2004

From left:   "Arahan",  "3-Iron",  "Taegukgi",  "Some"

   As 2004 opened, the Korean film industry was still buzzing with the surprising success of films like Old Boy, Untold Scandal and Memories of Murder from the previous year. In contrast to 2001 and 2002, when inexpensive high concept comedies ruled the box-office, audiences in 2003 showed a clear preference for work by experienced filmmakers with a distinctive directorial style. The biggest films of 2003 also featured well-known actors and showed considerable attention to production values. "Well-made" became the new buzzword of the industry, as producers noted that audiences were demanding more quality of local films.

The year 2004 opened with a new twist to this trend: the "well-made blockbuster." Many of Korea's recent attempts at making big-budget genre movies were hampered by directorial inexperience, weak storytelling, or a lack of A-list stars, but Silmido (released in the last week of 2003) and Taegukgi gave Korean audiences a new taste of slick, homegrown, star-filled event movies. Apart from appealing to younger audiences with their stars and special effects, they also attracted older viewers in droves with their subject matter related to the Korean War and modern Korean history. The results at the box-office were stunning: both films passed the previously only dreamed-about 10 million admissions barrier.

However the success of the two films also brought new anxieties about the direction in which the Korean film industry is headed. The tremendous distribution and marketing clout wielded by Showbox and Cinema Service in releasing their movies had the side effect of pushing many smaller movies off the screens. The idea that money and power are unevenly distributed in the local film industry has come to receive more and more attention from critics and the press.

At the same time, international film festivals have provided a respite for observers worried about the increasing commercialism of Korean cinema. In February, maverick director Kim Ki-duk's tenth film Samaritan Girl won the Best Director prize at the Berlin International Film Festival. In May came even bigger news, when Park Chan-wook's Old Boy from 2003 screened in the competition section at the Cannes International Film Festival and walked off with the Grand Prix (missing the festival's top prize the Palme d'Or by one vote on the jury, according to some reports). Finally in September, Kim Ki-duk returned with yet another film 3-Iron, shot and edited in under two months, that carried home the Best Director award at the Venice International Film Festival.

Despite these accolades, however, the general feeling among many critics is that this is a bit of a down year. Few films have exceeded the expectations that came before them, and general audiences as well seem to be less enthusiastic about the local films on offer. It may take until next year, when many of Korea's best known directors return with new films, that the excitement returns. (written on Nov. 13)

     Reviewed below:    Once Upon a Time in High School (Jan 16)  --  Ice Rain (Jan 16)  --  Spy Girl (Jan 30)  --  Taegukgi (Feb 5)  --  A Smile (Feb 13)  --  Mokpo, Gangster's Paradise (Feb 20)  --  Desire (Feb 20)  --  Samaritan Girl (Mar 5)  --  Mr. Handy (Mar 12)  --  Sweet Sixties (Mar 19)  --  When I Turned Nine (Mar 26)  --  The Wolf Returns (Apr 2)  --  Dance With the Wind (Apr 9)  --  The Big Swindle (Apr 15)  --  Arahan (Apr 30)  --  Woman is the Future of Man (May 5)  --  Low Life (May 21)  --  Clementine (May 21)  --  Windstruck (Jun 3)  --  Face (Jun 11)  --  Someone Special (Jun 25)  --  My Mother, the Mermaid (Jun 30)  --  Everybody Has Secrets (Jul 30)  --  The Doll Master (Jul 30)  --  Bunshinsaba (Aug 5)  --  Hypnotized (Aug 6)  --  Fighter in the Wind (Aug 12)  --  To Catch a Virgin Ghost (Aug 13)  --  R-Point (Aug 20)  --  A Family (Sep 3)  --  Spider Forest (Sep 3)  --  Ghost House (Sep 17)  --  Mr. Gam's Victory (Sep 17)  --  Springtime (Sep 24)  --  3-Iron (Oct 15)  --  Some (Oct 22)  --  A Moment to Remember (Nov 5)  --  DMZ (Nov 26)  --  Flying Boys (Dec 3)  --  My Generation (Dec 3).

Short Reviews

These are some reviews of the features released in 2004 that have generated the most discussion and interest among film critics and/or the general public. They are listed in the order of their release.

    Once Upon a Time in High School: Spirit of Jeet Kune Do

Non-Koreans who watch a lot of Korean cinema are likely to have been surprised at one time or another at the depictions of violence in Korean schools. From Beat and Whispering Corridors to Friend and Bungee Jumping of Their Own, we have seen teachers beating students (sometimes with sticks or bats), students beating other students, parents bursting into classrooms and beating teachers... just about every combination imaginable. "Surely," such viewers must have asked, "Korean schools aren't really like that, are they?"

Director Yu Ha asserts in interviews that it is indeed this bad, if not worse -- at least it was in the 1970s, when he attended high school. Once Upon a Time in High School takes us back to these days when Korean society had reached the height of its authoritarianism and the country was rapidly modernizing. Young boys at the time were obsessed by the image of Bruce Lee (hence the film's English title), and Yu depicts in this movie both how difficult life was for high school boys in those days, and how Bruce Lee served as a model and inspiration years after his death.

The film focuses on three main characters: the soft-spoken Hyun-soo, played by rising star Kwon Sang-woo (My Tutor Friend); an intimidating fighter Woo-sik, played by Lee Jung-jin (Bet on My Disco); and Eun-ju from a neighboring girls' high school, played by debut actress Han Ga-in. When Hyun-soo transfers in as a new student he becomes friends with Woo-sik, and later the two of them meet Eun-ju on the bus. Initially the fights and troubles around them cause the three to become quite close, but as time goes by, divisions flare up and they begin facing their battles alone.

In some ways though, violence itself takes the lead role in this film. The teachers themselves barely make a show of keeping control, while wayward students with nicknames like "Stabber" or "Hamburger" fight with whatever sharp or blunt objects happen to be at hand. Hyun-soo, modeled in some ways after the director's own experiences, has trouble adjusting at first, but eventually the stress of his environment begins to take its toll.

Korean film critics, perhaps thinking back to their own experiences at high school, gave the film a warm welcome at its first press screening. Audience members also responded with strong initial interest, although viewers seemed divided after actually seeing the film (for the record, my wife hated it and my brother-in-law thought it was fantastic).

As an outsider who went to a high school where students got into fights, but generally stopped short of stabbing each other with pens, I found myself with mixed feelings about this movie. It's not that I have trouble believing that this sort of thing could happen -- I'm sure it could. But I do have some trouble with the way the film seems to view the violence with equal parts awe and admiration, particularly towards the end. I also found it somewhat conventional, and I'd hoped for a little more from the director of Marriage is a Crazy Thing. Many of the film's details are quite evocative or impressive, but in the end it doesn't seem to be saying too much more than, "Man, we had it bad..."      (Darcy Paquet)

(Trailer: 300k)

    Ice Rain

A man, a woman, a man, a mountain. This basically describes Kim Eun-sook's first feature film, Ice Rain. Kim's short film "The Execution" had competed at Cannes in 1999, but the short form isn't usually a platform to immediate blockbuster proportions. Yet, somehow Kim was able to procure the backing to debut as director and writer with this mountain-climbing extravaganza, making her the first Korean woman to take the helm of such a venture.

The film flashes back from a mountaineering expedition in Alaska to memories of two of the mountaineers, Joong-hyun (Lee Sung-jae - Public Enemy, Dance With the Wind) and Woo-sung (Song Seung-hun - Calla) These memories are of married Woo-sung's affair with Kyung-min (Kim Ha-neul - Ditto, My Tutor Friend), an affair young, single Joong-hun wishes he had had. In the beginning, the development of the relationship each man had with Kyung-min receives equal representation along with the spectacular vistas of the treacherous hike up the snowy mountain. The visual enjoyment in the first half of this film is well executed by cinematographer Yoon Hong-sik (Tube, The Way Home) and for the most part the realism of the special effects affect as intended. The second half of the film emphasizes the relationship over the spectacle, thanks to a stalling of Joong-hyun and Woo-sung's climb up the mountain.

Where Ice Rain works for me is in its refusal to fall fully into the mountain as cliched metaphor for 'problem to surmount' or 'goal to reach.' There is no "change" caused by the mountain per se, just reflection on actions past. Instead, Kim has utilized the mountain to conjure up an interesting exploration of why it is we take risks, why it is we put ourselves in danger: the physical danger of mountain-climbing against the emotional danger of falling in love/lust or into relationships doomed to fail. Two scenes vividly underscore this, Woo-sung reaching into hot coals to retrieve Kyung-min's gift of her "love tooth," and the film's most powerful moment for me, Kyung-min's throat-clench reaction to her mother's surprise intrusion of her affair. As in a relationship, more than one person risks getting hurt since climbing partners are connected through rope. One slip on your part and your partner can fall with you. In this way, Ice Rain had me recalling the three attached partners in Takeshi "Beat" Kitano's Dolls without the absurd (in a positive way) elements of that film.

Where Ice Rain doesn't work for me is in the weak initial development of the relationship between Joong-hyun and Kyung-min. Perhaps the problem really lies in the English translation, but the initiation ritual of the relationship suffers from a too-cutesy-ness to which melodramas are vulnerable to fall prey. However, such does allow for the intended differentiation between Joong-hyun's immaturity and the more adult relationship Woo-sung is capable of with Kyung-min. The irony is that Woo-sung's illicit affair with Kyung-min comes off more legitimate than if she'd established a relationship with unattached Joong-hyun. Another problem with the film is the need to reflect too soon on matters that happened earlier in the film, such as Kyung-min's recalling of the "love tooth" incident.

It appears that the film did not work for Korean audiences because it performed poorly at the box office. Of the 50 Korean films released by the end of August, Ice Rain was roughly in the bottom 30% of both (Seoul) admissions and Per (Seoul) Screen Average (PSA). Tossing out the films that were shown in under 10 theaters and the huge anomaly of 2004, Taeguki, Ice Rain still only managed 45% of the year's average PSA. A positive sign is that it didn't fail as greatly as 2003's blockbuster bomb, Natural City, acquiring 132% of Natural City's PSA. And when looking at the other films so far this year that were placed on 20-30 screens, Ice Rain met 79% of the average admissions and 86% of the average PSA.

Normally, I could care less about the financial take of a film since my primary interest is that of aesthetic and sociological/political study. But a blockbuster implies commercialism, so here I'm judging the film on its own intent, which is to make money. And with only around 80,000 (Seoul) admissions, this film didn't live up to its own hype. I'm not aware of how much this film needed to gross to end up in the black, but guesstimating about the on site needs required when filming on a mountainside, I'd bet the financiers were not happy with the results.

Some may question whether Ice Rain should qualify as a "blockbuster." In Movie Blockbusters edited by Julian Stringer, Stringer notes what makes a "blockbuster" a blockbuster has not received much academic study. What he found most often denotes a blockbuster is self-reflexivity, ('I AM a blockbuster, damn it!'), and two factors of size, budget and spectacle. (The size of the eventual box office take is after the fact and qualifies the already established blockbuster as a success or failure.) Since Ice Rain announces itself as a blockbuster and I assume the budget was considerable, it meets those two factors. Although I find the expansive views of mountain climbs large enough of a spectacle to warrant the blockbuster label, the film's eventual greater emphasis on the relationships in the pedestrian settings of the city could lead some to question its blockbuster luster.

Regardless of its blockbuster legitimacy, considering that Kim Ha-neul was coming off of the sassy-fied success of My Tutor Friend the year before and that one of the most popular outdoor activities in South Korea is hiking the mountains of regions such as Kangwon-do, we must concede that Ice Rain performed below expectations at the box office. Even greater disappointment arises when we recall that another mountaineering film was extremely popular in South Korea, a fact that many a Korean cineaste wishes would simply disappear into thin air. That film? Sylvester Stallone's Cliffhanger.      (Adam Hartzell)

    Spy Girl

Part of me wants to call Spy Girl, Park Han-joon's advertisement for a major fast food chain... What's that you say? 'Don't you mean Park Han-joon's film, Adam?' Well, no, I don't. I'm absolutely serious when I say this film is first and foremost an ad for the I-refuse-to-mention fast food chain. Twenty-five percent of the film's running time is taken up by the fast food chain and I'm not just pulling that number out of my ass as what the ad space seemed like. I actually timed it. And I rounded down! With that amount of cinematic space as ad space, we must call this film what it was intended to be, an advertisement.

And I'm sure this provider of unhealthy fare is happy w/ director Park's efforts, because the commercial space is clearly and positively associated with desire. We have several Lolita-ly dressed hotties, or as the film-cum-ad labels them, "Angels", who work for the imposed-upon-the-viewer fast food chain. This commercial site is presented as the assumed site of everyday consumption for all the characters. The entire male population of the high school across the street from this cinematic billboard is portrayed as a horde unable to refrain from bumrushing the chain in order to order from the angel-est of Angels, our gorgeous main character, "Hyo-jin" (Kim Jung-hwa). The boys' teacher even mentions his patronage of the chain to further solidify its everyday presence within all of South Korean society, the young and the old.

Anyway, as I was saying, part of me wanted to call this ad "My Sassy Spy Is a Gangster III", but not all those references really stick when fully examined. At one point the subtitles do have a character label our secret agent as "sassy" and there are a few dashes of wire-fu dropkicks, but those references are just as minimal in the larger scope of the ad as the loving foot fetish scene straight out of Spring Bears Love. No, the only substantial reference point here is Jang Jin's The Spy. Yet, I won't call this a copycat since Jang doesn't own a copyright on all films about a spy. Spy Girl's re-gender-ized version tells its story through well situated flashbacks that could have easily become confusing in lesser hands. Director Park and Screenwriter Ha Won-jun provide us with a nicely layered back story regarding how "Hyo-jin" and Go-bong (Gong Yu) met each other. Let me first explain why I keep putting our North Korean spy's name between quotes. See, she's taken on the identity of the biological daughter of her sort of adoptive parents, the father of which is a North Korean contact. So her name is not really "Hyo-jin", but for most of the film, that is how she's known. While waiting for her designated hit to emerge, she takes a job at the afore(not)mentioned main character of this commercial. Unbeknownst to her, she is also being stalked by boys at the neighboring high school who have put her up on their personal website without her permission, thus violating her, as their premier Angel. This Angel that is (and isn't) "Hyo-jin" is purported to be so famous that "those who don't know her are North Korean spies", leading "Hyo-jin" to believe her secret operation has been discovered.

That subtitle quote above is what provides much of the fodder for comedy, that is, playing off the ignorance a North Korean would convey from being severed off from much of the modern outside world, especially the world right next door, South Korea. Thus, some of the humor may be missed on the Western viewer, such as when "Hyo-jin" is asked to sing a popular South Korean song by her bullying co-workers. The most successful humor is that around "Hyo-jin"'s spy parents, who, although still feeling obligated to help her, are presented to have taken quite well to 'soul-less' capitalism, being quite the consumers, even legally traffic-ing in the most processed and unnatural of confections, symbolizing their complete assimilation into the simulations of capitalism. Yet, demonstrating the recent trend in South Korean cinema, the North Koreans are not the butt of all the jokes. Although in no way are these realistic portrayals of North Koreans, "Hyo-jin" is portrayed quite sympathetically without requiring her to convert to South Korean nationalism. In fact, her character is portrayed more than sympathetically. She is presented as someone we all, male and female, should desire. Her character even diverges from -- to coin a word off of Kyung Hyun Kim's use of "Remasculinization" to describe recent Korean male portrayals -- the "Refeminization" contained within a subset of South Korean cinema that requires all sassy-fied females to hide some psychoanalyzed trauma behind their feisty facades, even though, being from North Korea, "Hyo-jin" could have been easily characterized as harboring multiple traumatic experiences considering that country's present horrific problems.

Although humorous moments arise in Spy Girl, for the most part, the attempts at humor are too often ridiculous and haphazard rather than poignant and smooth as is the case with its predecessor The Spy. Nowhere close to being a high quality example of Korean comedies, Spy Girl still succeeds in its primary goal, to sell burgers. Hey, at least you can order those burgers with kimchi on them, right?      (Adam Hartzell)

    Taegukgi

Being the director of a watershed hit like Shiri (1999) can give you some strong advantages when making your next film. It gives you the ability to attract top-name actors and crew. It becomes much easier to raise large sums of money from investors. Park Chan-wook (JSA) and Kwak Kyung-taek (Friend) chose to shoot smaller, more personal works after their record-breaking hits, but Kang Je-gyu took full advantage of his position and aimed for the stars. Taegukgi, which premiered close to five years after Shiri, ranks as the most expensive Korean film ever at $12.8 million and features perhaps the two hottest male stars in Korea. (Won Bin, when asked why he agreed to star in the film, is reported to have said, "You'd have to be an idiot to turn it down, wouldn't you?")

Its title named after the South Korean flag, Taegukgi tells the story of two brothers from Seoul who are forcibly conscripted into the army shortly after the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. The older brother, played by Jang Dong-gun, decides that he must try to win a Medal of Honor in order to secure the discharge of his bookish younger brother, played by Won Bin. As the war progresses from the outskirts of Busan to the northern reaches of the peninsula, however, Jang's character grows distant and starts losing himself in the passions of war.

Certainly this film is unique in Korean film history for its large scale, its battle sequences and the intricate reconstruction of war-torn Seoul and Pyongyang. The crew deserves praise for the tremendous amount of effort they put into the look and feel of the movie. I found it particularly interesting to see a reconstruction of the street Jongno in pre-war Seoul.

The scenes of war shown here are quite impressive, but ironically they also contain one of the film's biggest disappointments. Presumably to give the audience a feeling of excitement, the director shakes his camera violently back and forth in all of the fight scenes. The result is that we can barely see the elaborate explosions and effects, robbing the film of its greatest asset. Viewers who go to see this in the theater are strongly advised not to sit in the front rows, in order to avoid getting nausea from the lurching camera (not to mention the very gory scenes of battle carnage).

In general, one gets the sense that this film could have been crafted into a far more moving and eye-opening account of the most destructive event in Korea's history. For much of Taegukgi's extensive running time we are focused on the melodramatic discord that springs from the older brother's decision to sacrifice himself. This personal story dominates the film to the extent that, in some ways, the war is merely an elaborate backdrop. The film also makes little effort to say anything new about the conflict. North Korean soldiers are portrayed as crazed fanatics (no JSA-style humanism here), while the Chinese are just a teeming horde. It does try to show the ruthlessness of Southern as well as Northern forces (which provides for some well-acted cameos by Kim Soo-ro and Kim Hae-gon), but this is hardly new. Ten years ago, Im Kwon-taek's Taebaek Mountains portrayed the damage wrought by violent anti-communism with far more conviction.

In the end analysis, Taegukgi is a commercial blockbuster with little to say, but a keen sense of how to attract local viewers with spectacle and melodrama. As I write this, it is playing on a record 450 screens across Korea and it has become the first film ever to sell 2 million tickets in five days. With a long box-office run virtually guaranteed, it appears that Kang Je-gyu will continue to be able to call the shots for his future productions.      (Darcy Paquet)

(Trailer: 300k)

    A Smile

A Smile opens with a close-up of a woman's eye subject to an ocular test. It belongs to So-jeong (Choo Sang-mi, The Contact, Turning Gate), a photographer. It is revealed that she is afflicted with retinitis pigmentosa, a rare disease that kills optic nerves from the periphery, eventually leading to blindness. Her graduate student boyfriend Ji-seok (Song Il-gon) is supportive, but she abruptly terminates the relationship with him. She returns to her family for a funeral service, and briefly dabbles in a project photographing the famous statue of the Maitreyan Boddhisatva and explores the ancient tombs of Kyungju. In the end, she abandons photography and decides to take lessons for flying mini-planes from a loner ex-Air Force soldier (Jo Seong-ha).

A Smile, a directorial debut film by newcomer Pak Kyung-hee, is a stoic, aloof and somewhat doleful character study. Pak employs a haiku-like, spare style and medium-distance compositions (reminiscent of Yim Sun-rye, who served as the producer) to delineate the subtle psychological changes of a young woman faced with a personal catastrophe. Perhaps courageously for a Korean film, it presents a protagonist who refuses not only to display emotion but also to explain herself. De-glamorized and wrapped up in functional, baggy clothes, Choo Sang-mi delivers a restrained, finely tuned performance in the role of So-jeong. She is particularly effective in the country home sequence, which I thought was the best part of the film, stoically withstanding both abuse and indifference from her family members, including her weasel-like older brother (Pak Won-sang from Waikiki Brothers), disgustingly immersed in patriarchal-misogynistic values but nonetheless portrayed as real people.

A Smile is the kind of motion picture that probably reads better as a screenplay than as an actual film. Visually, it is rather claustrophobic, even when opened up for location shooting, and its devices for illustrating So-jeong's changing psychology are more interesting as ideas than as concrete cinematic expressions. For instance, So-jeong's spiritual engagement with the Maitreyan Boddhisatva (the film's title appears to be based on the famous "smile" worn by the statue) is obscurely presented. I was also disappointed by the fact that the flight sequences were shown in such a prosaic manner. Watching the film, I never got to understand what So-jeong wanted so desperately to see from the sky, even at the cost of breaking up from her kindly boyfriend.

The final image recalls that of Kurosawa Akira's Ran and opens the film up for an allegorical interpretation about the general human condition. It smacks of didacticism and high-handedness, but at the same time remains a striking and affecting sight, a fitting resolution to this obstinate yet plucky debut film.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    Mokpo, Gangster's Paradise

This overcooked ratatouille is a curious throwback to the yesteryear's trend: gangster comedy. It covers all the bases of the vilified subgenre: the glamorous stars cast as hapless idiots or foul-mouthed miscreants, the Cuisinart mixture of usually irreconcilable genre conventions and the stylized "action" scenes and macho CF moments. What distinguishes the film for me from its clones is the homoeroticism subtext so insanely in-your-face that it threatens to become the movie's central theme.

I have read elsewhere that Mokpo was originally conceived as a non-comedy project, and its rather ambitious, convoluted subplots indeed suggest a Korean rehash of Infernal Affairs. The film stars Jo Jae-hyeon (Address Unknown, Bad Guy) as a smart but nerdy cop, Lee Soo-cheol. Despised by his fellow cops, Soo-cheol volunteers for a dangerous mission infiltrating a Jeolla Province-based crime syndicate headed by a young boss, Seong-gi (Cha In-pyo, Season in the Sun, Iron Palm). Determined to expose the syndicate's drug smuggling operation, Soo-cheol gains Seong-gi's trust, but in the process begins to find his loyalties torn between the police and the criminals.

Judged purely in terms of the jopok comedy genre, Mokpo is a middling achievement, more colorful than the usual drek, but not as well-crafted as, say, My Wife is a Gangster. Jo Jae-hyeon's ability to give a real performance, while surrounded by the comic sketches straight out of the dumbest episodes of Gilligan's Island, is nothing short of impressive. As for Cha In-pyo, I frankly have never understood why he is so popular and this film certainly does not suggest any new clue. The casting of Jo as a "little brother" underling of Cha is such a bizarre setup, a little like casting Nick Nolte as a teenage brother of Andy Garcia, that any chance of taking Cha's character seriously evaporates. Of course, the character itself would have defeated the efforts of any good actor. To cite but one example, director and writer Kim Jee-hoon attempts to render Seong-gi cutesy-poo by making him a gigantic fan of My Sassy Girl who has memorized all of its lines. He should have cast Cha Tae-hyeon in Seong-gi's role. Cha Tae-hyeon as a crime boss, now that's creative casting. The charismatic presence of Son Byeong-ho (Oasis, Failan) as the #2 gangster makes me wistful about seeing Jo Jae-hyeon and Son squaring off as opponents in a serious crime film, the kind of film we will never see in today's Korean film industry, increasingly taken over by the concerns about the bottom line.

Some words on the film's curious homoeroticism are due. The film's plot involves retrieval of a maritime treasure in a sunken Chinese ship. In fact, the film's real coveted treasure is Seong-gi's penis ("seong-gi" is a synonym for "sexual organ" in Korean). The filmmakers laboriously hint at this throughout the movie, culminating in an oral sex joke between Jo and Cha. Although the setup is a truly lame parody of a famous scene from Old Boy, it encourages the viewers to laugh at Cha closing his eyes and softly moaning while Jo is, ah, rolling his tongue with loud slurping noises over a thingie jutting out between Cha's legs. What are we to make out of this? This and a few other scenes in Mokpo carry with them an air of sexual panic, as if the filmmakers are trying desperately to exploit the sexual attraction among the male characters, without honestly acknowledging it. Not surprisingly, the climactic orgy of slow-motion violence, in which gallons of bodily fluids are shed and shared, can be interpreted as the "safe" substitute for actual acts of lovemaking. At any rate, the "oral sex joke" was the only surprising thing for me in the whole movie. It almost gave me the hope of actually seeing a sex scene between Jo and Cha (maybe as a Freudian dream sequence?). Instead, of course, the film ends with the lobotomized image of a heterosexual nuclear family, denying with half-hysterical laughter what I now suspect... that this film is really made for Korean men who find Cha In-pyo sexually attractive, but must pretend that it's their girlfriends who want to see Cha on the big screen.

Of course, let's not forget that the movie comes fully equipped with the potful of pee-pee and ca-ca jokes. What would a Korean comedy be without them? Oh look! The dumb comic relief guy is having diarrhea and he forgot to lift the lid! Thatsa veddy fun-nee! Groan...

Finally, I freely confess that the heart-stoppingly unmirthful "comic dialogues" spouted by various supporting characters was one factor that made me seriously consider bolting out of the theater. I just had to clench my teeth and get over them. In one way, the non-Korean-speaking viewers who have to rely on English subtitles are spared of the worst element of these Korean "comedies." (Those who have sat through the movies like Cabin Boy and Ishtar would appreciate just how torturous unfunny lines in unfunny comedies can be) Count your blessings, kimosabe, 'tis a sign that Big Daddy in the Sky has not given up on you yet.

Mokpo, Gangster's Paradise is a grating jopok comedy almost surrealistic in its extremist, loony-tunes reworking of the once-safe formulae, perhaps revealing more clearly than its subdued predecessors the masculine anxieties that underlie much of what passes for entertainment in contemporary Korea.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    Desire

A rich housewife Rosa (Lee Su-ah), married to a psychiatrist Gyu-min (An Tae-geon, Oasis, Jungle Juice), discovers that he is two-timing her with a leather-clad pretty boy Leo (Lee Dong-gyu). Rosa approaches Leo, who moonlights as a boy toy for a gaggle of wealthy housewives, and "buys" his services with the money she raised among her friends. And yet, she continues to pretend as if nothing is amiss with her barren married life. When Gyu-min spurns Leo and half-heartedly attempts to reconcile with his wife, they are further ensnared in the cycle of mutual abuse and despair.

Desire is, in a nutshell, a long love letter to Michaelangelo Antonioni, especially his L'Avventura and Blow-up (the Korean import title of which was, you guessed it, Desire). For a regular Korean film, the discovery that the husband is having an affair with another man would be the big plot twist in the midpoint or even a climactic revelation. But in Desire, this issue is taken care of in the first five minutes. The rest of the film, virtually dialogueless, is devoted to the delineation of Rosa and Gyu-min's loveless marriage, and exasperating, sometimes repellent actions of Rosa and Leo to inject some meaning into their hollow lives. The narrative is bewilderingly elliptical: most characters are either frightfully annoying or depressingly banal.

Director Kim Eung-soo has made what may be termed as an anti-melodrama: imagine a dark, humorless version of My Sassy Girl in which Jeon Ji-hyeon's "The Girl" rapes Cha Tae-hyeon's Gyeon-woo with a dildo and he still tags along with her like a puppy on a leash. (To avoid a misunderstanding, let me state that Desire exploits Rosa's character in a familiar, leering European-art film fashion: don't expect any sexually progressive viewpoints here) However, Kim is so committed to blotting out any chance of the audience identification that might interfere with his fine-tuned presentation of the ennui and pointlessness of the upper-class Korean life, that he risks turning the whole film into an exercise in dehumanization, on the part of the audience as well as the characters. By the time the movie reaches its denouement, involving Rosa's tearful face and a bouquet of funeral flowers, many among the audience would be crawling up the walls, had they not already left the theater in utter confusion.

The film is certainly beautiful to look at. Director Kim has great eyes for composition, color and production design (Did he study painting?). And there are a few scenes that sneak in Bunuel-like wicked humor, such as the dinner party at Gyu-min's place. After the expensive, elegant dinner he, Rosa and the guests gather together and watch Happy End (1999) with the solemnity and absorption of attending a religious ceremony.

I think the film's biggest weakness is precisely the factor that the marketers would attempt to use to sell it (and fail miserably): sex. Sex scenes in this film are so frigid and un-erotic that they become almost (almost, but not quite) fascinating, as if they are reconstructions of human sexual conduct by a Silicon-based alien intelligence. If this is the effect that Kim Eung-soo had in mind, he succeeded. At least there is no confusion in this case about whether the title was meant to be ironic.

Coldly gorgeous, Desire is a technically superior production that earns respect for being so adamantly against the commercial conventions of Korean cinema, even at the risk of alienating the viewers.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

(Premiered at Locarno International Film Festival in 2002, but released commercially in February 2004)

    Samaritan Girl

In tag-lining his Silver Berlin Bear award-winning film Samaritan Girl with the biblical reference, "He who is without sin, throw the first stone," director Kim Ki-duk has allowed himself cover from critics. Such a tagline deflects any negative criticism before the critic has even criticized. It argues that only the critic who is without criticism themselves should throw damning words at Kim's film, otherwise, the critic should remain silent. And who among us is without "sin", hypocrites that we all are? Such underscores the marketing acumen, if not directorial skill, of Kim, a man who has quickly risen, justified or not, to become one of the most recognizable Korean directors throughout the world through his relentless work ethic that enables him to complete projects with a profitable - at least through overseas sales - efficiency that would make the members of many corporate board rooms around the world nod in approval.

Although I have found most of Kim's work ineffectual, leaving his violent vision in the theater where it belongs, Samaritan Girl is an exception. Although it presents many of Kim's faults as a director, such as moments of poorly guided acting and awkward forcing of style, it also presents Kim's vision at its strongest since The Isle. Kim's films were mostly the downside of my devoting my writing to South Korean cinema. Samaritan Girl hasn't brought a brightside, but at least a side that provokes interesting thoughts beyond the theater.

The film is set up as a triptych. It begins following two schoolgirls, Jae-young (Seo Min-jeong - Jenny, Juno and again in Kim's The Bow) and Yeo-jin (Kwak Ji-min - Wishing Stairs, Red Eye). Jae-young prostitutes her body with older men in a belief that she is following in the practices of a fabled Buddhist prostitute from India who transported johns towards enlightenment through the nirvana between her legs. Yeo-jin is upset by Jae-young's prostituting herself, finding the men she sleeps with disgusting, but concedes to act as her lookout and, in a sense, her pimp, since she is the one who calls the johns and snatches Jae-young from them when Jae-young steps across the line from business relationship into something deeper, and by extension, more dangerous. Based on Jae-young's almost mythic characterization as a sprite in her look and behavior, a possible interpretation is that Jae-young and Yeo-jin are actually two halves of the same person. This is further supported by Jae-young's Corsican-like bodily response in the hospital when Yeo-jin supposedly loses her virginity with Yeo-jin's favorite client, a musician. And the second section of the film does indeed have Yeo-jin echoing in the tradition of fabled Buddhist prostitute with an ease as if she's done this before. However, Yeo-jin decides to sleep with and return the money to every john Jae-young had previously serviced. Little does she know, her devoted single father (Lee Eol - Waikiki Brothers, and again with Kwak in Red Eye) discovers Yeo-jin's after school activities and begins stalking his daughter's tricks.

But he doesn't confront her at all with violence beyond vengeance as we've come to expect from Kim's oeuvre, not even in the third section of the film. He merely seeks out the johns to confront them for their immoral liaisons with his under-age daughter. And it is this aspect of Kim's film that is so compelling. I sat during this entire film wondering when the misogyny would arise and was astounded to find none. Sure, you could argue that his portrayal of each schoolgirl prostitute is a male fantasy, but to do so you'd have to deny how the reality of illegal prostitution intrudes at precise moments when the audience might be getting too comfortable with that interpretation. The only other claim of misogyny is trumped by the fact that it is a dream sequence that demonstrates a character's masochistic tendency, a masochism that Kim's narrative will not allow.

Kim gives me enough of what I want from cinema, something to provoke thoughts upon layers of other thoughts, that I will secede and give him major props here. Although it'll take time to realize if those layers build a stable structure or a shaky foundation, I have recently found myself wandering many productive critical avenues. What might Kim be saying about masochism that I've been missing in all the sadism? And, are we supposed to see the father as a Jesus figure? He enters his daughter's room just after we notice a portrait of a blue-eyed interpretation of Jesus. He seeks stigmata-esque wounds by hovering his hand over the hot stove. And, well, he indeed does throw the first stone. But there are equally plausible moments when this father/christ figure demonstrates that he is not without sin, such as the moment where we gaze with him along the body of his sleeping daughter. One of the more compelling aspects of the film that conveys the possible sinfulness of daddy is the score. The musician client Jae-young wishes to see in the hospital is called upon by Yeo-jin while working on a space-age sounding composition. And it is a similar sounding non-diegetic score that follows the father during some of his stalking, alluding to the fact that this father might know more about the evil ways of men than simply from observing.

Whether or not all of this combines into a greater whole for me still remains to be seen. Of all the ink and pixels spent on Kim, someone on the discussion board said it best when they wrote how Kim is equally overrated and underrated. (I searched and searched and searched but could not find which member wrote this so I'm sorry I can't cite you.) I would add to this that your reception of Kim can also be affected by which film you came in on. And if you came in watching Samaritan Girl, I can understand why you might be intrigued by his work. And like Yeo-jin's father to his daughter, I won't judge you for that.      (Adam Hartzell)

    Mr. Handy

The thirtysomething dentist Hye-jin (Uhm Jeong-hwa, Singles, Marriage is a Crazy Thing) resigns from a Seoul general hospital after fighting with a senior doctor. Blackballed and unable to get a job in Seoul, she decides to open a modest dental clinic in the countryside. But adjusting to the sleepy pace of a small fishing town turns out to be more difficult than Hye-jin thought. To her initial annoyance, a loud-mouthed local jack-of-all-trades Chief Hong (Kim Joo-hyeok, Singles, YMCA Baseball Team) interjects himself into her life. Not only is he the so-called "chief" of the Neighborhood Association, he is also a licensed real estate agent, interior designer, carpenter, occasional 24-hour store clerk and mediator for civil disputes relied upon by the rather unreliable town police. In addition to all these practical skills, Chief Hong sings ballads, plays golf and go and knows a thing or two about fine wine and artificial intelligence. Oh, and did we mention the fact that he is also a martial arts expert?

Mr. Handy is no Thanksgiving turkey, but it ain't chili con carne either, if you get my drift. I am not sure why the filmmakers thought they had to name this film If Something Happens to Somebody Somewhere, He Always Shows Up, Chief Hong in the original Korean, but I am fairly certain that its main target demographic is the young female moviegoers with disposable income. Director Kang Seok-beom and screenwriters Kang, Shin Jeong-gu and Yi Yoon-jin set Hye-jin up for every imaginable form of slights and harassments from men: being fondled in the rear end by a patient, being called a harpy, a hag or worse, and being thrown into a slammer for crashing into a male-chauvinist kid's automobile. The solution? It's Chief Hong to the rescue! When the slimy macho thugs need their asses whupped, Chief Hong is there to oblige! When Hye-jin runs into trouble with the police, Chief Hong bails her out! And of course, when Hye-jin wants to mope about her lonely, meaningless life, Chief Hong is there to wine and dine her and spout romantic poetry. He is like a comic book superhero who, instead of making the world safe for truth and justice, spends all his time getting rid of annoying people and problems for young Korean professional women. The idea is at least cute.

Disappointingly, Mr. Handy makes the serious mistake of compromising the powerful presence of Uhm Jeong-hwa, who radiates sex appeal like a Plutonium isotope and looks like she can eat all these macho thugs for breakfast. It is simply not believable that Hye-jin should fall for a dork, albeit a multitalented dork, like Chief Hong. Granted, he might be very useful to have around in the house. But then again, if your poodle could file income tax forms, drive you to the shopping mall, collect garbage bags and do the laundry, he would be darn convenient to have around, too. To put it simply, there are no sexual or even genuinely romantic tensions between these two characters: with no tensions, there is no real drama, and no real resolution, its teary climax eliciting a bored response from me, "Uhm (no pun intended), couldn't you just call him up on your cell phone?"

I wouldn't blame either Uhm or Kim for this low-octane outcome as they work quite well together (both starred in Singles, but their characters in that film had no chance to interact) and are obviously skilled actors. The problems with its basic premise and dramaturgy notwithstanding, Mr. Handy is competently put together, with nice cinematography and production design. I assume the tackily tasteless interiors of Hye-jin's big shot father's house (Ki Joo-bong, back in the saddle again) are intentionally so. On the other hand, the pace of the film seriously drags, especially in the middle section where Chief Hong's various "talents" are exposed with all the ingenuity of a junior-high school show-and-tell.

There is no point in second-guessing the filmmaker's designs, but if Chief Hong were a total fantasy figure that existed only in Hye-jin's imagination, that would have made the film more intriguing, or at least different, perhaps preventing the filmmakers from falling back on the Prince Charming complex, the cliche of all cliches in Korean romantic comedies. I wish that I could have liked Mr. Handy more than I do, and that it had the gumption to fully release the sexual energy of Uhm Jeong-hwa upon its viewers. As it stands, the movie is a well-intentioned, moderately pleasant comedy lacking in vim and vigor, not to mention genuine wit.     (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    Sweet Sixties

Let's talk Marketing first. Concept-wise, director/writer Lee Su-in's Sweet Sixties was a great pitch. Let's take an underserved market, seniors, and let's gear a film specifically for them since movies, as opposed to cinema, are geared towards the young, presenting life as so few of us can actually experience it. Some of Korea's best older actors are cast in this film, such as Joo Hyun (Saving My Hubby, My Wife Is a Gangster 2) who plays Jong-dal and Song Jae-ho (Memories of Murder, Double Agent) who plays Pil-guk, each providing reference points to Korea's film industry in the 80s and 70s. Plus, as a thriving cinema that has finally been recognized internationally, titling the film "Sweet Sixties" alludes to the "Golden Age of Korean Cinema" of that decade. Such an allusion allows for the industry to broaden how Korean cinema is seen internationally and to younger Koreans. And Korean cinema history is further represented - and further back - by the wonderful, light green, faux-aged, old school-designed advertising poster that harkens back to the gorgeous posters of old so well documented in the book published by the Korean Film Archive, Traces of Korean Cinema from 1945-1959. In this way, Sweet Sixties is going back to the future in an effort to market its fascinating, long history while paying allegiance to its elders, both the elders from back in the day and the elders of today.

This is why I'm less enthusiastic with the alternative English title "Dances with Solitude" since all this synergy is lost and we are left with a wannabe title with its less than subtle reference to Hollywood cinema. Similarly disappointing, rather than score the film with something original and engaging as we've come to expect from recent Korean films such as Take Care of My Cat and A Good Lawyer's Wife, we have something that's so generic in its orchestral Hollywood violin swoops, that I'd expect to see us plopped into an American suburban cul-de-sac at the beginning of the film. Plus, there's a certain pandering to sentiments not even conveyed in the film with the poster selected as the DVD cover on which all the characters engage in a strange, nonexistent poker game with Mi-seon (Jin Hee-kyung of Girls' Night Out, I Wish I Had A Wife) all dolled up in fetish gear. Yes, Jin is indeed looking suh-WEET! in this fishnet-stocking-ed, boots-made-for-walking, hetero-male fantasy, but this presents her as if she's the object of the heightened gaze/affections of this pack of 60-year old men when the major subplot involves her character not being the woman pursued. Such are examples of how Sweet Sixties as Dances With Solitude falters, since this marketing ambivalence presents the film as if insecure about what it wants to be.

The story revolves around a group of mostly 60-somethings in a fishing community. Joong-bum (Park Young-gyu from Attack of the Gas Station and a well-known singer with an intentionally ironic, horrible karaoke performance in the film) helps Pil-guk with his fishing business, whereas Joong-bum's older brother, Joong-dal, is trying his hand at raising ostriches, much to the annoyance of his fiercely Anti-Communist, retiree neighbor, Jin-bong (Kim Mu-saeng of Il Mare and films from the 70s/80s like Only You, A Deep, Deep Place). They come to fisticuffs quite often in the film not because of opposing political views but because they truly despise each other. Rounding out this old boy's club is driver's-license-less Chan-kyung (Yang Taek-jo of Two Cops 1 and 2) whom one cop finally catches, leaving him severely limited in his mobility.

However, this is not a woman-less Alaskan town. Late 40-something Mi-seon runs what appears to be the sole local inn and pines away for the still un-betrothed Joong-bum. There is Pil-guk's adorable granddaughter Youn-hee (Lee Se-yeong of When I Turned Nine). And there is the 60-something, recently divorced In-ju, or "Seoul Lady," (Sunwoo Yong-rye of 70s films like A Common Woman, Feelings) who mysteriously enters this sleepy town and garners romantic interest from most of the old boys.

The patient flow of the days and the dialogue provide for the most enjoyable moments in Sweet Sixties. One example of this inching pace is the most subtle of sexual propositions offered up by In-ju towards the member of the old guard she finally selects. Joo definitely provides the most interesting portrayal, and his change of heart, although instigated by somewhat cliched origins, is still very much believable. Park and Song perform equally well in their steadied, humbled portrayals. As for the major plot twist, I must admit I didn't see it coming the first time around, but I saw the logic in the hints with my second viewing.

Interestingly, one aspect where the film fails is through the portrayal of Jin-bong, whose virulent Anti-Communism is caricatured to the point of ridicule. As a result of this unsympathetic vengeance, the audience can't even relate to him in the way one would regarding more fully developed, and thus more entertaining, villains. Another area where the film does not work well involves the less than smooth editing choices between scenes, presenting an inconsistency in the natural flow of the fishing village.

End result is a film that is at times sweet, at times overboard in its slapstick moments, and at times poorly structured. The film will not hit you hard nor resonate with you long after your viewing. Yet the plot twist does paint an interesting progressive picture. Such a twist works off the fact that stereotypes imposed on the elderly as crotchety, stubborn, and narrow-minded make such a progressive stand surprising. Thus, the film expands not only on our ideas of Korean cinema, but on our ideas of the elderly, teaching us that they've perhaps learned as much from the younger generation as the younger generation has learned from them.      (Adam Hartzell)

    When I Turned Nine

Not only did the young actress Lee Se-yeong spend 2004 with a bunch of 60-year olds in Sweet Sixties, but she also got to hang out with some kids her own age in Yun In-ho's When I Turned Nine. Her character gave a character in Sweet Sixties the nickname "Seoul Lady" and, appropriately enough, she gets to be a Seoul (Little) Lady herself in the character of Woo-rim, the new student from Seoul that enters the third grade class of a country village. Being the new kid in town, she has the opportunity to remake herself in their eyes and she liberally colors an identity that allows for a wonderful scene of out-of-the-mouths-of-babes philosophical tussling around national identity in the middle of the film and a horribly overdrawn melodramatic moment near the end.

Based on a best-selling novel by We Ki-chul, Woo-rim's city-fied entrance into this country-fied environment disrupts the dynamics of the friendships between Ki-jong (Kim Myeong-jae), Keum-bok (Na Ah-hyun) and the main character, Yeo-min (Kim Seok). Yeo-min is the leader of the third-graders who is known to knock around a few fifth-graders as well. Depicted as too cool to run to school in the rain, Yeo-min has learned from his father that he must "protect" women. Both Yeo-min and Woo-rim fancy each other and much of the film has them fluctuating back and forth between their mutual crushes. This greatly upsets the jealous Keum-bok, who herself has a crush on Yeo-min, and allows for some of the more interesting emotive scenes through the well-directed contortions of Keum-bok's expressive face. Two other subplots make up the film. One appears in sync with the overarching protection theme, Yeo-min's efforts to procure his mother (played by Jeong Seon-kyung of To You From Me) sunglasses to cover her injured eye. The other, an impotent philosopher who pays Yeo-min to courier his letters to his object of obsession, provides subtext for Yeo-min's later actions.

Although I was in agreement with my roommate at first when she exclaimed, "I don't like anyone in this film!", I realized with a second viewing that what was so annoying about the ebbing and flowing of trust and betrayal, of altruism and selfishness between this pack of third-graders was what can be annoying about kids in general. How they can truly be like that, fickle and loyal all in a single moment of a single day. Still, as someone whose mother taught him that women don't need to be protected, I can do without the patriarchal leanings here. Yet the physical abuse sometimes delivered within such a patriarchal worldview is critiqued through the positioning of Yeo-min's father as an admirable figure who never lays anything but a comforting hand on his family. Yeo-min is even begged not to fight by Woo-rim, a page out of Conduct Zero, but her call is ignored when certain patriarchal tenets are challenged.

One interesting exploration the film continually addresses is the issue of Class in South Korea. Class tension emerges often, such as Woo-rim's reaction to Yeo-min's dirty feet and assumptions made when Woo-rim claims she'd been robbed. The most interesting example of this is the whack-happy teacher who, when confronted with actions by Woo-rim that would, when placed within the logic of corporal punishment, warrant her receiving a few whacks from his ruler, leaves Woo-rim's privileged head unstruck. We know the teacher wouldn't hesitate to strike any of the other kids if found guilty of similar transgressions.

As Sweet Sixties was partly an attempt to exploit - and I don't mean that word in a negative way - the talent of Korea's elder thespians, When I Turned Nine appears partly to be an effort to further develop an acting tradition amongst Korea's youth. Sadly, the film doesn't succeed. Although Na is a standout, and Kim Seok's stoic nature is carried convincingly at times, most characters suffer from a certain stiffness, and lesser characters even appear scared or bored in their inappropriately distant looks in some scenes. Lee is capable of quality work in limited roles, such as her performance in Sweet Sixties, but her overall effort here is crippled somewhat by what appear to be poor editing choices that cut to takes where her emotions from the previous cut are not carried over. I'm sure directing children is not easy, but the child performances in Spring In My Hometown worked, so we know it can be done. As a result, I can dig out the interesting Class tension in When I Turned Nine, but I have to forgive and forget poor flow and execution as I excavate. Not even the best DVD packaging I've ever seen, (a blue-ridge binded, brown faux-notebook with a clever, gold-buckled brown strap), can make up for the missed takes and wooden-delivered dialogue one will find too often within.      (Adam Hartzell)

    The Wolf Returns

A badass Seoul cop Cheol-gwon ("Iron Fist," played by Yang Dong-geun, Address Unknown, Wild Card) is sick of his job. After accidentally locking himself up in a broken elevator for three days, he decides to call it quits. He gets transferred to a police station deep in the mountains of the Kangwon Province (again?). Cheol-gwon's new idyllic lifestyle, however, is disrupted by the happy-go-lucky local cop Jeong-sik (Hwang Jeong-min, Road Movie, Good Lawyer's Wife) who romanticizes the "action-filled" life in Seoul and gleefully welcomes the news that the village station is about to be closed down due to lack of crime. Panicking, Cheol-gwon decides to clandestinely engineer "crime sprees" in the neighborhood, not realizing that he is about to uncover a local secret treasure and attract a trio of art thieves to it in the process.

The Wolf Returns starts off like a formulaic action-comedy, a cops-and-robbers version of My Teacher Mr. Kim, but soon mutates into a strange species of its own, a quirky comic thriller-buddy film with wonderful bits of characterization, a sort of 70's rhythm-and-funk sensibility (Is that wah-wah guitar on the soundtrack in the final scene?!) and decidedly lopsided sense of humor. Whereas the movies like Mr. Kim and The Way Home used the remote countryside as a backdrop for the metropolitan characters to rediscover their inner selves, The Wolf Returns assumes a more impartial, or perhaps more nonchalant, attitude about the metropolis/hinterland dichotomy. Director and screenwriter Ku Ja-hong pokes fun at both the rustic country life and the jet-set city life: he does not sell short Jeong-sik's very real desire to be a city cop.

Yang Dong-geun's craggy, bulldog noggin gets a wonderful workout here (especially in a series of close-ups spiced with the mock-film noir voiceovers), but his performance is greatly enhanced by the tit-for-tat give-and-take with Hwang Jeong-min. Hwang, usually cast as soft-spoken, inwardly directed characters, lets loose with a terrific Smokey Bear grin on his face, stretching and bending his limbs with the suppleness and energy of a Max Fleischer cartoon figure. Their verbal sparring, Hwang shooting down in a pronounced (hilariously polite-sounding) Kangwon Province accent Yang's desperate, Tommy-gun delivery of one dumb idea after another about how to attract criminals to the village, is simply great to listen to.

The supporting cast is also terrific, bolstered by the screenplay that swindles us into expecting the typical character arcs only to pull the rug from under our feet. For instance, you think that the local tow-service-owner cum two-bit racketeer Kwang-su's (Jo Hee-bong, Chang Jin-young's lecherous superior in Singles) flirtation with Jeong-sik's girlfriend Doo-mi (Kim Hyeon-jeong, Bloody Beach) will result in him trounced in the butts by Jeong-sik, but their "love triangle" is resolved in a deadpan, "peaceful" way that actually grants Kwang-su a measure of respect and has Doo-mi eat and have her cake too. The art thieves are played by three of the most distinctive supporting actors working in Korean film today, Oh Kwang-rok, Oh Dal-su (both should be instantly recognizable to those who have seen Old Boy) and Yu Seung-mok (Saving My Hubby), who get to show off their theater-trained acting chops. I don't know about you, but for me, just watching Oh Kwang-rok crumple his face and proclaim a simple line like "It's a fake" in his inimitable Hamlet-sucking-lemon delivery ("It's A. Fey-kh.) is enough to get me rolling on the floor.

Even though The Wolf Returns has no ambition beyond being a genre-savvy, feel-good entertainment, Director Ku deserves some recognition for his inventiveness and wit. Even the title is not what it initially appears to be, that is, the "wolf" is not a metaphor for Cheol-gwon. What it really means I leave you to discover on your own, but unlike some Korean critics I did not mind the interjection of this "special character" into the narrative. It is entirely consonant with the whacked-out tone of this charming doozie of a film.     (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    Dance With the Wind

In western countries, ballroom dancing often evokes images of graceful, aristocratic couples twirling in luxurious settings. In South Korea it is quite the opposite. For decades it has been considered a sordid, morally dubious activity for philandering housewives and slick, scheming men -- who sometimes swindled large bundles of cash from their partners. Ordinary citizens considered the "cabaret bars" where such dancing took place to be a direct threat to the institution of the family. It was not until the late 1990s that a younger generation picked up the hobby abroad and re-introduced it in Korea under the new name of "dance sports," where it is now becoming increasingly popular.

Dance With the Wind, adapted from a 1999 book by acclaimed novelist Ji Seong-sa, tells the story of a man named Poongshik who, having fallen in love with dancing, plunges headfirst into this unseemly world. Torn between his idea of dance as art and a society that won't accept such ideals, Poongshik ends up dragged deeper and deeper (willingly or unwillingly) into a corrupt world he never intended to inhabit. However after he seduces the police chief's wife, a female detective named Yeonhwa is assigned to go undercover to collect evidence against Poongshik that will lead to his arrest. After the two get to know each other, Yeonhwa asks Poongshik to teach her how to dance.

Dance With the Wind is the directorial debut of Park Jung-woo, who probably ranks as Korea's most famous screenwriter. The man behind such famous stories as Attack the Gas Station, Last Present, Kick the Moon, Break Out and Jail Breakers takes a departure from the slapstick comedy of his previous works to present a nuanced and funny account of a self-proclaimed artist who will never be recognized as such. Park shows a particularly fine grasp for comic details, and watching this film makes you look forward to seeing what kind of projects he will go on to direct in the future.

Popular actor Lee Sung-jae portrays Poongshik as being both suave and passionate about his art, though perhaps a bit naive. He appears together with debut actress Park Sol-mi (who appeared in the TV dramas All-In and Winter Sonata) and everyone's favorite supporting actor Kim Soo-ro, who brings quite a few priceless moments to the film. Actresses Lee Kan-hee and Moon Jeong-hee are also quite memorable as two of Poongshik's many dance partners. Most impressive, though, is how good everyone looks while dancing. Aside from one minor character (the young woman at Poongshik's first dance school), none of the cast members are professional dancers, but four months of intensive training prior to shooting has resulted in some fabulous-looking moves.

With a few notable exceptions such as Singles and Once Upon a Time in a Battlefield, last year it seemed that Korean comedies had fallen into a rut. So far, 2004 has been more successful in moving away from the formulaic slapstick/funny-accent comedies to give us something a bit new. Cheers to the people behind Dance With the Wind for giving us a stylish, sexy and enjoyable film.      (Darcy Paquet)

    The Big Swindle

A young con artist Chang-hyuk (Park Shin-yang) is killed in a car crash, after snatching five billion won from the Korea Central Bank. The reconstruction of the crime (the original Korean title) by the police reveals that Chang-hyuk was operating in partnership with the veteran conman Mr. Kim (Baek Yun-shik) and that he had named his brother Chang-ho (also played by Park) as the recipient of a massive life-insurance indemnity. Believing that Chang-ho holds the key to the whereabouts of the booty, Mr. Kim's girlfriend In-gyung (Yeom Jeong-ah) befriends him. But neither she nor Mr. Kim is quite prepared for the truth behind Chang-hyuk's con game.

The Big Swindle is a fine example of a caper film. The subgenre's lineage embraces such disparate examples as the French noir classics (Jules Dassin's Rififi [1955] and Touche paz au grisbi [1954] featuring the immortal Jean Gabin) as well as the big-budget Hollywood productions that are part tourist travelogues and part vanity-fair star vehicles (the original Ocean's Eleven [1960], Topkapi [1964], How To Steal A Million [1966] with Audrey Hepburn). When superbly done, a caper film can be almost unbearably entertaining. I still remember the two young women sitting in front of me agitating themselves into tears, when Robert Redford was shockingly gunned down by Paul Newman in The Sting (1973), and the roar of disbelief and laughter that filled the theater one minute later.

The film is meticulously constructed, sharply designed, and, best of all, smart as hell. Writer-director Choi Dong-hun keeps the action fast and snappy, following the jazzy rhythm of his screenplay, full of endlessly quotable lines and wholly believable details and character traits (At one point during the planning session, a character blurts out, "How many years do we get in the can if we get caught?" Everyone glares at him and simultaneously spits on the ground to ward off bad luck). One of Choi's amusingly creative touches is the self-reflexive analogy he draws between filmmaking and con jobs. He tweaks our expectations while challenging us to distinguish between the actors playing their characters and the characters acting their assigned roles. In one astounding sequence, for instance, a flashback of a wild bank robbery seamlessly flows into a bank guard's re-enactment of the event.

The ensemble cast is uniformly excellent. As someone who has never made it past the first ten minutes of Kilimanjaro, overwhelmed by Park Shin-yang's spittle-flying histrionics, I was a bit worried about him taking on a dual role again. However, Park seems to have figured out how to modulate his quasi-Method acting style since The Uninvited. He is charmingly sneaky as Chang-hyuk and believably mousy, even touching, as his bookworm brother. He gets to speak excellent Russian as the latter, too! Yeom Jeong-ah (Tale of Two Sisters) is the requisite femme fatale, lithe and cool, but with an unexpected twinkle in her vampish, Siamese cat eyes. Other familiar faces include Lee Mun-shik (Once Upon a Time in a Battlefield), Pak Won-sang (Waikiki Brothers, R-Point) and Cheon Ho-jin (Doll Master), cast against type as a dogged but befuddled detective.

However, the movie belongs to Baek Yun-shik (Save the Green Planet) as Mr. Kim, who can switch his identities with the aplomb of a traveling businessman adjusting his tie in a hotel restroom. Baek masterfully adds a layer of pathos to his portrayal of this debonair, high-class scoundrel. Mr. Kim is a vainglorious peacock, who nonetheless takes great pride and joy in his ability to hoodwink other human beings, all the while suppressing the anxiety that age and changing times would someday catch up with him. When he pulls a shotgun out of the cabinet and barks, "It's okay to be ugly when you are old!" Baek makes the delivery exhilarating and melancholy at the same time.

If I think The Big Swindle stops short of being a masterpiece, it is because I would have preferred the film to go beyond its cleverness and peer more deeply into the inner workings of the characters. The final reel generates tremendous suspense less from our anticipation of the actual outcomes of the con game and more from our interest in the possibility of the characters overcoming their ingrained instinct to lie and backstab, and trusting one another. It is somewhat disappointing, therefore, when the film reaches its finale with an ironic twist that's more of a clever plot device than an honest confrontation among the characters stripped of their masks.

Possibly the most ingeniously scripted Korean film of the year, The Big Swindle richly deserved its enthusiastic support from domestic viewers and kudos from critics. It is highly recommended to anyone looking for Korean films that break away from the stereotypical molds of weepy melodramas, haughty arthouse hits and "extreme" exotica drenched in sex and violence.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    Arahan

The young action-meister Ryu Seung-wan's third feature film following the searing Die Bad and snazzy No Blood No Tears was one of the most highly anticipated films of 2004. In a reversal of the fortune that greeted No Blood No Tears, overwhelmingly supported by critics but ignored by the audience, Arahan was a relative commercial success at around 2 million tickets sold domestically, but drew mixed reviews. Some critics were obviously disappointed to find in Arahan an unabashedly commercial film operating within the perimeters of the Asian action genre, minus the spurts of dark, realistic violence and artistic temperament in his previous works.

Sanghwan (Ryu Seung-beom, Conduct Zero, No Comment) is an earnest but scared-y-cat traffic cop, abused left and right by low-rent thugs. He gets accidentally embroiled in the lives of the Seven Masters, the secret guardians of justice, whose leader Ja-un (An Sung-ki, Nowhere to Hide, Musa, Silmido) suspects that Sanghwan has a potential to become Maruchi, an enlightened master of martial arts. Sanghwan, to the annoyance of Ja-un's tomboy daughter Eui-jin (newcomer Yoon So-yi), agrees to be trained in martial arts. The plot thickens when the workers at an excavation site accidentally releases the renegade Master Heug-un (Jeong Doo-hong). Can Sanghwan and Eui-jin attain the status of Maruchi and Arachi in time to defend the city of Seoul against Heug-un?

The best way to approach Arahan is to consider it as a shrewd hybrid of the updated kung-fu wire action extravaganza and a modern superhero comic adaptation, a mutation of Steve Chau's Shaolin Soccer by way of Sam Raimi's Spider-Man. It is readily identifiable as a labor of love by a filmmaker deeply immersed in the tradition of Hong Kong kung-fu cinema, especially the early films of Jackie Chan. The film has so thoroughly digested this tradition that the homages to Chan, Yuen Woo-ping and other past masters of Hong Kong cinema may not be readily spotted. But it's there when Ryu Seung-beom smashes a thrown chair in mid-air with a jump-kick, as (the Korean expatriate) Hwang Cheng-li did in the original Drunken Master. It's there when the camera licks the length of the sword that penetrates a character, as in The Eighteen Bronzemen of Shaolin. It's there in the way Sang-hwan "rides" a wooden plank like a skateboard, flashing a devil-may-care, Jackie-Chan-right-before-he-trusses-his-opponent smile.

At the same time Arahan comes with colors and sensibilities uniquely Korean, whether it is the film's clever premise that ordinary working class "craftsmen" are in fact secret masters of martial arts, or the mollifying comic performances that taste warm and hometown like a good 'ol bean paste stew Director Ryu draws out of the film's senior supporting cast. Arahan does not feel like a hodgepodge of Hong Kong film references at all (as it would have been in the hands of a lesser talent) but like a contemporary descendant of the (counter-factual) cross-breeding between Hong Kong and Korean action cinema in the '70s that should have taken place in reality but did not, a few exceptions like Jeong Chang-hwa's Five Fingers of Death notwithstanding.

Ryu Seung-beom has star charisma to spare, but for me it is his attention to little naturalistic details that marks him out, as in his uproarious expression of slow burn when a hapless thug hits him with a chair. His counterpart Yoon So-yi is tall and attractive in an excellently non-cutesy way. As expected, the great An Sung-ki anchors the film with his rock-steady presence but he also totally surprises the viewers with both amazing wire-action moves and wonderfully deadpan comic timing. He is far more interesting as an actor in this slightly goofy role than in Silmido. Jeong Doo-hong once again delivers a solid supporting performance and coordinates the project's insanely complex martial arts moves and wire action. Special mention must also be made of the art direction team led by Jang Keun-yeong and Kim Kyung-hee, responsible for the impressive hangar-size set of the Yongsan altar, cinematography by Lee Joon-gyu and the special effects supervised by Demolition, among others. Except for the scenes obviously modeled after Shaolin Soccer, Arahan's CGI effects are pretty distinctive from both Hollywood and Asian patterns. As was the case with Conduct Zero, the Arahan team's effort to selectively use the technology to generate unique aesthetic effects is laudable, even if a few rough edges still remain.

There have been some criticisms centered on the drawn-out, exhausting climactic fight sequence. I do agree that the overuse of slow motion as well as too many shots of the younger Ryu and Jeong roaring like lions with mouths hanging break up the rhythm of the climactic fight, but I believe that Director Ryu had to work the desire to surpass Yuen Woo-ping or Cheng Hsiu-tung out of his system one way or another. If anything, he seems to err on the side of passion and commitment rather than calculation. For me it was interesting to see, even in this sequence, Ryu Seung-wan's Cinema of Pain struggling to burst out like a geyser of blood from a character's mouth.

Despite its admittedly self-contradictory qualities, Arahan is the most fun I have had with a 2004 Korean film so far (early September). It is deceptively experimental like Ryu's other works and signals a step forward toward the development of Korean genre cinema.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    Woman is the Future of Man

Woman is the Future of Man may not mark any major departures of style for celebrated auteur Hong Sang-soo, but the filmmaker is still in top form in this tightly-constructed, mesmerizing work. Although it features much of the awkward dialogue and cutting irony that has made Hong's previous films so distinctive, Woman feels in some ways both more shallow and more elusive than the works that preceded it. As such, it is a difficult film to make sense of, unless you have had previous exposure to the negative energy that fills Hong's cinematic world.

The plot takes place over a 30-hour period in which a university art lecturer (Yu Ji-tae) meets up with an old friend (Kim Tae-woo) who has recently returned from studying filmmaking in the U.S. While eating at a Chinese restaurant, they both start to reminisce about a woman they once dated, who now runs a bar in nearby Bucheon. They end up going to visit her, and despite the fact that she doesn't seem overly enthusiastic to see them again, the three spend the night at her apartment.

Of course what seems like an overly mundane plot still ends up containing much that is hard to pin down. Unlike his previous works, where Hong adopts an overall structure that gives the film a clear symmetry or form, here he largely avoids it. The film takes several unexpected detours, and then feels little need to go back and link them up with what came before. At 86 minutes the film is also quite short, and is bound to leave many viewers feeling like they were told a story with no conclusion. Perhaps Hong felt that in a work filled with people living without meaning or direction, a clearly-structured form would be inappropriate. You might even liken the film itself to interrupted sex.

Despite some differences, the film's two male characters are quite similar in their callous arrogance, as can be seen in a hilarious exchange with a young waitress in the Chinese restaurant. I found the character of Seonhwa, played by Seong Hyun-ah, to be more interesting, even though we get only a rare glimpse into what she is thinking. To a certain extent she may have given up on the world, but she seems to hide a toughness underneath.

As with all of his previous works, Hong's title for this film is an object of curiosity. It is a line taken from an Louis Aragon poem that Hong saw printed on a postcard in a French bookstore. Hong's tongue-in-cheek effort to explain it doesn't leave one feeling any wiser: "As the future is yet to come, it means nothing, and if the future is multiplied by man, the result is still zero. And if woman is the future of man, which is zero, then woman is also nothing..."

After having The Power of Kangwon Province (1998) and Virgin Stripped Bare by her Bachelors (2000) screened out of competition at the Cannes film festival, this year Woman became the first of Hong's works to be included in the festival's prestigious Official Competition. Screened to crowds of press and critics, the reaction was actually quite negative, save for a group of French critics who praised it highly. My personal take on this is that, if you haven't seen any of Hong's previous works, that you are unlikely to get much out of this one. The movie is also distinctly uncommercial, which only provided more fuel for critics out to pan it.

Perhaps if those critics had researched Hong's filmography, they would have realized that his films are something unique in world cinema. On an aesthetic level, no other filmmaker produces the same weird tempo created by Hong's editing, and the elegance which underlies the awkward surface of his films. This is not where you should look for lectures on social ills or for moving tributes to humanity, but if you want an honest and sober effort to depict something truthful in human relationships, then this film is something you will enjoy more and more with each repeated viewing.      (Darcy Paquet)

    Low Life

One of the few bogus things about attending the Far East Film Festival in Udine, Italy, is the fact that I miss the San Francisco International Film Festival. It's somewhat ironic that I miss it because it played a major part in why I follow South Korean cinema. When I first came to San Francisco, they featured a retrospective of Jang Sun-woo's work. And the next year, Im Kwon-taek received the festival's Akira Kurosawa Award for lifetime achievement by a director. Having awarded Im, it only makes sense that the festival would present Im's latest film, Low Life, in 2005. I'm saddened that I'll miss seeing this film on the big screen, since the gorgeous set design would look even more magnificent than it did on my TV.

Who better to travail the political and apolitical gangster under and upper world of South Korea in the 50's, 60's, and 70's than Im, a director who was able to maintain a filmography across this entire era and onwards. Heading back to his action genre roots with films like the successful Son of a General franchise, the story begins with Choi Tae-woong (Cho Seung-woo - Chunhyang, The Classic) entering a rival school and beating up its leaders. In response to this humiliation, Park Seung-moon (Yoo Ha-joon) stabs Choi in the thigh and runs away after doing so. Choi then stutter steps the entire way to Park's upper-class house with the knife still embedded. Choi wants the "bastard" to finish the job, that is, pull the knife out of his thigh. Park's father, an independent politician named Park Il-won (Kim Jeong-su), agrees and demands the same of his son. After which, Park's father decides to adopt presumably orphaned Choi into the family, which also includes Park Hae-ok (Kim Min-sun - Memento Mori, A.F.R.I.K.A.) whom Choi will eventually, . . . uhm, . . . marry. Choi and his brother/brother-in-law Park will take different trajectories in their adult paths, Choi down the road of further gangster-hood and Park the path of student activism, although Park will eventually come around to Choi's world when it morphs into crony capitalism within the construction industry. Throughout this tale of Choi's "Raging Years" (the alternative English title), Im weaves the raging political events of the 60's and 70's, such as Park Chung-hee's military coup and surveillance of the populace.

Low Life's primary problems center around how much is packed into it, requiring too many drastic shifts from one scene to the next. Once Choi comes around to paying proper 'filial devotion' to his biological mother, (turns out he wasn't really an orphan), this moral statement is just dropped in the film and never returned to. We know nothing of Choi's mother after this supposedly important meeting. As a result of so much to tell, too much of it is told rather than shown, and some of the emotional transitions seem less plausible, even unintentionally comical, such as when Choi punches his mentor, Oh Sang-pil (Kim Hak-joon, a veteran musical theatre performer), to keep him from committing suicide. Still, those familiar with Im will note his trademark scene where we focus in on the anguish of a woman's face while having sex or giving birth. Here we have the latter, the sight of which Choi equates with divinity.

Choi is a character many might be incapable of identifying with since he's prone to yell out misogynistic threats that I can't even desensitize from long enough to type here. Perhaps Im presents a better portrayal of the 'real' gangster than we have found in Korean comedies or action flicks. But, one doesn't have to like or admire a character to identify with them. The protagonist in Peppermint Candy, another film where a character who exists outside politics is Forest-Gump-ed into Korean history, is a good example of accomplishing such difficult audience alignment with a loathsome character. Low Life doesn't accomplish the same.

Yet, there is much surrounding Low Life that fascinates me. I can neither confirm nor deny the accuracy of the representation of the period, but art director Joo Byung-do's sets and prop master Kim Ho-gil's artifacts replicating the streets and lives of 1960's Myungdong are truly wonderful. In particular, I found myself wishing Q was there next to me while watching so I could ask the significance of each Korean movie poster and marquee that briefly appeared. (I know the significance of the films of the two Jameses - Dean and Bond.) Im's portrayal of movie censors is quite intriguing as well, particularly due to Low Life's own exclusion and inclusion of scenes similar to the two we screen ourselves which are eventually forced out by censors of the movie made within the movie. A sex scene is cut out along with a film critical of American military occupation. Rare for a recent Im film, Low Life itself has no sex scenes save the one eventually cut out by the censors. Whereas, Im's representations of American occupation, ambiguous scenes of GIs walking around with Korean women in the background, remain in Low Life while the direct, negative critique in the film within the film is stricken by the censors.

This portrayal of the censors had me recalling Kim Hong-joon's video essay, My Korean Cinema, wherein director Kim reflects on the censored cuts of Ha Kil-jong's March of Fools. And Kim actually makes a brief appearance in Low Life as a man accused of being a Communist by a taxi driver. This scene places him in a police station amongst young adult men who are forced to cut their hair, a reality of the 60's referenced in March of Fools. In addition to this male humiliation, Im includes the treatment young women received from cops measuring the height of their skirts off the knee.

To me, it is all that happens around the narrative that is most engaging about Low Life. Outside of the excellent climactic scene where the connection between politics, student activism, and Choi's thuggish business practices is underscored, it is the signs and symbols of this Korean era that stay with me most. Im's reputation precedes him here, thus leaving me disappointed with number 99. I just hope everything jells better for number 100.      (Adam Hartzell)

    Clementine

There's something to be said about bad movies. That something is that they can underscore what makes a great movie. Bad movies bring heightened attention to the importance of certain aspects of film such as narrative, editing, and emotional subtlety. Although lapses in the narrative fall under the responsibility of the screenwriter, weak editing the editor, and lacks of emotional nuance the actors and actresses, all of these are also under the greater responsibility of the director to make sure each combines into a satisfying whole. A director needs to instruct the editing staff on how to structure the takes, she needs to work with the screenwriter to address any narrative obstacles that arise during filming, and he needs to utilize each actor's strengths without exposing their weaknesses. Clementine is a lesson in much of what makes a bad movie and the onus of responsibility regarding its failure lies greatly in the hands of director Kim Du-yeong.

The basic plot revolves around fictitious former tae-kwon-do champion Kim Jun-lee (Lee Dong-jun) whom we are initially told ended up a single father due to the death of his daughter Sa-rang's (Eun Seo-woo of Phone) mother while giving birth. Kim's violent spontaneity make it difficult for him to hold a job as a cop and eventually he gets rounded up with a group of gangsters which leads to the eventual kidnapping of Sa-rang to force him to compete in an illegal cage match. Although there's a major puzzle piece poorly fitting into the plot involving a prosecutor (Kim Hye-ri), a woman with a past revealed via the most outrageous of explanations, the film weakly builds towards the cage match. That cage match is with Jack Miller, played by Steven Seagal. Obviously, his "star" factor was used to merely tease viewers, because he doesn't really enter until the end, and when he does, it is so unbelievably anti-climactic you wonder why he's there at all. His fighting skills are never fully utilized. In fact, the spectacle of tae-kwon-do is not used as one would expect in this film. Our less than darling Clementine could have saved itself as a film made for simply visceral pleasure, like any other film within the porn genre, a nomenclature net I cast wider than most and one I do not necessarily intend negatively. Seagal doesn't even seem to try to act at all, as if he regrets caging himself within this horrible film, horrible even considering his filmography. Whereas Seagal's performance is poorly emoted, the rest of the cast, from our lead to Kim Hye-ri to even little Eun, are directed towards over-emotive heights to the point of being melodramatically pornographic.

It didn't need to be this way, because Clementine begins with a topic ripe for exploration. The beginning of the film alludes to an incident from the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah, where South Korean skater Kim Dong-song was disqualified for improperly blocking United States skater Apolo Anton Ohno. The referee's decision resulted in Ohno winning the gold medal. The world was reminded of this incident when Ahn Jung-hwan, after scoring the tying goal during South Korea's match with the United States in the 2002 World Cup, mimicked a speed skater. To the delight of Ahn's home fans, this performance was meant to mock Ohno's controversial win. In Clementine, we have our 'hero' Kim Jun-lee losing his tae-kwon-do gold medal round to the U.S. on what is portrayed as outright fallacious judging. Little did director Kim know while making this film that South Korea would again find itself feeling cheated at the expense of the U.S. in the 2004 Summer Olympics when judging mistakes led to a gold medal being awarded to U.S. gymnast Paul Hamm over Yang Tae-young in the male all-around. Regardless of which way your knee jerks, seeing the reactions to these incidents as evidence of Anti-Americanism or American Imperialism, these incidents would provide wonderful grist for a cinematic mill. Yet, director Kim doesn't harvest this beginning for anything more than extremely weak motivation for Kim Jun-lee's fight at the end of the film. Such demonstrates the film's major flaws - plot points brought in and dropped out with haphazard development, leaving the viewer wondering where the hell this film is going to go next.

The question arises with bad movies, however, if such awfulness was intended or not. As the old adage goes, a bad movie can be so bad, that it's good. A bad film then steps into camp and other forms of parody that provide entertainment through the laughter surrounding the mere ridiculousness of it all. Clementine has so-bad-it's-good moments, such as the totally random appearance of actor Lee Bo-seong briefly reprising his role as Inspector Lee from Two Cops II and III and the bizarre declaration of love to Seagal by Sa-rang during the credits. But also within the credits is a didactic narration demanding all families - apparently even insane ones like the one presented here - should stay together. This moral at the end suggests that director Kim was trying for more than he and his ensemble were capable of in Clementine. Only time will tell if Clementine will ever reach the point of awfulness where it transcends into the realm of classic B-Movie fare ala Ed Wood. Presently however, all that remains is a lesson in how bad a movie can be to remind us why we treasure the great ones, . . . or, jeez, even the simply OK ones.      (Adam Hartzell)

    Windstruck

Aside from Taegukgi, another of the year's most highly anticipated movies was Windstruck. Within a short period of four weeks, it had garnered a box office of 2,229,000 admissions, and become one of the top four domestic movies of the year. It is no wonder that the show would be a big hit, especially since the director is none other than Kwak Jae-yong, who was responsible for the success of the 2001 hit, My Sassy Girl. Also, the main stars -- Jeon Ji-hyun, one of the most popular actresses in Korea and Asia and up-and-coming actor Jang Hyuk -- contributed to its success.

In fact, some critics have retorted that Windstruck is just another sappy version of My Sassy Girl. This is true, to a certain extent. However, you could say that Kwak's style of directing has been recombined to give a new bittersweet formula. It seems that Kwak has drawn from his experience in directing comedies such as My Sassy Girl and melodramas such as The Classic, and decided to try both formulas in the same project. The result you get is: Windstruck!

If you are looking for a good comedy to watch, Windstruck might not exactly be the one to provide you with the most laughter. Switching between sappy and hilarious moments, this movie brings you on a roller coaster ride of outbursts of different emotions. The role played by Jeon Ji-hyun is a happy-go-lucky police officer, whose sole reason of joining the police is because that was her dead sister's ambition in life. Jang Hyuk plays a high school teacher who had lead an ordinary life until the day he met Jeon's character. Instead of a sedentary life as a teacher, he finds himself entwined in her day-to-day policing activities such as chasing after criminals.

In an interesting opening, the movie has Jeon, standing at the top of a building, attempting to commit suicide, with Jang Hyuk as the background narrator. It then moves on to a flashback and switches to a narrative mode to tell the story of the preceding events which eventually lead to the opening scene. Throughout the narration, we witness the encounters of our two protagonists and how they eventually end up together. There were a couple of hilarious moments and scenes which tickle the audience's funny bone.

However as the story slowly proceeds, it feels that it is being too far-fetched to accommodate so many ideas. One might feel that the plotline is ridiculous at many times, and might start wondering at some point if the film is a fantasy, ghost story, romance or an ultra-dramatic melodrama. Occupying an array of so many genres, Windstruck could be said to be one of a kind. Despite that, Kwak has attempted to insert too many of the ideas that he used in My Sassy Girl, especially the last scene, which entirely spoils the movie.      (Kit Lim)

    Face

One of the biggest disappointments of the 2004 summer season has been the terrible under-performance of the horror film genre. Aside from the critical and box-office success of the Viet Nam-themed R-Point, (To Catch a Virgin Ghost did fairly well too, but it is, strictly speaking, a comedy) this year's straightforward horror films performed between mild disappointments and dismal failures in box office terms, and were absolute disasters in critical terms. Interestingly, all these films seem to have failed for different reasons, aside from possibly one common denominator, the bad screenplay.

Face is at least based on an interesting premise. Hyun-min (Shin Hyun-joon, the sourface hero of Bichunmoo [2000], quite convincing as a misanthrope) is a specialist in recovering a dead person's identity by reconstructing his or her face. (Fans of mystery films might recall that facial reconstruction also figures in the Michael Apted thriller Gorky Park [1983]) He reluctantly takes on the job of identifying the victims of a horrid serial murder case. The victims have turned up as skeletons, with all flesh dissolved away with some chemical solvent. Sun-yeong (Song Yun-ah, Jail Breakers) joins him in the investigation as a junior partner and they develop a friendship. Meanwhile, Hyun-min is plagued by the visions of a long-haired, funeral-clothes-garbed female ghost, who seems to have apprenticed in ghosting skills under Sadako from Ring (1998). She pops up in his bathroom. She pops out of a puddle on the living room floor. And so on. Darn, it's so scary.

First and foremost among the movie's many problems is that its plot makes no sense whatsoever. The screenplay credited to Pak Cheol-hee and three other writers tries hard to plant red herrings and manipulate the viewer's expectations, only to hinge the entire film on a ridiculously flimsy "twist" ending. Looking at Hyun-min crawling away in abject horror from the "final revelation," you will either feel insulted, like being subject to a sales pitch by some beer-smelling cretin in a bar, or hang your head in embarrassment. This revelation comes from absolutely nowhere (let's not even go into the numerous lapses in logic required for the characters to arrive at this point) and yet is utterly predictable: it is a fine example of how the obsession with a "surprise ending" can ruin a screenplay. It might not have mattered that much if director Yu Sang-gon chose to make the film in a deliberately unrealistic style, perhaps in the manner of some Italian gialli. However, Yu chose to make the movie in a naturalistic mode with overtones of a police procedural, accentuating the senselessness of the plot.

The true shame is that Face is in fact a polished production with a lot going for it in the technical end. Choe Ji-yeol's cinematography, Lee Han-na's music (especially her use of the wailing female vocals) and the veteran Pak Kok-ji's editing are all proficient and envelop the film in professional sheen. Face also does include several effective scenes, such as the long, dialogue-less sequence where Hyun-min uncovers a key piece of evidence in a sand quarry near the Han River. Here Yu keeps things quietly menacing without resorting to herky-jerky camerawork that mars the similar sequences in many other movies.

In the end, I believe the biggest problem with Face is that director Yu Sang-gon was simply not interested in making a horror film. It is one thing to attempt to make a horror film that's different: it is quite another to be saddled with a screenplay so chock full of horror-film conventions and refuse to honor them. I was surprised to learn that Yu was responsible for the wonderfully droll and heart-warming short film Superman in Early Summer (2001). Unless I have missed another one directed by Yu that's an in-your-face gorefest, this is not the kind of short based on which a director is given a feature-length project involving the vengeful ghost of a woman and a vat of chemicals in which human bodies are dissolved.

Indeed, there is a sequence in Face where a character falls into a tub filled with chemical solvent, and Yu films it from a bird's-eye-view, totally distancing the viewers from the vista, and hurriedly moves ahead, as if he is ashamed to have to dwell on such crass, exploitative materials. However, as Stephen King has put it, after all the delicate fine-tuning of plots and characters are done, the writer/filmmaker of a horror film must "don the monster mask and go booga-booga." What's the point of trying to make some moving human drama out of a material that screams in block letters, "Faceless Ghost!" "Melting Human Flesh!" "Scary Ain't It?" It's like a producer giving Martin Scorsese Nicolas Pileggi's screenplay for Goodfellas and asking him to make a musical out of it: "You know, like you did with New York, New York, only with real wiseguys this time. De Niro can sing, can't he? Whaddaya say, Marty?"

I have to chalk Face up as another disappointing instance of talented Korean filmmakers just not getting the point of a genre film, be it horror or science fiction, while putting so much energy and skills in rigorously reproducing its form from the superior examples from outside Korea.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    Someone Special

Comic romances are a dime a dozen in Korea, and anyone who has spent much time watching Korean cinema will recognize the basic plot structure: young, good-looking (middle class or rich) man meets cute, spunky woman by chance; they go through some outlandish experiences together, and then eventually the threat of something sad pushes them together in a final burst of melodrama. When they're well directed, such movies can be a lot of fun. If not, they're instantly forgettable.

Someone Special seems to start off all wrong. Our male lead is neither cute nor particularly young; the role is played by Jeong Jae-young, better known for acting nasty and brutish in films like Silmido or No Blood, No Tears. His love interest is played by actress Lee Na-young (Please Teach Me English), who looks fantastic in the cosmetics ads plastered around Seoul, but here she's clumsy, badly dressed and mumbles a lot. She's not spunky, she's just weird. To top it off, the film's sock-it-to-you tragedy comes less than two minutes after the opening credits, before we even get to know anything about the main character. What was Jang Jin thinking?

Of course, I'm joking. Someone Special is line-for-line more charismatic than even the most successful of the formula films described above. Our main characters -- a moody, lovesick baseball player and a woman who seems unnaturally attracted to him -- seem real because we rarely come across anyone similar in Korean cinema. They are both more ordinary and more distinctive than the typical movie couple.

More than anything, the film is well-written. Up until now, the career of film and theatre director Jang Jin has been made up of two separate currents: a physical, talky humor in the films he's directed himself: Guns & Talks (2001), The Spy (1999), and The Happenings (1998); and more overt melodrama in the screenplays he has written for other directors: Ditto (2000), A Letter From Mars (2003), and "The Church Sister" from No Comment (2002). Only in this latest film does he seem to fuse the best of both tendencies. It's a bit quieter than his previous works, but his distinctive humor is as sharp as ever. And without intending to sound patronizing, I can say that Jang's latest work feels more mature, as if life experiences underlie the bittersweet humor portrayed onscreen.

One thing that might strike some viewers as odd is the way the movie sometimes crosses into outright sentimentality, without clear markers to show that it is meant to be ironic. Our hero seems to ask everyone he meets what love is, for example. They often humor him with a serious response. If the film pokes fun at sentimentality, it nonetheless commits the same sin itself from time to time. Personally, I like this -- you could argue it makes the film's point of view more complex.

My favorite part of Someone Special (the original Korean title means "A Woman I Know," or "A Woman Who Knows") is a film-within-a-film that we catch during our couple's first date. Acted out by Jeong and Lee themselves, the oh-so familiar plot and sarcastic narration is a glorious, cutting sendup of contemporary Korean cinema. Just as Jang seems to be laughing both at and with the characters in Someone Special, his skewering of Korean melodrama in this segment can probably be taken as equal parts ridicule and affection.

And I can't close this review without a small cheer for the acting. Before the film's release, hardly anyone I spoke to believed that Jeong Jae-young could pull off the part of a romantic lead. The unconventional casting must have had investors nervous, but Jeong's performance ended up being one of the film's biggest talking points. The part of Yi-yeon meanwhile was written with Lee Na-young in mind. She hesitated before taking the role -- perhaps not wanting to look too unglamorous in two films in a row -- but to her credit, she signed on and did a standout job.      (Darcy Paquet)

    My Mother, the Mermaid

This sophomore effort by director Park Heung-shik (I Wish I Had a Wife) has all the markings of a crowd-pleasing romantic comedy. The big draw is top star Jeon Do-yeon taking on a dual role for the first time, paired with Pak Hae-il (hot from Memories of Murder).

Na-young (Jeon Do-yeon) is a pretty but demure travel agent, living with her parents. Her mother Yeon-soon, played by the veteran actress Ko Doo-sim (Saving My Hubby), is a former haenyeo (female divers who make a living by catching shellfish) and now a back-scrubber in a public bath. She is a barely literate, tough-as-nails fiftysomething who spits everywhere and cusses like a macho gangster in an Oliver Stone movie. (The film opens with a cleverly staged sequence in which Yeon-soon is seemingly grieving over someone's death during a funeral service, only to be revealed as accusing the dead man of "dying irresponsibly" after having borrowed her husband's money) Na-young is desperately embarrassed by her mother's shameless, money-grubbing behavior and equally disillusioned by her father's refusal to fully engage with his life. When her father, sentenced to a terminal disease, disappears, Na-young traces him back to Yeon-soon's hometown, a remote island in Southwest (Even though the haenyeo is usually associated with Cheju Island, director Park made the characters converse in Cholla Province dialect. The authentic Cheju Island dialect would have been nearly incomprehensible to most Koreans). There, she is caught in a time slip, a la Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) and befriends her own mother as a young diver, courted by the younger version of her father, a postal worker.

When I first saw My Mother, The Mermaid, I was greatly impressed by Jeon Do-yeon and Ko Doo-sim's powerhouse performances, but a bit disappointed by the film itself. At the initial glance, it appeared too gentle and too dependent on its brilliant actors to carry the film forward, making half-hearted attempts at squeezing the viewer's tear ducts but not really presenting a powerful narrative in command of the viewer's undivided attention.

The second and third viewings have not changed my opinion that the whole of the film seems less than the sum total of its parts. Fortunately, they have made me realize that the pleasure derived from the parts is considerable. Freed from the need to follow the plot and chart the character arc, we can sit back and let our hearts resonate with the stirringly intricate and nuanced performances of the principal performers.

I hate sounding like a skipping CD, but Jeon Do-yeon is absolutely brilliant here as she is anywhere. She is no less impressive essaying the role of soft-hearted and introverted Na-young than playing an uncultured but spunky Yeon-soon. It would have been so easy to turn the former into an annoyingly self-centered twerp, and the latter into a cartoon caricature defined by her funny accent, tanned skin and "cute" pigtails. Jeon resists all the easy choices and paints her characters in layers and layers of shadings, so much so that the range of her performance is difficult to appreciate in just one viewing.

Pak Hae-il is dashing and handsome, devoid of the lethal and metallic beauty that he displayed in Memories of Murder. However, his presence is still so striking that we have trouble believing that he would age into the spineless old man depicted in the film: this disjuncture between Jin-guk (father)'s young and old selves is one of the film's major weaknesses.

Ko Doo-sim is also simply wonderful, matching Jeon stroke by stroke in technical adeptness and restraint. She projects life force of her own whenever she is on screen, and when Yeon-soon tearfully berates her husband for not standing up to his illness, Ko effortlessly communicates a lifetime of unarticulated disappointment, pathos and love without a shred of affectation.

It must be admitted, too, that the sensitive direction by Park Heung-shik and the warm and effusive cinematography by Choe Yeong-taek (Oasis, Volcano High), almost entirely done with natural lighting, collaborate well with the actors in mounting effective set pieces.

Despite its star wattage, My Mother, The Mermaid is neither a mainstream romantic comedy nor a well-calculated tear-jerker. Instead, it turns out to be a soulful tribute to motherhood, especially those Korean mothers who have foregone respect and understanding in their efforts to survive and care for their (indeed often totally useless) husbands and (indeed often totally unappreciative) children. Perhaps the best thing about the film is that it is not one of those disgustingly hypocritical melodramas that portray the grown children weeping over their (dead) mothers (and the meals that the mothers cooked for them, like the indentured servants that they were), whom they have exploited and kept silenced throughout the latter's lives.

As played by the beautiful-in-her-crow's-feet Ko Doo-sim, this Mother does not need the patronizing "appreciation" from her children, thank you very much.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    Everybody Has Secrets

The Han sisters -- the elder, married Ji-young; bookish middle sister Sun-young and the free-spirited Mi-young -- find the placid surface of their lives upturned with the arrival of Soo-hyun, a suave sweet-talker who seems to be the perfect man. Mi-young first discovers him at a club and brings him home to meet the family, however he ends up serving as a catalyst for the unleashing all of the household's repressed emotions.

A remake by Jang Hyun-soo (Ray Bang) of Gerard Stembridge's Irish feature About Adam (2000), Everybody Has Secrets is an attractive, slickly-packaged feature that highlights the development of Korea's star system. Lee Byung-heon (JSA, A Bittersweet Life) is probably a leading choice for the best-looking man in Korea, and this film is structured almost as an homage to his sex appeal. Lee plays Soo-hyun in such a way that his famous so-called "killer smile" remains a mystery right up to the final scenes.

As for the women, although Kim Hyo-jin (Legend of the Evil Lake) lacks some charm as Mi-young, the elder sisters steal the show. Choo Sang-mi (Turning Gate, A Smile) as the married Ji-young has long been known for the intelligence and sensuality she brings to her roles, and here she slowly and elegantly allows herself to come under Soo-hyun's spell. Meanwhile Choi Ji-woo -- a huge star in neighboring Japan after the success of her TV drama Winter Sonata -- puts her considerable talent on display in portraying a woman whose deeply-buried passions suddenly fight for expression.

Released in the peak summer season where it was quickly overwhelmed by competition from more popular Hollywood and Korean titles, Everybody Has Secrets was arguably more successful in Japan, where it turned a modest-sized release into a more sustained box office performance. As such, the film represents not only a showcase of the Korean star system, but also an example of how Korean films have come to rely ever more on audiences in Japan.

If the film ultimately falls a bit short, this is perhaps because it relies a little too much on the plot's catchy but thin central premise. It takes more than good acting to create an engaging and memorable comedy, and it would have been nice if there was a bit more happening in a narrative sense. Still, several highly amusing scenes from this film stand out in the memory, so it's probably worth a watch if one's expectations are kept in check.      (Darcy Paquet)

    The Doll Master

Dear Editor, I am ba~ack!

Yes, it's Yours Truly, the dippy-and-trippy-but-not-uppity stand-in for our mutual associate, Professor Kim. He's had too much Caravella limoncello mixed with champagne during the New Year's Eve. From the look of it, I might have to take over for a couple more reviews.

BTW, I hope there weren't any protests from the Matrix otaku constituency over the little remark in my last contribution. Let me post a correction here, if you don't mind. I never meant to call Matrix Relocated a glorified sunglass commercial. What I meant to say was, it's a sunglass and leather wardrobe commercial. Evidently I did not pay sufficient attention to the comprehensiveness of the flick's fashion statement.

All right already, Professor Kim, I am the writer here, and I can darn well start my review with any length of pointless chitchat. Stop screaming! Shoo! Go play with your cat!

Now, what have I got to say about Doll Master?

Doll Master takes a hoary horror film cliche especially well-developed in Japanese cinema, a living doll, and tries to jazz it up for contemporary Korean viewers. For that purpose, director/writer Jeong Yong-gi and the producers seized upon the ball-joint dolls that have articulated limbs and anime-style big eyes. First developed in Germany, these dolls have since acquired some disturbing air of sexuality in the hands of avant-garde European artists like Hans Bellmer. More recently they've become all the rage in Japan. Miike Takashi's "Box" segment from Monster... Extremes (2004) and Oshii Mamoru's Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, (2004) to cite but two examples, present the darker and taboo-shaking images of these dolls. It turns out that quite a few Korean youngsters (and maybe oldsters, too) own these ball-joint dolls, to the extent that the filmmakers apparently considered them a core group of viewers for this project. These dolls are indeed adorable and beautiful, strangely lifelike even though the proportions of their anatomy are all wrong, and yes, they can be major-ly creepy.

Instead of mumbling like Marlon Brando with cotton-balls in his mouth, I'll cut to the chase. Doll Master is pretty badly put together. In some sections it is flat-out incompetent.

Characters in this movie are not just dumb, they are irredeemably, incorrigibly stupid. Near the climax, Hae-mi (pretty but harried Kim Yu-mi, Phone), all torn and bleeding, gets one chance to make a telephone call. Instead of calling for the police, fire department, Ghostbusters or anybody else who could conceivably haul her butt out of the house, who does she call? Her mom, so that she could find out her childhood doll's name, and thus a plot point could receive exposition. That's merely one example. How about the numerous gaffes and "huh?" moments like car keys appearing and disappearing at will, or a laptop computer that mysteriously creeps into the frame in a key murder scene?

The narrative lurches from one set-up to another with the rhythm of a spatula turning over a two-pound hamburger patty in your local diner. The production quality is good overall, but even the doll-motif designs of the house, initially fascinating and riveting, become silly when the filmmakers put a mannequin inside a bathroom cubicle, in place of the lid of a toilet seat. And of course the dummy crunches a poor character into an origami sculpture, while she is taking a dump. What a way to go! As Aunt Li