Hopeless: Correct

How bleak can a life be? Writer-director Kim Chang-hoon's riveting feature debut Hopeless shows one that's extremely so. 17-year-old Yeon-gyu (Hong Xa-bin) has a family in debt, classmates who gang up on him, and a drunken stepfather (Yoo Seong-ju) who goes after him with a newly purchased baseball bat. The only place he's able to find (temporary) sanctuary is with cool-headed gangster Chi-geon (Song Joong-ki) who takes him under his wing, although the why is never clear. I have my theory. Anyone else pick up on some homoerotic tension? Regardless, love of any sort is not going to save the day. Because life goes from bad to worse pretty quickly.

Yeon-gyu loses his part-time job as a food deliver for small-time restaurant owner (Jeong Man-sik) when a new facial scar alienates the customer base. His new criminal boss' boss sees him as a killing tool, not a human being. And his step-sister Ha-yan (Kim Hyung-seo a.k.a. Bibi) is getting harrassed at school and needs his assistance. Even when he shares his life story with Chi-geon, his listener responds with a fairly blank stare. Yet Yeon-gyu's struggle to survive and maintain a moral center despite his shit-town surroundings makes Hopeless more than a trip to the dark(est) side. Surely we can do better as a species! Clothing and feeding the poor is just the beginning.

Live Stream: Snuff for the 21st Century

In a world that's making wrong choices left and right lately, putting a protagonist like Live Stream's Dong-joo (Park Sun-ho) front and center makes absolute sense. You can't watch his poor judgment and think "No one would would do that" even if he can't make a correct decision to save his own life (or the life of anyone else either). And so when the anonymous sleazy host (Park Sung-woong) of a sicko streaming show roofies Dong-joo's girlfriend (Kim Hee-jung), Dong-joo keeps making poor choices while trying to save her. He repeatedly calls his endangered lover to warn her instead of texting her when she stops picking up her phone. He curses at the predator instead of getting info that would help identify her whereabouts. He fails to explain the full scope of the problem to the cops, to his sister, to his friends... All of which makes you realize there's a perfectly good reason why this perpetually unemployed 20-something is getting nowhere in his job interviews. He's not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

But dumb isn't the worst quality a person can have. Consider his best friend Joon-ha (Kim Kyun-ha) who's not only unintelligent but unkind and untrustworthy. He'll open the door to strangers. He'll advocate jilting the doped young woman instead of rallying to her defense. He could go to the cops himself! At one point, they're literally outside the apartment. But no... he doesn't even protect the other best friend when the baseball bat comes out. It's not that kind of a movie. This one's about the predictable plot twist in Act III. Because we're not that dumb! Even if we missed the bigger plot twist after that. Because we're not that smart either.

Peninsula: The Walking Dead Abroad

As someone who worked on the digital marketing campaigns for The Walking Dead for a few seasons, I'm well aware that the most frustrating aspect of zombie movies -- and zombie TV shows for that matter -- is the habit of having characters take actions that serve no purpose except to attract the undead humans they're supposed to avoid. You can see what I mean in Peninsula when a treasure-seeker tries to extract a corpse from a van loaded with money instead of doing the logical thing: grabbing a bag of cash from the back then going on his way. His disastrous action isn't about greed; it's about attracting all the zombies in the vicinity. Which then turns the movie into a shooter game. Well, much of the world of Peninsula looks computer-generated so that aligns.

Yeon Sang-ho's Train to Busan sequel also suffers because it inserts a lot of unnecessary English, one assumes to attract American viewers. I honestly believe that this inclination, indeed this constant pressure, for artworks to be all things to all people is art's undoing. One need only look at Yeon's infinitely better vastly underrated Psychokinesis to see the man is hardly a one-hit wonder. And Peninsula is doing many things right: the family survival story, the military gone berserk story, the American imperialism story... I guess it's just that when you make movies as good as Train to Busan and Psychokinesis, I expect better. Even if this is better than most of the zombie content out there.