Fabricated City: Player One Ready or Not

A compulsive, unemployed video game player (Ji Chang-wook) gets framed for a murder. Sounds fun! Except Fabricated City also has a nasty prison rape and terrifying jailhouse beatings as well. Too real for you? Well, our falsely convicted young man is a former Tae Kwon Doh champ who can MacGyver a dart-thrower behind bars and protect his pressure points when under assault — as one sympathetic murderer keenly observes. Too preposterous? Okay, then you're really going to recoil when our ill-fated hero gets visited by the dead! As for me, Fabricated City is my kind of movie!

Strategic self-mutilation, ingenious jail-breaks, alternate online identities, intricate crime syndicates, and (finally) a cop who isn't trigger-happy... The juicy details keep piling up, including an adorable black couple who have come to Asia to backpack and bless the fugitive with a "shit car" before getting on a plane for happier trails. Yet for all its gloss, director Park Kwang-Hyun's crime thriller isn't mere escapist fare. Screenwriter Park Myeong-chan — an early collaborator of Park Chan-wook — has crafted a script that's making critical commentary on gender roles, universal surveillance, institutional power, and technology with every twist of its incredibly twisted plot. The final comeuppance is over-the-top, beyond the scope of the believable, even ludicrous, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Fabricated City is a fantasy of retribution (executed by a sweet group of misfits) against all the systems that routinely fail us.

Turandot: Popera From the East

The Korean movie Turandot has infinitely more to do with Broadway musicals than Puccini operas but it does call to mind those PBS specials (of both realms) in which live productions are recorded then televised for mass consumption. As such, choruses stand around idly when the principals sing; leads also hold poses in anticipation of their first lyric when a song begins. As someone who's spent a good amount of time in the theater, I don't mind these static moments but someone expecting an experience akin to Chicago or Cabaret might easily feel otherwise. But for those game for a Live From Lincoln Center-style experience...

Turandot (Bae Daehee) is a princess who heartlessly reigns in a kingdom of darkness; Prince Calaf is the heir of a neighboring realm brought to this doomed land by the search for his missing father. How Ping (Lim Choon-gil), Pang (Kim Dae-han), and Pong (Park Jung-pyo) came to be there, I've no idea. There are riddles to solve; marriages to propose; and ballads to croon or belt as the situation requires. The singing is universally strong. A little research suggests that South Korea has a deep interest in musical theater and with former K-pop stars Bae (Vanilla Lucy) and Yang Seo-yoon (The Pink Lady) among the cast, writer-director Kim See-woo's production has no shortage of vocal talent. I enjoyed some of the sparkly crowns as well.

The Witch: Part 2 - The Other One: Here We Go Again

I was thoroughly entranced by The Witch: Part 1 - The Subversion, a crazed mashup of evil scientists, ruthless assassins, and rebellious teens whose adolescence has been uniquely challenging. Yet even though The Witch: Part 2 - The Other One has all those elements to a degree, they're neither as prominent nor as playfully done. Writer-director Park Hoon-jung basically assumes we already know that Dr. Baek (Jo Min-soo) is a mad scientist; that the protagonist (Shin Si-a) is the counterpart to prior heroine Koo Ja Yoon (Kim Da-mi); and that a whole military industrial complex is funding the creation and the elimination of these two women warriors. What The Witch: Part 2 is missing, frankly, is a reason for being outside the introduction of a new character.

Luckily for us, this cinematic universe remains pretty entertaining. Once again, the set-up is a Davis versus Goliath story. Our poor nameless waif is being chased down by genetically engineered and genetically enhanced bounty hunters who are thirsty for mutant blood. There are a couple of narrative snags, like why go after your prey with weapons you know she's survived in the past when you could increase your chances of overpowering her if you simply doped her during one of her many food-binging episodes? But the history of humankind abounds with people making obvious mistakes over and over and there's nothing to suggest that the characters in The Witch: Part 2 are smarter so much as faster, stronger, and wilder than regular Joes. The people of the future are total animals.