The Bell Tower: Missing Another Dawn, Memories in the Belfry

When we look back at our lives can it be in any way except with sadness? For the joys of life are passing and don't etch themselves in our minds as deeply as the griefs do. In Yang Jun-nam's The Bell Tower: Missing Another Dawn, the bittersweet reflections are those of an old and ailing bell-maker (Heo Jang-kang) who experiences love and loss, not quite in equal measure. His fiance (Moon Jeong-suk) dies of appendicitis; his teacher dies of old age; what could be a career breakthrough is derailed by an old rivalry involving his grandfather. And yet, he soldiers on.

He has a new helpmeet (Moon, again), a nomadic spirit, and his craft. Fatherhood too comes into play but at a steep price. One gets the feeling every gift has its cost. And who hasn't felt that way at times. It's one of the things that redirects us back to work, to craft, to art. In a world in which the karmic balance feels arbitrarily applied by a whimisical, distracted deity, the practice — whatever that means to you — may be the place of most control. That and the telling of the story. The two are necessarily separate. And that's what makes The Bell Tower so good. Yang — Cheong Nam and Kang No-hyang — understand that the best lives are those which reconcile these two components. The work becomes the story; the story is part of the work. That work-story is generational, inherited, and by extension, bequeathed as well. Because the young have their story as well.

Dream: Waking Up Is Hard to Do

Anyone well-versed in children's fairy tales knows that getting your wildest wish granted is ultimately a nasty curse in disguise. For Jo-sin (Hwang Nam), the dream is leaving the religious brotherhood and spending the rest of his life with the beautiful Dal-lye (Choi Eun-hie). But living a commonplace existence with his ideal woman isn't the fantasy that he'd imagined. And it's not this his newlywed bride is a shrew or stupid or narcissistic. Despite his eventual physical abuse of her, she's a loyal companion, as pretty as ever, and as deeply in love with him as he is with her. He hasn't chosen his lovely soulmate unwisely. The problem is, basically, life.

In Shin Sang-ok's Dream, leaving the monkhood is going to mean being on the lam, murdering a rapist, then murdering an envious former holy man, too. Admittedly, Jo-sin gets a gloriously thick head of hair in his post-priesthood existence but otherwise, his day-to-day outside the temple is far from the ideal he desperately craved. Perhaps, his wish wasn't specific enough. Maybe he should've insisted that Dal-lye's fiancé would've stopped loving her. Maybe he could've have stipulated that his romance would last into eternity. He did not. So his bliss is temporary. And temporary bliss leads to temporary pain. What's to learn from this sad turn of events? Maybe that enlightened Buddhists must relinquish their attachments to earthly pleasures and earthly gains. That's the kind of epiphany that rarely lasts the time it takes to count the 108 wooden beads on your Buddhist bracelet. Or to put it in Karmic terms, better luck next time.

Carter: Bloodbath

To describe the extended action sequence and stunt showcase that is Carter as bloody is an understatement. Within the first 15 minutes alone, our amnesiac/brain-tampered hero (Joo Won) has slaughtered a spa full of Japanese thugs with a scythe. Once he's jumped out of that building (not his first escape, dear viewer), he moves on to hand-to-hand combat, first with a white guy; then with a black one. It's only then that we learn what's going on: He's the muscle for an intricate plan to rescue a young girl (Kim Bo-min) whose the sole source of antibodies for a wide-spreading zombie virus. Further biographical details are shared when a U.S. operative reads his profile to him (and us) during a brief moment of captivity.

Oh yes, Americans as well as North Koreans can be bad guys here. Where do I go? What do I do? For stretches, Carter's answers come largely from an implanted earpiece that also instructs him step by step as if he were living in a video game. But when his molar explodes or he falls out of a pilot-less airplane, this parttime puppet is going to have to rely on his instincts and his training. Both serve him well. The freefall battle between him and one particularly deranged opponent is like nothing you've ever seen, right down to the paraglided landing in the back of a pickup truck full of hogs. As for who our man on a mission impossible truly is, writer-director Jung Byung-gil saves that crucial bit 'til the final act, which peaks with a panopticon of baldcapped undead unruliness. The question is, do you believe it!