Piagol: In War, Everything Is Justified

YouTube's Korean Classic Film channel is the Korean film fan's beloved online version of Turner Classic Movies, a treasure trove of restored classics, cult curiosities, and other cinematic wonders from the celluloid vault. Piagol, one of the channel's older black-and-white movies, is a gritty 1955 war pic about a dwindling squadron of North Korean soldiers struggling for relevance and survival at the tail end of the Korean War. As portraits of the military go, it's anything but flattering yet the critiques leveled by writer-director Lee Kang-cheon have a despairingly universal quality: Ranking officers rape female officers with little consequence; villages are pillaged for food then violence is justified for dubious political reasons; discipline is extreme and inconsistent and often pointless; the enemy often comes from within. (P.S. Don't expect the Soviet Union to rescue your ass!)

And it's not just one bad red apple in khaki here. The icy-hot Ae-ran (No Kyeong-hie) backstabs her rival female enlistee Soju (Kim Yeong-hui) for no good reason while both the lead officer (Lee Ye-chun) and that snake of a G.I. Man-su (Heo Jang-kang) pull out knives to literally stab others, with even lower motives on their mind. With WWI poet laureate Wilfred Owen likely staring down at him from the heavens, all the duplicity and detonating bombs in the world cannot and will not kill the Byronesque tendencies of Piagol's impossibly romantic Cheol-su (Kim Jin-kyu), the dashing serviceman who gazes wistfully at the clouds as if posing for a paperback cover of Wuthering Heights. So who surrenders and who dies? Well, the one to ultimately survive the nasty infighting amidst periodic enemy gunfire may surprise you. It sure did me.

Split: Bowling for Debtors

Everyone owes something — usually lots and lots of money — in Choi Kook-hee's diverting bowling dramedy Split. The one-time Wednesday Nights league champeen (Yoo Ji-tae) is constantly racking up debts with his competitively disastrous gutter balls. The alley inheritress a.k.a. Split's spitfire love interest (Son Ye-jin) is saddled with extortion-level interest payments caused by her regretful use of the family business as collateral. Even the movie's quirky, somewhere-on-the-spectrum, potentially future lord-of-the-lanes (an excellent Lee Da-Wit) eventually owes his manipulative patron-funders around $20 for a birthday bus trip to visit the current home of his estranged mother and the mausoleum housing his deceased grandmother (who was quite a bowler herself in the city back in the day).

But by the end, Split also owes us, the audience, a few things, too, like that big important game that could go either way and is finally tipped towards victory thanks to the the young bowler's prowess and unusual methods; a romance-solidifying kiss — doesn't have to be post-coital — between the leading man and his pimping promoter; a scene in which the managress sees how bad life would be working as a hostess at the local coffee bar; a pile of Christmas presents that allow one neglected adult to heal his wounds with some help from Santa; and a drunk scene in which the same young man engages in forbidden behavior. The omission of all these scenes is perplexing because the movie actually feels like its building towards them at different times. Which isn't to say this movie is striking out. More that, it's leaves behind too many lone pins that are the marks of a less-than-perfect score.

The Man Standing Next: Not The President's Last Bang

Will the multiple Oscar accolades for Parasite result in larger crowds for new Korean movies at the multiplex? Not immediately from the looks of it if a recent screening of Woo Min-ho's big-budget political thriller The Man Standing Next is any gauge. (A recent matinee screening had the usual six or seven suspects in attendance at Times Square's AMC Empire 25.) In this case, that's probably all for the best since this film about the 1979 assassination of South Korean President Park Chung-hee (Lee Sung-min) is neither as layered as Bong Joon-ho's latest masterwork nor as stylishly seductive as Im Sang-soo's The President's Last Bang which covers similar territory. Which means this one is truly for cineastes with a taste for "Hallyuwood."

In its favor, The Man Standing Next is more forthcoming with historical details than glammy The President's Last Bang; less fortunate is how belabored the set-up part of the movie is. I learned more and cared less since The Man Standing Next only kicks into gear when the action turns decidedly violent. There's a terrific scene in which a kidnapped Kwak Do-won fights his way out of a car, which leads to an exciting final scene in which the KCIA Chief Kim Kyu-Pyeong (Lee Byung-hun) orchestrates the killing with his hired thugs as well as the cooperation of the duplicitous Deborah Shim (Kim So-jin). Most interesting of all however is the archival photos and audio of the real-life men portrayed in the film, a short aside which pops up right before the end credits. Getting upstaged by reality isn't uncommon but as a stand-in for The Man Standing Next's anti-hero of a leading man, a former-revolutionary-turned-frustrated-bureaucrat, Lee Byung-hun has certainly done better.

Shadow Flowers: There's No Place Like Home

North Korean defectors' harrowing escapes are well-documented. But what about those who wish to return? That less-common tale is rarely told. Which is exactly what makes Yi Seung-un's Shadow Flowers — which had its North American premiere in MoMA's Doc Fortnight — so curious. This feature-length documentary concerns Kim Ryun-hee, a decidedly tenacious woman who left North Korea in search of better medical treatment only to find herself trapped in South Korea unable to return. She certainly leaves no stone unturned: She brands herself a spy, engages in passive resistance, attempts suicide, holds press conferences, seeks assistance from the Vietnamese consulate, and networks with fellow ex-pats. Yet time and again, her effort to get back to her husband and daughter is met with bureaucratic delays. Even her renegade act of connecting with North Korean players at a good will hockey game is met with a wall of yellow-vested bodies that prevent her from making physical contact of any kind.

Over seven years in, government leadership may have experienced drastic upheavals in Seoul but Kim consistently appears no closer to success than she did when she arrived. "The kitchen appliances are better," Rhee quips at one point about South Korea but she also notes that her totalitarian regime had free healthcare, reasonable work hours, and built-in retirement plans. When she argues with a lone older protestor about dictator Kim Jong-un, the man-on-the-street's reply is "Go back to your own country" to which she responds: "I can't." After that, somewhat bewildered, he comments, "I need a smoke" then puts down his protest sign. Perhaps Yi's film can pick up where Kim's enemies left off.

Pursuit of Death: The Opposite of Bromance

Imagine spending your whole life hating someone. And not just hating them but chasing them. And not just chasing them for your entire adult life but in this prolonged, decades-spanning process, sacrificing everything that really matters: Your wife, your child, your career, your reputation, your eyesight, your health... Is it worth it? It certainly doesn't appear to be in Im Kwon-taek's Pursuit of Death (a.k.a. Jagko). As the former cop (Choi Yun-seok) hounds a Communist rebel (Kim Hee-ra) across decades, only to end up widowed with stomach cancer and a limp, this film's protagonist is neither particularly sympathetic nor heroic. He's suffering from an obsession that suggests some unresolved childhood trauma but what that might be I haven't a clue.

His adversary (Kim Hee-ra) isn't much better. A roaming womanizer who contracts VD and poisons his nemesis with mercury scraped from a mirror, this guy is downright mean despite his luck with the ladies — who frankly are the only other characters that are developed at all. Pursuit of Death's focus is narrow: We meet a taxicab driver, a former fellow officer, a check-in doctor at the rehab center where the leads meet and match wits but they're all largely expendable. The musical interlude in which most of the rehab center patients sing favorite songs from their past isn't informative so much as bizarre.

Director Im has made over a hundred films in a career that spans over half a century. Some of these movies — such as Hanji and Revivre — are quite good. Others — like this one — not so much.