Lucid Dream: It's All in Your Head

How much you like or loathe a scifi movie can be dependent on its central premise. You can live without good acting, good directing, and good dialogue, and not mind some sub-par special effects if the flick has got a really cool concept in play. The idea doesn't have to be completely sound but it does need to be interesting. In Kim Joon-Sung's Lucid Dream, the radical notion is that, through induced dreaming, you can step into your memories and look around and gather details you've previously overlooked. You have the option of walking around too but once you start to change location, you also impact the integrity of the memory. It's like we all have photographic memory and if we could just study said photos, we'd be able to parse every detail. That's probably not quite enough for a scifi movie. Well, Lucid Dream does indeed go further.

You can also enter other people's dreams, once you've identified the dreamer's frequency on your fancy computer. Once inside someone's head, you can ask questions that maybe you can't in real life because they're in a coma or something like that. But if the person in the coma dies then you'll be trapped in that dream forever. (Not sure why you don't just die or end up in a coma with no dream afterwards but I have to trust the experts in the movie here.)

And so, we have a reporter (Go Soo) who is also a single father with a young son (Kim Kang-hoon) who was kidnapped at the amusement park for reasons unknown. Distraught and desperate, dad enlists the help of a loner-doctor (Kang Hye-jeong) specializing in lucid-dreaming. Dad also hires a guerilla dream-infiltrator (Park Yoo-chun) because he needs to get some answers fast before his little boy is... harvested for organs? shipped out to an orphanage as revenge? dead? The only difference between reality and dreams is that the second hand on your watch doesn't move in the latter realm. Is that true? Check your watch next time you're asleep. If you're strictly digital, you're probably screwed.

Antarctic Journal: Get to the Point (of Inaccessibility, That Is)

I'd never heard of a "point of inaccessibility" before Antarctic Journal. Evidently, the term refers to a geographical location that's extremely difficult to access, often because of its distance from the coast. Reaching such a landmark is a source of pride for explorers because it's so challenging. For the general public, however, there's little to recommend a POI (as it's sometimes called). The same could be said for Antarctic Journal, the pseudo-horror flick by director Yim Pil-sung (and co-written by auteur Bong Joon-ho). It's for extremists only. In other words, if you're committed to being a completist and seeing every movie starring Song Kang-ho then then you're eventually going to have to watch this dud about a South Korean crew searching for the South Pole's POI.

Which isn't to say that Song isn't good. As the merciless captain who hallucinates memories of his son's suicide when he isn't letting his crew members die one by one, the actor keeps the action grounded, which isn't easy given how much appears to be shot in front of a green screen. Keeping it real can only take you so far though, and what is real, really? Not the sudden nose bleed that he gets at one point. Not the novice (Yu Ji-tae) who he cavalierly bequeaths the ominous British expedition diary that they find in the snow. Not the cynical cohort (Yun Je-mun) who can't persuade anyone how crazy the captain obviously is. Not even the cheerful radio operator (Kang Hye-jeong) who flies off in a search helicopter when captain and company "vanish into thin air." I'm not saying, Antarctic Journal needed to be a naturalistic take on a devastating expedition, but shots of a frozen eyeball and a ghostly woman's hand come across as pretty random and just leave me wondering whether the film is about to take a serious left turn. Maybe it did. Over and over. Which is another way of saying Antarctic Journal just goes in circles. And made me rethink my initial plan to curate a Song movie marathon, despite how wonderful I still think he is.

Oldboy: Revenge Is Sweet, Repeatedly

I'd always been afraid to watch Oldboy a second time because I loved it so much the first. This movie, along with Save the Green Planet, is why I'm the longstanding fan of Korean film that I am. I didn't want to mess with that memory. I didn't want to rob Oldboy of its stature. In a nutshell, I was secretly worried that knowing the "shocking ending" beforehand would diminish the pleasures ahead. Would it end up feeling like a gimmick flick? Not to fear. Park Chan-wook's revenge masterpiece works equally well when you're clued in to the horrific plot twists. It's still creepy, lyrical, and deranged but now it's also deterministic. That main guy is doomed! Choi Min-sik gives what's likely the performance of his career as a man who, imprisoned 15 years for crimes unknown, is driven crazy by his need to discover why he was captured and confined. He's more than ably supported by Kang Hye-jeong as a blameless femme fatale and Yu Ji-tae as his pretty boy nemesis. The whole spiral downward is stunningly shot, paced, and performed. And does anyone not like perfection simply because they know where it's going? Not me. If an ending's any good, it's good whether you know it's coming or not. The spoiler is a term reserved for second-rate films.