Second Life: Slow Study

Her homelife stinks. This we know when a teenager (Jung Da-eun) overhears her neglectful parents fighting in another room. At school, life's not much better when she wakes up in class only to find other girls having fun around a birthday cake which she is not invited to share. Will her situation improve when she gifts EXO concert tickets to her popular peers? Yes but...No good deed goes unpunished.

What goes wrong? Is it lying to her mother to get money to scalp those tickets? Or making up a story about two recently acquired rings out of her price range? Whatever her first misstep, by catapulting herself from outcast to kook, this troubled teen goes from being a source of indifference to a target of derision. Does she learn a lesson? Um, no.

Instead she attempts to frame one young woman whom she especially envies, a strategy that backfires terribly. Does she learn from this? Again, no. At least not immediately. But as the old A.A. adage goes: "Helping others is the foundation stone of recovery." Our anti-heroine may not be an alcoholic but she's definitely got issues. Perhaps some time hanging out with orphans will shape her into a better person. From the looks of it, she does become a better student. Which should serve her at the fancy private high school. But will it be enough?

News of Seoul: Three Minutes of Yesteryear

When it opened it 2015, Kyoto's Toy Film Museum was a humble institution, displaying historic cameras and bygone home projectors in a wall of cubbyholes. (There was also some toy audiovisual equipment with which visitors could play.) Screenings of old samurai movies were shown on a television, the guest speaker might be a screenwriter of yore. But just being a movie archive does position one to make discoveries. And so here we are as TFM's Director Oto Yoneo donates this bit of footage (dating back to the 1920s) to the Korean Film Archive circa 2019. If you're a Korean movie buff like me, then you know full well that homegrown celluloid prior to 1950 is precious goods indeed as the occupying Japanese were actively engaged in destroying Korean culture/art in all forms from 1910 up through the Korean war. How this particular snippet survived (on enemy territory, no less) is a bit of a mystery!

As for the footage itself, which lasts but a few minutes, there are street scenes with trolley cars and brief, overhead shots of Seoul's early skyline, devoid of skyscrapers, Namsan Tower, Lotte World, and the National Museum with its memorable modern spin on traditional architecture. Everything you see is scratched and marked up; the sound — if there ever was any — is long lost; and the title cards — like some of the in situ street signage — are in... Japanese. Still it's nice to get this glimpse of the past, no matter how damaged, no matter how mute.

War of the God Monsters: Cousins of Godzilla

The reclusive scientist (Kim Ki-Ju) has a crazy theory about an impending dinosaur resurrection. The daring reporter (Nam Hye-gyeong) — who's infiltrated his home as a housekeeper — sees his story as the scoop of her lifetime. The little girl (Kim Da-hye), his motherless daughter, wants to win a Blue Dragon Film Award by pouting and flirting and wailing. But no one's story — or ambition — is going to be as entertaining as the Godzilla-like creatures unleashed from the frozen waters by climate change. It's only then, when the kooky-looking creatures arrive, that Kim Jeong-yong's kaiju quasi-classic kicks into high gear. I mean, who cares about humans once this parade of monsters hits the screen?

War of the God Monsters is blessed with a giant lizard painfully covered in polyps, a many-legged dragon who has yet to sprout wings, an oversized bat pup in prehistoric Hammer pants, a triceratops who walks on hind legs, and an oversized rooster that may have wandered onto the wrong miniature set. Some monsters spit fire; others project electric bolts; a few can fly; at least one lays two eggs. At first the little girl is delighted by these oversized theatrics. Then quickly, she realizes that their show is rooted in demolation and decimation. I'm assuming she wasn't screaming for the airplane pilots to stop shooting the large lizards! I could be wrong. She could be a junior member of PETA.

Kingdom: Ashin of the North: Vengeance Thy Name Is Archer

Fellow followers of all flicks Korean, beware. Netflix has falsely categorized Kingdom: Ashin of the North as a film. Search by "korean movie" and this 2021 offering will wrongly pop up in your final results. IMDb, for its part, has more accurately labeled this feature-length flop a special episode. That makes loads more sense. Oh, it's not that you'll have a hard time following the spin-off plot: Kingdom's tale — of a young girl (Kim Si-ah) who grows up to be an angry archer (Jun Ji-hyun) after witnessing the total decimation of her village — is fairly standard fare. The problem with Kingdom isn't that it's confusing. It's more that only a devotee of its source material would care about what's going on. Trust me. I don't mind a stonefaced heroine shooting arrows at treacherous lords to make them into zombie meals. But the exposition here is so belabored as to be aggravating.

On further thought, I'd hazard to say that director Kim Seong-hun should've thrown out Kim Eun-hee's dialogue and had the characters scream and cry and laugh without words. The most exciting scenes are those with little or no speaking: a tiger's attack of an undead deer; a hunting party's fatal stalking of that same crazy cat. When we see Lady Vengeance dispatch with her enemies one by one, we don't need to hear hre victim beg for his life. This might be one case in which turning off the subtitles could work to your benefit.