No Other Choice: The Cruelty of Capitalism

The Americans make a brief appearance at the start of auteur Park Chan-wook's No Other Choice. They're a group of cold-hearted businessmen who have come to South Korea to dramatically downsize the devoted staff of a paper company, loyalty be damned. It's clear that Park finds the heartless "money first, people second" ethos as reprehensible. His anti-hero Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), however, doesn't necessarily agree. Or if he does, he certainly gets over it quick enough as he strategizes how he might get back into a high-paying job in his industry, in light of such ruthlessness. His plan: Kill, kill, kill.

Since this is a Park film, Man-su's deadly serious determination becomes horrifically literal as he systematically identifies who the competition before murdering them one by one. Changing professions is not an option. Selling the family home is not an option either. Competing as an equal has not worked in his favor so far. For him, offing his rivals is the best bet. As the title states, he has "no other choice." [His loyal wife Miri (an excellent Son Ye-jin) is more flexible as well as more adaptable but she's not driving the plot.] Once Man-su's masterplan kicks into action, the killings are quirky more than grisly: a shoe salesman gets twisted into a ball as if he were a bonsai tree; another rival (Park Hee-soon) is buried up to his neck after a night of excessive drinking; a third (Lee Sung-min) is fatally shot by his own wife (Yeom Hye-ran), a histrionic actress who's in the midst of a shallow love affair. Park's film may not have the constant cliffhangers of his earlier works like Oldboy and Lady Vengeance, but No Other Choice is nevertheless a powerful indictment of unchecked capitalism gone mad, both here and abroad.

The Suspect: Never Enough Heroes

Who's your hero in Won Shin-yeon's intricate thriller The Suspect? You actually have a few choices here. Is it Ji Dong-cheol (Gong Yoo), the former North Korean spy who's desperate to find his wife and child? Or Min Se-hoon (Park Hee-soon), his South Korean counterpart who sees Ji's capture as his redemption? Or even Choi Kyeong-hee (Yoo Da-in), the reporter who looks to both men as a way to resurrect her career? You could even pick Captain Jo (Jo Jae-yoon), the resourceful, gum-smacking military sidekick who's here for comic relief. It doesn't really matter. Because everyone has the same nemesis: Kim Seok-ho.

As the film's just-mentioned, amoral, mercenary, duplicitous NIS Director, Jo Sung-ha gets a lot of mileage out of a shit-eating grin. He flashes his teeth whether he's outsmarting a colleague or making a shady deal, whether he's pointing the gun at his enemy or having that same gun's barrel pressed up against his forehead. No doubt his mother told him he had a beautiful smile as a child but the more he grins the more you'll grimace. I mean that as a compliment. As bad guys go, he's deliciously detestable. The car chases in The Suspect are terrific, the camerawork frenetic, but that sickening smile really takes the cake.

The Age of Reason: A Good Song With Not Enough Lee

How big a fan am I of actor Song Kang-ho? Well, I went to a midnight screening at AMC's dilapidated Empire 25 Multiplex in Times Square just to see The Age of Shadows this past weekend. That's pretty devoted. But you know what I realized in the process? I'm also a big fan of Lee Byung-hun his costar in Shadows and The Good, the Bad, the Weird and JSA: Joint Security Area. In fact, I'm such a fan of Lee that I felt incredibly glum after his character dropped out of the movie in the first few minutes. I know he's crossed over to Hollywood now —the G.I. Joe franchise, the Terminator reboot, The Magnificent Seven remake — but please people, don't tease me with a Lee cameo. Not at 12 a.m.!

So I'm just going to talk about the movie post-Lee, okay? (Not that this makes a difference.) My beloved Song plays a Korean cop who's sold his soul to the occupying Japanese but may find redemption with the resistance. He favors black leather jackets with a long cut and epaulets that are embroidered with gold thread. He's got a mustache that R.W. Fassbinder would've loved and speaks in a low gravelly voice that suggests an artist trying out something new. He's delightful. So are his costars: Gong Yoo plays a revolutionary leader who's still finding his legs; Park Hee-soon, a wiser elder; Han Ji-min, a tough-as-nails lady spy; and Foster Burden, a European sympathizer.

The Japanese, as you might expect given the subject matter are heinous. (Both Tsurumi Shingo and Um Tae-goo seem to relish playing sadistic baddies, with one egging on the torture of a female captive and the other slapping the hell out of an underling's face.) And while we know that the fight for freedom will prove victorious, there's still plenty of tension and suspense in The Age of Shadows. It's not Kim Jee-woon's best flick -- that's probably I Saw the Devil -- but it's a nice addition to his ever-growing oeuvre, which now includes at least one pic with exquisite 1920s costumes.

A Barefoot Dream: Rallying for Sports Movies

You don't have to enjoy watching sports (I don't) to enjoy sports movies (I do) because, at the root, the sports movie is generally about overcoming adversity be it, class, disabilities, self-esteem, loneliness, oppression... It's a rare sports movie that isn't tackling a few of these issues on its way to the winners' circle. Think about it! In Marathon, a young man with autism finds meaning (and a friend) via running; in Punch Lady, a survivor of domestic abuse learns to fight back; even in the great horror pic The Host there's a sports movie subplot about an Olympic archer who learns not to crumble under pressure. These are satisfying movies, one and all. Keep thinking about it and you'll see that team sports tend to lead to even more uplifting experiences on the big screen: In YMCA Baseball, some scrappy Korean athletes defeat their Japanese counterparts on the diamond; in Glove, teenagers with hearing impairments bond to form a baseball team worth cheering for; and Lifting King Kong, young teen girls living in poverty discover their self worth via weightlifting. (I know, I know but tell me you don't think weightlifting is a team sport after you've watched Lifting King Kong.)

That the latter three are all based on real-life stories, makes them all the more heartwarming. The latest flick to join this list of ripped-from-the-sports-pages tearjerkers is A Barefoot Dream. Kim Tae-gyun's feel-good flick concerns a soccer team in war-torn East Timor, that's coached by a former middling if professional soccer player (Park Hee-soon) from South Korea. The boys (all poor, often parent-less) and their unlikely mentor bond and go on to compete in an international youth league's championship in Hiroshima. How far they go seems like a movie fantasy until you learn that their victories were real. The acting is not particularly good but considering the actual story of human triumph against the odds, it's hard to grumble about such things as that.

The Scent: A Formulated Noir

Grisly murders. Mistaken identities. Double-crossing lovers. Extortion. Adultery. Jailbreak. Evidence tampering. A patsy private eye. A flirty femme fatale. Even an increasingly complicated alibi that changes with each new clue. Sum up Kim Hyeong-joon's The Scent and people will no doubt think you're describing a B-movie noir. That is, until you add that final factor: This movie has no suspense. A mystery that goes for giggles more than gasps, this did-I-do-it whodunit frames its hero as the killer (in his own memory-lapsed mind, though never ours) then forces us to watch him discover that the most obvious suspect most probably killed the man who beat her then screwed other women in front of her. Is she's wearing a doped perfume that clouds everyone's judgment? Or, more likely, is writer-director Kim Hyeong-joon sniffing from the same poisoned bottle as he revises each screenplay draft?

Kim's thinking throughout is unclear. Who murdered Soo-jin's rich, cruel, lascivious husband as well as his adulterous lover in the hotel room next door? Why is said lover — who shares the wife's name and bedmate — hiring a P.I. to catch the husband in flagrante delicto? How much does the personal trainer from the gym have to do with the crimes? Are the shelves and shelves of disposable lighters ever going to come into play? Kim's plot is full of more holes than the stab wounds suffered by its two main victims. Even so, this kooky caper could've escaped merciless scrutiny if the following elements had come into play:

The framed detective (Park Hee-soon) sweated more, the jealous wife (Cha Su-yeon) carped more, the man-eating seductress (Park Si-yeon) oozed more, the philandering husband leered more, and the mistress blackmailer wept more. The only ones giving more are Lee Kwang-soo and Jeon Soo-kyeong. Lee, as the former cop's gangly sidekick, is straight out of a Max Sennet movie, in which every misguided gesture sets off a Rube Goldberg machine of disaster. Jeon, one of Korea's comic genii, has a bit part as a terrified witness who retracts everything once she learns her culprit is a cop.

Gabi: Russian Coffee: A Half-Empty Cup

One man sees coffee as love.
Another man sees coffee as the dream of an Empire.

I like a cuppa joe as much as the next guy but Chang Youn-hyun's historical thriller Gabi: Russian Coffee imbues the beverage with a potency that staggers the mind. Evidently, coffee can make you fall madly in love, it can save you from being murdered, it can get you insider access to a paranoid king, and it can inspire that same king to build a cafe in your dead father's honor as a way to restore status to the family name. I always thought it was enough that coffee could help you stay awake. Boy, was I wrong.

Tanya (Kim So-yeon), the court barista, knows better than me, too. She knows that the coffee-making method taught to her by her lover Illych (Ju Jin-mo) produces a brew capable of seducing — by way of its floral scent and bitter taste — the currently in-hiding Emperor (Park Hee-soon) of Korea. Furthermore, she knows which type of cup to use, how to fold a filter, and the right way to pour. She also enjoys the philosophical small talk that can make sipping the hot beverage so enjoyable for master and servant alike.

What she doesn't know, or at least hasn't yet to come to learn, is that you don't assassinate someone just to save your own skin. And you can't trust your torturers, especially when one of them — a fellow spy (Yoo Sun) — is also in love with your self-sacrificing boyfriend. Perhaps too much caffeine has clouded her judgment.

As such, Gabi: Russian Coffee is a silly movie. You can understand why actress Lee Da-hae dropped out of the production less than two weeks before the shoot began. She must have read the script and thought, "Hell, I'd rather be a barista."

The Showdown: Frenemies With Swords

Do-yeong (Jin Ku) and Heon-myeong (Park Hee-soon) are the kind of best friends who would've been a lot better off if they'd never met each other. They come from warring families and they both want the same woman (Jang Hie-jun) who may be the only interest they have in common. Because Hyeon-myeong is more academic, more intuitive, and more athletic than his BFF, resentments pile up over the years. (This is what happens when there's no other kids in the neighborhood to play with in 17th-century Koreea, I guess.) That Hyeon-myeong eventually tattles on Do-yeong's father and gets him killed doesn't foster much fraternal love either but at least it gives Do-yeong the high ground. Do-yeong is now more loyal and more moral. When these two frenemies end up stranded in an abandoned inn after struggling through a blinding snow storm in enemy territory, the survivors of a Pyrrhic battle that has left most of their fellow soldiers dead, they decide the time has come to talk out their differences, share some secrets and settle the score.

The catch is they're not alone. Do-soo (Ko Chang-seok), a bumbling farmer-turned-fool conscripted into the war and deserter during the battle, is stuck in this ramshackle inn as well. He's not conflicted by past loyalties and betrayals. In a flashback, you learn he's been unfairly drafted, unkindly treated, and repeatedly scammed. As potrayed by Ko, Do-soo is incredibly unlikable but it's hard not to root for the common man when the rich and the royals won't even give him his due when he tends to the fire and cooks up a potato soup for his "betters." Whether he actually adds to the story is debatable. The same can be said for the rival Chinese soldiers who show up in growing numbers at the inn but never really pose a threat or change the dynamic between Do-yeong and Heon-myeong, who, to their credit in writer-director Park Hoon-jung's The Showdown (a.k.a. Swordbrothers a.k.a. Hyultu), never look anything less than fabulous despite the frozen hair, the bloody eyes, the grimy hands, the tattered clothes.

My Friend and His Wife: Never Sell the Truth Short

And now, a few words about the workaholic at the center of My Friend and His Wife... If there's a more blistering portrait of the self-centered businessman (Jang Hyeong-seong) who takes responsibility for little else than financial profit, none comes immediately to mind. Shin Dong-il's dour domestic drama is a heart-stopping look at how one well-dressed heel's me-first money-making mentality inevitably stomps out the inner lives of everyone who tries to get close to him; in this case, the foolhardy offenders are a cook (Park Hee-soon) and his beautician wife (Hong So-hee). At different points in the movie, both halves of this almost-happy couple have fallen painfully in love with the careerist-capitalist because he seems to promise a better future and a stronger sense of themselves. He loves them too in return — something he shows with increasing dividends — but he's habitually unable to emotionally invest in either relationship. No level of intimacy is more valued than a phone call from the boss; no date can't be canceled once hedge funds go in flux. Because of that, both parties get psychically shortchanged, even as their bank accounts thrive. The husband goes to prison then gets released to find himself the owner of a questionably self-sustaining eatery for fried chicken; the wife loses her baby but eventually helms a high-end hair salon. Neither is near contentment when the riches start pouring in. Which finally prompts them to re-evaluate their feelings for the sharpest point of their costly love triangle. And while they realize something interesting in the process, the biggest lesson is reserved for the biggest offender: A moral debt is the hardest to pay off. Sometimes, it's almost impossible.