Rampant: Fighting the Mob Mentality

Don't get sucked in by the tantalizing promotional material. Kim Sung-hoon's Rampant isn't a movie about demons or spirit possession by a long shot. It's a zombie movie, and a very traditional one at that. Infection is spread by biting. Conversion from human to zombie can take some time or be fairly quick. To kill a zombie, nothing is more effective than chopping off the head. True to form, the actual cause of the zombie epidemic is unclear and only ill-fated fools think they can use the disastrous outbreak to their political advantage. The one thing unique to this particular zombie flick is that it's in period dress for the Joseon Dynasty.

Which mean that we're dealing with kings and princes, royal courts and invading armies who wear some pretty fancy duds alongside the scrappily dressed peasants and bloodthirsty undead. Our hero is a reluctant one: the self-exiled Lee Chung (Hyun Bin), next in line for the crown but more concerned with getting in women's drawers than getting to sit on the throne — a relief to his dad, the king (Kim Eui-sung) — a gluttonous man-baby who has basically abdicated in favor of feasts and concubines. Respected by no one, the monarch is secretly being undermined by his scheming Minister of War (Jang Dong-gun) who probably would make a better leader. But divine right has sway with the masses so the master archer (Lee Sun-bin) and her patriotic pals are going to side with the royal blood despite many good reasons not to.

On paper, it sounds okay but Rampant never quite works for me. The hero's queeny sidekick (Jeong Man-sik) fails to amuse despite hitting all the tried-and-true notes; the principled brother (Kim Tae-woo) isn't around long enough to earn your respect or your sympathy. At best, Rampant registers as a timely political parable — when it comes to those suffering from a mob mentality, it's best to move on to a different neighborhood. You can't convince a zombie of anything! Reason is powerless with the brain dead so don't waste your breath, don't argue. Just run. Or fight. You can always fight.

No Tears for the Dead: God Bless the Assassinated Child

No Tears for the Dead is a movie plagued by bad guys. The anti-hero is an assassin (Jang Dong-gun) who mistakenly kills a young girl (Kang Ji-woo). The young girl's mom (Kim Min-hee) is a greedy capitalist more concerned with mergers and acquisitions than maternity. The assassin's best friend (Brian Tee) has been assigned to kill him. The best friend's father figure is a kind of merciless godfather who seems to want everyone to die. And so on and so on. Even the little girl who gets offed in the opening scene is a bad girl when you come to think of it. I'm sure, her criminal father told her not to leave the table at the nightclub, and clearly, she disobeyed.

I'm a bad guy, too. Which isn't to say that I've murdered anyone or purposely executed any business deals with utter disregard to the large numbers of people who'd lose their jobs in the process. But I've definitely got my own list of sins to weigh me down so a cast full of reprehensible people trying to do right by their wrongs sits perfectly fine with me. I get the idea of going to extremes — explosions in buildings, machine gunfire, computer hacking gazillions of dollars, identity theft — as forms of doing penance. We can't whip ourselves with branches anymore. We refuse to wear hair-shirts. So it makes sense that we'd randomly stab, detonate, self-annihilate, and relive awful memories of mom (Kim Ji-seong) committing suicide by shooting herself in the head in the desert as a way to clear our brains. At least in the movies.

In real life, I guess we just stew. And hope that filmmakers like Lee Jeong-beom will write and direct slick, thrillingly violent movies that make us feel like we're exorcising our demons, even if we're really just distracting ourselves from dealing with our grim, not-so-glamorous realities. Recently, I spent a few weeks watching Shirley Temple movies. She was the box office queen during the Depression. But nowadays, cute won't cut it. We need blood. So we sacrifice the on-screen child.

Friend: The Odds are Four to One Against You, Kiddo

At first you might puzzle over the singularity within this movie's title. Why Friend instead of Friends? After all, this pic is about a quartet of boys whom we watch mature from adolescence to adulthood. But as the cinematic years (and the real-time minutes) roll by, you realize there's only one relationship that counts to writer-director Kwak Kyung-taek: The one between Sang-taek (Seo Tae-hwa), a cowardly nerd who goes on to earn his PhD, and Jeong-suk (Yu Oh-seong), the son-of-a-thug who becomes a thug himself. The other two pals -- Dong-su (Jang Dong-gun) and Jeong-ho (Jeong Un-taek) -- are there for local color. At least in theory. The catch is that the camera adores Yu, who practically makes the screen burn, and doesn't care about Seo, who fades into the background, like a set piece. For all I know that could've been writer-director Kwak Kyung-taek's intent. Since the film is semi-autobiographical, maybe he finds the more conventional middle-class life less thrilling than the dangerous and violent world of Jeong-suk and his sidekick Dong-su, the undertaker's son who ends up a formidable gangster himself.

The life of crime has more action, whether it's fighting with a crowd of high school kids while using anything within reach as your weapon, or giving a knifing master class that addresses both tools and methodology. Blood spills in movie theaters, back rooms, restaurants, karaoke clubs, and rainy streets. But the cruel impact of the mob's dog-eat-dog ethic is ancillary here as the fragile kinship between Jeong-suk and Dong-su ultimately says more about Jeong-suk's friendship with Sang-taek than anything else. Which isn't a bad thing. There's a certain satisfaction that comes with Dong-su getting repeatedly dismissed, belittled and humbled then watching him rise in power in Busan's ruthless underworld where he ends up Jeong-suk's rival. I was particularly taken with how Jeong-suk holds on to the past and wants to minimize their rivalry while Dong-su seems to embrace it, to heighten the tension. Old grudges die hard for those who get the short end of the stick -- which can be used to knife you.

My Way: A Man With a Story; A Man Without a Film

Yang Kyoungyjong led an interesting life to be sure. A Korean conscripted into the Imperial Japanese Army at 18 years of age, he then became a Soviet prisoner of war forced to fight for the USSR's Red Army until his troop was defeated by the Germans who in turn enlisted him as a Wehrmacht soldier until the Americans overthrew the Nazis and he was imprisoned in a British POW camp under the mistaken belief that he was a Japanese soldier in German uniform. Eventually his actual identity was revealed and supposedly, he ended up living the rest of his days in the USA. A fascinating tale certainly worthy of a stunning biopic. Which brings us to Kang Je-kyu's My Way.

Unsatisfied with a tragic Everyman, Kang needlessly complicates this strange bit of history by transforming Yang, a John Doe of practically Brechtian proportions, into Kim Jun-shik (Jang Dong-gun), a destitute rickshaw-driver/closet-marathoner who is at once the rightful heir of real-life Olympian Sohn Kee-chung and a rival to Japanese long-distance runner Tatsuo Hasegawa (Jo Odagiri) who ends up being Kim's commanding officer in the Japanese Army, his fellow POW in Russia, and his best buddy in the German barracks (which apparently come equipped with a staff beautician: Everyone looks smashing!). Why Kang scraps Kim's one-of-a-kind biography for a bromantic parable about an oppressor who learns to love the man he once subjugated suggests a very different kind of racism: How else to interpret the angelic choir that accompanies representatives of Japan and Korea finally united in Nazi uniform while fleeing the American troops? Better An earlier chapter in the film finds Kim falling for Shirai (Fan Bingbing), a sexy Chinese sharpshooter so skilled she can take out a warplane with a single shot but once she's dead, his heart belongs only to Hasegawa. Eventually, his identity does, too. Somehow I bet Yang Kyoungjong would hate to see a movie that credited his life's final triumphs to a Japanese man pretending to be him. There's gotta be a better way, Kang Je-kyu.

Repechage: No One Else Is Into Either of You So Get Together Already

A sweet-natured nerd (Jang Dong-gun) in a blue oxford shirt and dress pants is mindlessly walking down the sidewalk when a fiery knockout (Kim Hee-seon) in dark sunglasses, fishnet stockings and a leather jacket pulls over in her convertible and offers him a ride. How lucky is he? Before you answer that, take into account she's wearing a red pleather jacket and driving a canary yellow convertible. If that doesn't bother you too much, then check out the photographs she's just handed him of his fiancee (Kim Shi-won) making out with her boyfriend (Lee Jin-wu). Suddenly, the cliched male fantasy that opens Lee Kwang-hoon's Repechage is officially null and void. And what kind of fantasy was it really? I mean, he had a sexy fiancee already! Why did he get into this strange woman's car?

We'll never know because for the next 80 minutes, we're instead subjected to one of the slowest realization processes committed to celluloid. As we watch the two rejecting exes in the photos make out then dine out then take a mini-vacation together, we also see the two people they've dumped trying to figure out what could it all possibly mean? Neither the nerd (a veterinarian who likes to inject animals with anesthetic) nor the babe (a photographer who shoots everything from bathing suits to weddings) can comprehend that their former soul mates have moved on and that reconciliation will not be an option. Because they're slow learners, we sit impatiently waiting for them to figure out that the love of their lives is the fellow rejectee. Given how stupid these two are, you just hope they stay married forever (to save the rest of us from getting stuck with one of them) and never have babies (to save the world from their less-than-brilliant genetic pool).

The best thing to say about Repechage is it taught me a new word, which means "a last chance round for eliminated contestants to make the finals." I doubt I'll remember that. I doubt I'll remember this either.

The Anarchists: The Nicest Terrorists You'll Ever Meet

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.

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.

Nowhere to Hide: Look at the Crime; Don't Attend to the Crime

Nowhere to Hide certainly looks good. It's got a grainy black-and-white prelude in which one high-energy police bust periodically freeze frames into Crayola-colored stills. It's got slow, arhythmic pans that slide across glass surfaces reflecting autumn leaves, street lights and garish neon. It's got one extended fight sequence shot in silhouette so that it looks like cool shadow puppetry. All of this is good. It's also got a villain (Ahn Sung-kee) who despite being a murderer doesn't seem to justify the extensive manhunt. It's got a main cop (Park Joong-hoon, a kind of poor man's Song Kang-ho) who's technique is limited to swagger, smile and run. The detective has an ineffective sidekick (Jang Dong-kun); the bad guy, a teary-eyed girlfriend (Choi Ji-woo). All of this is bad. Does it balance out in the end? I'd say Nowhere to Hide is the perfect party video; director Lee Myung-se's movie is the type you want playing on a wall at a nightclub or a rave, its periodically flashy visuals acting as conversation-starters and boredom-preventers. Minus the dialogue (and there isn't much, frankly), Nowhere to Hide is fit to be seen and danced to.

Typhoon: There's a Storm Brewing for the South

There are whole dialogues in Typhoon that are in English (and Russian too) but that doesn't make it any easier to understand. Something's going on involving modern-day piracy, nuclear terrorism, and a North Korean family's amnesty request being denied but how these elements all fit together is a mystery...at least, at first. Later, a childhood flashback makes everything crystal clear. That's too bad. This melodramatic thriller is much better when it's being frustratingly confusing than when it's being overly simplistic. Not that it's ever very good. While its visual shorthand can be charming -- the villain (Jang Dong-kun) has messy, rock-n-roll hair and a leather jacket; the bland hero (Lee Jung-jae) sports a crewcut and white Oxford shirts -- the cinematic bombast promised by its 15 million dollar budget, a record high in South Korea when it was produced, never arrives. From the looks of it, auteur Kwak Kyung-taek would've done well to hire an outside screenwriter and put a toy boat in a bathtub for the climactic battle scene which simulates a major storm to minor effect. Maybe some of the funds went to getting top-shelf heroin and morphine for scenes involving the terrorist's druggie-prostitute sister (Lee Mi-youn). Lucky her, eh?

2009 Lost Memories: The Japanese Steal the Future

Of all the crimes against humanity, there are few worse than going back in time and changing history simply because you're ashamed you lost a war (unless that war is against robots). In the scifi action flick 2009 Lost Memories Japan, Korea's eternal nemesis, does nothing short of win WWII, nuke Berlin, and least forgivable of all, turn Korea into a Japanese colony—which at least isn't split into North and South halves because of internal conflicts. Masayuki Sakamoto (Jang Dong-kun) is going to change all that. A Korean member of the Japanese police, he stumbles upon a Korean patriotic faction that knows the secret of time travel and wants to return history on its proper track. That Japan will still emerge as a world power with Korea hardly its main commpetitor is a secondary concern. Sakamoto never thinks there might be away to exact revenge on Japan and really put them in the hot seat. He's happy enough to execute justice (and maybe his traitorous best friend, too while he's at it). Gun fire galore, a few exploding rockets, and some celebrational fireworks all add up to a body count that argues that you're better prepared in a nicely cut suit and a leather jacket than you are encased in armor because that just slows you down.

The Brotherhood of War: Boy's Life

I never considered that the love that dares not speak its name could be that between two brothers but such is the supposition of The Brotherhood of War, Kang Je-gyu's wacky war pic about two siblings drafted into service (and a weird battle of wills) during the Korean War. The opening sequence has the two young men feeding each other, sharing a popsicle, and fetishizing shoes. What with the string section in the background, you almost expect to see a class-usurping gay romance unfold before your disbelieving eyes. Instead, amid the prettily photographed explosions and hand-to-hand combat, what transpires is the making of a warrior—and a ruthless, bloodthirsty, wild-eyed one at that. Naturally, the younger, prettier sibling (Won Bin) is the conscience of the movie and the hunkier older one (Jang Dong-kun) is the fearless fighter. But the baby brother cries so much and seems so unappreciative of the butch one's self-sacrifices, perverse and self-aggrandizing as they might end up being, that you feel disappointed that the moralizer's head isn't blown off in some artful fashion with snow coming down from above and grenade-propelled dirt rising up from below. Can't blame communism for that.