One on One: Point Made, Point Taken

Indie auteur Kim Ki-duk has never been shy about embedding a message within his films. That's no exception with One on One, his didactic movie about the inherent evil of obedient capitalism. That's not the only message, comrade. For Kim's also critiquing inherited violence as a viable tool for effecting change. It's simply what we have that's readily available. We never really learn why the daughter of Ma Dong-seok's unnamed character has been murdered or exactly how this vigilante boss-man has managed to put together a camouflaged crew of six to exact revenge on those responsible for his child's death. I'm not even sure why one of the establishment's underlings gets gassed while another gets electrocuted while another gets his hand smashed by a hammer. There might be a logic that's evading me. The main message I'm receiving is this: Everyone is complicit; a few feel guilt.

Despite Kim's atypical casting of a bona fide action star (Ma Dong-seok) in the lead role, Kim's agitprop pic mostly adheres to an underground esthetic and a renegade style. The settings feel makeshift; the script was supoosedly written on site over a period of ten days; the violence looks fake; the dialogue is stilted. Don't get me wrong. I'm not dissuading you from watching this flick. Because One one One possesses a sense of purpose that makes it impossible to dismiss outright. The unpolished aspect of this film is the point, right? And if it isn't, it certainly could be.

Horse-Year Bride: No Rock, No Doris, No Fun

I was never a fan of the Rock Hudson / Doris Day movies which reveled in the sartorially stylish '50s and resisted the carnally swinging '60s. Yet that's what Horse-Year Bride recalls — a out-of-date, sighfully silly sex comedy set in a year astrologically reputed to birth the most strong-willed women. And like its American antecedent, Kim Ki-Duk's feeble farce has a flirtatiousness leading to coitus interuptus more than baby making. There's hormones everywhere from the rockabilly singers lip-syncing English pop to the bedazzled modern dancers shimmying to surf guitar yet, most of the time, no one is getting laid. One reason: According to one particularly prudish newlywed, intercourse during pregnancy can cause a cleft palate in the newborn child.

That's hardly the only piece of nonsense espoused in Kim Ki-duk's 1966 flick as its clownish narrator, a fortune-telling matchmaker of dubious talents, intermittently pops up to tell us things like Napoleon had his hand down the front of his pants because of his family jewels and that any incompatibility in the bedroom might be cured with the right yoga practice. Sound like a stretch? Well, follow this film's prescriptive guidelines at your own peril. Watch this movie against my advice. It's frustration on-screen and off.

Five Marines: Age-Old Warriors

With only a decade between them, marquee headliners Kim Seung-ho and Shin Yeong-gyun would seem best suited to co-star as brothers for a war pic but in Kim Ki-duk's Five Marines, they play a military father-son duo with a history as potentially woundful as the DMZ. They're not the only family following a wacky Hollywood logic when it comes to ages. Performers Hwang Hae and Hwang Jeong-sun take on the roles of a soldier-son and his seamstress-mother despite a mere five years separating the two. (Crazily, he's older than she is.) I mention these odd details because in some ways, Kim's patriotic paean to the South's infantrymen feels like the cinematic equivalent of asummer stock production, as if the director had assembled a group of actors first, and the material second. Except, it's hard to imagine him picking this script. More like it was assigned.

Given the constraints, he's cast as best as he can. So what if everyone's around the same age. Maybe age is irrelevant when we're wearing standarc fatigues and camouflage helmets. The first half of the film is spent meeting the battallion — which aside from the aforemention army G.I.s — also includes a city smart aleck (comedian Flyboy), a new recruit (Nam Jang-il), a heartbreaker (Choi Mu-ryong), and a chaplain. Eventually, this crew paddles behind enemy lines in order to accomplish a dangerous mission. (Less dialogue and clownery; more action with whispers!) And — in true war movie fashion — only one of these guys is going to survive! Consider that a spoiler? If so, you haven't been watching many war pics. Five Marines is nothing if not standard issue frontline heroics.

Made in China: Partly Made by Kim Ki-duk

Although directed by Kim Dong-hoo, the political flick Made in China largely bears the mark of its screenwriter Kim Ki-duk. Many of the auteur's standard ingredients are here: a largely silent central character, the random eruptions into violence, performances that careen from wooden to histrionic... And who else but Kim Ki-duk would build his movie around a Chinese eel farmer (Park Gi-woong) who needs to get his eel tested for mercury by a scientist (Han Chae-ah) who wants to suck his eel in her apartment. That particular relationship gets even weirder when she's wolfing down Chinese snackfood as a way to prove she's not xenophobic so she can get him back into her bed. (I don't know what she was eating but it definitely wasn't White Rabbit Cream Candy.)

Kim Ki-duk has pulled off outlandish plots before — the prison musical Breath, the summer-winter relationship of The Bow — but it's gotta be tough to get into his head as a fellow director. Sure, Jang Hun did it in the terrific action pic Rough Cut. I think that film is atypical for Kim Ki-duk, though, whereas Made in China is more quintessential. Which makes this particular movie feel like an apprentise work being done with the blessing of its mentor who should never be copied or imitated, only respected with caveats.

The Net: The Naturalism of Politics

Director Kim Ki-duk's films have always felt intentionally abrasive to me. I don't level that comment as a complaint. I'm a huge fan of movies like Bad Guy, Arirang, and Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring. Indeed, his agitating output feels as distinct as the slices of life from Hong Sang-soo or hyper violent thrillers of Park Chan-wook (though Kim's cinema generally lacks the veneer of either of these peers). Sometimes his "art is a hammer" aggressiveness works in his favor. But with The Net, those rough parts are working against him. The key to a great Kim film may be the cast's ability to get to its raw emotional core. But most of the actors here — especially those playing members of South Korea's spy-catching team — are giving amateurish performances that feel unrehearsed without feeling improvisational. The ham factor is high.

The one exception is Ryu Seung-beom, who as a North Korean fisherman who accidentally drifts below the 38th parallel, is so naturalistic in his performance you'd think Kim had discovered him in the exurbs of Wonsan. Even as the plot lurches into implausible places and the dialogue serves up unnecessary cliches, Ryu stays committed to the humility, confusion, and desperation of his character who just wants to be sent back home. The Net has plenty to say about the blind hypocrisy of capitalists when it comes to ideas of freedom and the better life but I caught myself shouting "That's so stupid" at the monitor more times than I'd care to admit.

Red Family: Suburban Assassins

When is a Kim Ki-Duk movie not really a Kim Ki-Duk movie? Basically, whenever he writes it and produces it but doesn't direct it. That doesn't happen often but it has happened a few times recently and, as in most things in life, sometimes it works (Rough Cut) and sometimes it doesn't (Red Family). What's intriguing is that in both cases cited here, comedy — hardly Kim's forte — comes to the fore. Yet whereas the exhilarating Rough Cut, about a gangster who gets cast in a mob movie, relishes every punch and kick at its disposal, Red Family never reconciles the physical brutality (or the "brutal realities" as Kim would probably put it) with its kooky plot about North Korean spies posing as a happy family just outside Seoul. Whenever violence rears its ugly head in these suburbs (and it does so with some regularity), you get the feeling that director Lee Ju-Hyoung doesn't know what to do with it. It's like he can't bear it. Like he doesn't know what it's even doing there. Like he'd faint at the sight of blood. Even though he's the director. Even though it's fake blood.

Compounding the problem, Red Family's bloodiest scenes look incredibly underrehearsed. That may also be why Lee doesn't zoom in for the kills. If anything, he rushes through them. Like the constructed family this movie's about, Lee shies away from violence. He tries to avoid it. Why he decided to get graphic with the barbed wire piercings at the end of Red Family may have more to do with pleasing a mentor than staying true to a directorial vision. Or maybe it took shooting an entire Kim K-Duk movie to make Lee realize that Kim's primary message has always been about how violence is ingrained in us by our culture and that it's impossible to escape. At best, we can try. Anyone who knows Kim Ki-Duk is aware that everything is not going to work itself out in the end for these well-meaning commies. Every Kim movie has bloodshed coupled with emotional scarring. As to anyone unfamiliar with Kim, they'll likely recoil at the nasty turn Red Family takes at the end. Ironically, that's a shock Kim would probably endorse.

Crocodile: True Love Kim Ki-Duk Style

I'm going to go out on a severed limb, and assert that Crocodile is Kim Ki-duk's most romantic movie. Duk's feature debut isn't a date movie by any stretch of the imagination, but there's definitely an emotional thaw experienced by its title character (Jo Jae-hyeon), a heartless thug who rescues, rapes, then revenges a suicidal artist (Woo Yun-gyeong) who he's pulled out of a particularly filthy section of the Han River. What causes the change is a couple of things.

1. He discovers a well-executed (and flattering) portrait of himself that she's drawn.
2. He's warned by his surrogate grandfather (Jeon Mu-song): "You won't always be young."
3. He's nearly raped himself by a police sketch artist (who ends up with a cucumber shoved up his arse).

Further tenderizing of our hero takes place when his young charge (Ahn Jae-hong) nearly castrates him with a pocketknife and when he's beaten to a pulp by some unscrupulous poker players who hit him with what appears to be a boar's hoof. (Understatement has never been Kim's bent.) So what makes Crocodile romantic?

I guess it's the way that the title character handcuffs himself to the artist's dead body and then slits — no, saws — his wrist as they sit next to each other on a loveseat underwater. This one-ups the saying "To death do us part" with "Look how death brings us together." Very Romeo and Juliet in a street life way.

As first films go, Crocodile is impressive, and feels like an earlier attempt at the same story which Kim would perfect five years later with the brilliant Bad Guy. Both movies star Jo Jae-hyeon, who can certainly be considered one of Kim's primary muses having also appeared in his Wild Animals, The Isle, Address Unknown, and the insane silent sex pic Moebius. Jo, like Kim, is best when he's making you uncomfortable which he does here for 102 minutes.

Rough Cut: Fighting Realism

Today. Here in my apartment. In Brooklyn. The year 2015. I wonder... Is the general consensus that the only life worth living is the one that's broadcast to the world? Are we all secretly aspiring to Kardashian levels of fame? Is it only through the media -- be it the web or TV -- that we prove ourselves as successful individuals — whatever "success" means — and should we write off the rest of the populace as "extras" or raw material to be converted into soylent green?

Directed by Jang Hun from a stinging screenplay by that great gadfly Kim Ki-duk, Rough Cut prompts these questions and more as it looks at the madness that follows when an action star (Kang Ji-hwan) with entitlement issues enlists a fan who's also a mobster (So Ji-seob) to be his costar because no one else will. As quickly as you can sign a contract in blood, the line between reality and fantasy is destroyed: The gangster has agreed with one stipulation; all fight scenes must be for real. Isn't acting "being," after all? Radiating jock cockiness and pretty boy conceit, So is good at both "real fake" (see how he treats his girlfriend) and "fake real" (watch the scene where he gets repeatedly slapped...if you can). Clearly, his mastery of dissembling has made him a superstar and a total louse. Now that attitude is going to earn him some bruises.

Kang, for his part, just feels real. And because of that, more sympathetic. Underplaying the hell out of everything, Kang's conflicted crook seduces quietly. So what if he's amoral, violent, desperate, lost. At least he's facing life head on without self-deception. Or is he? After all, Kang's gangster can't heed the advice he's doled out to Jo's prima donna. He too is playing to the camera and looking for validation from the big screen.

Is any actor really real when being real is just an act? And, in the world of Rough Cut, are you looking for honesty or just another sensational fight scene? (The slugfest in the mud near the end is FANTASTIC!) For that matter, why do the fight scenes, despite being staged, feel somehow more intensely true? Do acts of brutality register more viscerally because they're actions, not words? Is crime more honest than art? Is everything ultimately a sham?

There's a great line by the movie-within-a-movie's ingenue (Song Soo-hyun) who tells her new leading man something to the effect of "I thought I was good at understanding all types of people when I was young. But I've lost confidence as I've gotten older." In a society in which everyone is playing a public version of themselves, the ability to actually know anyone becomes seriously impaired. Egads, has our society degenerated into a pack of self-deluding liars? Could be.

Arirang: Kim Ki-duk on Kim Ki-duk

Who's that crazy, wild-haired, middle-aged, crooked-toothed guy living in a tent in a cabin on the top of a snowy hill and filming himself with a digital camera as a way to jumpstart his creative process? Why, it's Kim Ki-duk, who else? What other South Korean movie director would create this idiosyncratic memoir. A kind of low-budget 8½ with no cast, no production values, and no script (but with a homemade espresso machine), Arirang is part cinema verite, part documentary, part art therapy, part ego masturbation, part pity party, part artsy fartsy mumbo jumbo, and part magic. In other words, Arirang may be kooky as hell but it's also pretty brilliant. As resurrections go, Kim's return -- after a three-year hiatus following the near-death of an actor during his last movie Dream -- is worth celebrating.

You wouldn't think so at first. Kim films himself walking, cooking, eating, "being". (The shots of the back of his chapped heels are particularly repulsive.) Then he interviews himself. Then he watches himself interviewing himself. Then he films his shadow interviewing himself. Then he watches himself in his earlier movie Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter ... and Spring and cries. But are the tears real? He's already told us his drunken crying earlier in Arirang might have been just for the drama of it all. When he builds a homemade gun at the end and shoots himself, we don't believe for a moment he's going to die. In a way, he's already been dead and only just coming back to life. Maybe he's telling us we have to kill our former selves to evolve. Maybe he's being theatrical because that's his way. Kim really isn't much for giving answers. His films, and this one is no exception, seem created to reflect a tension, a horror, an anguish currently existing in the world. You may not agree with Kim's assessment that it's caused by forcing vegetables to grow in greenhouses instead of free in the world, but you'd need prescription level rose-colored glasses to look around you and think everything's fine in terms of where we're at and where we're going as human beings on this ravaged planet.

Moebius: The Family That Castrates Together...

The willfully shocking Kim Ki-duk, the Lars von Triers of Korea, is back with another ultra-violent, psychologically perverse art film, this one adding castration to his catalogue of deconstructed crimes: rape, murder, suicide, incest, etc. And it's not just one castration. There are actually a few -- the first being committed by a jealous woman (Lee Eun-woo) on her son (Seo Young-ju) after she is unable to execute the dirty deed on her husband (Jo Jae-hyeon) who is having an affair with a shopkeeper who resembles her (and is also played by Lee). If such an act of brutality feels outside the realm of reality, take note. Moebius doesn't occur in our world but takes place instead in some weird parallel universe where people never speak but merely grunt, moan and laugh. Language is confined to search results that come up when googling for something like "penile replacement" or "autoerotica." Sound ridiculous?

Well, some critics have label Moebius a black comedy. I for one didn't laugh once, though I winced repeatedly. For me, this film falls squarely in that half of Kim's work which strains credulity and hammers at its dubious points insistently and insanely. What distinguishes Moebius isn't its sliced-off penises but its wordlessness -- teens gang-raping the aforementioned shopkeeper, the married couple wrestling over a cell phone, some high school students ripping off the pants' of a schoolmate to get a giggle from viewing his stump -- all acts which would seem to necessitate the screaming of "No." But no. In a way, I left Moebius wondering why Kim allowed his actors any sounds at all.

And what is Moebius actually saying? That we're all animals -- more dogs, than apes, frankly? That masochism is our most reliable survival tool? That our culture has us trapped in an internecine cycle in which each generation attacks what follows and what comes before? There's plenty of meaning to extract from Moebius if you wish. You could also make a case for it being meaningless. I can see where some would love it and some would hate but I fall squarely in the middle on this one. Call it a love-hate relationship.

Pieta: An Avenging Mother Goes to Extremes

Most people I know have strained relationships with their mothers. But nothing compares to the parent-child dynamic in Kim Ki-duk's masochistic drama Pieta. In short, you might wish your mother guilt-tripped less and complimented more but whatever your issues may be, they're likely to dwarf when set aside those of loan shark Gang-do (Lee Joeng-jin) and the martyr-like woman (Jo Min-soo) who shows up on his doorstep, in search of forgiveness for abandoning him as a child many years ago. It's hardly love at first sight. Rather than hug his long-lost mom, he slams the door on her hand, slaps her face, even rapes her before he finally decides that maybe she really is the one. This total acceptance causes him to re-evaluate his way of living -- crippling indebted machinists so he can collect money from their insurance policies isn't the kind of work that would make a mother proud. Suddenly, he's got someone to live up to, this tireless, self-sacrificing woman who cooks him eel and knits him a sweater.

Personally, I've always thought that unconditional love was a bit of a false ideal. That's the type of affection we get from dogs. Do we really not want a person to judge us when we're doing the wrong thing or accept us no matter how far we transgress? Isn't there something to be said for conditional love, the idea that certain boundaries need to be maintained? Duk certainly thinks to seem so for when you see just how far this mom is willing to go to avenge her son, you realize that that kind of absolutism lacks compassion, surely an integral part of love. Forgiveness seems so much more powerful than a blind commitment; empathy feels more noble than devotion. Don't believe me? Check out Pieta. By the end, you'll see that an extreme version of a mother's undying love is just as twisted as the problematic relationship you're having with your own mother. In fact, consider yourself lucky!

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

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.

Kim Ki-Duk's Best Movies

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. Rough Cut (2008): Jang Hun directs this Kim screenplay which cumulates with one of the most memorable fist fights in Korean cinema. If Kim had directed it too, I might've ranked it higher.
5. 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.
6. Arirang (2011): This truly bizarre cinematic memoir finds Kim interviewing himself, then watching himself interview himself then filming his shadow interviewing himself.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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.

Also by Kim: Crocodile (1996); Real Friction (2001); Address Unknown (2001); The Coast Guard (2002); Moebius (2013); Red Family (2013); Made in China (2014); Made in China (2014), One on One and The Net (2016).

Updated on May 21, 2020

Address Unknown: Blinded by One Zany Sight After Another

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!

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

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.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring: Practice What You Preach

Like its title, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring doesn't conclude; it recommences. A bit of didacticism (Child learns cruelty to animals is bad!) serves as both prelude and coda. But what writer-director Kim Ki-duk extracts from this cliche the second time around feels oddly profound. That's because once you've traveled through childhood, youth, adulthood, and old age with the film's novice Buddhist monk (played by Kim himself at one point), you no longer interpret the same acts in the same way. Something inside you has changed, has shifted, and, dare we say it, has grown. Kim has always been about the internal world but this time, he forgoes having a mute lead character to underscore that point. This time, he lets the quietude emerge organically. The dialogue is as minimal as ever but Kim's unflinching acceptance of the unspeakable and his urge to convey the unsayable is less symbolic here even with this movie's parable structure and fabulist magic. To sum up what it all means about life, love and learning is bound to sound hokey. That's generally the case with a Kim movie which may explain why he likes to keep his characters so effectively quiet if they talk at all.

Bad Guy: Pimp Makes College Girl a Pretty Woman

Screw Julia Roberts. Director Kim Ki-duk knows prostitution is a nasty job capable of leaving a stink worse than the garbage man's. How's it start? Well, you've been framed. You owe some man $10,000 because you found his wallet then tried to steal the cash but you got caught red-handed so you took out an illegal loan to avoid going to jail but it basically turned you into a whore. That's the deal. Now, at $50 a bang, you're going to need to service 200 customers to pay him back. And that's not accounting for overhead—the rent, the cut for your madam and three pimps, the cost of cotton-candy colored wigs and a couple of batik summer dresses. Now you're up to 400 or 500 customers. How to keep count? How did this start again? Does the college girl (Seo Won) hate the ruffian (Jo Jae-hyeon) who trapped her into tricking or does the constant degradation eventually wear her down? A love story in the mold of The Story of O, Bad Guy is a harrowing descent into self-annihilation, a terrifying spin on class warfare, a despairing look at masochism's relationship to the world's oldest profession and maybe plain old human existence as well. It's a date movie for people who don't want to touch afterwards.

The Bow: Mind Your Own Business, Whippersnapper

Considered within Kim Ki-duk's oeuvre, The Bow is a fairly gentle fable. Sure, it centers around an old codger (Jeon Seong-hwang) who runs a recreational fishing vehicle and the underage simpleton (Han Yeon-reum) who he's kidnapped then raised for ten years to be his blushing bride but instead of delving into the brutal realities such a love-slave scenario suggests, The Bow turns out to be a peculiar winter-summer romance, and a shortlived one at that. In the end, you're left to figure out for yourself whether the appearance of the cute college student (Seo Si-jeok) is the girl's undoing, her salvation, or even whether it will have any major impact on her life at all. Since she's spent the entire movie as quiet as a dormouse except for a couple of giggles, one crying jag, a few whispered words into the old man's ear, and an orgiastic bit caused by her sexual awakening with a ghost, she's probably going to go through life as silently as she started whether she's surrounded by the clamor of the city, the rhythms of the country, or the serenity of the sea. If that busybody undergrad is a student of philosophy, he's now well prepared to write a paper addressing the following question: Are you responsible for the life you save?

Time: Love Me. Love My Face

It took me awhile to come around to Kim Ki-duk. He can be pretentiously affected (Real Fiction) or ridiculously farfetched (Samaritan Girl). But Time, like The Isle and 3-Iron, reillustrates that at his best he's an almost-mystical storyteller. The inverted romance concerns a man and his girlfriend (Park Ji-yeon) who gets plastic surgery to find out if he loves her. Or to keep him interested. Or because she hates herself. Motives are inscrutable: Kim is no Pavlovian! Anyway, just when this nutty girl is about to reveal that the new her (Seong Hyeon-a) is the same person as the old her, the boyfriend (Ha Jung-woo) announces he's still in love with his ex, not knowing his new paramor is one and the same. She goes ballistic. He finds out then freaks out himself. In fact, he freaks out so much that he goes to the same plastic surgeon for help. What the confused loverboy looks like after that operation we never learn. What we do see is she's going crazy trying to find out. Is that guy at the scuplture park him? Or the friendly patron at the neighboring table at Room & Rumors coffeeshop? Or is he, please God no, the fatal victim in a car accident? Whatever! She returns to the beauty clinic for another new face to help her forget or to let her escape or because she's addicted to going under the knife. Hippocrates, where art thou?

3-Iron: Return of the Silent Movie

Kim Ki-duk is no lover of dialogue. His favorite characters are the ones who keep their mouths shut. In 3-Iron, he's got two like that. The first (Lee Hyun-kyoon) is a drifter who crashes at temporarily empty apartments where he does the laundry and rigs booby traps. The second (Lee Syeung-yeon) is an abused housewife looking for an alternative to the black eye and the fat lip. Once they've met, they're a match made in heaven. But before earthly bliss is theirs longterm, they'll have to surmount police brutality, an incriminating digital camera, golfing accidents, and all those pesky talkers. For Kim Ki-duk film, there's not dialogue so much as monologues told to those who listen. That the two main characters are both listeners means huge stretches pass by with nary a word. Admittedly, it often feels implausible -- does no one in Korea have friends water their plants when they're on vacation? -- but if realism is your cup of green tea, you're drinking from the wrong pot here. Kim is out to create a shadow universe to ours. That the transient has attained an odd living ghosthood while in prison is a way of saying that maybe reality isn't just the hard facts and the words that describe them. Maybe what's left unsaid is what's important.