Blackpink: Light Up the Sky: K-Pop Meets Coachella

Blackpink: Light Up the Sky reminds me of one of those official celebrity biographies that present a blemish-free portrait of its famous subject with barely a hint at any darker reality. As such, Caroline Suh's peppy popumentary about the world-famous girl group from South Korea feels intimate without being revealing and thoroughly entertaining despite its veneer. The four performers — Jisoo, Jennie, Rosé, and Lisa — are all personable, perseverant, and pretty yet you'll come out of your Netflix cue knowing little else about them outside their home countries (South Korea, New Zealand, Australia, South Korea, and Thailand, respectively). And yet... Light Up the Sky enthralls.

These four women have charisma to spare so small wonder that the execs at YG Entertainment picked them to go through their rigorous training program, which sounds a little bit like Survivor set in a dorm for singers and extending about five years. Furthermore, the members of Blackpink appear to have a genuine affection for each other. If there's any backstage drama, I missed it. If their love for each other is manufactured by the factory then kudos to YG Entertainment for that emotional choreography as well. This extended promotional video is somehow something to sing about.

Yeong-ja's Heydays: Not Arm in Arm Forevermore

When you're young, falling for someone doesn't follow any kind of logic. And yet the feelings we experience for that person can last a lifetime. So it's not hard to see why Chang-su (Song Hae-jo) keeps pursuing Yeong-ja (Yeom Bok-sun). She's his first crush and he's leading a directionless life — from welder at the factory to draftee in the military to spongeboy at the spa. So why not run after the one person who's made him feel something deep?

The object of his obsessions is having one heck of a hard life. Raped by her employer's son, she's tossed out of the house then later gets in a bus accident (in which she loses her arm) on her way to her poorly paid seamstress job. Prostitution, here she comes! So yeah, life is worse than tough. It's downright nasty. Does this help or hurt their chances of being a couple?

In Kim Ho-sun's wildly popular Yeong-ja's Heydays, missing limbs and venerel disease aren't life-changers so much as bumps along a very rocky road. Life happens, it's hard, what else is new? Suicide excepting, you forge on. What's fascinating is that this isn't a star-crossed lovers story. It's more about two people just trying to find their way in the world. And when isn't a story about compassion and gratitude welcome?

Steel Rain: Enemies With Integrity

One element that continually catches me offguard in South Korean movies involving North Korean spies is how often the neighbors to the North are portrayed not as "bad guys" so much as people of integrity fighting for the wrong side. There's a respect accorded to the soldiers from Pyongyang, an acknowledgment that these self-sacrificing communists can't be seduced by an amoral capitalism of fast food and fast fashion. To their Seoul brothers, these patriotic brethren are basically wayward kin (unknowingly) awaiting reunification, a notion that runs counter to the more typical "us versus them" narratives you usually encounter in (cold) war movies. Yes, nukes are involved!

In Yang Woo-suk's Steel Rain, the agent/bodyguard/martial-arts-expert Eom Chul-woo (Jung Woo-sung) is better looking, stronger, nobler, and even more sentimental than his South Korean counterpart (Kwak Do-won), a self-assured, perhaps duplicitous political beast who's more cagey than cage-match. But those attributes don't necessarily guarantee our well-intention warrior victory because he's pitted against American and Japanese forces as well as his own country's traitorous military insiders. I never found myself exactly routing for Eom, despite his cancer diagnosis and inhuman perservence. But I did feel bad for how much the cards were stacked against him.