul over dinner re: Soo-hyeon's "hunter" mindset. This mealtime revelation allows Kyung-chul to turn the tables at least for awhile.

Both Kim and Choi turn in hypnotic performances: Kim as per usual takes a minimalist approach, executing tasks as a form of acting then showing flashes of deep emotion at crucial points like when he's leaving the mausoleum where his wife's just been entombed; Choi chooses a flashier approach, giggling tauntingly and staring furiously at anything that gets in his way. It's a nice balance. Kim grounds the film; Choi embellishes it. I've seen a number of Kim Jee-woon's movies before (The Good, the Bad, the Weird, A Tale of Two Sisters, The Quiet Family). I Saw the Devil definitely showcases what this director does best: an extended chase scene that's punctuated by artful depictions of violence filled with horror; an adrenaline-releasing thriller fueled by one believably psychotic personality. I'm thinking particularly of A Bittersweet Life which also features Kim as a nearly-invincible-and-unquestionably-wronged man trying to survive amid an army of fists, knives, and guns. I was a big fan of that earlier effort and I'm a big fan of this one too.

Lovers of 6 Years: Masochists for Eternity

2011-05-07T00:14:00.012-04:00

Someone please pass me a razor blade. Lovers of 6 Years is one depressing romance. We're supposed to believe that the two lovebirds — Da-jin (Kim Ha-neul) and Jae-young (Kim Ha-neul) — are meant for each other because they share a few common interests: namely bickering, crying and cheating. Yet while misery loves company, I don't know that I'd recommend shacking up with a longterm partner because he or she makes you feel like crap and you do the same for him or her. There must be a better way to bond than commiseration. Not that Jae-young's alternative amour, Ji-eun (Cha Hyeon-jeong), comes across any better. She's a flirtatious sociopath who jokes about poisoning him and slicing him up into little pieces so she can take him in her new suitcase when she flies to Santiago. It's no wonder he wants to get back with Da-jin. But Da-jin definitely could do better.

Jin-seong (Sin Seong-rok), the guy with whom she has her reciprocal fling, is both taller and more talented than Jae-young. Even considering that he may be egocentric and eccentric, Jin-seong strikes me as one of those once-in-a-lifetime guys who are too-good-to-be-true if you don't believe you deserve the very best. And after six years with Jae-young, Da-jin's ego has been whittled down enough so that she doesn't think she's worthy of someone that great. That's my take. This is a woman who has reconciled herself to the idea that if she's invested six years of her life with a remorseless, cheating jerk who's more concerned with getting laid than he is about that lump in her breast, well then, she might as well spend the next sixty with him too. Familiarity is her comforter. Note to Da-jin: Familiarity also breeds contempt. (It's good to use cliches when describing a movie so full of them.) Co-writer/director Park Hyeon-jin also suggests that Da-jin might be pregnant by way of a scene early on in which Jae-young insists that they have sex without a condom and then a few more scenes which reveal Da-jin's subsequently unappeasable appetite. Coincidence? Probably not. It's possible that Da-jin subconsciously knows that she's knocked up and recognizes that Jin-seong, the handsome artist who's also illustrating her first novel, might not stick around if he finds out that her baby isn't his. Best to stick with the guy who caused it. If nothing else, you'll get child support.

Monopoly: Neither a Crime of the Century, Nor a Movie for Tonight

2011-05-05T20:38:00.007-04:00

Sigh. Why isn't Lee Hang-bae's Monopoly better than it is? Why? It has sections that are pretty interesting. It also periodically suggests complicated back stories for its characters — an attractive trio that's masterminding the biggest swindle in Korean banking history. I'm certainly predisposed to like lead character Kyung Ho (Yang Dong-kun): a gay computer nerd who's all-too-willing to throw his morals out the window for John (Kim Seong-su), the emotionally manipulative, American heartthrob who eventually shows his commitment by running over said tech geek's homophobic co-worker, then backing over the jerk a second time to make sure the job is done. (Since this is a Korean movie, there's no shortage of vomit to prove our hero is sickened by the action even as he's won over by John's devotion.)

I also admit a weakness for the complications that arise once you learn that the aforementioned amoral dreamboat is actually bisexual and married to Elly (Yun Ji-min), a cigarette-puffing vixen who sashays about in form-fitting satin that accents every delectable curve. But these three promising characters never end up being that deep and the performances are a little too one-note. I ended up thinking Kyung Ho should cry less, John should emote more, and Elly should consider learning how to blow smoke rings. Hey, someone's got to lighten up. Because one thing Monopoly lacks is a sense of humor. Lee takes his central crime pretty seriously and truth be told, the outlandish embezzlement he's concocted is little more than Office Space meets The Usual Suspects. Yes, I know that's a spoiler but since Monopoly isn't so great, wouldn't you rather know this movie's pedigree now than sit through 90 minutes and feel like you'd seen it before? Which actually gets me back to my original wish. I feel like Kyung Ho especially could've been a truly original character. It's not often you get to see an effeminate, figurine-collecting office drone break out of his downtrodden status and enact revenge fantasies, even if they fill him with regret. But as played by Yang, Kyung Ho never really sheds the mincing stereotype, except at the very end when he discards his identity completely. If you're angry because I've just dropped another spoiler, I have to ask you: Why did you continue reading after the first one?

Flower Island: So You Wanted to Meet the Wizard Instead of a Shrink?

2011-04-23T16:39:00.008-04:00

Somewhere along the line in Song Il-gon's teary Flower Island, I thought, "Oh, this is just like The Wizard of Oz without the comedy, the catchy tunes or Judy Garland." But you definitely have three broken characters, with self-esteem issues, heading to a magical place akin to Oz as they search for life-changing wizardry — in this case, the wish-granting comes courtesy of a fairly low-key woman with magical powers and a knack for hypnosis. Sad more than hopeful, this trio isn't looking for a heart, a brain and the nerve. Instead, one (Lim Yu-jin) is seeking peace of mind so she can die of throat/tongue cancer; another (Kim Hye-na), for the mother who abandoned her as a child; and the third (Seo Ju-hie), for her "angel" friend who she hopes will make her feel a little less guilty about having sex with an old man as a way to raise money to buy her daughter a piano.

As in the Emerald City, no one gets what they've asked for exactly but they do return to the real world a little less troubled (although in one case, a little less troubled happens to mean dead). Shot on a digital camera, Flower Island feels somewhat insolent because its hand-held P.O.V. is often obstructed and its actors look directly at the lens, sometimes because one of the characters happens to be an amateur videographer and sometimes just because. That former conceit doesn't really have a pay-off. The fictional filmmaker's shots aren't that different from those by the actual one and there's no point-of-view epiphany, notwithstanding the blurred image of a maternal doppelganger who appears on the beach at the same moment that the cancer lady is about to disappear mid-air via a pair of cardboard angel-wings. I like the spirit behind making a low-budget film with little more than an idea and a handful of game actors. I'm less into a slack editorial process that permits scenes to wander willy-nily and a storyline that for all its grief never triggers a well-earned tear. Every character cries; one of them screams. As to the audience, we're left waiting for a glimpse at the dark, doomed reality within. At the end of The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy returns home and sees Kansas anew; at the end of Flower Island, the main character may be over her depression but she doesn't get a memorable catchphrase like "There's no place like home."

Dance, Dance: Out of Step With the Pleasures of Its Convention

2011-04-16T11:16:00.024-04:00

Dance, Dance adheres to a number of formulaic dance-movie conventions... up to a point. So while you'll find the seeds of the classic story of one innocent and eager newcomer (Ju Jin-mo) who starts off as the rehearsal studio's laughing stock only to discover that he's got real talent -- and an unexpected passion -- for dance, what doesn't follow is the triumphant emergence of a breakout star who has climbed from the very bottom of the ranks. Far from it, this newbie instead causes his ragtag troupe to lose a major gig on broadcast television before dropping out so he can continue his medical studies. Who saw that coming? Not me! Equally deflating is the mishandling of that beloved cliche about the quotidian struggles of dancers/best-friends who love, fight, perform, disband and reunite as they strive for success and fame. This time, the scrappy troupe neither wins the big competition nor overthrows the undermining TV producer who won't let them rehearse for their music video. Instead, these guys spend an inordinate amount of time and energy putting up posters for a b-boy revue in which they will play a fairly lame part. Again, true-to-life but why? Couldn't we lie for the sake of pleasure?

As to the romance that could've salvaged Dance, Dance, let's just say that the spark-less relationship between the dance diva (Hwang In-yeong) and her shy protege (Yang, as mentioned above) is a platonic one that probably won't outlast the credits. What draws them together? She's respectful of his having a career outside dance and tickled by his enthusiasm for the form. As to her attractions for him, outside of a killer waistline, she's really representing the artist's way more than she's inspiring love or lust or longing for the unattainable. He's not so much infatuated with her as he is fantasizing about being her, about being a dancer, an artist, someone not so square as he so helplessly, hopelessly is. I wouldn't go so far as to say his character is gay but if he is, he's the kind of quietly repressed gay who's so out-of-touch with his inner life that he probably won't realize his sexual orientation until he's 40 and then only after he's taken a dance class for nostalgia's sake at the community center. In summation, Dance, Dance has no inspiring journey of self-discovery, no good guys vs. bad guys drama, no sappy love story, no knock-your-socks off dance routines -- unless you count a brief clip of a trio of guys spinning on their heads. Which I won't.

The Coast Guard: Making an Anti-War Statement That Makes No Sense

2011-04-09T17:45:00.013-04:00

You can always count on a little bit of crazy in a Kim Ki-duk film. Here in The Coast Guard, you get a double dose via PFC Kang (a somewhat embarrassing Jang Dong-gun) and civilian local girl Mi-Yeong (an ultimately disappointing Park Ji-a), who are practically in a competition to see who can out-kook the other: He's irrationally obsessed with killing a North Korean spy; she's drunkenly reckless about getting banged by her boyfriend Young-gil across the forbidden border. And that's when they're at their most sensible! Once they both get what they want -- in a twisted way, naturally -- as Kang shoots her lover in a fatal instance of coitus interruptus, the two officially go off the deep end. He keeps thinking that he's still in the army although he's been discharged for being mentally unfit. She starts having sex with any man in a uniform, none of whom mind a bit that she's freakily damaged goods. Aside from his former comrade (Kim Jeong-hak) and her loyal brother (Yu Hae-jin), no one appears overly sympathetic towards their descents into madness. Insanity is tedious. Best to steer clear in case derangement is contagious!

And if you think that it can't get any worse, you don't know director Kim. Kang's inevitably bound for the nuthouse then escapes to go on a killing spree; Mi-Yeong's destined for an involuntary abortion without anesthesia. You may classify The Coast Guard as an anti-war movie if you wish but it's really so out there that it's not really anti-war at all. The more you consider the horrors, the more you realize that none of them would've happened if she hadn't lured her lover into a war zone and he hadn't been so dead set on being a hero. War isn't crazy. Unstable people near or on military bases are. No one -- whether they're pro-war or pro-peace or anti-war or anti-military-establishment -- is likely to change their stance after seeing The Coast Guard. They might not agree that shin-kicking, face-slapping and rolling around in the mud are the best ways to restore order among the ranks but they'll probably not have a strong opinion as to what to do instead. Marching and soccer are great ways of team building. Putting on war paint and looking at the ocean through night goggles are two soldierly activities that have lost none of their cool.

Five Senses of Eros: Speak No Hot Sex, See No Hot Sex, Hear No Hot Sex

2011-03-31T21:17:00.017-04:00

Memorable short films? I don't know many. Memorable short erotic films? I don't know any. The enervating anthology Five Senses of Eros didn't change that fact either, especially since there's actually not an arousingly erotic short in the bunch. The opener, Byun Hyuk's "His Concern," is a grating voiceover accompanied by images charting the first stage of a romance resulting from a chance encounter at a train station. (She's way too good for him even if he is played by matinee idol Jang Hyuk.) Number two -- Hur Jin-ho's "I'm Here" -- isn't much better: a twee 20 minutes of a husband (Kim Kang-woo) and wife (Cha Su-yeon) playing hide-and-seek even after she ends up dying of something or other. (This woman likes to spoon even when she's gone!)

On to the third mini movie "33rd Man" which gets more pornographic by kicking off with a naked humping couple undone once the ghost (Kim Gyu-ri) appears. She's not really a spook, mind you, she's simply an actress on a shoot with a frustrated director (Kim Su-ro) and an experienced leading lady (Bae Chong-ok) who oddly enough happens to be a bisexual vampiress. By film four, things get weirder and dykier. With Min Kyu-dong's "The End and the Beginning," now we've got a bitter, horny widow (Eom Jeong-hwa) who decides to shack up with the magician-girlfriend (Kim Hyo-jin) who her hunky husband (Hwang Jeong-min) was banging when he got killed in a car accident. (Just wait until she finds those S&M videotapes.)

Last and least erotic if most interesting is Oh Ki-hwan's "Believe in the Moment," a fragmentary little flick about six incredibly edible young things who confusedly swap partners as they struggle to find out the meaning of intimacy. Lots of kissing! No nudity! I've actually seen previous films by many of the writer-directors featured herein but I don't feel that any of them qualify as an auteur just yet. This project probably appealed to them as something to do before they got to work on a more serious project. Maybe they're auditioning actors. Maybe they're testing out cinematographers. Maybe they're trying to flesh out an idea about carnal desire or the eros-thanatos connection or a dream they once had but don't remember too clearly anymore. Maybe that's it. But only maybe.

See You After School: The Bottom of the Barrel Lands on Top

2011-03-27T15:59:00.013-04:00

I always think that I'm indifferent to the charms of the high school comedy but then once I start watching one, I start to think, hmm, maybe I'm not so immune to the genre or so above it all. Lee Seon-hoon's See You After School is typical fare: Transfer student and all-around reject Dahl Nam-koong (Bong Tae-gyu) is released from an international, slapstick medical study about lifelong losers just in time for the fall semester. At his new school, he immediately comes into conflict with on-campus bully Jae-koo (Ha Seok-jin) who is harassing the crush-worthy Min-ah (Jeong Koo-yeon) because that's what tough boys do to pretty girls when they're both 17. By defending her budding womanhood, however, Dahl lands himself in a heap of trouble. Now he's slated to get his butt whooped at the end of day for not knowing his place. As the hours diminish before his hopeless rooftop showdown, Dahl's attempts to get a suspension, detention, or medical leave as a way to escape yet another of life's humiliations (as well as death) inadvertently push him higher and higher in the school's seemingly unscalable hierarchy. Come the final bell, he's actually considered a serious contender as he squares off with the martial arts master. Look how far Dahl's come!

The Loser's Club has embraced him as their savior and leader; fellow outcast Yeon Song (Kim Tae-hyeon with a ludicrous coif) is willing to put his own life on the line in the spirit of wimpish solidarity; best yet, the prettiest girl in his class gently tries to dissuade him from fighting. (Who'd want to see that slack jaw punched?) Yet Dahl's greatest fear has evolved into a challenge he can't bypass without completely sacrificing his self-esteem It's one thing to get beaten up (again) and another thing to see yourself as trash. Aside from one major leap in logic which insists we believe that one toughie has inexplicably found religion and collegiate sweaters, See You After School teeters on the plausible throughout. Screenwriter Lee's balancing act of the real and the fantastic is commendable. I particularly enjoy the darker part of the movie that finds Dahl entertaining the idea of becoming the oppressor, even if it costs him a newfound chubby buddy. The devil is always offering you opportunities to sell your soul and there's something beautiful in an adolescent romp that reminds you that you can always buy it back.

My Friend and His Wife: Never Sell the Truth Short

2011-03-26T16:04:00.015-04:00

And now, a few words about the workaholic at the center of My Friend and His Wife... If there's a more blistering portrait of the self-centered businessman (Jang Hyeong-seong) who takes responsibility for little else than financial profit, none comes immediately to mind. Shin Dong-il's dour domestic drama is a heart-stopping look at how one well-dressed heel's me-first money-making mentality inevitably stomps out the inner lives of everyone who tries to get close to him; in this case, the foolhardy offenders are a cook (Park Hee-soon) and his beautician wife (Hong So-hee). At different points in the movie, both halves of this almost-happy couple have fallen painfully in love with the careerist-capitalist because he seems to promise a better future and a stronger sense of themselves. He loves them too in return — something he shows with increasing dividends — but he's habitually unable to emotionally invest in either relationship. No level of intimacy is more valued than a phone call from the boss; no date can't be canceled once hedge funds go in flux. Because of that, both parties get psychically shortchanged, even as their bank accounts thrive. The husband goes to prison then gets released to find himself the owner of a questionably self-sustaining eatery for fried chicken; the wife loses her baby but eventually helms a high-end hair salon. Neither is near contentment when the riches start pouring in. Which finally prompts them to re-evaluate their feelings for the sharpest point of their costly love triangle. And while they realize something interesting in the process, the biggest lesson is reserved for the biggest offender: A moral debt is the hardest to pay off. Sometimes, it's almost impossible.

The Man From Nowhere: An Action Movie to Answer My Prayers

2011-03-19T01:26:00.009-04:00

God, I love a good serious-faced kid actress (Kim Sae-ron) who's got a drug-addicted mom (Kim Hyo-seo) who calls her "garbage" when she's not working as a stripper or getting slapped around by her no-good boyfriend/pimp. And God, I love an emotionally numb but physically sexy assassin (Won Bin) who develops a fondness for little, helpless waifs without ever losing his ability to disarm and maim a whole gang of thugs even if they're equipped with knives, pipes and guns and he's got nothing but his flying fists and feet. I just love him! Especially, when he stands shirtless in front of a mirror and gives himself a stylish haircut with a bare razor blade and a handy electronic clipper that just happened to be lying around. And while I'm at it God, I also love a skinny, effeminate villain (Kim Seong-oh) who gets wigged out when blood unexpectedly splatters on his white Dolce & Gabbana ensemble even as he's torturing someone for his less-pretty-but-just-as-amoral brother (Kim Hee-won) who specializes in donor harvesting. I even love a greedy, guilt-free hag (Baek Soo-ryeon) who kidnaps motherless children then pimps them out to run drug deals or credit card scams. And while I don't necessarily love the assassin's soul mate (Thanayong Wongtrakul) who really just wants to have a fair fight with our hero because his mirror image is so hotly efficient, I can at least get into the homoerotic aspect of their brutal embraces and animalistic sparring. Oh, maybe I do love him, too, God. Maybe I do! And because of that, I definitely love Lee Jeong-beom's The Man From Nowhere. Thanks God! I really appreciate it!

Dasepo Naughty Girls: Grease Was the Word

2011-03-13T01:01:00.015-05:00

I'm trying to think if I've ever seen a sunny teen sex comedy that built its humor around venereal disease, prostitution, S&M, incest, transvestism, transsexualism, statutory rape, and masturbation without any mention of alcohol or drugs? The only equally innocent adolescent romp that comes to mind as a possible American counterpart is Grease, -- also a musical featuring a girl with bubblegum-pink hair -- but that comparison doesn't extend far since Grease includes neither a cyclop (Lee Kyeon) who can't get laid nor a high school principal possessed by a demon who's turning the slutty student body into born again virgins so she can become a dragon once and for all. In short, Lee Je-yong's Dasepo Naughty Girls is in a class all its own. As such, it's hard to judge it too harshly even if it's never laugh-out-loud funny or jaw-droppingly shocking. It's cute yet surreal, with its female protagonist (Kim Ok-bin) suffering a series of indignities -- such as being forced to do an erotic dance for a polyamorous secret society -- that propel her to stardom and out of poverty (represented by a featureless gray doll that clings to her back for much of the movie). Whether Dasepo ever ends up a cult classic is anyone's guess. If director Lee can produce more films like his previous hit Untold Scandal then this movie's chances would definitely increase.

Tell Me Something: Serial Killer on the Loose Leaves Questions

2011-03-05T01:17:00.014-05:00

Tell Me Something? Okay. How about I first saw this serial killer thriller over five years ago yet this viewing proved super suspenseful? How about a number of scenes are so gruesome, you'll need to turn away from the screen? How about actor Han Suk-kyu is perfect as Detective Cho, the lead investigator with a shady past of his own? How about deadpan actress Shim Eun-ha is infinitely more intriguing here than she was in that sickly sentimental Christmas in August? How about the soundtrack is great, and not just the public domain-sounding music but the Foley art as well which heightens agitation by periodically upping the volume on footsteps, doors shutting, and other environmental noise? How about I don't understand why director Chang Yoon-hyun hasn't written another mystery since this one from the late '90s? How about Jang Hang-seon and Yum Jung-ah both turn in compelling performances as a police officer and a student doctor respectively? How about this is exactly the kind of slick, atmospheric flick that made me fall in love with Korean movies? How about Tell Me Something might leave you with questions but they won't interfere with your enjoyment? How about it's good to have questions that can't be answered? How about the best movies aren't flawless? How about that?

Once Upon a Time in Seoul: Watching the Rope That You'll Hang Yourself With

2011-02-27T22:09:00.014-05:00

There are two movies going on in Bae Hyeong-jun's oddball Once Upon a Time in Seoul (a.k.a. Boys Don't Cry). One concerns two orphaned teens (Lee Wan and Song Chang-ui) peddling stolen goods alongside a crew of young misfits in the black market of post-war Korea; the other concerns two 20-somethings living out the same plot with kids and middle-aged adults. This freaky double-take is what happens when you cast actors way too old for their parts. A story of youth becomes a story of late bloomers; innocent children morph into incompetent grownups. And that's just the beginning. Since the one female gang-member (Park Grina) dresses like a boy and appears twenty years older from certain angles, the two lead characters now appear to have either latent homosexual tendencies or a mother complex. Actually, the man-child played by Song might be looking for a father figure too since he's clearly enamored of one kick-ass street thug (Ahn Kil-kang) who's mastered the bullwhip and the swagger. In a movie like this, action sequences can make you forgive and forget but the big final fight scene here -- in which the upstart and an evil crime boss duel with whips instead of knives -- is mostly memorable for being so anti-climatic.

Poetry: Not Enough Rhyme or Reason in the Old Lady's Lousy Life

2011-02-20T00:12:00.011-05:00

Oh, Mija (Yun Jeong-hie), you pitiable, misdirected old lady. Did you really think that enrolling in a creative writing class at the community center would reconnect you to the beautiful things in life? Your troubles are far too deep for that. Your grandson (Lee Da-wit), after all, is one of six admitted rapists who've driven a fellow high school student to jump off a bridge to her untimely death. You claim to be close to your own daughter (his mother) but from the looks of it, you'd prefer whoring yourself out to a disabled old man as a way to raise funds to bribe the suicide's mother than to ask your dear child for a measly dime. Oh Mija, did you actually think that learning to write a sonnet would cheer you up? Did you really believe that getting to know the wisecracking cop while hanging out at poetry night at the local cafe would lead to something better? What were you thinking? Oh, wait. That's right. You can't remember what you were thinking because you've got Alzheimer's. So I'll ask the film's director Lee Chang-dong: What were you thinking? Sure, Poetry has quietly profound moments but did they require two and a half hours to serve? And is the film's bleached out palette a commentary on the washed out lives of your characters or an unneeded snub to the art of cinematography? I love Oasis and I like Secret Sunshine and The Green Fish quite a bit but this Poetry just wore me out.

May Story: National Uprising Is Backdrop for Downer of a Film

2011-02-13T12:52:00.014-05:00

In the annals of bad movie history -- a very thick book of small print -- Park Kwang-man's May Story may deserve a page all its own. The nonsensical plot climaxes on a rooftop where one moody terrorist (who mistakes a memorial parade for the actual conflict it's commemorating) goes suicidal while his female accomplice screams regretfully after supplying him with weaponry stolen from the blank-faced cop who loves her. The performances though less extreme are nevertheless extremely bad. As a gun-crazed femme fatale bored with running a roadside chicken cafe, Jang Se-yoon is so affected in front of the camera that she can't even pick up a stick without "acting" it out. Her two male leads have the courtesy to fail each in his own way: As the lovestruck officer, Yang Im-ho is Buddha incarnate, projecting a complacent stillness, often inappropriately. As the politicized kook, Kim Yoon-seong starts out cool then ends up a heap of histrionics. Add murky cinematography, pointless parade footage, and tediously long sequences that depict Soon-ji (the title character and an alternate title of the film) silently washing her hair or running down a road and you suddenly realize May Story subscribes to the "waste-not want-not" school of film making. No dialogue is too inane; no shot is too dark; no sequence is too inconsequential. The one thing left on the cutting room floor is the future careers of those involved.

The Housemaid: A Camp Classic Gets Reinvented for the Better

2011-02-05T12:00:00.006-05:00

I'm not a big fan of the original version of The Housemaid, Kim Ki-young's 1960 camp melodrama about a psycho servant usurping control in a middle-class household. Im Sang-soo's update, which shows a richer family's new nanny getting abused instead of abusing, seems infinitely more plausible, and for the first half of the film, Jeon Do-yeon gives such a transfixing performance as a good-natured naif willing to roll with the punches, that you'll be feeling as though you're watching a purported classic being transformed into an actual one. But then the story kind of plateaus. Jeon, who's done such a heartbreaking job at conveying a variety of vulnerabilities, doesn't relate the same level of intensity when she's realizing how she's getting the short end of the stick or devising her revenge. The movie doesn't tank, exactly, but it does go from being great to good. At one point, I wondered if the story was going to shift to the other, older housemaid (Yun Yeo-jong) who has more than enough bitter memories to incite a glorious revenge on the narcissistic woman-of-the-house (Seo Woo) or her bj-loving husband (Lee Jung-jae). No such luck.

Daytime Drinking: Beneath Every Rock Bottom Is Another Rock Bottom

2011-01-29T13:44:00.006-05:00

Eight telltale signs that Hyuk-jin (Song Sam-dong), the protagonist of Noh Young-seok's Daytime Drinking, is severely depressed and in need of therapy:

1. He watches long stretches of mindless television alone while eating instant noodles.
2. He drinks and smokes even when he doesn't really want to and actually wakes up after a blackout in a completely different town.
3. He's an easy target for a pimp (Tak Seong-joon) and his drunk, good-time girl (Kim Kang-hee).
4. His best friend Ki-sang (Yuk Sang-yeop) thinks he's a downer and procrastinates meeting him, even at a time of need.
5. He's unable to clue in to the fact that the jolly trucker (Shin Woon-seob) -- who gave him a lift when he was stranded in his underwear on the highway -- is looking for sex, not for Good Samaritan points.
7. He has psychosexual nightmares involving some crazy poetess (Lee Lan-hee) whom he met at the bus terminal.
8. His life is spiraling so out of control that if he isn't severely depressed at losing his girlfriend in the beginning then he definitely should be after being screwed left and right by the movie's end.

If ever there were a movie that reinforced the idea that drinking won't solve your problems, this one is it. With every drink, Hyuk-jin's life gets worse and worse. What's weird is at the end, you sense he might be about to embark on yet another bender!

Lament / Elegy of the Earth: As Queer as a Three-Dollar Bill Named Jong-man

2011-01-22T15:37:00.007-05:00

I'm pretty sure Kim Hee-cheol's Lament is a tragic gay love story. But I'm not totally sure. I mean the two main guys never kiss but cute, stupid Jong-man (Lee Byung-hun) who works in a beer hall definitely appears to fall in love-at-first-sight with alcoholic composer Kwang-su (Shin Hyeon-jun) who's just found out that his crazy brother committed suicide. But is it love just because the two guys shack up together in an apartment then move into an abandoned house to escape the cops? or because they run through a field while screaming something about escaping their pasts? or because the composer sobers up and sweetly ties the waiter's tie in the morning? Actually, Jong-man's not a waiter. He's an aspiring actor-screenwriter who videotapes himself engaged in mundane activities like eating and making funny faces before faxing his script -- a Meg Ryan vehicle -- repeatedly to Hollywood. He's a man with big dreams, my friend. As to his crush, Kwang-su would be happy enough to attain more modest goals, like staying out of the hands of the corrupt police force and maybe cuddling with not-too-successful, nearly mute independent business owner Se-hee (Jeong Seon-kyeong) whose music shop is always full of musical instruments but never customers. It's hard to imagine this movie getting many customers either, gay, straight or otherwise!

The Pot: The Holy Ghost Isn't Supposed to Be Scary Or Is He?

2011-01-16T18:26:00.015-05:00

Goodbye, Age of Anxiety. Hello, Period of Paranoia. As all serious discourse on subjects like art, pornography and spirituality-nee-religion is watered down to "I know what I like," "I know it when I see it," and "I know what I believe," assertions about being an artist, judging intent, or subscribing to any system of belief besides science are too scary for most people afraid of risking ridicule by stating an opinion outside the noncommittal norm. Organized religion has been especially hard hit with Christianity, in particular, constantly debunked as creepy mumbo-jumbo. Playing upon that spooked out view of spirituality, Kim Tae-gon's largely effective horror movie The Pot presents a deaconess (Kil Hae-yeon) and her evangelical church's congregation as Satanic ne'er-do-wells with duplicitous motives when it comes to helping a struggling businessman (Im Hyeong-gook), his pregnant wife (Yang Eun-yong) and their daughter (Ryu Hyeon-bin), a little devil herself who's got no truck with punching her mom's pregnant belly as a way to demonstrate that she, for one, has no interest in having a baby brother. That the Church ends up not being the bad guy in this movie comes as shock later on. And frankly, a disappointment. Blaming the devil for bankruptcy, miscarriages, and badly behaved children is so much more interesting than faulting an unhinged man.

Missing: You Should Never Call a Woman a Dog, Pet Owners

2011-01-15T00:56:00.011-05:00

So you're one of those people who equate owning a dog with rearing a child and believe that pooches are really people in fur, eh? Well, have I got a Korean movie for you: Missing. In Kim Seong-hong's twisted little fright flick, the serial killer kidnaps young women then forces each, in quick succession, to be his dog: keeping her in a cage, spraying her down with a hose, getting her down on all fours for some doggy-style. The idea of canines as humans doesn't sound so hot when you reverse the direction, now does it? And I'm sure Hyeon-ah (Jeon Se-hong) and Hyeon-jeong (Chu Ja-hyeon) -- one a brutalized victim, the other her sister survivor -- would heartily agree on all counts. Being treated like a dog is a bitch, especially if your owner is Pan-gon (Moon Seong-geun), a devoted son and deranged serial killer who spends his time in between torture sessions playing harmonica or spoon-feeding gruel to his invalid mother (Son Yeong-soon). Missing was inspired by a true story of a septuagenarian fisherman who killed four women in Bosung. That character doesn't show up until the movie's end; the villain in this movie -- with his axe, birthday cake, and egg delivery service -- is really more of an original.

Another Public Enemy: Revenge of the Nerds Who Work for the Law

2011-01-10T17:10:00.007-05:00

Justice prevails! What a square sentiment. And what a satisfying one to see played out in a cops-and-robbers movie. In Kang Woo-suk's Another Public Enemy, you're never quite sure if that's going to happen though, whether Public Prosecutor Kang (Sol Kyung-gu) is going to nail his childhood nemesis Han Sang-woo (Jeong Jun-ho) or whether that sneering sociopath is going to abscond with millions after killing his brother and father then dissolving the family estate. What you do know is that the poor-boy-made-good versus rich-boy-so-bad scenario is hard-to-resist if you secretly suspect all wealthy people -- and especially their children with entitlement issues -- are inherently evil. With two killer gang fights within the first half hour, you might expect this action pic to have more physical conflict than it does but Another Public Enemy is really an homage to its hero -- an upstanding, rule-breaking guy who'll go to any length to catch the criminal. He's got no wife; he's got no life. But what he does have is moral integrity and a support team that will put their lives and reputations on the line for him. It's all work and no play but the cause of justice is not such a bad raison d'etre.

The Best Korean Movies of 2010 (Sort of)

2010-12-31T20:07:00.007-05:00

Most year-end "best of" lists reflect the vibe of the year. Not this one. My top ten is composed of Korean movies seen this year regardless of release date, and because of that, reflects my own current preoccupations more than the world at large. The common thread this time? Revenge. In short: If you crossed me in 2010, watch out in 2011.

1. Jeon Woochi: The Taoist Wizard (2009): Fantasy isn't generally my cup of tea but Choi Dong-hun's sorcerer's tale about righting wrongs is a bubbly glass of champagne. The director's crime pic Tazza: The High Rollers almost made my list but ended up in the eleventh slot.

2. Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000): Bong Joon-ho's portrait of a bitter, vengeful, petty academic (Lee Sung-jae) is evidence that genius is apparent at the start of some careers. (Bong's first film also memorably features Bae Du-na whom he cast later in The Host.)

3. A Frozen Flower (2008): Not for those who blush easily, Yu Ha's sexed-up melodrama finds King (Ju Jin-mo) and Queen (Song Ji-hyo) feuding over Hot Bodyguard (Jo In-seong). Many scenes with humping. Many scenes with suspense.

4. Secret Sunshine (2007): This character portrait by Lee Chang-dong isn't as good as his Oasis but what is, really? The movie concerns a woman who loses her son then spirals into an evangelical Christian support system that's a bit troubling. This time, don't praise Jesus. Praise Lee.

5. Old Partner (2008): The one documentary on this year's list tells the story of a very old farmer and his very old ox. Very moving. If you think animals are people in a way, you'll love it.

6. Antique Bakery (2008): This one looks like it's going to be a lighthearted gay romantic comedy but ends up a murder mystery in which the gay man isn't the victim or the killer. He's simply a patissier with demonic powers of attraction. Now that's novel!

7. Arahan: Urban Martial Arts Action (2004): Usually my guilty pleasures go in the number nine or ten slot but this action pic -- basically The Tao according to Marvel Comics -- is so adorkable I couldn't demote it further than seven.

8. Black House (2007): This horror flick creeped me out big time. As a female Hannibal Lecter, Yu Seon gives a performance to send shivers up your spine. As the male Jodie Foster seeking justice, actor Hwang Jeong-min is somewhat unlikable which makes the conflict even more interesting.

9. The Secret Reunion (2010): The one film actually from 2010 is also a major blockbuster and stars Song Kang-ho (who also gives a memorable performance in Secret Sunshine) and Kang Dong-won (who's even better in Jeon Woochi).

10. Green Fish (1997): Another really polished work from Lee Chang-dong (see slot 4), this directorial debut is most notable for the exceptional performances by Han Suk-kyu (as a late-blooming thug) and Shim Hye-jin (as a down-on-her-luck-forever nightclub singer).

The Green Fish: You Need to Go Down to Get Deep

2010-12-17T02:25:00.014-05:00

The loss of innocence is so upsetting sometimes. Even if you factor in that innocence and adulthood are pretty much incompatible, watching a late-bloomer fall from grace can make for a painful viewing experience. And coming-of-age only gets crueler the older you get. In Lee Chang-dong's masterful first film The Green Fish, the naif about to lose it all is earnest 26-year-old Makdong (Han Suk-kyu). He's a poor, eager-to-please guy who, recently discharged from the army, ends up working for ruthless mobster Bae Tae-kon (Mun Seong-kun) after one unlucky circumstance. Bae's girlfriend Mi-ae (Shim Hye-jin), for her part, is about as far from innocence as you can get. Pimped out by her boyfriend when she's not being harassed by customers who ridicule her nightclub act, she knows she's sinking more and more deeply into the mire but she can't find a way out. She's drawn to Makdong not because he's cute but because he's the least corrupt thing she's seen in God knows how long. He'll never be the life preserver he and she wishes he could be; the few times he tries, he proves a terrible protector since he's adhering to a school boy code in a roomful of truants. But their love is inevitable. Just as their future is doomed.

The Secret Reunion: How Our Tastes Are So Predictable and Distressing

2010-12-13T23:50:00.011-05:00

Going into Jang Hun's blockbuster spy-caper The Secret Reunion, we pretty much already know that we're going to side with South Korea over North Korea, actor Song Kang-ho over co-star Kang Dong-won, and being true to your friend over being true to your country. But what's nice about this movie is that, for each decision you make between two obvious choices, you end up liking what you didn't pick as well. After all, if this movie is to be believed, Pyongyang's military academies are training single assassins capable of outwitting entire police forces (pretty cool); Kang is, against the odds, delivering a winning performance that's equal parts withdrawn hipster and anxious weirdo (also cool); and the fanatical political hit man operating under the name of "The Shadow" (Jeon Gook-hwan) is plain cool no doubt about it. A few hours after the movie, you may momentarily lose your cool should you question your knee-jerk reactions. I mean, do your sympathies really lie with a hot-headed, profiteering divorcé who tracks down foreign mail-order brides then returns them to unattractive, working class husbands who may beat them? Uh. Yes. You do. The Secret Reunion isn't out to radicalize your way of thinking. It's out to entertain you despite your disturbing predilections. So uncool!

Blue: Bromance, Romance, Adventure, Dud

2010-12-02T23:41:00.018-05:00

Shin Hyeon-jun must have one of the most unconventionally fetching faces in Korean cinema. With his humped nose and goofy grin, he's not anyone's idea of "typical leading man." Yet despite his oddly attractive oddball looks, once you've considered his resume -- The Legend of the Shadowless Sword, Marrying the Mafia II and III, and Face -- he suddenly seems like the face that launched a thousand (uneven) films. He can't save a movie, no, but he can steer it, and if it sinks, survive it. Until Blue. Director Lee Jeong-kuk's soggy submarine drama is that exceptional instance in which Shin goes down with the ship. His slapstick-y shtick holds charm neither in the rocky bromance with his less attractive co-star (Kim Yeong-ho) nor in the doomed romance with their shared love interest (Shin Eun-Kyung). Did Shin mistakenly think that looking handsome in a naval uniform on land and without a shirt while underwater would have us forgiving a movie that lacks a well-dressed plot? If so, he was wrong. And our wandering eyes instead have drifted over to Park Sun-il (the immature loud-mouthed cadet) and Ryu Su-yeong (the psychotic soldier). At this boot camp for deep sea rescue missions, any actor who thinks he can float by looking cute is about to get a cold splash in the face.

The Housemaid: Cheating on Your Wife Means Gambling With Your Life

2010-11-23T21:29:00.014-05:00

Checking references for a potential domestic hire? If the candidate's name is Myong-ja (Lee Eun-shim), be sure to talk with her former boyfriend as well as her recent employers. This girl's got serious jealousy issues! In Kim Ki-young's kooky melodrama The Housemaid, all hell breaks loose when this saucy servant starts cooking and cleaning... then screwing the master-of-the-house -- a music teacher named Dong Sik (Kim Jin-kyu) who leads a women's choir at the local factory. What's the best way to deal with her irrational behavior? Try to kill her off with the same rat poison she used to kill your bratty son (Ahn Sung-kee) and you'll end up like Dong's wife (Ju Jeung-nyeo ): a slave to her sewing machine and Myong-ja! Try to defuse her when she explodes and you'll end up like Miss Cho (Eom Aeng-ran): at the wrong end of a very long knife! Whatever you do, don't continue to sleep with her!!! In this movie's crazed reality, Dong Sik's last-ditch attempt to get away leads to his loony lover being latched on to his ankle and bumping her head against every stair along his failed escape. As black-and-white middle-class tragedies go, this one is campy, corny and not too credible.

Take Care of My Cat: Celluar Disintegration Comes After High School

2010-11-21T11:18:00.010-05:00

Oh my God! Ji-young (Ok Ji-young) has the most depressing life ever! She can't find a job. She lives in a ramshackle hut in the slums of Inchon with her grandparents because her parents are both dead. And she's given herself a home-job hair-do that's just one strand shy of heroin addict. When the tin hut in which she's been living collapses and kills what little is left of her family, you're almost glad she ends up in a juvenile detention center. At least, someone is taking care of her and preventing more fashion faux pas. Actually, she's not completely alone even after she ends up on the inside. Her classmate Tae-hee (Bae Du-na) is a bit of a drifter too who, as she's looking for a way out of conventional middle class existence, sees Ji-young as a kindred spirit with whom she can bond. While Take Care of My Cat never ends up as a lesbian coming-of-age story (That one would have a racier variation of the title!), Jeong Jae-un's cell-phone driven movie is poignant nonetheless. As to the titular cat, it's actually a kitten who gets passed among these two ladies and three fellow recent high school graduates: a corporate cog named Hye-ju (Lee Yu-won) and twins Bi-ryu (Lee Eung-sil) and Ohn-jo (Lee Eung-ju) who have a street vending business for cheap jewelry. Caveat emptor.

Hidden Floor: Welcome to Your New Home... Time to Meet the Dead Neighbors!

2010-11-20T04:26:00.010-05:00

Hmm. Let's see. Daughter Joo-hee (Kim Yoo-jeong) has developed a rash and been caught stabbing her doll with a discarded syringe. Not good. Mother Min-young (Kim Seo-hyeong) is an overworked architect hallucinating her new apartment building as a shabby domicile ready for the wrecking ball. Not good either. What's going on here? It's Kwon Il-soon's Hidden Floor, a pretty good fright flick that's part of 4 Horror Tales, a quartet of low-budget scary movies circa 2006 -- all but one written by Yoo Il-han. Yoo definitely has a classic formula at work here: A horrible crime (in this case the murder of a stubborn tenant and her son) must be uncovered by the living if the latter wishes to escape becoming one of the bitter dead's casaulties. Not that anyone will be believe her! I mean, ghosts... Really? Who believes in such things! You must be joking!!! Equally laughable are many of the performances: Like most B-movies, the exaggerated performances in Hidden Floor underscore how flat the other ones are. The exception? Kim Yoo-jeong. As the troubled pre-schooler who creeps out her babysitter, Kim feels vulnerable and menacing at the same time. You know she knows something about that hidden floor but you don't know whether that's a help or a hindrance to her mom.

Saulabi: I Only Regret That I Have But One Head to Get Decapitated for My Country

2010-11-11T22:12:00.006-05:00

According to legend though refuted by Wikipedia, the "saulabi" is the Korean antecedent of the Japanese samurai. Fact or fiction, this continental counterpart to Japan's noble warrior comes with an identical code of honor demanding duty, loyalty, and -- if the movie that bears its name is any indication -- a great deal of patience, too. A clunky recounting of yet another war of independence in which a ragtag group of Korean underdogs must overpower a larger group of tyrannical Japanese, this martial arts costume drama celebrates, in particular, the revolutionary diligence of expatriate Woo-do (Sang Hyun-lee) who must work for decades at forging a sword so powerful that it will cut through steel. Once he's done that, he knows (as does everyone around him) that victory will be assured. But until then, heads will roll because even blades that can't cut through steel nevertheless can cut through the vertebrae that connects the head to the torso. While pursuing his career-making goal as a sword smith, Woo-do makes a little time for play and ends up bedding local girl Osame (Uenemya Masako) who, lucky for him, will do anything to learn how to play the Gayageum -- basically a zither. For some girls, mastering the Koto just isn't enough.

This Is Law: Some Days, Blood Red Can Be a Pretty Color

2010-11-07T19:39:00.010-05:00

The beginning of This Is Law moves at such a clip, that you fear the movie's murderer is going to go through an entire Tarot deck since he's leaving bloodied cards at each and every one of his kills. But is he even one killer? And when he stops leaving cards, what does that signify? Whoever is doing it and for whatever reason, Homicide Detective Bong (Lim Won-hie) is out to find out before his rival Pyo (Kim Min-jong) from the Special Task Force does. While he's at it, Bong's going to win the affections of his competing officer's partner Kang (Shin Eun-kyung), too. Where's there's time for crime, there's time for romance, I say. Predictable? On paper, yes. But running a sprawling two-and-a-half hours with random quick edits, evaporating subplots, and periodic misdirects that sometimes inexplicably entertain, you'll probably forget which way Min Byeong-jin's crime pic is inevitably headed. Then once you finally get there, you'll be doing double-takes at your television. Really? Is this how it all wraps up? Flashy without being the least bit artful, This Is Law is a souvenir of Korean cinema. It's shiny and made from the basest materials and like most trinkets, it's perfectly harmless. Watch it. Discard it. Pass on to a friend.

Asian Queer Shorts: Neither Asian Enough, Nor Queer Enough, Nor Short Enough

2010-11-06T12:26:00.006-04:00

Looking to get a glimpse of gay culture in various Asian countries? Then look elsewhere. This compilation, called Asian Queer Shorts, is neither very good nor strictly from Asia. One featurette (Yellow Fever) concerns a Brit of Chinese descent who must overcome his internalized racism to forge a relationship with his adorable neighbor downstairs; another (Dissolution of Bodies) concerns two hot Asian guys rolling around in an American bed while discussing Foucault and Bataille as foreplay. Talk about a softening effect! A third entry (Still) is a rootless silent that speaks to the notion that sexy guys in wifebeaters look yummy no matter what their nationality. As to the two other flicks, which actually reflect gay culture in Asia, the first is a fairly chaste piece about a man-boy romance (Last Full Show) that develops at a cruisey movie theater in the Philippines while the other (A Crimson Mark) is a Korean pageant drama in which robed men testily argue about what the proper length of time is for the queen mother to stay in mourning, while a splinter group of two generate a royal hickey. The only cockfighting in this collection takes place between two roosters in a short scene in the Filipino flick. The rest is for the birds.

With the Girl of Black Soil: Here We Go Again... Being Poor Is Terrible

2010-11-02T12:30:00.011-04:00

In neo-realist films, Murphy's Law applies with a vengeance: Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong and then some. Yet as a slice of bleak life, With the Girl of Black Soil's bad news buildup never really rings true. Why is that? The circumstances are plausible enough: Single dad (Jo Yeong-jin) loses job in a down-on-its-luck mining town. Mentally-challenged son (Park Hyeon-woo) wrecks a rich man's car then disappears. Rats eat the family's eggs. Pile on the problems: This little family's dire straits never elicit more than a shrug from me. Life sucks. Yeah, and? Frankly, I wonder if I'd like Jeong Soo-il's oh-so-sad movie better if someone turned it into a musical. The material already comes with a few ditties built in: a kiddie song sung by father and daughter (Yoo Yeon-mi) during a car ride, a lip synched pop hit performed by both children over a meal, a worker's sing-a-long belted out at the bar. You can get away with maudlin moments that don't feel that real when you're more entertaining. Writer-director Jeong needn't sacrifice the more depressing aspects of the story either. I'm willing to sob over a self-sacrificing girl who poisons her dad's ramen if you set her not-so-thought-out actions to a really catchy tune. "Eat it! Just eat it!"

My Bloody Rommates: The Biggest Test These Girls Face Is One to Their Sanity

2010-10-30T23:30:00.016-04:00

Four gal pals with dreams of a better life. No. It's not Sex and the City, it's My Bloody Roommates (a.k.a. D-Day), Kim Eun-kyung's K-horror flick about four young ladies sent by demanding parents to a fascist prep school to improve their academic standing and thereby gain access to choice universities. In this sadistic pre-college program, the pressure to perform is great... as is the severity of the hairstyle and disciplinarian methods of the school's hall monitor (Yoon Da-kyeong). Of her charges, the bitchy girl (Yoo Joo-hee) cracks first and hangs herself; the brainy one (Kim Ri-na) gets knocked off her rocker next and starts hallucinating blood; the third girl -- a self-effacing dork (Heo Jin-yong) with a pet hamster named "Happy" -- seems imbalanced from the start so her going off the deep end is inevitable. The one survivor (Eun-seong), who is neither bitchy nor bright, neither bold nor bonkers, ends up with a leopard print scar on her face, a pair of sensible shoes, and a fairly interesting story to tell at cocktail parties should she get invited to any. I'd toast her resilience. (This movie is part of 4 Horror Tales, a series of fright flicks that also includes The Curse of February 29th, Forbidden Floor and Dark Forest of Death.)

Paradise Villa: Piling Up Bodies on the Cheap

2010-10-30T08:57:00.008-04:00

"Cheap" can mean quite a few things -- inexpensive, shoddy, ashamed, even mean -- and Paradise Villa, the low-budget slasher flick from director Park Chong-won, certainly takes on every definition. Shot in washed-out video and set in a run-of-the-mill apartment building where lights flicker on and off, the movie certainly looks cheap. It feels cheap too with its meaningless dialogue leading to gratuitous nudity or soft core sex nearly as often as explosions of violence. There's something mean (i.e., cheap) about the violence itself, too. The sick-o psycho (Jo Han-jun), who's bloodying room after room, is a dubiously distressed video gamer who sees every tenant as an uncooperative gaming competitor. Since no one knows what he's talking about, he slays them. Not that these neighbors would be safe if he'd never arrived. There's murder and mayhem throughout the complex with the coitus-interruptus killing of the landlord by a man who's having an affair with his mistress, and the bottle-smashing head-bashing of a soccer fan who won't stop singing when the power goes out. It's worth adding that "cheap" can be fun when it's this unashamedly tawdry. For me, watching Paradise Villa was time well-spent.

Soo: People Who Look Alike Have the Same Kind of Trouble

2010-10-25T23:21:00.012-04:00

Twins in a thriller is a lazy conceit. Well, a half-hearted thanks then to Soo, a movie which has the decency to introduce the lookalikes early on then kill one off fairly quickly. No, the uncanny resemblance in this Sai Yoichi crime pic doesn't play out as a case of mistaken identity but instead as a case of an assumed one. You see Brother A (Ji Jin-hee) has decided that the best way to track down the killer of Brother B is to impersonate the murdered sibling (same actor, of course). For A to pass as B completely, he gets a new haircut (a salon-caliber home-job) and a fresh, cool scar sliced into his chin. The corpse's not-so-helpful girlfriend (Kang Seong-yeon) knows this new guy's an impostor but she's willing to move in with him, hoping to have sex with him, and seeking to pick up where the last relationship left off. Why complain that you've lost your boyfriend if a facsimile shows up at the police prefecture where you both work? Plus, he's three seconds faster at running the 100-yard dash and can defend himself with a can of hairspray and a lighter. This guy rips off ears and tears out eyeballs. That's how tough he is! As for his victims, they all go down with the same scream whether they're being stabbed or strangled or shot or all of the above.

Black House: A Contract With the Devil

2010-10-09T10:21:00.010-04:00

Tonight, I'll probably have nightmares. That's what happens when you watch a stomach-turning thriller like Shin Terra's Black House over a bowl of Raisin Bran in the morning. You may think you have a whole day ahead of you to forget about the stabbings and the dismemberments, but this freaky little film about a female psychopath (Yu Seon) and the busybody insurance agent (Hwang Jeong-min) who foolishly gets between her and her money is, in a nutshell, unforgettable. In many ways, Black House is a Korean variation on Silence of the Lambs, a suspense-horror hybrid in which a serial killer is being pursued by someone who's got a few issues of his/her own. The fact that here "the good guy" is a bespectacled, chapped-lipped claims processor instead of an inexperienced-but-attractive FBI Agent is actually all to the good of the movie because it makes the hero a little less sympathetic and the conflict a lot more problematic. He may be working for justice, but he's also a tool of the machine. She may be incapable of feeling remorse, but she's also hardly living the high life and she's stuck with a limp. As the killer kook, Yu turns in one of those bone-chilling performances in which the eyes become the gateway to no soul. She's so riveting, you almost want her to win or at least luck out with parole.

Jeon Woochi: The Taoist Wizard: When Life Gives You Lemons, Paint a Cool Still Life

2010-10-03T00:01:00.009-04:00

When life gets you down, go to the movies. If you're lucky, you'll see smart escapist fare like Choi Dong-hun's Woochi and be reminded that existence is an adventure and many worlds reside in this world -- not just the oppressive one that's put you in a funk. Woochi is cinema as anti-depressant, a preposterous, uplifting fantasy about a baby-faced wizard (Kang Dong-won) who fights a rodent-faced gremlin (Kim Yun-seok) in order to protect a wooden recorder that accords its possessor universal control. As the battle between good and evil rages on, this action-adventure shuttles between opposing realities -- medieval days and modern ones, dreamscapes and nightmares -- all of them magical. Are we living in a classical watercolor, a poster for an energy drink, an elliptical eternity, a video game? Blink your eyes and whatever it was that you were living in will be gone as something disorientingly new takes its place. And since your surroundings are so unstable, follow Woochi's lead and surround yourself with cool people like a trusty sidekick who's really a dog in human form (Yu Hae-jin) and a pretty damsel-in-distress (Lim Su-jeong) who's actually a reincarnated former flame. Yes, you'll still have to deal with pesky evil spirits and unreliable gods, but at least you'll be with your friends!

Land of Scarecrows: There's No Wizard Behind That Curtain

2010-09-26T19:41:00.011-04:00

As a gay man, I hate to come out against experimentation but with Land of Scarecrows, I'll make an exception. A grueling 80 minutes of disjointed, often wordless storytelling, Roh Gyeong-tae's second film hops around topics like poisonous landfills, identity disjunction, and society's outcasts without ever landing squarely on any. His characters are outsiders kept at a distance: We don't enter their world, we stand off to the side -- neither judging nor, ultimately, caring. That lottery-ticket-selling transexual (Kim Sun-young) with the Filipino bride, aside from being completely unbelievable, isn't very sympathetic. She's kooky without being cute, funny, adorable, tragic or weird. She's actually kind of a bore despite her bound breasts. While I'd hardly commend MoMA for screening Land of Scarecrows, I can say I'm glad I saw it in a theater. There's something reassuring about witnessing so many people get up and leave when a movie doesn't deserve their attention. That they were there at all suggests that they're open to experimental film. That they left means they're able to spot when the emperor's new clothes aren't there.

A Frozen Flower: This Love Triangle Is a Fading Pink

2010-09-24T22:39:00.008-04:00

My heart goes out to this King (Ju Jin-mo). He needs to sire an heir to protect his kingdom but he can't get it up for the Queen (Song Ji-hyo) or his concubines. My heart also goes out to Hong Lim (Jo In-seong), the King's male lover and bodyguard. After being enlisted to impregnate the Queen, he fatally discovers that he's got a taste for the ladies -- as one 69 scene graphically illustrates. And because I've got a big heart, my heart also goes out to the Queen. Horny and unhappy, she's trying to make the best of a bad situation. Which, for a time, she does. (After being pimped out by her Lord and Master, she falls head over heels for the royal sperm donor and demands that they do it again and again in as many different positions as possible.) As love triangles go, Yu Ha's costume-drama/softcore-melodrama is ingenious in how it inverts a familiar forbidden love setup by having the straight couple sneak around while the gay man gets bitchy and suspicious. If A Frozen Flower might seem to side with the straights, it also illustrates that whether you're hot for men or women, everyone loves to kiss with a lot of tongue.

Addicted: Self-Denial Can Be a Form of Love

2010-09-18T14:57:00.009-04:00

Something undeniably creepy is afoot in Park Young-hoon's Addicted, a transcendental love story about a woman (Lee Mi-yeon) whose comatose husband (Lee Eol) appears to have returned to the conscious world by taking possession of the younger, hotter body of his little brother (Lee Byung-hun). While you could look at this sibling soul-swapping as a form of superficial upgrading for the widow, you do also have to wonder about the morals of a guy who'd evict the soul of his brother just to continue making kitschy furniture and cuddling with his wife. Naturally, the widow is confused and full of questions. Possession's not as commonplace as it once was, though -- in this movie -- the hospital's resident psychiatrist seems to treat it as a rare yet legitimate diagnosis. What the psychiatrist does not provide is a treatment plan. The younger brother's wannabe girlfriend (Park Seon-yeong) takes a stab at an exorcism of sorts by inviting her old love interest to the family farm for some backbreaking labor. All this does, however, is break her heart a little more. He didn't love her before. He doesn't love her now. Like any smart reject of romance, she packs her bags to study abroad. But not before sending those soul-mates to Hell!

Arahan: Urban Martial Arts Action: The Karate Kid Grows Up to Be a Cop

2010-09-12T11:42:00.010-04:00

I'm coining a new term: Adorkable. Definition? Stupid-cute. Prime example? Ryu Seung-beom, an actor who embodies the idea here via his role as a goofy, rookie cop with unprecedented superpower-potential. The film itself, the martial arts pic Arahan (directed by Seung-beom's brother Seung-wan), is pretty adorkable too. This fabulist tale about Seven Masters guarding a magical, transferrable tattoo has found a way to philosophize about justice and balance without ostentation by keeping the action -- and there are some killer action sequences here -- in a world of black market acupuncture, backfiring self-promotion, and deadly lotus positions. This is The Tao according to Marvel Comics, or a Universal Religion that inserts its message between splashy fights and silly slapstick done with a wink. Sweetening the deal are a supervillain (Jung Doo-hong) who knows great evil requires great abs, and a foxy love interest (Yoon So-yi) who's fierce with her fists but faulty with her palm blasts. (Some superpowers are harder to perfect.) If Arahan has a fault, it may be that to describe it is to demean it. This is stupid-cuteness of the highest order, as adorkable as Old Partner is poignant and The World of Silence is creepy.

Popee: All Dogs Go to Hollywood to Die

2010-09-05T13:41:00.004-04:00

You'll have to be an ardent dog-lover to get into the spirit of Kim Ji-hyun's pseudo-documentary Popee. A weird mix of "true crime" re-enactments of very un-criminal moments surrounding the death of the family dog ("Popee") and naturalistic interviews with various dog owners who flounder and falter as they discuss animal consciousness ("Do dogs dream? Do they know their names? What are they thinking?"), this hour-long video -- hardly a movie -- holds a small fascination for people who like to see the raw, awkward output of weekend artists committed to decidedly non-commercial, personal endeavors. This is what happens when someone has the power to round up a bunch of friends to man the cameras and stand in front of them, talent be damned. Many of the anecdotes -- especially one concerning a woman who buys a sick German Shepherd from an unsympathetic pet shop owner -- feel overly scripted; others -- like the one about the titular dog mating with all the female dogs in the neighborhood -- reflect poorly on the owners. Evidently, Kim made a sequel called Cats six years later. In another six years, I suppose we can expect the final entry in the trilogy: Birds.

Into the White Night: Fashioning an Imperfect Murder

2010-09-04T15:16:00.010-04:00

I don't know what to say about this one so how about director Park Shin-woo's mystery is filled with symbols galore: a police detective (Han Suk-kyu) who's slowly going blind, a killer (Go Soo) who wields scissors for art and murder, and a rape victim (Son Ye-jin) who desires nothing more than to launch a line of ugly clothing for men. Fighting interpretation, each lexicon of Into the White Night's cinematic semiotics loses significance as quickly as it gains meaning. The more you study it, the less the movie reveals. So put aside that imagery! You're better off sticking with who kills whom how, when and why as the action rewinds and fast forwards with all the stylishness of a ten-year-old operating a VCR. That same clunkiness trips up most of the characters who feel only half-developed. One of the more complex roles -- a tough private eye (Lee Min-jung) with a good sense of intuition -- gets knocked off too soon; a largely forgettable police chief (Jeong Jin) gets reincorporated too late. Stick around long enough and you'll witness a perverse scene in which the rape victim psychologically victimizes the sexually assaulted daughter of her husband-to-be but I'd rather spoil that plot twist for you here and save you the trouble.

My Tutor Friend: Teacher's Pet Is Also Her Pretty Boy Peer

2010-08-21T16:01:00.014-04:00

My Little Bride. My Mighty Princess. My Sassy Girl. You'll find no scant supply of possessively titled rom-coms in the K-pop movie canon. So consider Kim Kyeong-hyeong's My Tutor Friend part of a tried-and-true tradition. Here's how the films work: On one side, you've got a bossy, egocentric rebel. In this case, it's Ji-hoon (Kwone Sang-woo), a dreamy flunky who's too busy primping and punching to pass 11th grade despite his 21 years. On the other side, you've got a self-effacing brat who'll act as his unknowing mentor and unlikely love interest. For this installment, her name is Su-wan (Kim Ho-neul) and she's got a thing or two to teach that young man about respect, verb conjugation, and idiomatic expressions in the English language. Rich boy, poor girl. Cool kid, square chick. Once these two learn to deal with his catty girlfriend (Kim Ji-woo), the school bully (Kong Yu) and the local gang, they'll drive off into the sunset on his motorcycle. But there's mayhem and misfires until then plus an improbably erotic scene in which she bandages the knife wound on his six pack abs as if they were making love and another queerly sexy moment in which he licks the blood off her paper-cut finger. Why kiss when you can nurse each other's wounds?

Shadows in the Palace: A Slow Death

2010-08-19T20:26:00.009-04:00

There's a half-decent murder-mystery/costume-drama to be salvaged from the grandly shot footage of Shadows in the Palace but as a too-slow burn deadened by a supernatural black fog that kills off suspects one by one, Kim Mee-jeung's pretty-looking period piece is instead a lame anti-suspense with weird horror F/X that reminded me of the inky squirt of a panicked squid. After awhile, I stopped caring if Chosun dynasty nurse-to-the-courtesans Chun-ryung (Park Jin-hie) was ever going to find out who the murderer was and started thinking that the movie was just plain odd. All the quippy bitchery I expected from a thriller set in a gynocentric society of maids and female medics never came to fruition. All the plot twists and sudden revelations that should've led to my involuntary gasp in the living room caused nothing of the sort. As art, this one didn't work. As pulp, it didn't work either. Neither sassy nor nasty, the film needs to flash B-movie tit or unfurl melodramatic claws to get my sisterly praise. (On the plus side, it does show one woman getting her hands chopped off.) Beautiful and bland, Shadows in the Palace only triggers one helluva classy yawn. Hee-bin (Yun Se-ah) can scheme to make her son a crowned prince all she wants. I'm still looking for the queen!

Dream of a Warrior: Your Past Life Is on a Distant Planet

2010-08-16T00:44:00.009-04:00

Usually, movie characters who time-space-jump end up in costume-rich eras: the 1920s or some century with powdered wigs perhaps. In Park Hee-joon's Dream of a Warrior, the time-travelers ditch earth completely and head for Dilmoon, a sword-and-sorcery planet where people wear neutral-colored Arthurian capes and black leather halters while warriors prove their mettle via mixed martial arts and a variation on football owing something to mud wrestling. Adept at both sports is Dean (Hong Kong pop star Leon Lai Ming), a lower class type who's contemporary counterpart is a soft-spoken cop with rare brainwaves that facilitats intergalactic adventures. He's been enlisted today to rescue Princess Rose (Park Eun-hye) of yore but first he needs to relive their entire romantic story as research. (Cue the sappy score for a flashback that lasts nearly the entire movie.) In this earlier courtship, Dean gets help fending off bad guys from tough chick ShoSho (Lee Na-yeong). By the time he returns to unfreeze Rose, ShoSho is dead so he's stuck fighting solo against Rose's betrothed who's got a better bloodline, bigger biceps and the supernatural powers that come from selling your soul to the devil. Lucky for Dean he can make a clone of himself!

Tazza: The High Rollers: Don't Test Your Luck Against This Double-Crossing Dame

2010-08-14T17:04:00.020-04:00

All hail the dragon lady! As played by Kim Hye-su, this ruthless cardshark and resplendent clotheshorse may not be the movie's lead character but she sure steals every scene she's in. Give her a second of screen time, and she'll flash her panties at a neighborning player or shoot her onetime lover (Cho Seung-woo) after he's screwed her out of a wad of cash. Then again, maybe she's spreading her legs and wielding that pistol because her co-star got better billing. Kim is evidence, if any more was ever needed, that there are no small parts, only lesser actors in the same movie. Choi Dong-hun's slick crime pic may be about vengeful gamblers so crazed with greed and thirsty for blood that they're willing to bet a limb once the funds run out is for Kim, an alternately sadistic and sentimental backdrop for a fabulous wardrobe, a stylish haircut and a series of poses with attitude. Let the talkative sidekick (Yu Hae-jin) ham it up. Let the pretty young thing (Lee Su-kyeong) win the hero's worthless heart. Let one oldtimer-bigtimer (Baek Yun-shik) retreat into the scenery. By the time the last hand's been dealt (and severed), Kim will emerge victorious, even as her winnings go up in flames. Did you ever doubt her, fool?

The Power of Kangwon Province: Rejection Involves a Loss of Color

2010-08-08T13:00:00.005-04:00

Hong Sang-soo's The Power of Kangwon Province is two pretty good movies in one. The first concerns a recent high school graduate (Oh Yun-hong) who joins two friends for a short, frankly miserable vacation at a beachfront tourist trap, where she has a botched romance with a married local cop (Kim Yoosuk). The second half-a-movie focuses on a struggling professor (Baek Jong-hak) with whom the young woman recently had an affair and who happens to be simultaneously taking a much more decadent trip to the same subpar resort. Although the two narratives tie together quite nicely come the final scenes, all of The Power of Kangwon Province feels so infected with melacholia that even tangential asides never feel that disconnected. Mood is everything here. A background story about a man who may have pushed his wife off a cliff only heightens the pervading sense that love is disappointing at best, fatal at worst. As someone who has found Hong's later efforts (Woman on the Beach, Night and Day) to be affected dreck, The Power of Kangwon Province proved unexpectedly moving. This flick has an earnest directness that makes its washed out palette feel like an honest manifestation of the colorlessness of the heart's despair.

The Divine Weapon: God, It's a Long Time Before The Rebels Rise to Glory

2010-08-01T11:05:00.009-04:00

Personally, I have a hard time getting revved up for a movie about the development of the first multiple rocket launcher and the first missile (even if it's interesting to learn that both were developed in Chosun in 1430). Hearing female warrior Hong-ri (Han Eun-jeong) bark orders then pull her hair out as she tries to figure out how many millimeters an injector hole is supposed to be just isn't gripping drama to me. I prefer seeing her suitor, crafty merchant Seol-joo (Jeong Jae-yeong), in an endless series of "one man vs. a hundred soldiers" street fights. Now that's cool! And while there's plenty of kicking and sword clanging, The Divine Weapon's only really glorious match up comes at the end when the scrappy Chosun renegades -- who've been slaving over their weapon of mass destruction for two hours -- stab, slice, kick, pierce then mass slaughter their way to freedom while battling an army ten times their size. In that climactic scene, director Kim Yu-jin taps into the magnificent awe and terror that the first exploding mega-weapon must have produced among soldiers who thought, until then, that arrows were as far-reaching as you could get. For that scene alone (and you can fast forward to it if you like), The Divine Weapon is worth seeing.

Marraige Is a Crazy Thing: She Pushes Love to Extremes John Donne Never Considered

2010-07-24T15:38:00.007-04:00

Yeon-hee (Eom Jeong-hwa) shows the depth of her love for Jun-young (Kam Woo-seong) in a weird way: She stages a whole faux relationship with him from courtship to marriage, then from honeymoon to separation -- even as she marries someone else in reality. All these pretend dates and pseudo-life-stages are intended to get her dimpled, English poetry professor to realize that he's the one that she truly adores. But when you think about it, her elaborate playacting is a major turnoff. While it's easy to peg Jun-young as a selfish commitment-phobe who uses Yeon-hee for sex and money, it's just as easy to call Yeon-hee a callous two-timer who never makes herself truly vulnerable and whose stab at martyrdom is a glib one. The tortured relationship that develops between these two is exactly what each deserves. He's a jerk who doesn't deserve a pretty, self-sacrificing wife. She's a greedy manipulator who shouldn't be getting unconditional affection from her well-educated gigolo. The final moment of Yu Ha's Marriage Is a Crazy Thing suggests a reconciliation but the white picket fence ahead for these two is likely to rot and fall apart.

Old Partner: The Past Is Around Us All the Time

2010-07-17T20:02:00.006-04:00

To some extent, every documentary is about a passing way of life. In Old Partner, the near-dead culture is farming before tractors and pesticides. Director Lee Chung-ryoul's primary subjects are a decrepit farmer, his toothless wife and their ox. As the three seed, cultivate and harvest crops repeatedly over a period of two to three years, the arthritic trio register as the faint final echo of an era that ended a century ago. There's nothing particularly nostalgic about seeing the physical toll that comes with doing everything by hand but there is something spellbindingly moving about watching an ox pull two passengers in downtown traffic as suited protesters declaim imported beef from America. And though he hasn't a line in the movie, that ox -- more than either owner -- comes to represent the bygone age most poignantly. Having worked alongside the stoic farmer and his pestering spouse for 40 years, this shaggy beast is the picture of perservering self-sacrifice. Is he a four-legged slave or a symmpathetic sidekick from another species? Whatever he is, you grow to see him as an equal partner in a brutally rigorous life that counts work as a kind of penance and a kind of reward. Understated poetry to be sure.

Tidal Wave: Cheap Laughs Then a Bucket of Cold Water

2010-07-09T22:11:00.006-04:00

For much of writer-director-but-hardly-auteur Yun Je-gyun's Tidal Wave, I wondered... Have I been misinformed? Is this a disaster pic or a spoof? It certainly feels like a spoof. No complaints for my part. To the contrary, I'll gladly laugh and snort in derision on cue. The comic antics of the losers who live, love, and loaf at the beach resort of Haeundae serve two purposes too. 1. They make you chuckle. 2. They make you oh-so-eager for that big wave that's going to wipe all that goofy ineptitude away. And yet when the tsunami strikes -- albeit a little late in the game for my taste -- I inexplicably found myself swept up in the various survivor stories. How the hell did that happen? Maybe, just maybe, that guilt-ridden drunk Man-sik (Sol Kyung-gu), that shrewish bitch Yu-jin (Eom Jeong-hwa), and even that psychotic girlfriend Yeon-heui (Ha Ji-won) deserve to live. Oh, hell no. I take that back. Rise, ocean, rise! Non sequitir: I don't usually watch the DVD extras but this time, I decided to check out the gag reel and boy was it NOT funny. There are a few very disturbing excerpts of a child actor getting smacked and later, that same kid not wanting to simulate drowning no matter what his pay scale. Easily the scariest part of the movie.

Temptation of Eve: A Good Wife: And Now a Word on Hot-bodied Backstabbers

2010-06-26T09:23:00.009-04:00

I hereby postulate that actors who are stunningly beautiful (Sophia Loren, Nastassja Kinski, Marlon Brando, etc.) don't need to act. Instead, they can stare disinterestedly into the distance for all I care. I'll do the hard work and invest their faces with deeper meaning. Actors who are simply really good looking however better have some acting chops to go with those chiseled features. Otherwise, like in Kwak Jeong-deok's Temptation of Eve: A Good Wife, you grow to resent them a little as the film goes on. Neither Kim Tae-hyeon nor Jin Seo-yeon is talentless but looking this good in an erotic thriller this boilerplate, they need to be a bit more nuanced in their performances to win our affections. Otherwise, the mind begins to wander and all those tawdry sex scenes that should be heightening the suspense feel as though they're shortchanging us because they never cross over into porn. We don't care if he's cycling out of control with lust. We don't care if she's out to poison her husband (Ahn Nae-sang) to get the insurance money. And if we don't care who might be doublecrossing who, then we haven't got much of a movie. With really just three characters of note (and even fewer locations), Temptation of Eve feels like a play that's been filmed for television. But not PBS. More like Ovation.

Dark Forest of Death: Here's to the Bucolic Zombie

2010-06-19T17:14:00.010-04:00

Horror fans jabber away about fast zombies versus slow zombies but how about city zombies versus country ones? Is there any difference between the pale-faced corpses who reanimate in urban environs and those who resurrect in the woods? Kim Jeong-min's low-budget Blair-Witch-meets-Dawn-of-the-Dead flick doesn't answer that question directly but the casualties in his Death Forest of Death are definitely victims of an evil woodland spirit, not a man-made disease run amok. It's man versus vengeful nature here, not man versus sinister science. And these zombies are sometimes fast, sometimes slow and always out to get you. Whether you join their ranks or not isn't dependent on whether you decapitate them before they make you bleed either. The only thing that can save your life is stopping your own blood from hitting that forest floor. Since no one here ever learns this basic rule of survival, their successive deaths are all unavoidable. Ignorance is death, as they used to say. Until someone sees the forest floor drink a whole bucket of blood and not just slurp up a few drops, visitors to this national park are going to continue to die one by one. Cleanliness is next to godliness after all.

Killing Machine: She Only Seems Crazy, Indie Fans

2010-06-12T20:46:00.007-04:00

Killing Machine is one of those movies that never quite lives up to the insanity of its plot synopsis. The story is invitingly nuts: A high school nymph (Lee So-yun) earns extracurricular money by hooking with the faculty then falls into a brief relationship with one maniacal teacher (Kim Dae-tong) who rapes her, impregnates her, shoots her, mutilates her, hires a super-seamstress to stitch her back together, then turns her into a robot assassin. Trimmed of the excess footage showing the victim/vigilante standing/staring or running through poorly lit interiors, director Nam Gee-wong's Killing Machine would've probably run a zanily enjoyable half-hour. As is, this artsy exercise in cyberpunk surrealism runs closer to an hour. That means you often have to wait through stretches of filler to get to the weird imagery like a post-op fembot's gunblasted breast leaking green goo and gnarly wires or a Metropolis-inspired rebirth during which thick electric cords pump new life into the recently dismembered girl. It's no B-movie beauty a la Hera Purple or Terror Taxi but Killing Machine is at least an attempt to think outside the box. Good things come in small packages but good things in oversized packages tend to feel disappointingly small.

Voices: A Chorus of Loved Ones Are Out to Kill You

2010-06-05T22:23:00.005-04:00

If everyone close to you wanted you to die -- and by everyone, I mean your mom, your dad, your little sister, your boyfriend, your best friend, your homeroom teacher, and your fencing coach -- would life be worth living? If the answer is "yes" then factor in this: Would life still be worth living if it meant killing each and every one of your loved ones to survive. Because these are the questions haunting unfortunate schoolgirl Ga-in (Yun Jin-seo) in director Oh Ki-hwan's frightful fright flick Voices. For me, those two existential questions begged a third, more professional one. Namely, if you were offered the lead part in a not-so-hot movie in which you were going to be stalked at knife point by every member of your family without a logical motive and furthermore had to respond "Yes" to the question "Feel better," every time you murdered someone in self-defense, would you take the part for the exposure? One saying has it, there are no small parts, just small actors. I would add that there are no small movies, just movies in which you'd be better off taking a smaller role. As the mysterious stranger, Park Ki-woong gets to look stylishly dangerous without having to act. That's an ideal scenario in a pic like this.

Murder, Take One: There's No Reason to Take a Second Shot

2010-05-23T14:01:00.006-04:00

My friend Graham suggested early on that I stop watching Murder, Take One and ask the readers to tell me the ending. It was that boring. But I stuck with it, and writer-director Jang Jin's police procedural did finally pick up with the late entrance of a motherly exorcist (Lee Yong-lee) and her child sidekick. Prior to that, I was basically wondering how tall is that dashing detective (Cha Seung-won) -- He's 6'2" according to Wiki -- and why has he agreed to have his interrogation of the main suspect (Shin Ha-kyun) videotaped for prime time? Can the resultant program possibly be getting good ratings? Who are the sponsors? They weren't questions I felt deeply. Just things to think about while I clipped my toenails or nibbled on a frosted strawberry pop tart. But ghosts can make a movie more interesting. What had been a not particularly suspenseful murder mystery wrapped in a bland TV news special now became a ticklishly spooky character portrait about a cute cop who may have some connection to the other side. When the cocky television producer got possessed by the victim's spirit, I had to confess: This wasn't the worst Korean movie I'd ever seen. Up until then, it had been in the running.

The Good, the Bad, the Weird: Let's Assume You Can Drawl in Korean

2010-05-16T18:30:00.012-04:00

The Ramen Western, like its forebear the Spaghetti Western, fetishizes the genre. All the period details -- the opium pipes, the sweeping leather coats, the aviator goggles, even the rotten teeth -- don't ground the action in reality. They tickle us with their particularity. That's especially true in Kim Ji-woon's vintage piece of filmmaking The Good, the Bad, the Weird. Here actors Song Kang-ho, Lee Byung-hun, and Jung Woo-sung seem to be playing cowboys in a tribute to a Sergio Leone homage more than performing in a movie indebted to John Ford or Sam Peckinpah. Consider this flick a hall of tarnished, sometimes cracked mirrors reflecting dusty cowboy hats, galloping horses and a big Montana sky. You'll be as pleased when you get the expected (like the climactic battle involving cannons, the Japanese militia, and scores of rebels on a desert landscape) as the unexpected (Song absurdly running around with a diving helmet straight out of Jules Verne). There's plenty of blood -- some of it splattering on the camera lens -- and more than a little sadism (one stabbing scene leading to the slicing off of a finger is particularly gruesome). Neither ever feels gratuitous. Much of it's pretty fun.

Blood Rain: A Murder Mystery with a Paper Trail of Proof

2010-04-25T00:41:00.011-04:00

In 1926, Agatha Christie disappeared after her husband confessed to having an extramarital affair. What she did during those eleven days remains a mystery to this day. Director Kim Dae-sung's Blood Rain suggests, against the odds, that she may have flown to Korea and written an old-fashioned potboiler as a restorative. The plot is standard Christie. It's 1808 and the royal investigator (Seung Won-cha) -- working on an arson case on the island of Donghwa -- suddenly lands in the middle of a gruesome murder case. As any Christie fan knows, everyone's a suspect so while one piece of evidence points at the paper mill owner's son (Park Young-woo) and another at the local artist (Ji Seong), who did it, even who had it done to him, stays unknown 'til the bitter end. There's a rational vs. superstitious conflict at work here but only a genre novice would side with the villagers blaming the vengeful ghost of Commissioner Kang (Jeon Ho-jin). And while she's without a motive, the island shaman (Choi Ji-na) is the creepiest character on screen. No one else could inspire followers to chop the heads off five real-life chickens, a jarringly bloody sequence that makes a human dismemberment earlier in the flick that less memorable. I see a PETA protest coming.

Secret Sunshine: Give Me That Old Time Religion

2010-04-04T17:48:00.008-04:00

Talk about a beautiful downer. This movie from writer-director Lee Chang-dong (Oasis) charts the precipitous descent from melancholia to grief in one unfortunate's lonely life. The subject is Shin-ae (the captivating Jeon Do-yeon), a mourning widow who has transplanted her piano teaching business and her not-quite-normal son (Seon Jung-yeop) from Seoul to Milyang in an effort to regain autonomy and to forge a new identity. There, instead of finding comfort or stability, she loses her savings, her son, and her sanity in short order. The respite of an evangelical Christian church seems to reground her temporarily then sends her into an even more dangerous freefall. Throughout the emotional upheaval, one person stays -- sometimes annoyingly -- near. He's the local mechanic (Song Kang-ho), a momma's boy who at 39 still hasn't found a wife and sees in Shin-ae something worthy of pulling out all the stops. Theirs is a troubled romance. He's not her type; she's not all there. But just as Secret Sunshine is an X-ray of sorrow, it's also a study of the curative powers of devotion, on what it means to love, be loved, and accept love both in times of need and from places we'd normally prefer to disregard.

My Father: A Man Without a Country

2010-03-28T15:42:00.007-04:00

Warning! Warning! My Father should be watched with a box full of tissues. An issue-driven picture about a Korean-American soldier (Daniel Henney) who leaves the American suburbs -- perhaps because his adoptive father (Richard Riehle) resembles Colonel Sanders -- and joins the U.S. Army as a way to track down his Korean birth father (Choi Jong-ryeol), Hwang Dong-hyeuk's pleasantly mushy biopic is overly packed with weepy moments that find you saying "Awww" out loud even if you're alone in your living room. Is it a work of art? More like a movie of the week. And that makes sense given lead actor Henney's CV is more TV than anything else. Yet while the culture clash between whites and Asians (in both countries) is key to My Father, Henney's character's approach to his problems is stereotypically American. He's a big-hearted, pig-headed savior as he deals with bigotry, fights the death penalty, and expands his idea of what family or dad means. And, since My Father is based on a true life story, you get to see some of the same moments play out again, only this time featuring the film's inspiration in documentary footage that plays right before the credits. That addition helps make a film that could've felt sappy feel kind of cool.

Antique Bakery: Cooking up a Sweet Little Mystery

2010-03-21T11:39:00.013-04:00

I haven't received many Korean movies recommendations for my blog. In fact, I've received just one: Antique Bakery from a reader named The Purple Girl. Well, I wish more people would share their favorites because Min Kyu-dong's film is a highly enjoyable bonbon, a sweetly fruity comedy about the friendship that evolves between a gay patissier (Kim Jae-wook) with "demonic powers of attraction" and a bakery owner (Ju Ji-hun) struggling with repressed memories of being kidnapped by a serial killer. If that set-up sounds more twisted than twee, take into account that the movie is based on Fumi Yoshinaga's popular manga. Because of its source, snappy irreverence holds sway over psychological derangement; the comic book colorfulness informs everything from the song-and-dance fantasies to the secondary characters like a retired boxer who finds a second life as a baker (Yu Ah-in) and a bodyguard (Choi Ji-ho) whose devotion to his boss extends to serving him hot cocoa in bed. While romance flirts between all four leading men, the only serious man-on-man action comes when the pastry chef re-encounters his mentor (Andy Gillet), a lovely Frenchman with the biggest non-Asian role that I've ever seen in a Korean movie. It's all pretty delicious!