Tomb of the River: Paid in Blood

This movie has too much stabbing for my taste. There's also plenty of — somehow more acceptable — men wielding pipes but these secondary gangfights always build to a stabbing so the pipe-brawls feel like they're basically teasers for what's yet to come. As to who's killing whom in Yoon Young-bin's jopok joint Tomb of the River, I don't know if it matters. Everyone's playing king of the hill here: power-grabbing Min-seok (Jang Hyuk), slow-witted if loyal Gil-seok (Yu Oh-seong), eternal second banana Cheong-seop (Lee Hyun-kyun), traitorous Mu-Sang (Kim Joon-bae), and the archetypal godfather (Park Jeong-hak) because where would a movie like this be without him. Most of these thugs are going to take one to the heart (via multiple stabs, regardless of rank). Interestingly, the best standoff ends up being a fistfight between two secondary henchmen. Kapow!

After the majority of ToTR's riffraff gets offed, the central conflict looks as though it might shift from gang versus gang versus gang to dirty businessman versus dirty cop. No such luck. The primary detective (Park Sung-Geun) has verbal swagger but can't walk the talk. A sleazy businessman (Song Young-kyu) enters the game late and leaves early. Stab, stab, stab. The body count is high. The final face-off takes place between exactly whom you'd expect: two well-dressed hoodlums. The underlying question turns out not to be whether the good bad guy or the bad guy is going to come out on top. It's whether there's really any difference when you're building Asia's biggest casino right before the next Olympics.

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.

Gang: Gong

Someone please explain to me why I'm supposed to rally behind Ji-hoon (Cha Ji-hyuk) when he joins the fight club at the prison-like high school to which he's been transferred after breaking the ribs of another student at his former school. Is it because he's the outsider? Because he's thinner than everyone else? Because his competitors are either too chubby (Kim Dae-han), too crazy (Lee Jung-hyun), or have a creepy, cloudy eye? Am I supposed to intuit a homoerotic relationship between him and his not-quite-loyal new best friend? Because by the end of Gang, I didn't care much as to whether he or that rich student with the earbuds was about to get his ass whooped? Not that I wish anyone a crack to the jaw.

That's what one of the problems with Jo Bareun's hyper-violent, light-hearted Gang. The film presents a world in which bloodshed is the single option to decide who gets to be king of the hill. Despite being set in a high school, you never meet the smart student or the teacher's pet. Every young man attending this institute of lower education has one goal in mind: survive. For the toughest, that means going to the basement and flailing about while a DJ scores the bout with a hip soundtrack. For the less physically inclined, that means aligning with a contender, maybe being his friend, his coach, his promoter, his bitch. Why more kids don't skip class entirely, even if it means running away from home is a question that's never addressed. Are they all secretly pining for the jaded school nurse (Bae Hyo-won) who wears a silver leather jacket? Seems possible. She's doing something right as no one ever seems to lose a tooth or retain a bruise.

Forever With You: Two Men, Two Women, Innumerable Problems

It takes a certain level of confidence to start a film off with an extended take of three children silently building a dirt fort outside a prison. (Not even credits are happening!) It takes an even greater boldness to have a handful of adults exaggeratedly act like children in a series of flashbacks for the first quarter of your movie. But anyone who's seen Stray Bullet is bound to come to Forever With You with the belief that director Yoo Hyun-mok's risky choices will deliver a pay off. They're not wrong. Forever With You fairly teems with stageworthy compositions and an overall sense of mystery. If it's no Aimless Bullet, it's surely a stepping stone to get there.

An earlier flick in Yoo's oeuvre, Forever With You is more moody melodrama than tragic thriller: Its two adjoining love triangles feature a harmonica-playing gangster (Choi Bong), a shopgirl-turned-mob-wife (Do Kum-bong), a shady businesswoman (actor unknown), and a pitiable exconvict (Lee Yong) who in five packed days will discover that the world has largely left him behind after ten years in the slammer. (Although there is that matter of paternity regarding one nine-year-old girl...)

Montage: Start All Over Again

Fairly quickly, you realize something strange is happening in Montage: After young Detective Cha (Oh Dae-hwan) informs still-grieving mother Ha-kyung (Uhm Junghwa) that the statute of limitations around the murder of her child is slated to run out in five days, instead of sequeing into a suspenseful countdown, the movie leaps forward to "nine hours left." Given that this jump happens well before the halfway point, we're relatively assured that something else is afoot besides the solving of a 15-year-old homicide. What is it? A second crime, dear reader. A second crime that mirrors the first! So is the original killer back for more mayhem or has a copycat (perhaps within the police force) emerged to take his place. And what does this all have to do with grandpa (Song Young-chang)?

The force's retired cynic (Kim Sang-kyung) would like to find out more than anyone else but since he's no longer paired with his initial sidekick (Oh), Montage loses some really great opening chemistry. In its place, we're left with an echo chamber of screaming. Screams of grief, screams of anger, screams of frustration, screams of rebellion, screams of justice unfulfilled, and screams of indignation. Strangely, Bom (Heo Jung-eun), the kidnapped girl at the center of this story, doesn't scream that much. In Montage, the screaming is left to the adults. You may scream too at how this movie resolves itself. Unless you turn the screams into a drinking game, in which case you may think this film is a scream.

The Villainess: Getting Even Means Bloody Hell

I'm going to go out on a severed limb and say that action auteur Jung Byung-gil's The Villainess may have more fatal throat stabbings than any other crime pic I've ever seen. The incredibly gory opening sequence alone shows our anti-heroine Sook-hee (Min Ye-ji) walking purposefully through a grimy building where, once her guns run out of ammo, she pulls out her knives then slits, slices, severs, cuts, slashes, eviscerates, and punctures the neck of every man who gets in her way — all of which we experience from a shooter-game POV meant to replicate the first-hand view of our angry young woman. Since she's not capable of killing everyone, she's eventually captured and given plastic surgery because that'll make her lose her memory. Because her face looks so different. Because you can't remember who you are if you look totally different, right? Especially if you're prettier!

Okay, okay. The logic is wobbly. But The Villianess is really a movie created for people who will eagerly put aside concerns around plausibility if it means watching a tough woman who likes to fight and knows how to win. I mean, who doesn't want to see a bride holding a sniper? My problem with The Villainess is that none of the other women who've been trained at the assassin school where the older Sook-hee (Kim Ok-bin) has her killer instincts refined, possess a skill level that's anywhere close to hers. Her future husband Hyun-soo (Jung Suk), a graduate of the boys program, never really gets to strut his stuff while her former husband Joong-sang (Shin Ha-kyun), an instructor (?), needs a better storyline. Maybe Chief Kwon (Kim Seo-hyeong), our respected Dean of Death, needs to hire a more vicious staff so that her graduates are deadlier after they've donned their caps and gowns. For now, the program can only bring those with natural talents at taking someone out to the highest level. The rest of the students are doomed to be practice targets for bullets, fists, and yes, knives. This villainess doesn't have a true rival. I guess she's her own worst enemy.

Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time: Buoyant Slime

Choi Min-sik's career encompasses a rogues' gallery worth of tough guys: the serial killer in I Saw the Devil, the title character in The Admiral, the washed-up pugilist in Crying Fist, and — perhaps most hauntingly — the vigilante/victim in Park Chan-wook's messed-up masterpiece Oldboy. Yet as tough as all these guys were, Choi's character in Nameless Gangster could probably beat them all. It's not that he's physically stronger, more intellectually limber, or naturally bloodthirstier. It's simply that he's a shameless slime-ball who backstabs like nobody's business, an evil Everyman with a chip on his shoulder. Never has an ingratiating laugh felt more like a secret weapon.

Indeed there's something so believably sleazy about Choi Ik-hyun, the wheeling and dealing gangster played by the actor, that your disgust rises and rises each time he gets out of another jam by screwing somebody else over. His one-upmanship of a younger, more seasoned gangster (Ha Jung-woo) is ingenious; his self-serving coercion of his brother-in-law (Ma Dong-seok) into a life of crime is heartless; his outmaneuvering of an ambitious prosecutor (Kwak Do-won) is infuriating. When you're loyal to none, evidently, there's no place to go but up! As the old adage goes: "Poop floats."

Writer-director Yun Jong-bin has presented us with an uncomfortably cynical point of view of every level of society: the judicial system, the police department, organized crime, the workplace, your family, your hometown, you name it. And yet, despite Choi's continual deceits, at no point do you feel, "Oh this could never happen" or "someone would have caught on by now." We've all lived with and/or worked with reprehensible success stories like Choi's double-dealer. He's our relative, our boss, our elected official, our next door neighbor, our social studies teacher. Humanity is horrible.

Traffickers: Ship of Fools

A friend of mine wanted me to give him an introduction to Korean movies and rather than showing him one of the great ones — like Oldboy, The Host or Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring — I decided to screen a movie that I'd watched earlier this week: Kim Hong-seon's Traffickers, a pulpy noir about low-level smugglers who switch from dealing in black market organ donations to illegal drugs then back again. To me, Traffickers, more than the three earlier films cited, reflects what's kept me so engrossed in Korean cinema for a decade. What's good is very good.

Yet, on second viewing, I realized that much of what I liked about Traffickers may be kind of insider-y: the casting of Lim Chang-jung, an actor best known for comedies, as a gang leader, the cultural commentary about China, the scarcity of gunfire... Even the way Choi Daniel plays his role as a nerdy insurance agent like a pretty boy K-pop star looking to break into film. Which isn't to say Traffickers was totally lost on my friend here. He dug the Keyzer Sose plot twist, the DePalma-esque filming of violence, the ludicrous conceit of a cruise line that harvests its poor clientele for kidneys and livers, the doomed chorus of losers unlucky in love and money, the seediness, the perversion. I don't know that I made a final convert at my home theater but he did say afterwards that he'd like me to show him a Korean rom-com next time so I probably will need to pull out the big guns: Attack the Gas Station 2, Jeon Woochi: The Taoist Wizard, Le Grand Chef.

Come to think of it, I doubt that I'd be a Korean movie addict if all I'd seen were enjoyable but less-than-mind-blowing thrillers like Traffickers, Confession of Murder and No Fears for the Dead. These movies have sustained me in between masterpieces like Peppermint Candy and The King and the Clown. As sustenance, they're delicious. As I said to my friend beforehand, this is a B-movie that makes you realize just how good B really is in Korean cinema. B means "better than most" not "below A." So what if it doesn't mean "brilliant."

No Tears for the Dead: God Bless the Assassinated Child

No Tears for the Dead is a movie plagued by bad guys. The anti-hero is an assassin (Jang Dong-gun) who mistakenly kills a young girl (Kang Ji-woo). The young girl's mom (Kim Min-hee) is a greedy capitalist more concerned with mergers and acquisitions than maternity. The assassin's best friend (Brian Tee) has been assigned to kill him. The best friend's father figure is a kind of merciless godfather who seems to want everyone to die. And so on and so on. Even the little girl who gets offed in the opening scene is a bad girl when you come to think of it. I'm sure, her criminal father told her not to leave the table at the nightclub, and clearly, she disobeyed.

I'm a bad guy, too. Which isn't to say that I've murdered anyone or purposely executed any business deals with utter disregard to the large numbers of people who'd lose their jobs in the process. But I've definitely got my own list of sins to weigh me down so a cast full of reprehensible people trying to do right by their wrongs sits perfectly fine with me. I get the idea of going to extremes — explosions in buildings, machine gunfire, computer hacking gazillions of dollars, identity theft — as forms of doing penance. We can't whip ourselves with branches anymore. We refuse to wear hair-shirts. So it makes sense that we'd randomly stab, detonate, self-annihilate, and relive awful memories of mom (Kim Ji-seong) committing suicide by shooting herself in the head in the desert as a way to clear our brains. At least in the movies.

In real life, I guess we just stew. And hope that filmmakers like Lee Jeong-beom will write and direct slick, thrillingly violent movies that make us feel like we're exorcising our demons, even if we're really just distracting ourselves from dealing with our grim, not-so-glamorous realities. Recently, I spent a few weeks watching Shirley Temple movies. She was the box office queen during the Depression. But nowadays, cute won't cut it. We need blood. So we sacrifice the on-screen child.

For the Emperor: Nothing to Learn from Beautiful Bashings

How does violence affect the brain? Well, the first time I saw the prolonged, audio-enhanced knifing sequence in For the Emperor, during which our antihero Lee Hwan (Li Min-ki) and his fellow thugs stab away in a shadowy hallway packed to the gills with rival gangsters, I flinched repeatedly. When the scene was repeated (I'm assuming, unchanged) after we'd learned the sad story of Lee's downfall from pro baseball player to pro kneecap basher, I barely winced at all. This does not bode well when you consider all the murder and mayhem we choose to watch and re-watch in movies, TV series and video games. Within two hours I'd already become pretty much inured to all those knives puncturing bodies to a Foley soundtrack.

Not that the butchery ever feels totally real in For the Emperor. The merciless, long, lean killing machine that is the mop-headed, dead-eyed Lee Hwan is a sinewy cartoon of cruelty. He doesn't respect elder mafiosos Jung Sang-ha (Park Soong-woong) and Han-Deuk (Kim Jong-goo) so much as he's intent on learning their ways so he can take their place. His prostitute lover Madame Cha (Lee Tae-im) is more reward than relationship. It's as if Lee has viewed this movie more times than we have. He's absorbed director Park Sang-jun's message entirely: Violence pays! But whose message is it? Maybe comic book artist Kim Seong-dong on whose work the movie is based...

I've never thought graphic novels had very deep truths to tell. Even those I've enjoyed — Nick Abadzis Laika, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood — felt like children books for adults, and were nothing to rival a novel like Lee Chang-rae's A Gesture life or an autobiography like Cullen Thomas' Brother One Cell. Is it that drawn pictures can't speak as powerfully as words? And is there anything to be learned from the orgy of blood that sometimes erupts in For the Emperor? Or should we be chastened for finding it entertaining? Probably the latter. So how to explain I like this movie nonetheless? Shame on me!

Running Wild: Cop a Feeling

I'm not a fan of screenwriter Han Ji-hoon. His scripts are way too sappy. Once Upon a Time in Seoul looks to milk tears from two orphans trying to survive together in the underworld. The Brotherhood of War is even weepier: Here they're blood brothers fighting to survive on the front lines during the Korean War. You can practically hear the metaphorical violins over the Foley-ed bomb explosions and rapid gunfire. Running Wild is pretty much more of the same: Male bonding in a corrupt world that doesn't have time for love or respect or bear-like hugs, only this time it's set in a police station. Given that this is a Han pic, you know someone's going to die; someone's going to be left behind to grieve. And it won't be a woman.

Baby blue tissues aside, this might be the worst of Han's three testosterone tearjerkers. And it isn't just the flat characterizations of it two heroes: a nerdy prosecutor (Yu Ji-tae) driven to despair when his reputation is publicly called into question, and his unlikely partner, a tempermental detective (Kwon Sang-woo) crazed by procedural inefficiencies, reluctant witnesses, faulty lighters, his junkie half-brother (Lee Jung-mun), his ailing mother (Lee Ju-sil) and a syndicate don (Son Byung-ho) who reacts to every treachery and every threat with a devil-may-care smirk. No it isn't the odd couple dynamic that bothers me most. It's the running time, more than two hours when 80 minutes would've easily sufficed.

Why so much grief about the length of the movie? Well, there's just so many scenes I simply didn't need to see. Like the woman singing jazz (poorly) in the nightclub. Like the gun-toting race through traffic in the movie's opener. Like the volatile cop filling out a lotto ticket in such a considered way. Like the mom's funeral, hell, anything with the mom. Like anything with the young woman who's always visiting the mom at the hospital even though she's not related and the crazed cop has said point blank to said woman that he doesn't love her so why is she still making food and coffee for him. Director Kim Seung-soo should've been infinitely more merciless cutting Running Wild's script. After all, he co-wrote it — meaning it's not all Han's fault after all.

Friend 2: The Legacy: Before and Before That but After That

Ready to get ever-so-slightly confused, my fellow Korean movie fan? Well, Friend 2: The Legacy picks up exactly 17 years after the action in the original Friend movie, even though only 13 years have actually passed since the first movie was shot. Why the discrepancy, I don't know. Furthermore, the movie isn't just a sequel (with some flashbacks to old footage we've already seen). It also flashes further back to an extended prequel that predates part one, as well to a kind of latter-day prequel with action that's post-Friend but pre-Friend 2. With all this jumping back and forth (if you're anything like me), you're going to question which is the primary storyline and whether you truly need to know so much ancestry about so many characters. I mean, The Godfather this is not. Plus there is no Old Country.

So what's supposed to be the focus here? Is it the current-day partnership between newly released con and mob heavy Lee Joon-seok (Yu Oh-seong) and fatherless, aspirational teen hood Choi Seong-hoon (Kim Woo-bin) OR is it the familial dramas of Choi and his posse of warrior wannabes OR is it the well-appointed mob history of someone's grandfather? I am frankly still unsure. The present-day ending doesn't resolve any of the stories so much as it positions the characters for a threequel during which it seems likely that the layering could expand to include a scifi future scenario examining the offspring of Lee, Choi and maybe the illegitimate offspring of a character killed off at some point in time. Please don't let these comments dissuade you from checking out Friends 2 if you've already seen its predecessor. Even with all the complications, auteur Kwak Kyung-taek's delivers some undeniable and simple pleasures -- one being the joy that comes with witnessing how much better an actor like Yu has gotten (which isn't to say he wasn't good before) and how much sexier he's gotten too; the other is getting to see a new, young talent like Kim glower in scene after scene with one of the best '50s style Elvis coifs to hit the screen in many a day. This movie has left me with a serious care of hair envy.

The Show Must Go On: A Thug's Life

The Show Must Go On is definitive proof that Song Kang-ho is one of the greatest actors of his generation. It's a fantastic mob movie that, because of Song, plumbs unusual depths, too. What makes Song such a genius performer? Well, this may sound like a funny place to start but I don't believe there's another actor who can play sleepy (or mine it for its comic possibilities) as well as Song can. And there's something about all the correlatives that go with sleepiness -- overworked, overanxious, overburdened, overwhelmed -- that strike me as emblematic of our times. In The Show Must Go On, Song's putting that somnolent skillset to good use as an overextended mobster who is so sleep-deprived that he conks out repeatedly -- including at the driver's wheel of his car in the midst of a noisy rush hour.

Not one to rest on his laurels, Song's also a master of drunkenness, too, which when you think about it, is simply a gateway to sleep. But look at the variety of intoxications that Song can do: He's funny drunk, nasty drunk, sloppy drunk, violent drunk and, in one awfully humiliating interaction between his character and his character's daughter (Kim So-eun) -- who has him arrested for disorderly conduct -- contritely drunk. Song can make reprehensibly sloppy behavior consistently sympathetic. Naturally, Song can do much more than drowsiness and drunkenness. But whatever he does, this actor always feels like he's doing it right on the spot. Maybe that's why his drunken and drowsy scenes are so impressive. Both states give way to irrational behavior that's abnormal but still firmly rooted in who we intrinsically are. If you think that Song can only do showy stuff then re-watch his married mobster here when he turns on the charm for his wife (Park Ji-yeong), a woman who's got wise to his ways and wants out. Who else can mix lightness and desperation so effectively? How in the world did he do that? What'll he dream up next? I'm always ready to see.

4 Toes: Comedy on the Fly

You get the feeling that writer-director Gye Yun-shik neither wrote for nor directed the actors in his jopok comedy 4 Toes but rather that he set up a couple of cameras then threw out spur-of-the-moment ideas for improvisation until he'd amassed enough material -- at least in terms of footage -- to cobble together a feature film. To that end, you've got skits about blood type, about a car's CD player, about a car accident with your buddy, about a mythical golden axe... You've also got skits based on locations, like a nightclub, a parking lot, a photo portrait studio, and a sauna which means for this big fight half the guys are naked, although never full-frontally so. Most scenes are super-short. Nothing really adds up. Nothing really goes anywhere either. There's no larger vision at work here outside of the desire to make a movie fast and cheap with some friends. And actually, it's a technique that could work but you'd have to have luck on your side and some actors who were a bit more naturally funny.

Fortune isn't smiling on Gye, however, or his four male leads, all of whom feel too old to be playing high school students in some scenes and too goofy to be gangsters in others. And yet, as ineffective as 4 Toes is, and as lazy as the script is (there's so much voiceover you'd think Gye was filming a novelization), I still appreciated the ballsiness of the undertaking. The willingness to risk, though it didn't pay off here, certainly explains why some members of the cast have gone on to much more successful comedies: Jeong Eun-pyo (Le Grand Chef), Kim Kap-su (She's on Duty), Lee Won-jong (200 Pounds of Beauty). Which suggests to me that sometimes there's something to be said for just practicing your craft in public or on celluloid or in this case what looks like digital video; and that there's no shame in having a little egg on your face if you're aiming to eventually get a part in an enjoyably frivolous movie that's light as a souffle. Even Gye went on to greater success: My Wife Is a Gangster 3 may not be a work of genius but it's a threequel in a fairly big film franchise.