Be With You: Stormy Weather for the Win

The romance Be With You isn't labeled as scif but it could be. It's a time traveling tearjerker in which an amnesiac mother (Son Ye-jin) comes back from the dead, only to fall back in love with her husband (So Ji-seob) and child (Kim Ji-hwan) again. The rebirth of affection for the kid is easy to understand: He's quick, conscientious, loving, and adorable. The return of warm feelings for the dad is tougher to fathom. He seems to be cursed with bad luck, made worse by an inability to act responsibly despite being the sole caregiver for their orphaned child. Upon returning to earth, she might've been better off being smitten with her husband's best friend, a baker (Ko Chang-seok) with a better job and a sweet willingness to take on parenting duties, no questions asked.

Well, there's no explaining love. And to his credit, Be With You's father is handsome, earnest, and hasn't lost his swimmer's build despite dropping out of competition years ago. (Is it all the bike-riding?) He's also devoted if a bit dimwitted. Some people prefer a partner not as smart as them, I guess. I only wish he wasn't telling all those little fibs all the time. Honesty is such an important part of a relationship — especially if it's only going to last the rainy season, no matter how often the cars get washed and how many four-leaf clovers you paste to your window.

Tune in for Love: Not a Static Romance

Now that my boyfriend has gone abroad for three months, I've become much more open to seeing the long-resisted romantic movies that normally make me cringe. Oh yes. Since my own lovelife is confined to Kakao video chats, I'm desperately seeking out sappy Korean movies, feel-good fables of the heart, each sneakily awaiting to make me cry. This week's treacly panacea is Tune in for Love, Jung Ji-woo's '90s-era tale of a high school girl (Kim Go-eun) who meets the dream-thug (Jung Hae-in) at the bakery run by her surrogate sister (Kim Guk-hee).

She's an orphaned aspiring writer; he's a high school dropout fresh out of juvie. Will they find happiness together? If so, she'll have to find a better job than her factory gig and overlook the overtures of a smarmy boss (Park Hae-joon). And he'll have to stay out of prison, land a radio gig, and deduce the password code she gave him so they could stay in touch during his military service. In the world of movie romance, these are not insurmountable obstacles. Wedding bells aren't a shoe-in, however. Hence the box of tissues I'd advise you to bring.

Wish You: Your Melody Is in My Heart

I used to think my gaydar wasn't that good. Now I think it's too good. Which can be frustrating when watching queer romances that feature actors who play at gay unconvincingly. Trust me, this doesn't have to do with not femming it up enough. My gaydar isn't based on such stereotyping. It might be the way we inhabit our bodies. Or the way we look in each other's eyes. But when is the problem an actor who doesn't understand how to to feign attraction to men and when is it an actor who's afraid of revealing it. And is there a difference?

Sun Do-joon's Wish You definitely doesn't pass my gaydar but who's fault is that? Could the editor who condensed the eight-episode K-drama into a movie shoulder the blame? Would it help if the street musician (Kang In-soo) was flirtier? Or if his obsessed fan (Lang See) was less unsettlingly naive? Definitely, the fan fantasy puts a worrisome kink in this story. Do we really need a movie that tells you that you can meet and fall in love with your same sex YouTube dream? That the harmonies you're crafting on your Casio at home are going to result in a lifelong relationship? Factor in that the lovelorn one works for a recoding agency as a low-level assistant and the creep factor gets worse. But considering the aspiring pop star is in a contentious relationship with his barista-videographer (Baek Seo-bin), his life can only get better from here. Stalkers, right this way.

Shoot Me in the Heart: What Makes a Movie Gay?

Though it retreats from a satisfyingly manly kiss at the end, for me, Shoot Me in the Heart is definitely a gay romance. The two leads — a bad boy (Lee Min-ki) with violent tendencies who's been institutionalized by his greedy stepbrothers and a long-haired semi-mute (Yeo Jin-gu) who everyone at the psych ward refers to as "Miss Lee" — definitely have a courtship of sorts going on as the dom of the relationship constanty flirts — and even climbs into bed — with the same-sex sub who eventually comes around to his handsome bunkmate's charms. Even those around them — hospital staff and crazy inmates alike — recognize they were made for each other!

But can these two caged lovebirds survive the physical brutality of this particular institution? Will electroshock treatments leave them brain-dead and, in one case, blind? Can they possibly escape to freedom and what might they do when they're finally out? Instigate conga lines to Chubby Checker's "Let's Twist Again" at the local karaoke club? Mun Je-yong's love story might not lead to the desired lip-on-lip action (or grip-the-hip either) but it could've and should've. Who wants to discover they're best friends instead of friends with benefits? Not me! One wonders whether the censors came into play or the director had homophobic mass appeal on his mind. It's possible the screenwriter didn't know his own inclinations but at this point in the 21st century, I wish the unapologetically queer story weren't resisted. We're well past that. Succumb. Succumb.

Failan: Long Distance Lovers

As love stories go, writer-director Song Hye-seong's Failan is a strange one. The two characters never truly meet — she's an illegal alien who needs a husband so she can stay in the country; he's a small time hood who signs the necessary documents. They see each other in the flesh a few times in passing: first, at the Hope Employment Agency; next, when he's being taken away by the cops for selling porn to minors; and a third time at the morgue if you can count that. But mainly their relationship is one projection. She's got a framed photo of him propped up in the room where she lives while working as a laundress. He gets a few flattering letters from her that cause him to re-evaluate his own low self-esteem. Would they have been a happy couple if they'd actually paired off? That seems doubtful. But that isn't the point of Failan which seems to be saying something about the impact of the positive things we do in life, even if they're accidental.

To imagine a better life for Kang-jae (Choi Min-sik) is to imagine a completely different person than the pathetic thug we meet, a man who pulls rank on teenagers at a video arcade and ingratiates himself to the belittling mob boss who used to be a close friend. As for his wife-in-name-only Failan (Cecilia Cheung), the moment she coughs up blood (which is pretty early on), we know that she's doomed. That she's able to salvage a few happy years by grape-stomping dirty clothes and cycling around a village to drum up business feels like a small miracle. Hey, the small miracle is the best that most of us get if we're lucky. If you can make one happen for someone else, please don't hesitate. Cast your spell.

An Early Rain: Who's the Drip?

The giddy excitement a new raincoat elicits from spacey hired domestic (Mun Hie) seems like that of a child. "What should I do? This raincoat is changing my life?" she queries after a frolic at the local nightclub where she finds herself the somewhat improbably unparalleled object of desire for all the suits and the musicians on site. The one who continues in hot pursuit of her is a womanizing mechanic (Shin Sung-il), who — mistaking her for the daughter of the French Ambassador — dumps his sugar mama, hustles his former flings, and gets himself a new suit so he can... take her to a bar for a televised wrestling match?

Not exactly the ideal date but she seems to like it well enough. Hell, she even stays in good spirits when, on the way back home, the stolen car gets a flat tire and the engine conks out. Is it love? A mutual infatuation? Or two young people projecting their fantasies of a better life on each other's mistaken identities? I suppose for some people that might pass for romance and could even end up in troublesome marriage if neither party gets found out.

But the opportunities to find out are somewhat limited in Jeong Jin-woo's An Early Rain because their dates are dictated by the weather: These two only meet when there's a downpour. Are gray skies ahead for this pair of pretenders? Of course, they are... which leads to fun times at the roller rink, the amusement park, the horse track, and a boat ride. And less fun times, that remind you that though money can't buy you love, it can purchase something more disturbing and more violent.

A Day Off: An Off Day

Watching Lee Man-hui's late-'60s melodrama, you get the feeling that the director was a big fan of L'Avventura, La Notte, and the other great existential romances of the decade. Like those two Antonioni films too, A Day Off is beautifully shot in black-and-white and involves characters futilely searching for a deeper meaning in life. (Good luck, right?) This time around however one major practical concern is also at play: One of the film's two leading ladies, Ji-yeon (Jeon Ji-yeon) is six months pregnant and needs to get an abortion. (Even the doctor thinks she's unwise to carry to term, people!) Unfortunately for her, both she and her shady boyfriend (Shin Sung-il) are damn flat broke.

And so, a good chunk of A Day Off is spent following the unlucky love of her life as he attempts to scrape together the necessary funds from a ladies' man, a drunk academic, and a chubby guy who really likes to take baths. But where the movie gets especially interesting for me is when he goes on a bender with a different woman, an equally down-on-her-luck Seoul-mate who wants to drink this particular Sunday — hell, every Sunday — into oblivion. As these two souses careen from one drinking hole to the next, A Day Off begins to feel both more real and more surreal — capturing the recklessness, giddiness, and danger of getting blind stinking drunk with someone who can match you drink for drink. How's it all end?

Well, the censors banned it for being too depressing back in the day despite a coda that's like a little poem to "being". Is life a flower growing in the crack of a city sidewalk? This poetic flick wants to believe so.

The Wedding Day: Black and White Union

Sometimes, a form of cruelty emerges in morality tales featuring rich men who wed poor women. Consider the sadistic acts inflected by the Marquis of Saluzzo on Griselda in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales or the sliced-off heel and snipped-off toes in The Brothers Grimm's "Cinderella." Ouch, right? That twisted aspect also pops up in Lee Byung-il's The Wedding Day, a cinematic fable in which a female servant — infatuated with the bride-to-be — marries the wealthy suitor when the family patriarch coerces her to take his daughter's place after being tricked into believing his future son-in-law has a limp. Yet rather than being overjoyed by a life of luxury, our handmaiden looks depressed when taken away in a palanquin. The only one truly happy by the switcheroo is her new husband and his brother-in-law, the traveling scholar who cooked up the scheme.

And so... The father-of-the-bride is now humiliated. The bride herself will never find a good match. The mother-of-the-bride realizes her hubby's a moron. Even the local worker who'd hopelessly pined for the servant-woman remains despairingly single at the end. Perhaps grandfather is happy. He's senile and clueless and unflappably giddy. But the main players, outside the groom's family, are universally screwed and sad.

That said, The Wedding Day is visually appealing, with plenty of elegantly composed long shots and countless sartorial touches to delight the eye. Too bad that this film is ultimately a deflating romance nastily mocking disabilities. The circle of dancing young ladies who ridicule the purported handicap in a sing-song fashion is especially deplorable. May they be spinsters for the rest of their lives.

A Good Rain Knows: Love Is in the Air

Director and co-writer Hur Jin-ho's wondrous little romance A Good Rain Knows wastes no time in getting to the heart of the matter: Former lovers Dong-ha (Jung Woo-sung) and May (Gao Yuanyuan) are meant for each other but first they'll have to put aside any old resentments or reservations and rediscover those purer versions of themselves they were so many years ago. He's got to shed that unfeeling corporate skin and reconnect to his inner poet; she needs to forget getting dumped then ignored and deal with some PTSD caused by a fairly recent earthquake in Szechuan.

The acting in this film is exquisite. You can sense that both characters are fully aware of their attractions to the other so the flirting is at once calculated and earnest. Each wants to entice their ex- yet they're both scared too. What starts as a chance encounter at a scenic historic site devoted to the great Chinese poet Du Fu (where May works as a tour guide while finishing her dissertation) builds into a whirlwind courtship of sorts (accelerated by the severe time limitations of Dong-ha's business trip from South Korea). But how much passion can be rekindled in a couple of days, especially when you're dealing with a tactless business associate (a comic Kim Sang-ho) who appears to want to have an affair with May and to be best buddies with Dong-ha? Doesn't this guy understand three's a crowd?

Happily, A Good Rain Knows keeps the comedic interference to a minimum and chooses instead to focus on the increasing intimacy of its two leads. Since most of the movie is performed in English — the two lovebirds met previously while undergraduates in the United States — this little film feels primed for a bigger American audience. If this modest review can help in that regard, I can consider my good deed as done for the day. You can call me your online movie matchmaker.

Grand Prix: Horsing Around

Little did I know but there's a special place called Jeju Island where all the Korean horseback riders whose lives have been hurt or harmed, ruined or ravaged by those big, beautiful beasts go to ride, romance, and recover. On this bucolic isle, during one recent cinematic escapade, we get to meet a small, representative sample of those on the mend: a female jockey (Kim Tae-hee) who fell off her saddle during a race and a male jockey (Yang Dong-kun) who blames himself for his best friend's death on the racetrack. We also get to meet a little girl (Park Sa-rang) who was orphaned when a stallion ran away in a storm (long story), a cranky old neighbor (Ko Du-shim) who lost her leg in a stable fire, and a blacksmith (Park Geun-hyeong) who specializes in horseshoes and pointlessly stabs his own leg. What's that, you ask. Well, you know how horses are about their legs? Exactly. And he's in this argument where he's making a point so...

Does this all make you want to visit Jeju Island? Before you answer, let me add that the island is graced with rolling green hills and two impossibly sexy, young men. (The one — played by Song Jae-rim — who lives at your accommodations has gorgeous long hair.) Both men will flirt with you but only one will be able to reconnect your dislocated shoulder, give you two four-leaf clovers, and steal your heart. Does this wondrous world of Yang Yun-ho's Grand Prix sound too good to be true? I'd have to agree with you there. It's a happiness that feels far from real. Trophy ahead.

Anyway, there are just as many reasons to leave the enchanted isle as well. You've got a feel-good sisterhood of fellow jockeys who want you to win the big race. You've got a lovingly crabby mom who runs a little cafe where the food is getting worse every year. You've got a gambling addiction that finds the perfect outlet at the track. (Put a dollar down on Tamra.) Just remember when you leave the island, the bad people will cheat you and undermine you and act like martyrs even though they're the ones causing all the pain. Stay strong. Stay in the race. And never give up on love.

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.

Where Are to Go: Drive, She Said

The search for meaning in life is a staple of the art house film but only frowny, rich wife Hee-young (Kim Gyu-ri) would think to seek this meaning by way of a taxi. In Jin Hyun-seung's Where Are to Go, the soul-searcher's quest will lead her to being chauffeured around Busan where she'll reconnect with an old flame, stare out at the ocean, sulk amid neon, and bum a few cigarettes — plus a lighter — from her cloyingly upbeat driver (Yu Geon). Unfortunately for Hee-Young, the search for meaning is ultimately an internal one so clobbering a bully in the streets and popping sleeping pills at night are unproductive paths to reconnecting her to her lost dream of being a real actress. Well, there are worse ways to play tourist in Korea than in the back of a cute guy's cab.

As to the cabbie, his goals are a little less noble, a little more practical: He just wants a sugar mama! Broke and burdened with abandonment issues, he's been bedding female travelers from all over the world, in the hopes of finally scoring the big one. Hee-Young could be his ticket out. She's got prescription meds, a seemingly deep checking account, and a fur coat that self-dries. (That coat must be expensive!) She's also willing to dress up like a school girl when he asks. What more could a guy hope for? And so they go drinking and shopping and sightseeing and drinking again then again. One binge leads to screwing but frankly, for most of the movie, love feels out of the question.

Because she knows his game. She knows he's got to cater to her whims, cook for her, paint her toe nails, give her back massages, and be her designated driver every time she wants to get blitzed. He knows that she knows what he's doing and yet he still hopes. This is the province of youth: To hope against the odds. The province of old age is wanting to hear someone tell you you're still young. So he does that. Not she's that old. Still it's nice to hear. And maybe she can go back to being an extra in the movies. That's something, isn't it?

Now and Forever: Love You to Death

Somebody help me. I've seen nearly all the good Korean movies on Netflix and Amazon Prime and I'm now stuck watching crap like director Kim Seong-jung's sappy romance about two terminally ill "beautiful people" who hide their fatal diagnoses from each other as the ultimate expression of their death-defying, tragic, self-sacrificing love. She's got a heart ailment. He's got a brain tumor. I've got a headache and gas. And the discomforts don't end there either.

Aside from her cardiopulmonary issues, Han Hye-won (Choi Ji-woo) has some mental deficiencies too -- so much so that for a good stretch of the movie, I assumed that she was in the Psych Ward, not the ICU. Choi clowns around -- giving sudden looks of total incomprehension then giggling inappropriately -- so often that you assume the doctors must periodically instruct her to stand on her head just to ensure she gets some blood to her brain. The drama, surrounding her constant "escapes" from the hospital, suggests a staff that thinks she's a desperate case. But since her best friend Soo-jin (Seo Yeong-hie) periodically takes Hye-won's medicine in the butt cheek, you wonder if the patient is just getting placebos in the end.

That Lee Min-su (Jo Han-seon) pursues her so arduously, intellectual lightweight that she is, isn't romantic so much as creepy. A self-styled ladykiller, he's apparently bedded so many independent women (all with abandonment issues) that his devotion to a half-wit feels a bit predatory. Here's a woman with only one real friend, a rarely visited father, half a brain and half a heart. Are those wedding bells he's hearing or the bells of bedlam? Is he in love or has he simply lost his mind?

Min-su's sidekick Kyung-min (Choi Seong-guk) is infinitely sweeter, if a bit of a dingdong. Falling in love with Soo-jin may be equally irrational but it's also pretty harmless and pretty amusing. You won't cry when the two best friends get together in Now and Forever but you won't vomit in your mouth either. Small victories!

Jenny, Juno: Teen Pregnancy Is So Twee, Right?

I found Jenny, Juno detestable. That's right. Detestable. A lighthearted puffball about an adolescent girl who gets pregnant (but looks as lithe at six months as she did before getting knocked up) and her pouting boyfriend (who looks as though he's never had a lewd thought, never mind a pubic hair), Kim Ho-joon's YA rom-com suggests the sole repercussions of an underage pregnancy are the girl's growing appetite and the boy's desire to emulate John Hughes movies. What's weird is that Kim is actually building an oeuvre about marrying minors. His previous romantic comedy -- My Little Bride -- concerns a high school girl who discovers that her arranged marriage with an older guy might not be such a bad deal in the end. So is having both the lovers be young this time around an improvement? Quite possibly. But I'm not totally sure.

I think part of the problem of Jenny, Juno is that the two lead actors (Park Min-ji, Kim Hye-sung) don't just look super-young, they also play super-young. There's something mildly depressing about seeing a ditzy, expectant teenage girl lying on a bed piled high with stuffed animals and personalized throw pillows. The young couple's single concession to impending parenthood consist of standing outside a Lamaze class to glean instructions from the other side of a glass window. Evidently, it's enough to simply watch what's happening once to master the technique. Who knew it was this easy?

Everyone knows it's not. Which is what made the American-made Juno (similar title, similar plot, completely different attitude) so engaging. The title character of this latter movie had to struggle with physical discomforts, savage ostracism, and some painful choices that have to do with being a teen mom. That Juno managed to extract a happy ending from a complicated reality; this one includes a chaste fantasy wedding that made me want to cry like a baby. And then puke. Apparently, Jenny, Juno causes morning sickness!

The Old Garden: Incompatible Politics

I'm trying to remember if I've ever seen a Korean movie that left me feeling as shut out as this one simply because I hadn't read Korean history, outside of Pearl S. Buck's novel The Living Reed, and Cullen Thomas's Brother One Cell, an expat prison memoir. That said, I do remember seeing The President's Last Bang, Im Sang-soo's cinematic retelling of the assassination of President Park Chung-hee (brilliant) and at least three movies about the courtesan Chunhyang (all good) without feeling gravely uninformed. But The Old Garden -- also by Im -- left me out in the cold.

I eventually figured out that this movie has to do with a bloody student uprising and a fascist president but Im's film spends a lot of time referring to political upheavals, not depicting them. That means, you hear about the psychic damage but generally don't see what caused it. By the time the brutal conflict between students and cops hits the screen, it just feels like another generation's daily news report. Even when one character self-immolates herself, The Old Garden feels pretty tame somehow. Listen as the students softly sing a few verses of "We Shall Overcome" and try not to get bored.

Furthermore, The Old Garden suffers from a narrative that mines its conflict from the inability of one woman (Yum Jung-ah) to understand the sacrifices her radical lover (Ji Jin-hee) is making for the cause. "I hide you, put you up and feed you, and even let you fuck me. Why would you leave?" Clearly, either he hasn't been educating her on the necessity of the movement or she hasn't been listening.

It might also be that he's a secret masochist. Maybe he doesn't really have to turn himself in and get tortured by wearing a leather mask that won't let him spit properly. Maybe he could've gone with her and shacked up in the mountains, hiding from authorities, and making babies. Maybe governments naturally go through dictatorial and democratic phases and it's silly of any of us to think we can change, prevent or overthrow any regime. I'd call that a hopeless viewpoint. But don't be sad. These characters are sad enough without you joining them. They cry when they eat black noodles. They cry when they hug goodbye. They cry when they get thrown in the hole. (The extended sobbing during an on-screen blackout for that last part proved a bit much for my taste.)