Sorry, Thanks: Four Flicks For You and Your Four-Legged Friends

For Sorry, Thanks, an omnibus of four shorts about twice as many house pets, I've chosen to focus on the performances of the animals, not their human co-stars. First up: Ha Neul-i, the yellow lab in Song Il-gon's "I'm Sorry, Thank You." Suddenly orphaned by an elderly owner who dies of a stroke, this dog doesn't grieve. He pulls some blankets over the corpse. His inability to bark effectively means a passing real estate agent never learns there's a dead man inside. A 10-year-old with possibly weight issues, this dog has been around so long, he seems to convey a "been there, done that" attitude in all his scenes. His eventual adoption feels strictly sentimental. Not earned!

The title character in "Jju-jju" (some kind of Corgi, perhaps?) might not be Hollywood pedigree but he's the strongest performer in the pack. His near-death strangulation by some homeless thugs looks convincing without being histrionic. Plus he's incredibly charismatic whether he's fetching a ball or begging for pre-packaged pastry. Unlike the senior lab, this one's got range: He plays sleepy, sick, loyal and perky effectively. If he improves his focus, he could become Korean cinema's go-to super-canine. You can imagine director Oh Jeom-gyoon wanting to work with him again. Or at least wanting to take him home!

What follows in Park Heung-sik's "My Younger Sister" is one of the most thankless movie roles a dog has ever had: This mini-pic concerns a young girl who pretends her puppy is her sibling so most of the time, a very young actress is playing the role of an adorable puppy! White, fluffy, and radiating happiness, the actual dog might've captured our hearts if he'd been given more screen time. But can he complain when he sees Lim Soon-rye's "A Cat's Kiss," where all the canines are background (one barks off-screen; another's seen behind a fence). As to the cats, there's no breakout performances. There's the one wearing a protective cone (nice blinking), the one who gets pelted (good cowering) and three abandoned kittens (is there anything cuter?!). None of them come across as trained. This is strictly amateur hour for pet performing.

A Smile: Eyesight's Sore Loser

As disease-of-the-week movies go, A Smile is oddly uninformative about its spotlit illness: retinitis pigmentosa. This currently incurable degenerative eye disease can cause a short list of intermediary symptoms -- ranging from night blindness to color separation issues to blurring to tiredness -- before the dreaded darkness sets in. Yet aside from some early mentions of tunnel vision and the occasional bumping into objects like a tripod or a low table, photographer So-jung's (Choo Sang-mi) primary side-effect appears to be depression. Her soul is suffering more than her sight and her symptoms feel more psychological than physical. When she informs us her situation is getting worse, you can't help but think: Girlfriend, your biggest problem isn't retinitis, it's you!

Unable to reconcile herself to the possibility of going blind, she ends a relationship with her really sweet boyfriend Ji-seok (Song Il-gon), mopes around her grandmother's funeral without telling anyone else in her family of her recent diagnosis, and sells nearly all her cameras and equipment to run away and take flying lessons from a drunk aviator in the middle of nowhere. At no time do we see her exploring treatment options (admittedly limited) or tracking down her father's side of the family (the disease is genetic). It appears a part of So-jung saw doom forecast and then just ran with it.

I wasn't sure whether writer-director Park Kyung-hee wanted us to feel she was bold or batty when she decided to throw her life away so she could learn to fly but I definitely fell into the latter camp. So-jung's longing to get free of the earth and see the world from a new perspective may have some poetic cache but as an element in a hyper-realistic drama, she comes across as incredibly irresponsible and egocentric. Will she ever take to the skies? If she does, will she crash? If she crashes, will she die? If she dies, will she see again? If she does, will she meet the smiling Buddha which was one of the last things she photographed? And if he does, will the Buddha smile? I wouldn't.

Flower Island: So You Wanted to Meet the Wizard Instead of a Shrink?

Somewhere along the line in Song Il-gon's teary Flower Island, I thought, "Oh, this is just like The Wizard of Oz without the comedy, the catchy tunes or Judy Garland." But you definitely have three broken characters, with self-esteem issues, heading to a magical place akin to Oz as they search for life-changing wizardry — in this case, the wish-granting comes courtesy of a fairly low-key woman with magical powers and a knack for hypnosis. Sad more than hopeful, this trio isn't looking for a heart, a brain and the nerve. Instead, one (Lim Yu-jin) is seeking peace of mind so she can die of throat/tongue cancer; another (Kim Hye-na), for the mother who abandoned her as a child; and the third (Seo Ju-hie), for her "angel" friend who she hopes will make her feel a little less guilty about having sex with an old man as a way to raise money to buy her daughter a piano.

As in the Emerald City, no one gets what they've asked for exactly but they do return to the real world a little less troubled (although in one case, a little less troubled happens to mean dead). Shot on a digital camera, Flower Island feels somewhat insolent because its hand-held P.O.V. is often obstructed and its actors look directly at the lens, sometimes because one of the characters happens to be an amateur videographer and sometimes just because. That former conceit doesn't really have a pay-off. The fictional filmmaker's shots aren't that different from those by the actual one and there's no point-of-view epiphany, notwithstanding the blurred image of a maternal doppelganger who appears on the beach at the same moment that the cancer lady is about to disappear mid-air via a pair of cardboard angel-wings. I like the spirit behind making a low-budget film with little more than an idea and a handful of game actors. I'm less into a slack editorial process that permits scenes to wander willy-nily and a storyline that for all its grief never triggers a well-earned tear. Every character cries; one of them screams. As to the audience, we're left waiting for a glimpse at the dark, doomed reality within. At the end of The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy returns home and sees Kansas anew; at the end of Flower Island, the main character may be over her depression but she doesn't get a memorable catchphrase like "There's no place like home."

Spider Forest: A Deadly Case of Amnesia

Memory can be tricky but at least most people have the luxury of knowing their lives will unfold in a linear fashion. Not so, Kang Min (Kam Woo-seong). This unlucky victim of a hit-and-run accident is caught in an infernal time loop that has him regaining consciousness in the most traumatic parts of his past. Struggling to get a grip on reality, he's forced to relive the death of his wife (Suh Jung), the loss of his job as a TV producer, a deeply felt betrayal by his newscaster-girlfriend (Kang Kyeong-heon), and his all-but-forgotten childhood which he's slowly piecing together with some help from a strangely familiar photoshop owner (Suh Jung again). That Kang's doing all this while suffering from a spider-bite and a serious head injury only compounds his hallucinogenic disorientation. Beautifully shot and intoxicatingly cryptic, Song Il-gon's Spider Forest is a humdinger of a puzzler to be sure. You may be able to predict certain plot twists but Song executes them so exquisitely and with such nuance that even the expected feels fresh. A noir fable with a couple of steamy sexy scenes, Spider Forest is a movie I've got lost in more than once. No doubt, I'll go there again.