Mickey 17: Revenge of the Replicants

I was lucky enough to attend a "visiting artist talk" with auteur Bong Joon Ho at Yale University the afternoon before I saw his latest movie Mickey 17 and what really stuck with me about both experiences is Bong's sense of play. Whether he was wittily answering questions about surviving a successful Oscar campaign or his protagonist (Robert Pattinson) was engaged in a battle with a "habanero" version of himself, Bong serves up the unexpected in a way that unfailingly conveys an exhilarating freshness. In film as in life (or in life as in film), Bong never feels stale or weary... even when the questions are obvious, even when the set-up is seemingly familiar.

So while I'll never be an internationally recognized director nor a umpteenth iteration of my own clone bumbling about in outerspace, Bong points a way to be in this world. If you're engaged in a Q&A at a school auditorium, that's attentive, curious, humble, generous, and morally grounded; if you're floating in a spaceship ruled by a demented politician (Mark Ruffalo) and his twisted wife (Toni Colette), your best strategy is pretty much the same. How else would you connect with your best self or find a way to communicate with those giant snow bugs with fingernails for teeth? In both instances, however, if you're lucky you'll get to hang out with the incredibly talented Steven Yeun... which I did, in a way, in another life that was my life, too. Ask me about it next time you see me.

Will You Be There?: With a Bloody Nose

I assume the bloody noses suffered by middle-aged Soo-hyeon (Kim Yoon-seok) are caused by his lung cancer and then exacerbated by those mysteriously acquired time-traveling pills. I'd also guess that his oncologist wouldn't recommend jumping across decades while undergoing any form of medical treatment. But his 20-something counterpart a.k.a. young Dr. Soo-hyeon (Byun Yo-han) doesn't particularly care about what side effects are going to be triggered for his older self by shuttling back and forth through the years. He wants to save his dolphin-training girlfriend (Chae Seo-jin), let his future self be damned. If that might mean sacrificing the daughter (Park Hye-soo) he hasn't met yet, so be it. Most people's allegiances are going to be with the living persons they know...

And life gets complicated when you break a cardinal rule of science fiction. Like "Never talk to the past version of yourself." That's a basic no-no. You know, the butterfly effect and all that! So what will be the ultimate sacrifice for love in Hong Ji-Yeong's Will You Be There? And might it involve a puppy named "Potato"? Or the ever-trustworthy Uncle Tae-ho (Kim Sang-ho)? Or his younger but just-as-reliable iteration (Ahn Se-ha)? I'm also curious whether the guy with the magic pills couldn't have provided a placebo so that all those involved only thought that everything had turned out for the better. After all, as that old guy put it: "Life is what happens when you can't sleep."

Badland Hunters: Ma Dong-seok Survives the Apocalpyse

Everytime I see the words "co-produced by Netflix" (or words to that effect) in a Korean movie's opening credits, my heart sinks a bit. Having worked at a TV network that meddled detrimentally with their shows, I feel qualified to detect inept input — often about making things a little less strange and a little more generic. In martial artist-turned-director Heo Myeong haeng's Badland Hunters what might've been an above-decent zombie movie arrives instead as a fright flick that looks like a video game. And so, like most shooter games, this action pic reveles in bullets to the head, exploding skulls, splattered blood, and cracking bones. Primary players — I mean, characters — recover from injuries in record time while most of the other people onscreen are scenery.

I don't know whether to blame leading man Ma Dong-seok (a.k.a. Don Lee) or bless him for Badland Hunters. He's definitely the film's saving grace, dominating every scene with a prime Bruce Willis persona that relates equal parts worldweariness and bemusement. He's also, like the American title of his earlier film, pretty much "unstoppable." Whether his opponent is a body-regenerating mutant or a mad scientist with a machine gun, this loveable lug never blinks an eye. They have an arsenal, he has a butter knife? No problem. He's going to make them sorry they thought they had a chance. All human-testing in the post-apocalypse ends here!

Alienoid: Star Wars for Warlocks

Just like there are good humans and bad humans, there are good aliens and bad aliens. And good sorcerers and bad sorcerers too. In other words, the eternal, universal battle between Good and Evil plays out on multiple, mindbending levels throughout blockbuster auteur Choi Dong-hoon's deliriously fun Alienoid. What else can you expect when humans possessed by imprisoned aliens and aliens masquerading as everyday humans find themselves in conflict with each other, the law, and medieval merchant magicians who are also masters of mixed martial arts. That the film is able to bounce effortlessly back and forth in time — while throwing a good-cop/bad-cop twist into the mix — is another truly remarkable aspect of this irresistible sci-fi fantasy.

I'd also like to say that when a film runs well over two hours, I sometimes break it into parts, like two acts over two days or even a series of webisodes that'll last a week. But with Alienoid, I watched from start to finish as the interplanetary guard (Kim Woo-bin) and his sidekick "program" Thunder (Kim Dae-myung) handled everything from childcare (Choi Yu-ri) to spaceship dogfights to bounty hunting a rogue rebel in the present; and as a bumbling wizard (Ryu Jun-yeol) and his humanoid cats (Shin Jeong-geun, Lee Si-hoon) collaborated with a gun-toting heroine (Kim Tae-ri) and an odd couple of occultists (Yum Jung-ah, Jo Woo-jin) to combat the same dastardly extraterrestrials centuries ago.

Now about that ending...

Jung_E: She Works Hard for the Money for Her Kid's Operation

As devoted mothers go, you'd be hard-pressed to find one as committed to the well-being of her child as Jung_E (Kim Hyun-joo) in the somewhat philosophically inclined sci-fi movie that bears her name. After spending her young daughter's formative years fighting the inevitable robot takeover of Planet Earth in order to raise money for her kid's cancer treatments, she then spends a posthumous second-life as an eternally cloneable brain inserted into a metal humanoid body that is the basis for that same child's military experiments. That her adult daughter (Kang Soo-yeon) has grown up to run a pilot program for the military industrial complex proves a disturbing way to honor her mother's memory, considering the work is all about mom being being pummelled and tortured in a recurringly fatal combat re-enactment. To reference the James Bond theme sung by Madonna, this noble lady survives only to "die another day."

The movie documenting mom's inability to become the ultimate war tool raises timely questions about immortality, genetic inheritance, human commodification, and, most of all, mankind's downward slide. But personally, I had a tough time admiring a woman who could make it her life's work watching her mother get beat up. I also didn't see the benefit in saving one of thousands of replicate brains so the android encasement could forge out its own existence... where and to what end? Yeon Sang-ho's action-packed flick should be commended for not devolving into pure video game nonsense (which is basically where it starts) but given his previous zombie classic Train to Busan, I wish he'd pushed his Woman vs. Machine narrative a little further than "one mimeographed mother has finally broken free of the System." That's good. It just could've been great.

Fallen: The Future Is Weird

For all its meta conversation about science fiction, revenge porn, and film criticism, the opening scene of Lee Jung-sub's Fallen creates a palpable sense of suspense. You sense one of the characters discussing scifi screenwriting sensation Baek Jo-kyeong (Yang Ji) is up to no good but which one and why is a mystery. Shortly thereafter when the antisocial artist wakes up, battered, handcuffed, and leather-masked in an oil barrel, you — like her — are desperate to find out how she got there (and how that mask mysteriously turns into duct tape soon thereafter). Yet what follows isn't so much an explanation or an elaborate escape so much as two dueling narratives — one akin to Six Characters in Search of an Author meets Molly's Game; the other, a tribunal of sorts in which the Twelve Angry Jurors (or thereabouts) must decide whether to grant immunity to two figures who may or may not be from the future and who may or may not have life-saving cures for the sick relatives of all those present. How do these two stories relate?

Well, there's some business about the mother of the scifi writer being a serial killer and the author's daughter being blessed with artificial intelligence (because the humans of tomorrow can be hybrids, don't you know?) but despite scads of exposition, unhelpful flashbacks, and some ever-menacing drones, I'm still not sure why that one guy had cool-looking magic marker lines on his shaved head or what the two young women playing with sparklers were intended to signify. Unwatchable? Apparently not since I stuck with Fallen to its cockamamie end. Recommended? Not to anyone I know... not the scifi geeks, not the literary eggheads, not the radical sisters, not the South Korean cinephiles. I suffered for you. I wrote two paragraphs. Let's all move on. Goodness lies ahead.

Space Sweepers: It Takes a Crew to Raise a Child

The four astro-pirates in Jo Sung-hee's Space Sweepers aren't looking to adopt a child. To the contrary, the least likable member of the crew — Tae-ho (Song Joong-ki) — is frantically doing all he can to retrieve the corpse of his neglected daughter before she drifts outside his galaxy. Yet once new kid "Dorothy" (Park Ye-rin) arrives on the scene, Ship Engineer Tiger Park (Jin Seon-kyu), Captain Jang (Kim Tae-ri), and resident robot Bubs (Kim Hyang-gi) discover their tenderer side and fall hard for this irresitbly precocious little girl.

Adoption has never been an easy process, though. And that's especially true in this apocalyptic future where eco-activists and a mad scientist (Richard Armitage) are set on saving and destroying the Earth, respectively. Good guys and bad alike want to get their dirty paws on this pipsqueak. As for her, she's digging her newly chosen family and is willing to call on her inner nanobots and compel those pesky nanobots into outerspace to fight off deadly lasers, metal claws, and the biggest bomb humankind has ever seen. Here's to the next generation!

Illang: The Wolf Brigade: Man Gets Worse Over Time

In a not-so-distant future in which we still take cabs but fire guns that look like blowdryers, a war has broken out on the Korean peninsula. This time around, however, the conflict is not between North and South (which want to reunite despite international pressures to the contrary). This time around, the fight is between The Sect (rebel forces) and The Special Unit (an elite police force). At least that's what it seems like at first. As the movie progresses, the battle appears to actually be between The Special Unit and Public Security, a rival law enforcement agency. None of the groups comes across as a force for good, although The Sect theoretically represents the proletariat. Do they uphold the sanctity of life? Not a chance. And really can you blame them?

Humans have grown worse over time. Our basest traits have evolved. Im Joong-kyung (Gang Dong-won) is an affectless soldier who was part of a mass killing of young girls. Lee Yoon-hee (Han Hyo-ju) is a faux bookseller who will betray anyone for her ailing little brother. Can these two fall in love? Even if they're working at cross purposes? More to the point, can they feel anything? Furthermore, what do either of them have to do with the young suicide bomber (Shin Eun-soo) in Little Red Riding Hood drag? Let it go. Let it all go. The best part of Kim Jee-woon's scifi snoozer are the shootouts and fistfights during which I found myself as unconcerned with who'd come out on top as I was tickled by the fight choreography.

Sector 7: The Oiliest Monster in Town

What attributes would you give a scary sea monster? A long, retractable tongue? A pair of backwards elbow-joints? Blood made of oil that can easily catch fire coupled with a gift for scarring instantaneously thereby creating a seal that prevents further blood flow and oil-fueled flames? Yeah, me neither. I'd probably make the beast of Kim Ji-hoon's Sector 7 more agile in the water than on land and maybe give it night vision (and a hypersensitivity to light) since its natural home is many leagues deep in the ocean. That the killer creature is so unoriginal comes as a particular disappointment because its ancestors are so fascinating: aquatic, sharp-toothed fireflies that resemble the offspring of Tinkerbell and a sperm.

The humans aren't more impressive here either. The alpha female crew member nicknamed "bad-ass" (Ha Ji-won) may be tough as nails but she's also inexplicably inept at crawling. Her uncle (Ahn Sung-ki) isn't nearly as cool as you're initially fooled to believe he is and her motorcycle-riding boyfriend (Oh Ji-ho) doesn't even merit a proper kiss. Everyone in this movie falls short of your hopes including the short-lived resident geneticist (Cha Ye-reyeon) and the pointlessly crabby ship captain (Park Jeong-hak).

What works in Sector 7 is its pro-ecological message: We shouldn't look at living things strictly as revenue generators; we would do well not to keep drilling the planet full of holes and consider other less-invasive energy sources such as solar panels and wind turbines. So next time you come across an oil-producing, underwater demon, put it on the endangered species list instead of sticking a fuel hose up its butt.

Last Day on Earth: 15 Minutes of Fame

If you found it today was your last day on Earth, whatever you chose to do, you can bet it would probably feel like it was over too quickly. And in Ko SangJin's short scifi pic Last Day on Earth, the action lasts a mere seventeen minutes. What happens in that short stretch of time? Quite a bit. A young man (Adam Maurer) returns from the dead to persuade an old scientist (Kim Kiedrowski) to bury science likely to be destructive to mankind and instead go on a journey — alone — to another planet. Meanwhile, the messenger must pay a visit to his mother's grave and decide whether or not he wants to fall in love with a blonde women (Erica Pastore) who happens to be an extraterrestrial in disguise. That's a lot of plot to pack into a half-hour or less. Major futuristic blockbusters have been made with skimpier story-lines. Yet Ko hit alls his points quickly and clearly. He's not as interested in the drama of getting from point A to point B as he is in surfacing moral quandaries which he safely assumes his audience shares.

When does science for science's sake not make sense? If there's life after death, what's the point of our time on Earth? On this overcrowded planet of ours, should the old find a time to willingly exit to make space for the young? Is love something that happens just because or does it occur because we ask it to and let it? Is the pursuit of "gold" our primary undoing as human beings? And given that I'm reading Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus," why wouldn't you commit suicide since we seem destined to cause each other pain?

I'll be the first to admit that I was more into the visual style than the scientific substance here as the references to Higgs boson went over my head while Reza Fakharieh's special effects and Kitanan Chewvej's cinematography were both unexpected treats. Am I too shallow to appreciate Last Day on Earth? I don't think so. Do you?

End of Animal: The End of the End of World Movies as We Know Them

Doomsday scenarios tend to be big-budget affairs in the movies which makes writer-director-editor Jo Sung-hee's bare-bones End of Animal something truly unique, a catastrophe flick unconcerned with grandiose visuals, a low-budget Last Judgment pic that looks so familiar that you really do feel that the Final Days are just around the corner. This is an Armageddon without fire and brimstone. Instead of the four horseman, you've got a child-molesting taxi driver (Kim Yeong-ho). Consider this the reckoning that happens when the lights go out, there's no more electricity and you're left fending for yourself amid a greatly decimated population peopled by antagonistic survivors with no fashion sense.

Apropos of a 21st Century End of Days, you've got plenty of latter day Christian imagery throughout: a long-suffering Mary (Lee Min-ji), single, pregnant and looking for a place to rest; a mean-spirited angel/archangel (Park Hae-il) who communicates via walkie talkie; and a few small, strange miracles like a candy bar that appears from out of nowhere and a cute yet ominous, fluffy white dog that shows up just in time to be barbecued.

Everyone seems somewhat shell-shocked in End of Animal because instead of grappling with the larger reality (life as we know it is damn well over), they're fighting over the smallest of necessities: a middle-aged bicyclist (Yoo Seung-mok) just wants to get laid or sucked or jerked off; a stranded woman (Lee Min-ah) covets then steals a comfortable pair of walking shoes.

Having suffered endless indignities — many of them from a bullying traveling partner (Park Sae-jong)— the young woman is invited by her guardian angel to say what she wants to which she belatedly replies "a nice apartment, a new car, etc." She's clearly learned nothing from surviving one disaster after another, which leads you to wonder if we're living in a Heaven we don't recognize or suffering in a kind of Purgatory from which we'll never escape. Never. At least, not like we'd imagined or hoped. Or prayed.

Snowpiercer: Bong Joon-ho Does Scifi a la Park Chan-wook

St. Teresa's The Interior Castle. Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death." Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. There are many examples of spiritual journeys that take their protagonists through a series of bizarre rooms before delivering them to an inner chamber housing a great if hidden truth. For Bong Joon-ho, the rooms in Snowpiercer may be train cars but the quest remains the same: The hero -- or in this case, the cannibalistic antihero (Chris Evans) -- must navigate a succession of rooms, each with its unique challenges, each with its own queer millieu, before arriving at the font of wisdom. The engine room, as it were. Along the way, he'll pass through a well-guarded water room with a lady tyrant clownishly played by a buck-toothed Tilda Swinton, a Willy Wonka-esque school room overseen by a blindingly sunny, pregnant fascist (Alison Pill), a kitchen where cockroaches are turned into gelatinous bricks of protein, a greenhouse, a steam room, a nightclub, and so on. The final chamber -- the engine room -- is ironically the domain of a child-kidnapping God-like tyrant (Ed Harris). Shades of The Truman Show?

What's unusual is that once Ed Harris' character unveils the TRUTH, the epiphany occurs not for Curtis but for Yona (Ko Ah-sung), a seer who hasn't heard it and who, as apprentice to the train's master locksmith Min-Soo (Song Kang-ho), has spent much of the time in a drug-addled haze. Are we hallucinating this scifi pic's parade of celebs along with her, for there's also John Hurt as a steampunk Yoda, Jamie Bell as a second banana in the people's army and a sleepy-eyed Octavia Spencer as a mom out to get her kid back. You might also cite Park Chan-wook as a co-star. While he doesn't appear on screen, his imprint is apparent as producer: Snowpiercer is packed with the video-game violence that has caused some critics to label Park as a purveyor of gore porn. I've never felt that way but I do feel the recurring blood-splattering here proved a bit much. Bong usually finds his shocks in psychology.

Doomsday Book: Three Short Films Herald End of the World as We Know It

The apocalypse elicits mixed feelings in me. The primacy of survival appeals to my minimalist bent. The mass destruction of life makes my heart break. Secretly, between you and me, I think that technological advancements don't always advance society but that doesn't mean that I want to see planet Earth turned into a cinder of its former self to make a technophobic point. The three doomsday scenarios played out in Doomsday Book tap into some of my fears and some of my frustrations about the end of the world scenarios, although only one does it in a way that's truly artful. That's not the first entry, Yim Pil-sung's In a Brave New World, a vegan parable that posits that one bad apple is going to transmogrify mankind into rageaholic zombies, after the rotten fruit is eaten by a cow that's eaten by another cow. The winner isn't the third short either, Yim's Happy Birthday. This woeful tale of world's end finds a little girl (Jin Ji-hee) mistakenly making an e-purchase for a meteor that resembles a giant 8-ball. You can scratch that one off your must-see list too.

The standout, for me, is -- Kim Jee-woon's The Heavenly Creature. This mesmerizing short concerns a service robot (voiced by Park Hae-il) at a Buddhist temple who may or not be the latest re-incarnation of Buddha himself. Both suspenseful and philosophical, The Heavenly Creature is chockful of clever social commentary about consciousness, loneliness, self-actualization, pets, corporate hierarchies, religion, perception, apartment dwelling, etc. It's strong enough to stand alone, even if it's running time is under an hour. The end is near. Who has time for a long movie?

Footnote for completists: Ryu Seung-beom headlines In a Brave New World as the Adam of the new zombie race while director Bong Joon-ho (The Host, Mother, Memories of Murder) also makes a brief appearance (in front of the camera for a change).

A Bizarre Love Triangle: The Virtues of Being Weird

Lee Mu-yeong's A Bizarre Love Triangle may be an ineffectual dud in some ways but it's also such an oddity, with more-than-a-few WTF moments sprinkled throughout its cockamamie story, that you can't just dismiss it outright as something terrible. Repeatedly, in this screwball comedy about a deadpan standup comic (Choi Kwang-il), a female Tae Kwon Do instructor (Kong Hyo-jin) and the bimbo (Jo Eun-ji) they both inexplicably love, you're likely to do a double-take at your television and hit rewind to confirm that what you saw really did happen. Nonsensical narrative twists and out-of-left-field visual details occur regularly as if to justify the word "bizarre" in the title. Here are nine details of note. I'll let you provide the tenth yourself.

1. The movie is a flashback to the present from a space colony on the moon. (No scifi comes into play outside that.)
2. A blind masseuse pressures her young lover to donate her eyes, over drinks.
3. The femme fatale performs a monologue from Othello while wearing a hooker's pink fright wig. (She doesn't get the part!)
4. A strange Cirque-du-soleil quartet does a Solid Gold number following one comedy act. (Or maybe it's a Vegas version of Cats.)
5. A guy in the background at a talk show attaches a toilet plunger to his head.
6. An electronic, hot pink dildo suddenly appears.
7. A fairly graphic blowjob is enacted after the character you didn't expect to get pregnant has her baby.
8. One sex scene is shown entirely as shadow puppetry.
9. The film concludes with a gay wedding involving two characters you know nothing about.

This doesn't even count the weird leaps of logic, like when the martial arts instructor noisily robs her sleeping blind lover or when the stand-up comic confesses he's a fraud as if that kind of honesty could win over a studio audience. And then there's the dead baby...

Invasion of Alien Bikini: Female Aliens Ought to Be Treated Better

A hot female extraterrestrial comes to Earth in search of sperm. Sound like a porno flick? Well, don't you have a dirty mind! Remember the horror flick Species? That hardly qualifies as smut but that was basically the idea. And it's the same one here with Invasion of Alien Bikini, a weird hybrid flick that's got comedy, scifi, martial arts, horror, and domestic drama as part of its movie makeup without a naked breast in site. Which doesn't mean that sex doesn't figure into the picture. It does. The alien has taken human form (Ha Eun-jung) and spends the majority of her time parading around in a black bra and panties. But her targeted sperm donor -- a volunteer community activist (Hong Young-geun) who has unwittingly rescued her from earthlings wiser to her ways -- has taken a vow of celibacy so while he too spends much time in his underwear, her attempts to stimulate him via a feather duster, some rope and an off-screen (and somewhat bloody) blowjob are all for naught. Her biological clock clicks way too loudly for his taste.

Because of that, her attempts at pre-martial sex annoy him. He's got his moral code and a fairly damaged childhood to keep him on the straight and narrow. And when she resorts to violence as a way to get him to comply, he comes right back at her... which is the problem with Invasion of Alien Bikini. Although we know she's an alien -- we have been told as much and even seen her spine pop out and try to strangle him -- she still registers as a woman so when her designated donor turns against her and starts punching her repeatedly in the face, you can't help but see it as violence against women. Try as a I might to rationalize that scene, I couldn't shake the inherent misogyny of it, which could've been solved quite easily if we'd seen the whites of her eyes turn fluorescent green or her teeth turn metallic or her hair fall off to reveal a bald head tattooed with advanced math problems.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that Invasion of Alien Bikini is a bad movie. To the contrary, it's a remarkable low-budget indie that does an immense amount with very little and has super-fun performances from its two leads. But this particular misstep knocks what could've been a Grade A B-movie into the bargain bin of basement curiosities. Maybe writer-director Oh Young-doo will right the film's wrongs with his next flick. I'd watch it!

Yesterday: Tomorrow Is Looking Doubly Depressing Today

The year is 2020 and two kindred spirits (Kim Seung-woo and Kim Yunjin) raised during the 1980s are having a rough time of it. Consider the headaches, the memory lapses, and their inability to have a sparkling conversation. A desperate, combined search for their father and a serial killer (Choi Min-Su) isn't about to make their lives easier. And despite all the years that have passed for them (and for us), tomorrow looks suspiciously like yesterday. Cops still fire machine guns, fat girls still sing in discos, and everyone still loves their cellphones -- which now come with constant advertising! In this all-too-familiar future, the most screenworthy character is secondary, a tough lady cop named May (Kim Seon-a) who likes to shoot firearms in a short sporty haircut and a tight-fitting leather tanktop. Maybe in some alternate universe, audiences will get to learn her storyline too and movies -- like video games -- will come with multiple plots we can follow and not just the one chosen by director-writer Jeon Yun-su. For today, we were stuck with Yesterday, his middling scifi flick about three siblings drowning in a messed up gene pool. For something more buoyant, check out Jeon's delightful comedy Le Grand Chef.

2009 Lost Memories: The Japanese Steal the Future

Of all the crimes against humanity, there are few worse than going back in time and changing history simply because you're ashamed you lost a war (unless that war is against robots). In the scifi action flick 2009 Lost Memories Japan, Korea's eternal nemesis, does nothing short of win WWII, nuke Berlin, and least forgivable of all, turn Korea into a Japanese colony—which at least isn't split into North and South halves because of internal conflicts. Masayuki Sakamoto (Jang Dong-kun) is going to change all that. A Korean member of the Japanese police, he stumbles upon a Korean patriotic faction that knows the secret of time travel and wants to return history on its proper track. That Japan will still emerge as a world power with Korea hardly its main commpetitor is a secondary concern. Sakamoto never thinks there might be away to exact revenge on Japan and really put them in the hot seat. He's happy enough to execute justice (and maybe his traitorous best friend, too while he's at it). Gun fire galore, a few exploding rockets, and some celebrational fireworks all add up to a body count that argues that you're better prepared in a nicely cut suit and a leather jacket than you are encased in armor because that just slows you down.