Top Ten Korean Movies of 2018 (Sort of)

In 2018, I definitely saw fewer Korean movies than in previous years but I also saw more current releases, and made it a habit to check out the foreign film lineups at the multiplexes. And while I had less to choose from for this list come December, I still had more than enough for my ten top picks. In truth, I feel bad about not including the Korean-American Gook, the artsy doc Factory Complex, and Hong Sang-soo's On the Beach at Night Alone. Well, you can check out these three runners-up if you're using this post as a what-to-watch guide and have already seen the others.

1. Burning: Lee Chang-dong's best film since Oasis finds Steven Yeun playing a soulless rich boy who treats his friends as playthings.

2. The Great Battle: Few things please me more than a well-told "David and Goliath" tale. Here it's about a small village against a massive army.

3. The Royal Tailor: A tragedy for the fashion set, this period drama brims with unexpected compassion for the bad guy.

4. Unstoppable: I've been waiting for years for someone to cast Ma Dong-seok as a vigilante hero and so now all I can say is "Thank you!"

5. Right Now, Wrong Then: If there's a director eliciting as nuanced performances from actors as Hong Sang-soo does, let me know asap.

6. The Day After: Oh, the lies that cheaters tell themselves. Just ask the bookseller in this exquisite chamber pic, also from Hong Sang-soo.

7. Runaway From Home: This brom-com about two men tracking down a wife on the lam injects the right amount of seriousness into its silliness.

8. Swing Kids: Two teens at the theater reveled at how many times they cried during this war pic with tap dance. Bring tissues.

9. Default: Q: Can hand-drawn flowcharts and stacks of financial docs simulate the tension of South Korea's 1997 financial crisis? A: Yes.

10. The Red Chapel: Documentaries about North Korea constitute a sub-category of their own; this strange comedy tour stands out from the pack.

Right Now, Wrong Then: Oops, He Did It Again

The paradigm of the lovable rogue has not aged particularly well. For whereas ten years ago, many still considered the hard-drinking, womanizing, lone-wolf ne'er-do-well an inexplicably appealing type, nowadays the general consensus is not so flattering. At least for the moment, an asshole's an asshole. And while the leading men in Hong Sang-soo's movies could certainly be cited as examples of that no-longer-so-likable Lothario, there's one major difference: Hong recognizes who they are as much as we do. We don't come away from his 2015 movie Right Now, Wrong Then with the impression that filmmaker Ham Cheon-soo (Jeong Jae-yeong) is an attractive bad boy who can't help being bad. To the contrary, he comes across as a preposterously immature middle-aged dude with an age-inappropriate haircut, a drinking problem, and a sad need to seek validation by seducing a pretty woman 10 years younger than he is. He's a specimen, an outdated archetype, more than he's someone out to trigger our sympathy.

As if to underscore that this guy is caught in a cycle of unawareness, Hong divides the film into two parts that more or less repeat the same story with minor variations. Think of it as a scaled back, hyper-naturalistic version of Sliding Doors or Melinda and Melinda only this time, the choices made by the protagonist aren't going to be that radically different when we switch from part one to part two. In both sections, Cheon-soo will court the model-turned-painter Yoon Hee-jeong (Kim Min-hee), imbibe too much at a very small party, then bullshit at a poorly attended screening of one of his films. If one sequence ends more happily than the other, that's merely luck at work because Cheon-soo is destined to make the same basic mistakes, although the severity of them may change depending on the day. It's as if, Hong is letting us experience a "what if" scenario that acknowledges that our choices are more likely to be similar if we had a chance to do it all again. There are second chances for sure but sometimes, they're just second times to lose.