In Between Days: Be Quiet and You'll Hear the Sound of Young Hearts Dying

Aimie (Kim Jiseon) wants to get laid. Since she's just a teenager that's a radical thing to say but it's true and she's set her sites on Tran (Taegu Andy Kang), a fellow Korean-American who like her doesn't seem too engaged with life in general in Nowheresville, USA. They're two drifters-in-the-making: He's drifting towards drugs; she's drifting toward oblivion. Before either of them gets there in Kim So Yong's In Between Days, we'll watch them do a lot of mundane things like riding buses, doing laundry, drinking coffee, and doodling in a notebook. They should be studying! They have their whole lives ahead of them!! But it's hard to get excited about tomorrow when today is so bland, so barren, so quiet. Pause. Pause. The dialogue in this movie is insisently flat. It's as if Kim is afraid that having anyone say anything profound, even accidentally, will make her film seem false. To keep it true, she adheres to a stylized hypernaturalism that's all about boots trudging in snow, and Aimie's one-way conversations with her father who probably returned to Korea just to have more people to talk to. When you see Aimie's mom (Kim Bokja) crying on the couch, you don't ask why. Life's a sad enterprise. There were days when you cried about it too.

200 Pounds of Beauty: Blubbering Over Love, Your Looks, and Your Life in General

Have you ever noticed how skinny people made to look fat in the movies bear a disturbing resemblance to old people who have extreme plastic surgery in real life? There's something similarly fake-looking about both types of reconstructions. So Kim Yong-hwa's 200 Pounds of Beauty is really turning reality on its head by having the fake chubby chick turn into a real non-fake beauty through a full-body makeover with additional facial refinements. The porker turned pretty is poor overweight Han-na (Kim Ah-jung). She's kind of lost in life, dubbing the voice of pop star Am-my while pining for their cute producer (Ju Jin-mo); her crazy dad (Lim Hyeon-shik) is in the nuthouse; and she's making extra money on the side as a phone sex operator. (Now that's a versatile voice!) Lucky for her, one of her clients is a plastic surgeon (Lee Han-wi) who she can blackmail into giving her a complete overhaul. Reborn as a real looker, Han-na goes by "Jenny" and is out to get herself a man, a career and a new identity by singing covers of Belinda Carlisle, Blondie and Michael Jackson. As one girl, fat and thin, Kim has you hoping she'll find love in either incarnation. But then that's the name of her dog too. Which may be the true love she finds in the end. Woof! Woof!