Circle of Atonement: Head-Spinning

There's a lot of coincidence at work in the thriller Circle of Atonement. Teacher Nam Cheol-woong (Son Ho-joon) gets involved with a star pupil Lee Jang-hyun (Kim Yoo-jeong) who is the surviving daughter of Shin Ji-chul (Lim Hyung-joon), the man who years ago murdered his girlfriend Kang Yoo Shin (Seo Ye-ji) who -- in his mind at least -- resembles this new student. Furthermore, Jang-hyun is blamed for killing her own mother with a gun dropped by police officer Lee Sang-won (Sung Dong-il) who was the lead detective on the case involving Yoo Shin and has secretly adopted the basically orphaned Jang-hyun.

I can practically see co-writers/co-directors Lee Dong-ha and Park Eun-kyung's intricately layered corkboard of index cards labeled with characters and plotpoints as well as the web of strings that connects them together like a spider's web. Some of the notes feel sketchy. Would Cheol-woong would want to kill Jang-hyun as revenge? Would Sang-won be so glib about Cheol-woong's slit wrists? When Reporter (Jin Kyung) starts poking around, looking for answers, we've got the same questions and more. But she's got a serious task ahead of her if she wants to write the article documenting this whole chain of events which started with a poor father who can't afford diapers and leads to a double suicide with hydrochloric acid then a pair of handcuffs ripped apart through rage.

The Grand Heist: Frozen Assets

The 47 Ronin. The Dirty Dozen. The Hateful Eight. The Magnificent Seven. Apparently, those on a quest like to gather in relatively large numbers. I don't know what to call the rebellious collective found in Kim Joo-ho's feature debut The Grand Heist but there are eleven of them on board: a tunnel digger (Ko Chang-seok), an explosives expert (Sin Jeong-geun), an underwater swimmer (Min Hyo-rin), and a financial backer (Sung Dong-il), among others. Why have they banded together? Why, to steal roomfuls of ice, that's why. Ice, you ask, like diamonds? No. Ice like frozen water, stupid. Hundreds and hundreds of big blocks of it stored in secret rooms underground.

Set in the late 1700s, The Grand Heist is, oddly enough, a period piece first, a comedy second, and a heist flick last and least. There's plenty of planning and scads of scheming, but the importance of the crime (or even the value of ice, for that matter) never really registered for me. I got that the heist itself is an act of revenge, since the two leaders (Cha Tae-hyun, Oh Ji-ho) are motivated by the unjust imprisonment of the father of one, and the cruel mass killing of the co-workers of the other. I also got that the price of ice was jacked up by a shady businessman, disloyal to the king. But I didn't get how the theft of frozen goods (and with it the discovery of an obscene amount of gold) was going to make a big difference in how the government was run, despite a forged letter intended to influence the political future of the dynasty. Too much silliness abounds.

Translation note: The original Korean title for this movie is "Baramgwa Hamkke Sarajida" which means "Gone with the wind" so it's not hard to figure out why the American distributors decided to change it. That said, it might've been smarter to have assigned a title that was a little less genre-focused. My suggestion: "Frozen Assets."