2008

   The year 2008 started with the industry still reeling from a very tough 2007. Nonetheless there was some good news early on, with two unexpected hits in January and February: Lim Soon-rye's handball drama Forever the Moment, which sold over 4 million tickets, and the low-profile thriller The Chaser, which thanks to strong word of mouth was well on its way to selling even more tickets. At the same time, Night and Day, the eighth film by Hong Sangsoo, was invited to screen in competition at the Berlin International Film Festival, where it was roundly praised by some critics, and criticized as being too long by others. Bad news awaited the film on its commercial release in Korea, though, with shockingly low box office returns.

Looking ahead, the year will see new films from several established names. Kim Jee-woon returns with his ambitious spaghetti Western The Good, the Bad, the Weird, scheduled for a July release, and Park Chan-wook's long-awaited vampire movie Thirst may be ready in time for December. Lee Yoon-ki of This Charming Girl fame will shoot a new film with acclaimed actress Jeon Do-yeon, and rising director Yu Ha is shooting an ambitious period film about a gay love triangle involving royalty (sound familiar?). Meanwhile Lee Joon-ik, director of King and the Clown, has a big-budget release lined up for summer in Sunny, about a woman who travels to Vietnam in the 1970s as a singer to entertain Korean troops fighting in the war.    (written on Mar. 10)

     Reviewed below:    Forever the Moment (Jan 10)  --  Hellcats (Jan 17)  --  The Chaser (Feb 14)  --  The Guard Post (Apr 3)  --  The Good, the Bad, the Weird (Jul 17).

    Forever the Moment

Handball is not the most glamorous of sports, which may explain why Forever the Moment ranks as the world's first handball movie. But like any sport, it can offer up moments of drama, as when the South Korean women's handball team competed at the 2004 Athens Olympics. The efforts of the players made them briefly famous to the multitudes of South Korean viewers who were following the match on TV. The fact that four years later, a film has been made from this story, and that it has emerged as the first smash hit of 2008, is not in itself surprising. Yet this is in some ways a surprising movie.

The director, for example. Lim Soon-rye made an acclaimed debut in 1996 with Three Friends, the story of three high school graduates hesitating at the threshold of adulthood. In 2001 she followed this up with another story about men, the musical drama Waikiki Brothers. Like her debut, it earned her strong praise from local critics, but both films flopped at the box office and they never really caught on with international film festivals, either. In general, her work displays a strong interest in everyday frustrations and injustices, and a clear-eyed vision that never romanticizes her subjects -- though as viewers we share in the compassion she feels. She's not blockbuster material, in other words. Which is why it's such a surprise that she made a low-budget sports film that expresses so much of her personal style, and that it became a blockbuster.

If there are thrilling sports movies, and emotional sports movies, then Forever the Moment definitely fits in the latter category. The long prelude to the Olympics involves (for us viewers) very little handball. Lim is more interested in the characters, and how they all relate to each other. Mi-sook (Moon So-ri) is a veteran player who won a gold in Barcelona but has since seen the team slide in quality. With a young son and a husband who can't pay his debts, she gets a job at a discount mart and takes her son along to handball practice. Hye-kyung (Kim Jung-eun) has retired from playing but has been successful as the coach of a pro team in Japan. When the coach of Korea's national squad suddenly quits, she is asked to fill in -- but she is faced with an undisciplined team filled with older and younger players, and hardly anyone in their prime.

Much of the dramatic action of the first three-quarters of the film involves the changing relationships between the extended cast of characters. Some of the standard developments we expect in any sports movie pass by unacknowledged, and some patience is required of us -- in a sense, we are obliged to relate to the team members as ordinary people rather than heroes in the making. When the games do start, however, our patience is rewarded with a truly gripping final reel. Director Lim is not one to exaggerate emotions, but there is no need here. Although not what you would think of as exceptional, the unfolding of the final match is dramatic and suspenseful enough as it is.

Great, climactic moments in the movies are often transformational: they vanquish tragedy and usher in Happily Ever After. But this film is too honest to suggest that that is what is at stake here. The Korean title translates as "The Best Moment in Our Lives," and while a bit sappy, it does more or less capture the point of the story. The moment is important because the players have decided to invest so much into it, even if all they will ultimately take away from it is the memory. We know that everything will return to normal soon after the game ends, and we are already familiar with the rather dull backdrop to their lives back in Korea. This juxtaposition of the thrilling sports finale and the film's stubborn realist point of view is perhaps its greatest strength. The dreams of the women are in themselves bittersweet, which is something you can't say of the average sports movie.      (Darcy Paquet)

    Hellcats

Relationship drama Hellcats centers around three women who live together in an old neighborhood of Seoul. Ami (Kim Min-hee, below) is a 29-year old screenwriter who has been holed up in a motel trying to finish a screenplay, but like most people involved in the film industry, her career is not progressing smoothly. Frustrated with life as it is, she receives a further shock when her boyfriend Won-seok double-crosses her. Furious and disoriented, she ends up channeling her energies into two things that look likely to get her into further trouble: alcohol and a hot-looking accountant named Seung-won.

Meanwhile Ami is getting little sympathy from her older sister Young-mi (Lee Mi-sook of Untold Scandal fame), who rents out a room to her. A successful 41-year old interior designer working on a new theatrical production, Young-mi has an active love life, and has lately gotten entangled with the much younger Gyeong-su. However an unexpected surprise is awaiting her on her next visit to the doctor's office.

Young-mi also has a daughter in high school named Kang-ae (An So-hee from the phenom teen pop group Wondergirls). A bright, optimistic sort of kid, Kang-ae enjoys a strong friendship with Mi-ran who grew up in Brazil, but she worries about her boyfriend of three years Ho-jae. In short, Ho-jae seems more interested in computer games than in getting naughty with her. Kang-ae and Mi-ran draw up a plan to push the relationship along, but this leads in unexpected directions.

Director Kwon Chil-in stumbled upon a hit in 2003 with Singles, a film that relied on good casting and a somewhat more honest take on modern relationships to catch viewers' attention. Five years later, Hellcats (the Korean title is "Some Like It Hot", just like the Billy Wilder classic) sticks to much the same formula, and though it failed to draw as much interest at the box office, the film still has its charms. The story of Ami in particular is engaging, as we follow her through wild swings in her resolve and emotional state. Actress/model Kim Min-hee (Surprise Party, Asako in Ruby Shoes) was once thought of as a pretty face with no talent, but in recent years she has surprised the public with nuanced performances in several high-profile TV dramas. Here too, the emotional tone she strikes is just right -- she doesn't come across as weak or immature, but her confusion feels genuine. The fact that her character shines the brightest in a film that also stars the legendary Lee Mi-sook is quite an accomplishment.

Unfortunately the film's other two stories are less developed; Young-mi and Kang-ae are interesting enough characters, but we never really get inside their heads as we do with Ami. Perhaps there just wasn't time in two hours to simultaneously develop these three separate stories, or (more likely?) it's a screenplay problem. Still, the film projects a breezy energy that makes it stand out from the average Korean rom-com. Not prudish, if not particularly racy either, Hellcats is a tasty two-hour diversion.      (Darcy Paquet)

    The Chaser

Jung-ho (Kim Yun-seok, who played Agwee, one of the contemporary Korean cinema's scariest villains, in Tazza: The High Rollers) is a former cop turned pimp for a "massage parlor." He is convinced that a young, dorky customer Young-min (Ha Jung-woo, The Unforgiven, Never Forever) has kidnapped and sold his "girls," including Mi-jin (Seo Young-hee, Shadows in the Palace). Unfortunately, what the cops discover is far worse: Young-min is a serial killer who uses a chisel and a hammer to slaughter his victims in lieu of sex. While the police investigation stumbles and takes a detour, Jung-ho increasingly suspects that Young-min's latest victim, Mi-jin, is still alive somewhere.

The Chaser was the first runaway hit of 2008, selling close to 5 million tickets. Was that success deserved?

Can Yuna Kim skate?

Suffice to say that the above synopsis by itself cannot possibly convey why The Chaser is the grittiest, snazziest and gutsiest Korean thriller in years and one of the best Korean films of 2008.

The Chaser is written and directed by Na Hong-jin (who had previously made the award-winning short A Perfect Snapper Dish), and it is truly difficult to believe that this is his feature film debut. The film exudes the aura of a piece de resistance concocted by a supremely confident genre veteran. Na's direction is peerless in orchestrating suspense by slowly and methodically disclosing to the viewers clues about what is really going on. Adding to the film's power is its intricate, sharply intelligent screenplay that always remains a half-step ahead of the viewer expectations, which generates completely unexpected moments of dark humor as well as teeth-rattling frisson. Technical credits excel as well: DP Lee Sung-je (No Comment), lighting director Lee Chol-o and production designer Lee Min-bok (Epitaph) contribute greatly to the hauntingly naturalistic re-creation of the Seoul landscape. A moody, acoustic-minimalist score by Kim Joon-seok and Choi Yong-rak is uncommonly effective.

I was also pleasantly surprised by how realistically and sympathetically The Chaser's struggling police force was depicted: it's definitely the best police procedural since Memories of Murder. I disagree with the criticism that it sides with Dirty Harry-like vigilantism over the legal protections accorded even to criminal suspects. The police in The Chaser, convincingly foul-mouthed and perpetually exhausted but struggling mightily to find an acceptable compromise between upholding civil rights and using old beat-'em-up-until-they-confess methods, are just a bunch of working stiffs, neither "the evil establishment" nor heroic public servants. Frankly, I would recommend The Chaser to any foreign viewer who has developed the view that the Korean police are baseball-bat wielding thugs, based on complete fantasies like Lee Myung-se's Nowhere to Hide. This is one of the few Korean films where situations like a white-haired, flinty-eyed psychiatrist baiting a murder suspect with taunts of sexual impotence and a female cop (Park Hyo-joo) fending off the latter's sneering advances can be appreciated without any suspension of disbelief.

But if anyone owns The Chaser, it is perhaps not director Na, despite his incredibly impressive command over the material, but Kim Yun-seok. Jung-ho, as played by Kim, has a bloated, sad-sack mien with an undercurrent of hostility and desperation. Kim never once mugs for the viewer's sympathy, and yet, as the film unfolds, he (with the terrific direction by Na) constantly demolishes our (genre-bound) expectations about how Jung-ho would behave in a given situation. His choices are amazing as much in their fidelity to the conception of his character (he begins as a truly irredeemable scumbag, and doesn't exactly become a white-winged angel by the end) as in their restraint and precision. I would venture to say that Kim's performance in The Chaser begins where Choi Min-shik's ends in Failan. Yes, it's that great.

The film's weak link, in my opinion, is Young-min, the serial killer character. It's really not Ha Jung-woo's fault at all, as he delivers a terrific performance as a genuine sociopath. It's that a serial killer, in the Korean context at that, can no longer generate enough fascination and interest. Some pretty out-there new wrinkles, as displayed in, say, Mr. Brooks, or another Korean thriller, Our Town, are needed to jolt such a character out of the annoying sex-murderer-with-the-face-of-a-saint cliches. Young-min's presence also ensures that the movie occasionally veers off into the territory of extreme gore (climaxing with a scene in which a character is bludgeoned to death in slow motion -- one both disturbingly beautiful and mind-bogglingly horrid), possibly losing a section of the audience who might have otherwise appreciated it.

Not for the faint of the heart, The Chaser goes a long way in restoring confidence not only in Korean cinema's capacity to churn out terrific crime thrillers, but also in the untapped reservoirs of filmmaking talent in Korea, still left to be discovered.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    The Guard Post

South Korea's meandering border with the North is one of the world's most surreal places, a heavily armed space still trapped in the Cold War. Park Chan-wook's JSA depicted the tension and close proximity of Southern and Northern soldiers at Panmunjeom, a former truce village that is now divided cleanly in half. But elsewhere along the DMZ, the most prominent structures are guard posts (GP for short): large, heavily armored self-contained forts that are strung along the border like pearls on a necklace. North Korea also maintains its own guard posts, which form pairs with those on the South.

The atmosphere in the DMZ (the term "de-militarized zone" is a bit of a joke) is tense. The military sends its strongest soldiers to this area, and imposes the harshest degree of discipline on them. Shots are occasionally exchanged across the border. Suicides or mysterious deaths have been known to occur among the men stationed there, and there was a recent case of a solider in a guard post who became mentally unhinged and slaughtered many of his fellow recruits.

What better place to set a supernatural gore fest? GP506 is a guard post that has fallen strangely silent (each GP is required to send a signal to headquarters every half hour; if the signal is not received, troops are sent in). A neighboring contingent of soldiers enters the post and finds blood on the walls and grossly dismembered bodies strewn in every direction. A military inspector arrives to investigate, and at first the deaths seem to be the result of some inner conflict within the group. The one surviving soldier is severely traumatized and seems unwilling to talk. Eventually, however, more disturbing clues emerge.

Kong Su-chang received both critical praise and commercial success with his debut R-Point (2004), about a company of Korean soldiers serving in Vietnam who are sent to a remote location to investigate a vanished squadron. The Guard Post would appear at first glance to be a virtual redux, with only the setting changed, but it's surprising how different the two films feel. R-Point was a slow-moving, chilling mystery with a slightly arty feel to it. The Guard Post is a roller coaster that wears its genre credentials more prominently on its sleeve, and despite its setting, offers a less developed political subtext. Unfortunately R-Point's greatest strengths -- its pitch-perfect ensemble acting and narrative coherence -- are reproduced far less successfully in the latter film.

The making of The Guard Post turned out to be more of an adventure than the filmmakers hoped. Midway through production, a spreading sense of crisis in the Korean film industry, together with unrelated trouble at the film's production company, caused the film's main investors to back out and shooting to ground to a halt. It appeared for some time that the film would never be finished, but eventually distributor Showbox stepped in and re-started the project.

Viewers beware: The Guard Post is gory! Brains, rotting flesh, self-mutilation -- this movie goes the extra mile (the poor woman sitting next to me at the press screening seemed to only barely make it through the film). Whereas R-Point had sort of a crossover appeal for people who don't like horror films, The Guard Post seems intended more explicitly for fans of the genre.

At two hours in length, the film is not short, and unfortunately the middle section is somewhat flaccid and confusing (some viewers may be annoyed by the constant jumping back and forth between past and present). I also found it frustrating that for all the care taken to build a highly authentic guard post set, the film never takes the time to properly "introduce" it to the viewer. JSA, by contrast, was much better at finding ways to orient and inform the viewer about Panmunjeom. However as its mysteries are sorted out, The Guard Post does finally find its rhythm in the last 30 minutes, and from then on out it's an engaging enough genre splatterfest.      (Darcy Paquet)

    The Good, the Bad, the Weird

Chang-yi (Lee Byung-heon), a dandy hit-man with a perpetually bemused, go-ahead-call-me-a-psycho grin on his face, is hired to retrieve a certain map currently in the hands of a Japanese banker. Unbeknownst to him, meanwhile, bounty hunter Do-won (Jung Woo-sung) is sent by the Korean independence army for the same mission. To their irritation, however, the map is snatched by train robber Tae-gu (Song Kang-ho), who is convinced that it leads to the fabled treasures of the fallen Qing dynasty.

Kim Jee-woon, who has an impressive track record of having successfully tackled a wide range of genres, from sports comedy (The Foul King) to horror (A Tale of Two Sisters) and European-style film noir (A Bittersweet Life), now turns his sight on the western. As one can surmise from the title, the movie is intended as a conscious homage to Sergio Leone's Eastwood triptych. Like Bittersweet Life, which invoked the cool, nonchalant exterior and existentialist attitude of a Pierre Melville rather than the original American film noir, The Weird passes over the concerns and themes of classic westerns (individual freedom vs. commitment to community, and so on) and focuses on the stylistic vocabularies of the genre. Viewing The Weird is, in other words, a lot like watching a witty pastiche of great westerns, a la My Name is Nobody, rather than a great western itself.

Perhaps I am overly harsh with Kim, who might have never intended his film to be anything more than an affectionate send-up to the mythic grandeur and marvelous vistas writ in a Leone film. He certainly knows how to entice his viewers with visual language, staging complicated shoot-outs and tense mano-a-mano duels with the aplomb of a master stylist. From the opening credit sequence with gliding birds of prey trailing the names of the cast like I.D. Tags; to busy shootouts in a rain-drenched marketplace, in which a Robot Monster-like diving helmet finds an unconventional usage; to the final confrontation that exactly copies the Leone original's set-up but goes for a typically bloody, excessive resolution, Kim and his technical staff (cinematographer Lee Mo-gae, production designer Jo Hwa-seong, and composer Dalparan) are fully in control of the film's aesthetic and technical elements.

The Weird's main weakness is the screenplay. Granted, Leone's works don't exactly have Oscar-caliber dialogue or entirely sensible plots either (although some fine directors like Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento have been involved in writing them), but Kim Jee-woon and co-scribe Kim Min-seok fumble in throwing the three main characters in sharp relief, either as archetypal, mythic beings (this is something Leone and his writing team excelled in, even though it had very little to do with the real, historical "west") or as sympathetic flesh-and-blood characters. Their efforts to introduce lively details and narrative twists more often than not fizzle out; for example, the revelation of the ultimate reason for Chang-yi's pursuit of Tae-gu elicited a "So what?" response from me (It certainly can't compare with the famous "harmonica" scene between Charles Bronson and Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West). I have had problems with Kim Jee-woon's lack of control over the narrative flow and resolution of Tale of Two Sisters and Bittersweet Life before, but at least I was willing to defend their characters as worthy of emotional investment on the part of the viewers. I am not so sure about The Weird, even though Lee Byung-heon and Song Kang-ho still provide plenty of entertainment value, relying on their patented tools of the trade. Jung Woo-sung by default leaves the weakest impression, although it is not really his fault that he sounds like a guy from an outdoor sportswear commercial.

As for the claim that the movie marks a significant departure from Korean nationalism, sure, Song Kang-ho does mumble something about how the yangban aristocrats and Japanese colonizers are hardly different from one another as rulers, but it really has nothing interesting or worthwhile to add about Manchuria as a multicultural, potentially subversive (fictive) space. In the end, The Weird reduces the Japanese opponents (along with Chinese bandits) to straw figures to be mowed down, especially in the extended My Name is Nobody-meets-Road Warrior climax in which Jeong Woo-sung gets to play the hey-look-ma-I'm-Steve-McQueen trick reloading his rifle.

The Good, the Bad, the Weird is, all things considered, quite entertaining and Kim Jee-woon's reputation will not be sullied (if not significantly enhanced) by this latest exhibit of a "Manchurian Western," (a genre that has a checkered but surprisingly long history in Asian cinema). I must confess, though, that my (perhaps unrealistically high) expectations about it were not met, except in the gorgeous production/ cinematography department.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

Koreanfilm.org, last updated August 19, 2008.