New Year Blues: More Than a Couple of Romances

At first, New Year Blues doesn't look like your typical, traditional, ensemble romcom: When paralympian snowboarder Kim Rae-wan (Teo Yoo) proposes to horticulturist Han Oh-wol (Choi Sooyoung), he pulls out one of the ugliest engagement rings I've seen in quite some time. And yet... maybe that's intentional. After all, flashy diamonds aren't what love's all about. Travel agent Oh Yong-chan (Lee Dong-hwi) and his Chinese bride-to-be will learn that when his company's embezzled by a new employee. Divorced Detective Kang Ji-ho (Kim Kang-woo) will learn that while enforcing a restraining order for physical therapist Lee Hyo Young (Yoo In-na).

In true fictional feature fashion, all the stories are interconnected: Lee is Kim's rehab go-to and Kang has been assigned to Oh's criminal case. Even the one outlying story involving the recently dumped Min Jin-ah (Lee Yeon-hee) who flees the country for a last-minute holiday trip to Buenos Aires has loose ties to the other stories. Are their narrative narrative improbabilities? Of course. Would a Korean tourist in Argentina really hop on a Vespa driven by an old man who just happens to play the washboard in a cafe band? I doubt it. But I still shed real tears as everything started to come together in the end. There's something lovely about a man getting a pep talk on relationships from his exwife and a bad google translation bringing two future sister-in-laws together. (Nice work, Yeom Hye-ran.) And it's hard not to embrace the feel-good sentiment underlying director Hong Ji-Yeong's final images. "Next year let's be happier than this year."

Recalled: Amnesia - Past, Present, and Future

In the movies, it never bodes well when a rich woman (Seo Ye-ji) wakes up in a hospital with amnesia and doesn't recognize her dashing, mysterious husband (Kim Kang-woo). When you find out this married couple is planning to emigrate from South Korea to Canada very soon, your suspicions are heightened. This man is not to be trusted. When he says to his wife, "You didn't take your pills," you want to scream at her: "Do not take that medication, girl!" When he says, "Let's forget everything and leave," you want to say, "Run, bitch, run!" And yet you can't. You're seated in your living room. She's on your TV screen. There, she's left to her own devices... while having intense visions that leave her deeply shaken.

Are they delusions? Premonitions? Remembrances of her own severely damaged past? Neither we nor she can be sure. Two detectives (Park Sang-wook, Bae Yoo-ram) investigating the potential domestic violence flagged by a team at the hospital from which she was discharged are uncovering the truth as quickly as they can. Can these two cops assemble the case in record time? Can she put the pieces of the puzzle together herself? Writer-director Seo You-min wants to keep us guessing: Who did it? What did they do? Why did they do it? Where is this going? And what kind of medicine's been prescribed? Is being psychic a side effect? Side note: I gather she's an heiress... but to what? Where are her people? Surely, she has a personal assistant who could provide some moral support and a reality check... Then again, realism is so overrated.

The Childe: The Chase Is on

Coming from the poorest side of town in the Phllippines, streetfighting gambler turned big-time heir Marco (Kang Tae-ju) naturally has no one to turn to once he gets to South Korea. His newly discovered, snarky half-brother (Kim Kang-woo) wants him dead, his long-missing father (Choi Jung-woo) on life support wants him dead, and his conniving little half-sister (Jung Lael) wants him dead — each for uniquely self-serving reasons. The other new people in his life are a pair of kidnappers — a man (Kim Seon-ho) and a woman (Go Ara) — working independently from each other yet sharing a desire to keep him alive long enough to turn him (or his body) in for millions of dollars. As you might guess from The Childe's outlined plot, Marco spends a lot of time on the run. But where to? And whom should he trust?

The two competing kidnappers may be his better bet since they buy him some time. But which one? One's a femme fatale who hit-and-run him with her car as a form of entrapment; the other's a Cheshire Cat dandy who seems psychotic in his clarity of purpose. Korea's current auteur of adrenaline Park Hoon-jung doesn't give Marco much of a choice. Instead, Marco ends up wherever he ends up as a matter of bad luck and narrow escapes. His ailing mother (Caroline Magbojos) desperately needs an expensive operation but how can Marco secure any inheritance to save her when he's simply trying to survive. Thrilling!

Hahaha: Taking a Page Out of Woody Allen's Book

I don't know why the similarities between Woody Allen and Hong Sang-soo never occurred to me before. They're both directors who crank out a movie a year, and primarily focus on troubled romances -- sometimes seriously, other times comically, oft times of the summer/winter variety, occasionally triangles. They're both critical darlings who have won more than a handful of awards -- both nationally and internationally -- yet neither could be called a box-office goldmine. They also have a small group of actors they reuse in multiple movies then were drawn to casting bigger names later in their careers. For Hong, that last bit has led to Isabelle Hupert in In Another Country and pop star Rain in Soar Into the Sun. Since Hong is a master of naturalistic acting, neither celeb upstages his or her co-stars.

One way that Hong differs from Allen, however, is in his constant use of drunk scenes. In Hahaha, not only is the framework a drunk scene -- two friends recount their overlapping weekend in a small coastal town called Tongyeong -- but so are about a quarter of the events they recount: failed filmmaker Moon-kyeong (Kim Sang-kyung) taking Seong-ok (Moon So-ri) back to a hotel room, depressed critic Joong-sik (Yu Jun-sang) taking his mistress (Ye Ji-won) to meet his uncle, Moon-kyeong's mother (Yoon Yeo-jeong) drinking with all of the above at some point or another. Because it's a Hong Sang-soo film, the drunk scenes are universally good. No one facilitates as many riveting naturalistic performances as Hong.

Both Allen and Hong are experimenters with form, too. Here in Hahaha that manifests itself with the framing conversation that takes place in the present being merely a voiceover to a black-and-white slideshow of Moon-kyeong and Joong-sik toasting, talking and saying "Cheers!" But unlike Allen, Hong isn't one of the leads nor does he cast himself in a cameo. He's got a history of having stand-ins for the alcoholic, womanizing, deluded artist we assume him to be and here he does it in triplicate, the third version being a fickle poet (Kim Kang-woo) who's not only the best friend of pill-popping critic Joong-sik but also a surrogate son to man-child Moon-kyeong's mom who gives the poet a free apartment once Moon-kyeong turns it down.

This is the 10th Hong Sang-soo movie I've seen! (I'm ready for more!)

The Taste of Money: Horny Rich People Doing Terrible Things

It's easy to imagine a Marketing Director branding Im Sang-soo's The Taste of Money "an erotic thriller." The plot involves a family of avaricious backstabbers who commit multiple murders and enjoy fairly graphic sex lives in front of your very eyes. Yet none of it feels particularly erotic or thrilling. Sure, the family is loaded -- they've got a warehouse full of dollars bills. They're in cahoots with an American corporate sleazeball (played by Koreanfilm.org's Darcy Paquet!). And just to add a touch of street cred, the family heir (On Ju-wan) goes in and out of jail with some regularity. The greatest mystery may be why the Filipino housemaid (Maui Taylor) dies in the pool without her bikini top. Or maybe it's how an old suicide can sit in a bathtub of his own blood without losing any of his vitality.

So what's a Marketing Director to do? Bill this as sexploitative social commentary? Here too the movie doesn't meet the demands of the genre since the carnal scenes are super short. A Bacchanal with a half-dozen bare-breasted women doesn't even culminate in a proper orgy. The family patriarch (Baek Yun-shik) goes down on a household servant then the door is shut! The longest sex scene comes when the amoral matriarch (a deliciously evil Yoon Yeo-jung) coerces the suited houseboy (Kim Kang-woo and his corrugated midsection) into her bed where she yells "Harder! Deeper!" repeatedly. But afterwards, when the boy toy soaks in the tub -- and does shots and eats limes presumably to get her taste out of his mouth, you're more likely to laugh than get titillated. The final Mile High Club rendezvous between Kim's character and the family's pretty daughter (Kim Hyo-jin) is so contrived you'll scream "Faster! Faster" until the credits appear.

In terms of finding an appropriate film genre to apply to The Taste of Money, this Marketing Director is screwed. Which isn't to say he's doomed: The dialogue does provide a memorable tag line: "The money's easy, the fucking's great. Korea's a fantastic country."

Rainbow Eyes: A Gay Thriller That's Not Gay Soon Enough or Thrilling Long Enough

I've seen a number of great thrillers this year, which puts Rainbow Eyes at a disadvantage. For while it's gorgeously photographed, energetically edited and possessed of a sensationalistic storyline that starts off with the murder of a gym owner (who may or may not have been gay), Rainbow Eyes falls short of the high-wire tension that ultimately makes a great thriller so thrilling to watch. It's just good! Part of the problem is the way the gay subject matter is handled. While much is made of the secret sex lives of some characters early on, Rainbow Eyes initially feels a little shy of peeking behind closed doors, even as it flashes every dirty detail it can of the actual crime scene. So while the quick slicing of fingers off a hand will make you gasp, the constant repetition of "Is he or isn't he?" will leave you exasperated. Rainbow Eyes would be a hell of a lot better off stating outright, "He is!" then going for broke with gratuitous displays of homoerotic antics in the locker rooms, steam rooms, and weight rooms. Talk about a series of lost opportunities!

Although prudishness ultimately gives way to salaciousness (thank God!), the shift is shockingly quick. It's like we go from a murder mystery about closet cases in a secret society to a transgender revenge fantasy acted out against a military backdrop with gay prison rules. Far be it from me to underestimate homophobia in the armed forces or the persecution of the LGBT across many subcultures -- Hey, I've been bashed myself -- but the way Rainbow Eyes relates oppression to sexuality causes me to raise a well-plucked eyebrow. No one really thinks homophobia in the army is caused by closeted gay men who leave their fatigues behind to run queer nightclubs. No one thinks transgendered people pursue sex changes to work out vigilante fantasies either. Racy? Yes, Rainbow Eyes is that! It's campy too with a priceless performance from Oh Ji-yeong as Mi-sook, the nightclub singer who always looks like the cat who swallowed the canary. In its own weird way, as out of touch with reality as Rainbow Eyes may be, it does feel as though it were written by a certain type of gay man who thinks every hot man is a repressed homosexual, every out gay man is a flaming queen, and every sympathetic woman is a fag hag. Naturally, the most beautiful lady in the room is a man in drag with a manicure destined to blow her cover.

But if Chelsea boys are writer-director Yang Yun-ho's intended audience, this movie needs more sweaty exposed flesh at the gym and some humping of the non-heterosexual variety, ideally involving eye candy Kim Kang-woo, who'd look best brooding out of uniform...completely.

A Better Tomorrow: The Beauty of Not Being Original

Art movements have their renaissances, theaters have their revivals, neighborhoods have their rebirths. But movies, movies have their remakes. As re-creations go, this is certainly the least glamorous of terms. And after watching Song Hae-sung's A Better Tomorrow, the Korean remake of John Woo's landmark film of the same name, it got me to wondering: Why do movie remakes -- also called rehashes -- get immediately stigmatized? It certainly isn't as if we generally leave most movies, commenting "How original!" Isn't it enough to come away from a movie saying, "How excellent!" That's how I felt after watching Song's A Better Tomorrow. But then I'd never seen the original.

But should I have? Would I have enjoyed the film more? And are remakes made simply as byproducts to compare to their progenitors? Is it wrong to re-make a movie because a director thinks the material might speak to a different generation or to a different culture or have something in it that now has something new to say? Should you chastise that director for not optioning a wholly new script, and instead choosing a really good story dying to be retold? When you look at the parts of the first A Better Tomorrow, it's not as if they're pioneering ideas either. We're all familiar with the story of two conflicted brothers -- one a cop (Kim Kang-woo), the other a criminal (Ju Jin-mo). We've all heard the one about the sleazy backstabber (Jo Han-sun) who rises to the top of the mob through nefarious means. We've also cheered on the anti-hero (Song Seung-heon) whose luck runs dry as he goes out in a blaze of well-amunitioned glory. Woo's script -- from which I'm assuming this draws heavily since Woo is credited as both producer and co-screenwriter -- isn't good because it's got new ideas. It's good because it's well-constructed. It makes sense to use it again.

Song's pic updates the recipe somewhat. (How much, I neither know nor care so I'll just make educated guesses.) Now the two brothers are North Korean defectors; their tough-love aunty figure (Kim Ji-yeong) runs one of those eatery tents that I've never seen outside Korean movies and scifi pics with an apocalyptic bent. Let traditionalists deride Song's remake as a retread and those who prefer this A Better Tomorrow celebrate it as a snazzy re-invention. For me, it's just a really good mafia movie tackling all the expected themes of family, betrayal, devotion, greed, redemption and respect amid a deliciously bloody fantasy of gunfire. You watch the one-man vigilantism of the righteous partner or the high-adrenaline final shootout between the self-chastising brother and the thug who's trying to kill his younger brother then tell me whether you care whether it's ever been done before. I sure don't. More likely, you'll be repeating what I wrote earlier: "Excellent! Excellent! Excellent!"

Marine Boy: One Man Goes Underwater Just So Someone Can Get High

I'm trying to remember if it's ever actually specified, what kind of drug is being trafficked in Yoon Jong-seok's enjoyable crime pic Marine Boy. Is it heroin? Is it cocaine? I know it's a contentious white powder that has rival gangs and cops all vying for its possession but, for all I know, it could be talcum powder, a product which also strikes me as worth fighting for given the recent advent of cornstarch within the Johnson & Johnson empire. There is some mention early in the film of benzodiazepine, I believe, in relationship to the film's femme fatale Yuri (Park Si-yeon), a nightclub singer who likes to croon in Paul McCartney's "No More Lonely Nights" in English and clock men with her surprisingly lethal purse. But since we never see anyone pop pills, shoot up or snort lines, Marine Boy almost feels like a stylish agit-prop piece against drugs filmed in a country where depicting drug use on the big screen is illegal.

And it's not the only vice under attack here either: Former swimming-champ-turned-drug-mule Chun-soo (Kim Kang-woo) never would've gotten involved with the backstabbing world of black market narcotics if he hadn't incurred a gambling debt by misreading an ace for a four in the mirrored surface of an opponent's lighter. Has he been framed? Can he escape? Is there anyone to trust among this den of thieves that surrounds him? Or is the only way out to shove a sausage full of the aforementioned but unspecified drug up his butt and then to swim underwater from one ship to another in the un-patrolled waters between Japan and Korea? Well, at least he looks good in a rubber wetsuit. Really good. And if he's fallen for Yuri, despite having seen her last boyfriend beaten to death by her surrogate father, frenemy and drug kingpin Kang (Jo Jae-hyeon) who also just happens to be the man pimping out Chun-soo's large intestine as a storage locker, maybe that's because he knows that if Yuri sees him often enough in that wetsuit, she'll double-cross anyone who stands between the two of them and their fantasy getaway on the island of Palau. Don't be jealous of two beautiful young people who end up shacking up on a picturesque beach front property with quick access to world-class surfing. Neither has enrolled in a 12-step program for gambling or drug addition yet.

Five Senses of Eros: Speak No Hot Sex, See No Hot Sex, Hear No Hot Sex

Memorable short films? I don't know many. Memorable short erotic films? I don't know any. The enervating anthology Five Senses of Eros didn't change that fact either, especially since there's actually not an arousingly erotic short in the bunch. The opener, Byun Hyuk's "His Concern," is a grating voiceover accompanied by images charting the first stage of a romance resulting from a chance encounter at a train station. (She's way too good for him even if he is played by matinee idol Jang Hyuk.) Number two -- Hur Jin-ho's "I'm Here" -- isn't much better: a twee 20 minutes of a husband (Kim Kang-woo) and wife (Cha Su-yeon) playing hide-and-seek even after she ends up dying of something or other. (This woman likes to spoon even when she's gone!)

On to the third mini movie "33rd Man" which gets more pornographic by kicking off with a naked humping couple undone once the ghost (Kim Gyu-ri) appears. She's not really a spook, mind you, she's simply an actress on a shoot with a frustrated director (Kim Su-ro) and an experienced leading lady (Bae Chong-ok) who oddly enough happens to be a bisexual vampiress. By film four, things get weirder and dykier. With Min Kyu-dong's "The End and the Beginning," now we've got a bitter, horny widow (Eom Jeong-hwa) who decides to shack up with the magician-girlfriend (Kim Hyo-jin) who her hunky husband (Hwang Jeong-min) was banging when he got killed in a car accident. (Just wait until she finds those S&M videotapes.)

Last and least erotic if most interesting is Oh Ki-hwan's "Believe in the Moment," a fragmentary little flick about six incredibly edible young things who confusedly swap partners as they struggle to find out the meaning of intimacy. Lots of kissing! No nudity! I've actually seen previous films by many of the writer-directors featured herein but I don't feel that any of them qualify as an auteur just yet. This project probably appealed to them as something to do before they got to work on a more serious project. Maybe they're auditioning actors. Maybe they're testing out cinematographers. Maybe they're trying to flesh out an idea about carnal desire or the eros-thanatos connection or a dream they once had but don't remember too clearly anymore. Maybe that's it. But only maybe.

Le Grand Chef: Cooking Up Something Special

Is there a dependable recipe for making a comedy? Le Grand Chef will have you thinking so. Director Jeon Yun-su's feel-good hit sticks to a tried-and-true formula that's served everyone from Frank Capra to Ron Howard. And it's so simple! Gather together some beloved types: the loyal grandson (Kim Kang-woo), a saucy ingenue (Lee Ha-na), the amoral rival (Lim Won-hie) dating back to childhood. Toss them into an equally classic story about a working class Joe who must compete with a citified poseur for the title of greatest chef. Spice it up with wacky subplots involving a charcoal-maker on death row, a cow that cries, the death of a one-armed royal chef, and the search for the perfect Ramen. Stir. Serve warm...and fuzzy. Since this is a Korean romantic comedy, there's no shortage of sugary moments. By the same token, there are episodes of outright violence as well as slapstick. (The uninterrupted gutting and skinning of a live blowfish is shown not once but twice up close.) Throughout, cooking is presented via split screens as if it were the national sport of Korea. Maybe it is. Who wouldn't vote for BBQ over Tae Kwon Do? Only fools who don't find Le Grand Chef deletectable.