Pavane: Resistance Is Futile

Lee Jong-pil's romance Pavance is a movie that sneaks up on you. Two department store laborers -- the gregarious Park Yo-han (Byun Yo-han) and the withdrawn Lee Gyeong-rok (Moon Sang-min) become best buddies for no other reason than they both wore David Bowie T-shirts one day. Weirder set-ups have led to lifelong friends, ultimately. Yo-han chases after life while running away from his past. Gyeong-rok finds an unlikely soulmate in Kim Mi-jeong (Ko Ah-sung), an awkward, grubby delivery person who is even more of a social outcast than him.

Eventually the three form an improbable trio with incongruent dreams: Yo-han wants to be a rock star who also happens to be a best-selling novelist; Gyeong-rok wants to be modern dancer and practices in an underground parking lot; and Mi-jeong wants to be a cool grandma who lets the kids get away with murder. (Not literally) Admittedly, Lee's film resorts to some extreme plot points (a coma, a celebrity father who disowns his kid, a vehicular accident, a snow storm) but everytime the story went off the rails, Lee managed to find a way to get it back on track fairly quickly. Pavance is one of those movies for which you feel compelled to make allowances because when it's good, it's very much so. The emotional truths keep coming up to the surface. The sentimental tears keep flowing from my eyes.

The Beauty Inside: I Love All of You

We like to think there's an essential "me" inside of each of us, a self that exists free of the superficialities and realities and randoms that are our actual bodies, our haircuts, our bank accounts, our bloodline. Some call this "our true selves." Others, a soul. So it goes to follow that a soulmate is someone whom we connect to from this deepest place inside ourselves without regard to how we look and what we do. Kind of.

Baek Jong-yeol's marvelous The Beauty Inside both challenges and supports these ideas by having the male romantic lead, a furniture designer named Woo-jin, suffer from a condition that causes him to wake up in a new body every day. I guess you could call it, multiple body disorder. His mother (Mun Suk) -- wisely -- doesn't take him to a doctor. His best friend (Lee Dong-hwi) thinks it's a hoot. Longterm dating is off the table. That is, until he meets Yi-soo (Han Hyo-ju), a furniture salesperson who connects with him from that very special place within. Home decor does tell us a lot about a person, scoff if you must.

That means she's willing to stick around and cuddle even when he wakes up as a middle-aged bald guy (Kim Sang-ho), an attractive young woman (Ko Ah-sung), an old lady (Lee Myeong-ja), a child... Fortunately, she gets a number of handsome men (Lee Dong-wook, Lee Beom-su, Lee Jin-wook) to tide her over but a love that keeps changing its face, its voice and sometimes its language is definitely be hard to sustain. That Yi-soo is game to try speaks volumes about her integrity and her sense of adventure. There's a few asides that suggest Woo-jin tried initiating a relationship with other women prior to her but once you've found your soulmate, let's face it: All the others just disappear.

Awards: Han Hyo-ju was rightfully nominated as best actress for the Baek Sang Art, Blue Dragon and Grand Bell awards. But that Yang Jin-mo didn't win the Grand Bell for editing, despite also being nominated, is the real crime here! At least Baek Jong-yeol won best director.

After the Banquet: I'm Reminded of a Day-Old Danish

It's not often that a movie's creators namecheck their inspiration directly in the opening credits but that's just what director Kim Yun-cheul and his screenwriter Rie Yokota have done in After the Banquet. The movie that inspired them is After the Wedding, an amazing, emotionally naked Danish movie about an expat teacher/drifter working at an orphanage in the slums of India who's suddenly called back to Denmark to witness the marriage of the daughter he didn't know he'd had. Susanne Bier's film is a remarkable piece of work, a gut-wrenching family drama all about the dictates of money and the debts of blood. You can see how Kim and Yokota would want to make it their own. You can also understand how they'd want to avoid duplicating it too closely since it's so exquisite as it is.

Too bad all the changes they make to distinguish their variation, lower the stakes. For whereas the original had a wedding guest suddenly coming face to face with an old flame, a new relation, and his ongoing shortcomings, the update has a recently orphaned daughter (a cloying Ko Ah-sung) searching for her long lost daddy among the male wedding guests, most of whom slept with her carefree mom. Because of that, After the Banquet owes a lot more to Mamma Mia! — my vote for Meryl Streep's worst movie — than it does to After the Wedding. The kindest thing you can say when comparing After the Wedding and After the Banquet is that they both find equally handsome grooms in their leading men: Mads Mikkelsen and Shin Sung-woo. Yet even here any comparisons put the Koreans in a distant second place: Mikkelsen's stardom was instantaneous with the mid-'90s international hit Pusher; his luminosity only increasing once he exploded stateside with NBC's Hannibal. As for Shin, while he too hit it big time in the mid-'90s (as a rock star), his subsequent acting career has been primarily Korean soaps. Definitely, a less glamorous story. Still, you gotta love Shin's man-bun.

Snowpiercer: Bong Joon-ho Does Scifi a la Park Chan-wook

St. Teresa's The Interior Castle. Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death." Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. There are many examples of spiritual journeys that take their protagonists through a series of bizarre rooms before delivering them to an inner chamber housing a great if hidden truth. For Bong Joon-ho, the rooms in Snowpiercer may be train cars but the quest remains the same: The hero -- or in this case, the cannibalistic antihero (Chris Evans) -- must navigate a succession of rooms, each with its unique challenges, each with its own queer millieu, before arriving at the font of wisdom. The engine room, as it were. Along the way, he'll pass through a well-guarded water room with a lady tyrant clownishly played by a buck-toothed Tilda Swinton, a Willy Wonka-esque school room overseen by a blindingly sunny, pregnant fascist (Alison Pill), a kitchen where cockroaches are turned into gelatinous bricks of protein, a greenhouse, a steam room, a nightclub, and so on. The final chamber -- the engine room -- is ironically the domain of a child-kidnapping God-like tyrant (Ed Harris). Shades of The Truman Show?

What's unusual is that once Ed Harris' character unveils the TRUTH, the epiphany occurs not for Curtis but for Yona (Ko Ah-sung), a seer who hasn't heard it and who, as apprentice to the train's master locksmith Min-Soo (Song Kang-ho), has spent much of the time in a drug-addled haze. Are we hallucinating this scifi pic's parade of celebs along with her, for there's also John Hurt as a steampunk Yoda, Jamie Bell as a second banana in the people's army and a sleepy-eyed Octavia Spencer as a mom out to get her kid back. You might also cite Park Chan-wook as a co-star. While he doesn't appear on screen, his imprint is apparent as producer: Snowpiercer is packed with the video-game violence that has caused some critics to label Park as a purveyor of gore porn. I've never felt that way but I do feel the recurring blood-splattering here proved a bit much. Bong usually finds his shocks in psychology.

The Host: Honey, I Lost the Kid... to a Mutant Monster

Government. Military. Big business. The medical establishment. The media. Which is the most inhumane, the most corrupt, the most evil? While The Host's central family unites to track down the aquatic Godzilla who's kidnapped their daughter (Ko Ah-sung), director Bong Joon-ho hilariously castigates the movie's true villains -- those power-crazed officials who keep getting in their way. Yet The Host is hardly some diatribe of antiestablishmentarianism; Bong is critical of his core characters, too: the slacker dad (Song Kang-ho), his self-defeating sister (Bae Du-na), his bossy brother (Park Hae-il) and the lovable grandfather (Byeon Hie-bong). Everyone does stupid things, no matter what your walk in life. To err is human. But what's also human are the brave, crazy acts that love can inspire us to. What elevates The Host from Kaiju camp to exceptional monster movie is how Bong uses familial love -- as opposed to romantic -- to propel his four squabbling yet noble family members to the very bowels of the Earth. You could say their rescue efforts fail but the final image of a re-configured family of survivors is nothing if not uplifting. Song's performance as the endearing doofus dad is frankly unforgettable.