Two Guys: May I Please Be the Third

When white people show up in Korean movies, they're rarely good people. There's the creepy puppeteer in A Brand New Life, the military bullies in My Father, the abducting adoptive parents in Baby and Me... The company of origin makes no difference either. There are clueless Australians in Lady Vengeance, irresponsible Americans in The Host, and thuggish Russians in My Girlfriend Is an Agent. This isn't a complaint. I actually don't mind all that white slander. To the contrary, I'm wondering how I could get a part like the predatory homo in the delicious comedy Two Guys. A shady, souless, self-serving simp who's got a nice spread of gay porn on his coffee table and gets to make sexual overtures to one of the movie's two handsome leads, this negative stereotype doesn't seem damning so much as damn hilarious. Hey actor Scott Phillips! I'm jealous of you! Hey director Park Hun-su, consider me for the sequel!

I'm more than ready to lasciviously lick my lips or bat my big, beautiful eyes at Park Joong-hoon, who plays a short-tempered loan shark, or Cha Tae-hyun, who plays the vainest of valets — with a serious debt. I'm even willing to vamp around in women's clothes if Han Eun-jeong isn't interested in coming back for Three Guys or Two Guys Part Two or 2Guyz2 or whatever you want to call it as the brains of their operation. I think I'd be pretty good at the level of slapstick required if the follow-up caper follows suit with chase scenes on rooftops and subway platforms, and physical altercations involving serving trays and stripping down to my skivvies. All I ask is please, please, please, let me have a scene with Park and Cha during which we get to — once again — beat the hell out of Kim Gu-taek, World Wide Wrestling-style. I could learn how to execute the Tadpole Splash, the Ankle Lock, the Cross Rhodes or any of a long list of white man moves developed for laughs and a taste for blood that feels completely in keeping with this movie.

Headshot, resume and references are all available upon request. Will travel.

My Dear Desperado: The IT Girl Is the It Girl, Too

One great thing about seeing Korean films in the United States is that 99 percent of the time you're going in blind. You might have a two-sentence description of the movie's plot, but generally speaking there's no reviews in the local paper and no buzz at the water cooler to build expectations or undermine your experience with spoilers. Because of that, you sometimes stumble on a truly unexpected experience. You think you're cozying up in front of the TV for a random romantic comedy? Well, think again, my friend. Because My Dear Desperado is hardly cliched cuteness. A zeitgeist-y romcom about IT girl Sae-jin (Jeong Yu-mi) -- who can't get a job despite her smarts and skills -- and her neighbor Dong-chul (Park Joong-hoon) -- who's just got out of prison and is kind of trying to get out of the mob and kind of resigned to staying in it -- My Dear Desperado is a subversion of the traditional romance. Do the two main characters fall in love? Of course they do. But only to a certain degree.

Defying Hollywood conventions, My Dear Desperado's writer-director Kim Kwang-shik always keeps one foot firmly grounded in reality so while there are sparks between these lovebirds, there's never really fire. Kim is fully aware that even if these two are fond of each other that that doesn't mean they're meant for each other until the end of time. A one-night stand stays a one-night stand. A pretended engagement doesn't last the duration of their weekend visit to her father's place. And Dong-chul's devotion to Sae-jin may help help change her life but it doesn't work in reverse like a fairytale. Sae-jin neither attempts nor considers helping Dong-chul extricate himself from a gangster's life. Because of that the two are destined to drift apart. Just how far they do will likely come as a surprise to most viewers. It shocked the hell out of me!

I'm still undecided if My Dear Desperado is a great movie or simply a good movie with an ending that I simply didn't see coming. Until I figure this out, I'm going to recommend it to everyone willing to hear me sing its praises. There's one unexpectedly delicious scene in which Sae-jin's crying jag transforms into an erotic breathing lesson and another spot-on vignette in which Dong-chul's attempt to be a gentleman gives way to his ingrained thug. I believe, Kim knows exactly what he's doing here. But it's really just a guess on my part.

Hanji: Paper! Paper! Read All About It!

It's a good thing, I didn't read the synopsis of Hanji in the MoMA Korean Film Festival brochure beforehand. I never would've gone to the theater. A film about the challenges, setbacks and rewards encountered by a local government official helping to revive the traditional method of papermaking hardly promises the stuff of high drama. And funnily enough, within this movie itself, are snippets of what appears to be the dreaded documentary we'd expect from that description: a clunky primer on the fine art of Hanji that pans reverentially over intricate antiques while a droning voice-over puts us summarily to sleep. Crafting a new copy of the Annals of the Chosun Dynasty may be a momentous occasion to scholars but most of us are not going to perch on the edge of our seats, desperately waiting to see if the undertaking succeeds. Will they master the old craft? Who cares! Director Im Kwon-taek does a little, perhaps, but at the same time that's not the story that he's set out to tell with Hanji either. Im's sublimely understated film is based on a real story but doesn't relate history so much as it distills  reality. (That's much more interesting!) His Hanji quietly conveys how the lives of people of no historic note are deeply impacted by something as unexpected as a well-meaning civic restoration project.

The movie's central character is  Pil-yong (Park Joong-hoon), a womanizing bureaucrat incapable of advancement and burdened with a wife (Ye Ji-won), whose severe disability was caused in part by his last extramarital affair. As he works to incite the masters of the local paper-making community to participate in the project, he strikes up a friendship of sorts with a divorced female film director (Kang Soo-yeon) who makes the aforementioned documentary, in part because she can't get funding for a feature film. No major love triangle emerges. Throughout Hanji, conflicts are small; treacheries, minor. What distinguishes Hanji is not its ability to extract tragic consequences from a historic footnote but rather its acknowledgment that a story with little razzle dazzle can nevertheless be the biggest thing to happen in some people's lives. Im's blunt depiction of cubicle culture, stroke rehabilitation, and petty crime as nothing but a part of daily life, any life, every life, underscores that the familiar and the pedestrian can still be quite deep. There's a beautiful passage in Hanji during which one character talks about the moon being a source of light that you can stare at continually without danger. Like the moon, most of us will not be as radiant as the sun but our insignificant lives are no less worthy of uninterrupted, loving attention.

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.

Les Formidables: This Brotherhood Knows No Bounds

Nothing pleases like a tale of redemption. And in Les Formidables, writer-director Cho Min-ho has made an action-packed one in which a degenerative detective (Park Joong-hoon) and a principled criminal (Cheon Jeong-myeong) have a shared lesson in selflessness and the meaning of true friendship. Unlike his earlier buddy flick Jungle Juice (which was a guilty pleasure at best), Cho's Les Formidables wastes no time setting up its story of two men on the run by looking for laughs in dorky adolescent humor. Brutal and spare despite its corkscrew narrative, the movie opens with a spectacular fight scene that leaves Park's cop with a battered head, a loss of dignity, and no partner. Next up is Cheon's just-as-rapid descent from self-employed short-order cook to bloodied, bewildered fugitive. What keeps the heart pounding from then on is Cho's skill in tightening the net around the duo by having one side of the law then the other get closer and closer to capturing and/or killing. That each man has a friend on on the inside and a woman on the outside who'll go to great lengths (one for love; the other, for kicks) ensures that this action movie outpaces its competition in the genre. The bobbypin scene qualifies as a classic.