2009

   The year 2009 opened in difficult circumstances, to say the least. With a global financial crisis exacerbating a two-year old crisis in the Korean film industry, expectations for the year were low. The situation was particularly tough for mid-sized, genre-based commercial films, which in the previous few years had lost money for more often than they had earned it.

In better shape were Korea's internationally-recognized directors, with both Park Chan-wook (Thirst) and Bong Joon-ho (Mother) lining up high profile spring releases. Hong Sang-soo also turned in a new film Like You Know It All, shot for a tiny fraction of his usual budget. All three films would be invited to various sections of Cannes.

Surprisingly, low budget independent films were also showing considerable life in the midst of the crisis. Daytime Drinking and Breathless, two debut films shot on tiny budgets, earned critical praise and an encouraging degree of commercial success. Most astounding, however, was the smashing success of the low budget documentary Old Partner, about an elderly farmer and his cow, which as of May 1 was the best grossing film of the year with close to 3 million tickets sold.    (written on May. 5)

     Reviewed below:    Marine Boy (Feb 5)  --  The Naked Kitchen (Feb 5)  --  Handphone (Feb 19)  --  Private Eye (Apr 2)  --  Breathless (Apr 10)  --  Thirst (Apr 30)  --  Mother (May 28)  --  A Blood Pledge (Jun 18)  --  Chaw (Jul 15)  --  Haeundae (Jul 22)  --  Possessed (Aug 12)  --  The Pot (Aug 20)  --  Paju (Oct 28).

    Marine Boy

Cheon-soo (Kim Kang-woo, Rainbow Eyes) is a talented swimmer, once a competitor in international games. A bad gambling habit, however, ruins him financially. He gets willy-nilly recruited into a dope courier job for the gangster President Kang (Jo Jae-hyun, Hanbando, Romance). The task seems to involve swimming past the Korea-Japan border with a string of bags filled with dope inside your intestines (As I had suspected it would, the movie milks this set-up for ca-ca jokes, so sensitive viewers beware). Kang is obsessed with his former colleague's daughter, a fruit tart named Yuri (Park Si-yeon, Dazimawa Lee), and naturally she and Cheon-soo fall in love with each other, after sharing several cosmetics-commercial moments of cocky stares and pouty insults. Just to make things more complicated than necessary, Cheon-soo is being tailed by a corrupt cop named "Dog Snout (Lee Won-jong, The Foul King, Hi Dharma!)," who has a past history with President Kang.

Marine Boy is a typical commercial "action film" being turned out with a sense of foot-dragging futility by the Korean industry these days. It takes a premise and a plot vaguely reminiscent of a '70s or '80s Hollywood action thriller (this time, it's Peter Benchley's The Deep, itself more than a little schlocky and illogical) and tries to update them with slick visuals imported from TV commercials, while "Koreanizing" the characters by burdening them with arch-melodramatic gestures, dialogues and motivations. Jo Jae-hyun and Lee Won-jong, both terrific actors, try gamely to bring some verve and finesse to their roles that seem to be defined more by their Kyongsang Province accents than anything else. Director Yun Jong-seok, like many Korean debut directors, is competent if not inspired, and knows how to wrangle camera angle and editing to keep the pace up. Unfortunately, the ridiculously convoluted plot and motivations quickly drag down the proceedings. Park Si-yeon, foxily charming in Dazimawa Lee, here has to grapple with a role that cannot decide if Yuri is just a spoiled brat with a drug problem or a manipulative femme fatale. And wasn't she supposed to be a serious addict? Or maybe that was a put-on, too, since we never see her once without looking like she just stepped out of a Vogue photo spread. I suppose since she and Cheon-soo got to sip Pina Colada at Palua in the end, we shouldn't be asking these niggardly questions. As for Kim Kang-woo, I still like his wild-cat hauteur with a dash of vulnerability, but he really should fire his agent or just stay away from whoever it is that advises him on choosing scripts.

I think I would have been more charitable to Marine Boy if it, like The Deep, at least had a good sense to regale us with beautiful underwater footage. But no, the movie wastes most of its running time among boring characters jawing unconvincing one-liners and "tough guy talks," ensconced in chi-chi apartment living rooms, or seated in fancy cars barking into cell phones. Where is "marine" in Marine Boy? Frankly, who gives a sardine's fin if President Kang is in love with Yuri? Was that the point of this alleged "action film?" Marine Boy was at one point the most frequently downloaded Korean film of this year: an "oceanic action film" fit to watch on a 17-inch PC screen? I somehow doubt that's what this movie's crew and cast had in mind while making it.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    The Naked Kitchen

The day of Ahn Mo-rae and Han Sang-in's wedding anniversary is pretty eventful. First, Mo-rae (Shin Min-a, Go Go 70) cooks breakfast,serving it on their best china, hoping to get Sang-in (Kim Tae-woo, Woman on the Beach) into the mood for love before he goes to work. (It works.) Second, Sang-in quits his high-end stockbroker job so that he can devote himself to his lifelong dream of running a fancy restaurant. Third, while shopping for an anniversary gift for Sang-in, Mo-rae sneaks into a closed gallery, where she encounters another illicit visitor -- a very handsome young man with whom she hides when the gallery owner turns up. Mo-rae, overcome by heat and dizziness, has a sudden sexual encounter with the stranger, who then vanishes. Fourth, Sang-in tells Mo-rae over dinner that he's expecting a mentor to help him plan the menu for his dream restaurant: a brilliant young French-Korean chef who will arrive that evening. Fifth, you guessed it: Park Du-re (Ju Ji-Hoon, Antique, Princess Hours), the French-Korean mentor, turns out to be Mo-rae's zipless stranger, who now will be staying with the young couple, sleeping in the room that had belonged to Sang-in's late mother.

From there the story goes about as you would expect. Mo-rae is powerfully drawn to the seductive Du-re while Sang-in gets cooking lessons from him. Eventually everything comes crashing down, but Kitchen is a comedy, so it turns out all right in the end. (The official English title of this movie is The Naked Kitchen, but it's a cheap tease, since nobody gets naked, even metaphorically. This is a very buttoned-up movie. The Korean title is nothing but the English word Kitchen, so that's what I'll call it here.)

Kitchen didn't do well at all, which is surprising since it features three bankable stars. It wasn't even noticed as a coming release here at Koreanfilm.org. I wouldn't have known about it if it hadn't been featured in a book-length survey of Korean movies for 2008, which gave some idea of its visual appeal and emotional dynamics, so I picked up the DVD. First-time director Hong Ji-young made a very pretty movie, her cast turned in fine performances. So what is wrong?

If not for the fact that not many other people liked it either, I'd guess my lack of enthusiasm for Kitchen was just my personal hangup. First, I suspect someone loved Jean-Pierre Jeunet's 2001 hit Amelie, a movie I hated for the way it reveled in its own cuteness - so if you liked Amelie, maybe you should give Kitchen a try. Shin Min-a seems to be channeling Audrey Toutou, and has been made up and coiffed to recall her perky obnoxiousness. The soundtrack slathers on a Parisian-style waltz, Sang-in's restaurant will feature a Korean-French fusion cuisine, and of course Du-re is a French-Korean adoptee. The food is a major character in the movie, with lots of close-ups of yummy-looking table spreads.

Under all the Francophile syrup there are interesting characters. Mo-rae and Sang-in have been friends since childhood. He didn't mind that she followed him around, calling him hyung or Big Brother (though Korean girls are supposed to call their older brothers oppa), and their marital relationship is an odd but appealing mix of hot sex and best buddies. The script explores this intelligently, as when Mo-rae tells Du-re, "To me, love doesn't mean much. It's Han Sang-in. Not because I don't love someone, or love more someone else. I'm just trying to be me."

Kitchen also flirts, ever so delicately, with male homoeroticism. There's a hint that Sang-in and Du-re had an affair when they met in France; when Sang-in shows Du-re his room, Du-re asks him to spend the night with him. Sang-in begs off awkwardly: "Well... I have a wife." But Kitchen doesn't explore these possibilities; it refers to them glancingly, trying to make itself look spicier than it really is. It always draws back to the pretty surface. In this it suffers by comparison with the far superior Wanee and Junah (Kim Yong-gyoon, 2001), which shares some of its topics: a relationship more of friendship than of passion, flirting with bisexuality and gender games. Kitchen just frustrates me, though; because it falls so far short of what it might have been. The film seems torn between taking chances and playing it safe, and playing it safe didn't help either artistically or at the box office.      (Duncan Mitchel)

    Handphone

A warning: if you are looking for a feel-good escapist entertainment, avoid Handphone. That type of film must meet several conditions. First and foremost, we should be able to feel for its protagonist. Conversely, the piece's villain should brook no sympathy. The violence the good guy employs against the villain must be clean-cut, not messy like one we see in real life. And so on.

Handphone ignores these conditions. In fact, it gleefully violates them. Seung-min the entertainment agent, the film's alleged hero, is not someone we would voluntarily feel any sympathy toward. He is shallow, low-rent and lacking in conscience. Yi-gyu, who accidentally picks up Seung-min's cell phone and decides to blackmail him, is, on the other hand, someone easier for us to root for. Yi-gyu is slowly crumbling under the pressure of working life, unlike Seung-min, whose shallow character seems to actually enhance his ability to navigate through the treacherous waters of his profession. The film is aware of this contrast, and puts Yi-gyu through a wringer to prove its point. Naturally, the violence eventually sparked between these two disturbed characters does not help the viewers whatsoever in reducing the latter's stress.

Well, what can I say? Handphone is masochistic, cynical and ultimately misanthropic. Few characters in this film are mentally stable or morally upright. Most of them are seriously flawed in one way or another: a few are annoying on a metaphysical scale. Of course, since Handphone's hateful depiction of humanity is based on the relational dynamics of the Korean society as well as the stereotypes of its members, we might accept that the scope of its misanthropy is limited to those whom we see around us. Whatever the director originally intended with all this is rather beside the point.

How does Handphone stack up as a thriller? Its structure is rather loose. The cell phone in question can only do so much as a multi-purpose McGuffin. The filmmakers eventually resort to improbable coincidences and a bit of cheating. As in his previous film Paradise Murders, director Kim Han-min does not quite know when to end the movie. A double-entendre epilogue is frankly redundant, although we could concede that this looseness does contribute to extending the agony of the climax.

The film's biggest assets, not surprisingly, are its two stars: Uhm Tae-woong and Park Yong-woo. They are quite well cast for the respective roles of a sleazy agent and an "emotional laborer" rotting from the inside, producing a powerful synergistic effect. If I were compelled to compare the two, I must say Park seems to benefit slightly from a more three-dimensional character he is playing.

Let me finish by observing that Handphone performs an excellent public service by providing those of us living in the contemporary Korean society with three useful and important lessons: 1) Let's keep a watchful eye on any digital device that contains private information: 2) Let's pay attention to the mental health of the emotional laborers, lest they snap: 3) And most importantly, let's not be aggressively rude to total strangers. The payoff can be really ugly.       (Djuna, translated by Kyu Hyun  Kim)

     Private Eye

I'd heard some positive things about Private Eye before actually catching the movie in the theater. A detective story set in the early 20th century under the Japanese colonial rule! With Hwang Jeong-min, Ryu Deok-hwan, Uhm Ji-won, Oh Dal-soo in the cast! And the screenplay picked up some kind of award! Well, the last bit was not so intriguing. It's not uncommon for an acclaimed screenplay to turn out to be disappointing. Still, the first two pieces of information were enough to get my expectations up.

The details of the story go like this. Hong Jin-ho, the character played by Hwang Jeong-min in this film, is a pro at things like tracking down missing people and exposing illicit love affairs. He doesn't call himself a private eye, but that's basically what he is. He usually tries to avoid tight situations but is one day pushed into a rather sticky murder case, when Jang Gwang-soo, a med student who collects abandoned bodies for dissection, asks Hong to find the murderer of his latest cadaver.

Wait. I mean, wouldn't it be obvious to a med school student that if you find a body with a knife wound in it, it was probably a victim of murder? The film begins to lose its footing this early on. The story wouldn't make sense even from the viewpoint of early 20th-century Seoulites. Any moderate reader among them would have been familiar with the ABCs of detective novels. This would have included a cadaver-hungry medical student, by the way. It could be that Jang was simply thinking that his actions were fine if the body belonged to some insignificant fellow, but less so if it turned out to be the son of a high-ranking official that spells out mortal danger for him-- but then the audience wouldn't be able to like him as much.

If it's all an excuse to bring together a private eye and a doctor-to-be as a murder investigation team, well, I can't say I don't understand. The folks who made this film were indeed aiming for a Holmes and Watson partnership, colonial Seoul-style. The names match somewhat, with a little stretch: Holmes - Hong Jin-ho, John Watson - Jang Gwang-soo, see? But there's a fatal flaw here. As you Baker Street Regulars already know, Holmes and Watson are highly distinctive characters. Just a few pages into the story and you know what kind of people they are. In Private Eye, it's much harder to figure out the two main characters. Especially Hong Jin-ho. What is he, anyway? A man of "the little gray cells" like Hercule Poirot? No, he's too dumb for that. Or an eclectic super-hero like his namesake Holmes? He doesn't have half the skills. Maybe a tough guy like Sam Spade? Not so. Hong can't hold up in a fistfight, nor does he have the guts to handle the life underground. Then why in the world is this man the hero?

Hong's plight springs from the fact that the film denies him a chance to reveal his unique features or skills. In other words, the screenplay was not very well thought out. The film doesn't have much mystery in it. There's no foreshadowing that lasts more than ten minutes, and most clues are explained away in the very next sequence. On top of that, there's just one suspect. Or were there two? In any case, there's no room for a detective to do anything, much less show himself off. Even that snazzy toy that looks like something Q might make for 007 is simply no good if the man doesn't get to use it.

And who makes these toys for Hong? It's the inventor Soon-duk, played by Uhm Ji-won. Soon-duk, although not very realistic, could have been an interesting character: a lady of noble birth that gets hooked on modern Western science and sets up a lab in an abandoned church to cook up all sorts of inventions. A personage of these dimensions might well be the heroine in a sensible screenplay, but here she remains underdeveloped and misused in a supporting role.

Another badly formulated character is the police officer Oh Young-dal. As always, Oh Dal-soo turns in a fun, top-notch comic performance, but his character really does not deserve such cutesy treatment. It's always a bad idea to put together in one character the roles of a harmless clown and an accomplice in crime. No amount of good acting on Oh Dal-soo's part can pull it off, however excellent an actor he may be.

The film attempts to cover up gaping holes in the story and characters with action scenes, but those aren't so well-crafted either. The chase scene between Hong and a mysterious pursuer is a glaring example. The city-stomping stunts on the fabulous open sets could have been "cool," or so the makers must have thought, but it did not work. The rhythm is awkward and the timing a mess. The entire sequence here is meant to end on a clear slapstick note, which might have looked good in the script. But where one second would have been enough, the film drags on for a few more seconds and the result is a boring scene. This is just one of many such unwise decisions. All in all, I don't believe that the makers of Private Eye are giving film as a medium its full workout.       (Djuna, translated by ye-jung)

     Breathless

Sanghoon, the character played by Yang Ik-June in Breathless, communicates mostly in cusswords, beats up people for a living, and thinks he's got a God-given right to spit all over the place. Your everyday guy -- just with all of the worst qualities one can get through the combination of unlucky breeding and bad genes.

Sanghoon works as a thug for a company. His job is to beat up and threaten weaker folks. It fits him like a glove. Maybe it is better for guys like him to stay there, instead of messing with other parts of society -- although his victims probably would not agree.

Sanghoon is far from having a knack with people, but for some reason he's got some complex relationships going on around him, which add flavor to the movie. His father, for one, is stuck at Sanghoon's house after being released from jail. There is also his recently divorced stepsister and her son. One day he has a nasty run-in with a neighbor, a high school girl called Yeonhee, and due to Yeonhee's odd taste in men (or perhaps a desperate ploy to incorporate at least one decent character into the film) the two build up something like a friendship. Yeonhee is burdened with a total jerk of a brother and a disturbed Vietnam veteran for a father. The cast also includes Sanghoon's friend-slash-boss Mansik and his cronies at work.

These folks have one serious problem in common: their fathers. All of the father figures in this film are downright horrible people. They assert their existence only through displays of violence. They do awful things that come back to haunt them later. Of course, it's not entirely their fault. Yeonhee's father, for example, is the victim of some kind of illness. But somehow I don't think he would have been much of a pleasant person even if he had not been sick. The film portrays a disease that spreads violence and ill humor, and fathers are the carriers of the virus.

From this sprouts the main dilemma of the film. The cure for this 'disease' is to cut away one's life from the father, then run like hell. The few close-to-normal characters in the film, like Sanghoon's stepsister or Mansik, have either succeeded in pulling away from the violent father figure or are fatherless from the start. In Sanghoon and Yeonhee's case, though, it does not work out that way. Circumstances and blood-ties keep them tangled up with their fathers for life. Since they cannot get away, the film repeatedly attempts to reconcile them with the fathers somehow, showing symptoms of a whiny and unimpressive sort of self-vindication. Sanghoon, in particular, has already sunk pretty low, maybe as low as the father he hates so much, so he must take drastic measures to avoid serving as an excuse for the kind of man his father is, and one that he is becoming. This is not so easy. What the film shows us is probably the best he could have done under the circumstances.

Breathless is a rough and unpolished film, made extremely low-budget under the hands of an inexperienced director. However, being rough and unpolished does not equal lack of professionalism. True, 130 minutes is on the drawn-out side, and too many close-ups clog up the screen. On the other hand, Yang Ik-joon's direction of his cast is close to perfect, and the lines jump straight out of real life. The plot could be more creative, but it is logical enough. The style goes well with the story, the pace is appropriate, and the music is well-designed. In other words, for all his talk about not knowing what he's doing, Yang has turned out a better-made film than most films being churned out in the Korean movie scene today. Whether he can keep up the raw energy driving this honest-to-goodness portrayal of lives gone sour throughout his future career remains to be seen. With Breathless, he is just beginning to pour out the words that must have been fermenting inside him all his life.       (Djuna, translated by ye-jung)

    Thirst

Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho), a tormented priest, volunteers as a human guinea pig at an African research facility, working on the vaccine for a virulent virus called EV (which only infects celibate or sexually inactive men). The virus kills him, but he is miraculously resurrected by blood transfusion. Unfortunately, the miracle comes with a serious side effect: he turns into a vampire. Only continuous supply of fresh human blood can reverse the symptoms of EV infection. While grappling with his disturbing new habit-and superpowers-Sang-hyun becomes attracted to Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin, Dasepo Naughty Girls ), unhappily married to his childhood friend Kang-woo (Sin Ha-gyun, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), a bizarrely infantile hypochondriac living under the thumb of his manic dressmaker mother Ms. Ra (Kim Hae-sook, Open City).

Thirst, which, along with Bong Joon-ho's Mother, is 2009's most anticipated Korean film, opened to good if not spectacular box office performance (0.8 million tickets sold in the first weekend for the Seoul theaters). Unlike Park Chan-wook's "revenge" trilogy, however, the movie is generating extreme reactions from both viewers and critics. Some reviews have blasted it as a pretentious bore or a poorly conceived adaptation of Emile Zola's Therese Raquin (from which this film borrows certain plot points and a love triangle central to the plot): only a few critics have hailed it as a masterpiece. Among the viewers, the chasm is even wider: internet comments freely range from "a piece of trash" to "the best movie I have seen in 10 years."

Even for someone like me, a rabid-crazy Park Chan-wook fan, the initial reaction to Thirst was that of deep unease: I literally could not name what it was that I was feeling as the end credits rolled up. All I knew for sure was that I had to see it again immediately. Only after the second viewing did I understand that the unease came from my inertial inability to acknowledge that I'd just watched a bewildering but awesome work of art, well-nigh indescribable in its insane, alchemic melding of disparate genre elements.

Thematically, Thirst is as a straightforward and relentless exploration of Catholic guilt as any Euro-American film I have ever seen--as painful as Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant, as scorching as Bunuel's Viridiana-- with its profoundly contradictory attitude toward the glamour and agony of desire. The protagonist Sang-hyun, like Graham Greene's Scobie in The Heart of the Matter, is tragically, sympathetically flawed. He has enough dedication to face certain death in the service of humanity yet cannot stop his pity toward a beautiful, unhappy young woman growing into passionate love. He is powerless to stop the faithful who regard his vampirism as a sign of being touched by God: having committed a mortal sin out of love, he figuratively and literally drowns in guilt.

Song Kang-ho gives yet another brilliant performance (I don't think he can just walk through a role even if his life depended on it), but it is not a flashy one: as was in Secret Sunshine, it's a catcher's turn that perfectly anchors the emotional content of a particular scene and at the same time generously puts the spotlight on other actors. I can only hope that Euro-American critics are not lazy (or foolish) enough to mistake the essential passivity of Sang-hyun's character for the lack of talent on Song's part.

A lot of media attention has been paid to the explicit sex scenes between Song and Kim Ok-vin, an interesting choice on Park's part. He seems to have had a young Isabelle Adjani (The Story of Adel H was allegedly one of the films Park recommended to Kim as a research material) in mind: fiery, heartbreaking, maybe a bit raw. Kim is stunningly sexy and gorgeous in both wilted-housewife and full-blown femme fatale modes, and throws all of herself into the role, but I cannot help but seeing Yeom Jeong-ah (who appeared as a fictional vampire in Park's "The Cut" from Three Extreme) or Lee Young-ae as Tae-ju. Kim strikes me as a bit too young and contemporary: she does not strike as someone who could have tolerated long years of indentured servitude in exchange for meager domestic comfort. She is blindingly beautiful, I must admit, in a blue hanbok dress.

The rest of the cast is equally superb: Oh Dal-soo, Sin Ha-gyun, Kim Hae-su, Kim Jee-woon regulars Park In-hwan (The Quiet Family), as a blind senior priest with a wry sense of humor, and Song Young-chang (the head-rocking section chief from Foul King), as a hard-nosed former cop. Their ensemble acting in the sequence where a character tries desperately to alert the presence of a vampire to other unsuspecting guests is a piece de resistance, superior to any similar scene in Sympathy for Lady Vengeance.

By now we expect not just high quality jobs but extraordinary aesthetic achievements from Park Chan-wook's regular staff, and Thirst certainly does not disappoint. Production designer Ryu Seong-hee is responsible for the uncommonly reined-in colors-bleached white and faded green-of the religious and medical institutions as well as ever-so-slightly off-kilter hues of Ms. Ra's domain-deranged blues and slick browns. Lenser Jeong Jeong-hoon weaves pure magic with shadows and light, culminating in the stunning vista of the ocean spreading in scarlet red, illuminated by the setting sun, as looked on by the eyes of the doomed protagonist.

Oh, is it a good vampire film, you ask? It sure as heck is- the tomato juice flows abundantly in horrendous, cringe-inducing scenes of violent exsanguinations, and there are many insanely creative twists on the familiar genre staples that will either stun you into silence or make you gape in disbelief. Have you wondered how a vampire can convince a blind person that he is one? Watch Thirst. Have you ever wondered whether becoming an immortal creature will heal calluses on the soles of your foot? Again, watch the movie. There are at least two sequences in this film that matches in sheer audacity and jaw-dropping hutzpah the notorious "long-take corridor action" set piece in Old Boy.

But Thirst is not an exhilarating showcase of directorial vision and filmmaking pizzazz that Old Boy was. Despite occasional insertions of absurdist deadpan humor, it is at its basis a tragic romance. And despite much bloodletting, the film is not interested in generating frisson of fear, but a deep sense of melancholy. In the end it returns, perhaps in a purer form than ever, to Park Chan-wook's starting point: the torturous reflection on the impossibility of salvation, the moral weight of sin and desire, and the agonizing scream of a man against God who may or may not exist, and may or may not love him. If Thirst were a book, it probably deserves a whole shelf of its own: regardless of one's likes or dislikes, it is a true work of art that calls out for the defense of its artistic honor by those who are taken with it, way beyond the question of one's taste in specific genres or stylistic choices.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    Mother

Bong Joon-ho's new film Mother begins with a tease: Do-joon's Mother (Kim Hye-ja, Palace), in an embroidered violet jacket, walks toward the camera through a field of tall grass. Soft jazz-funk begins to play on the soundtrack. Gazing offscreen, she stops walking, then hesitantly starts dancing to the music. We'll see her in the same field later in the movie, but not dancing.

Do-joon's Mother lives with her son Do-joon (Won Bin, Taegugk, Guns and Talks) behind the murky shop where she sells medicinal plants and roots, and practices acupuncture without a license on the side. Do-joon is very good looking (he's played by Won Bin, after all), but he's not quite right in the head, rather like Song Gang-ho's character Gang-du in The Host, and like Gang-du, there is a hint that his impairment is his mother's fault. He's not retarded, but his dullness is difficult to define: he has no attention span to speak of and a poor memory; at twenty-seven he still sleeps with his mom, with a hand on her breast. He hangs around with Jin-tae (Jin Ku, A Dirty Carnival), who's also good-looking in a bad-boy way, and is a bad boy - a tough, cynical hustler who feels constrained by his small-town life and dreams of adventure. Still, Jin-tae seems to have nothing better to do than hang out with Do-joon. He taunts Do-joon for being a virgin at his age. Jin-tae doesn't seem to have any family, and lives alone at the edge of town. There's a lot of this in Mother: one high school character lives with her half-senile, boozing grandmother, intact families are not much in evidence. (For a "traditional" society like Korea, its films and TV dramas feature a surprising number of one-parent families and broken homes.)

Do-joon and Jin-tae are already in trouble with the police for vandalizing a Mercedes-Benz that knocked Do-joon down in the street. Then a high-school girl is murdered, and a clue connected to Do-joon is found near her body. Relieved that their first murder case in living memory is so cut-and dried, the police pack Do-joon away. He insists that he didn't kill the girl, though he saw her the night she died. Frantic, his mother sets out to prove Do-joon's innocence. Her blundering efforts draw Jin-tae into helping her to play detective, and they poke around the seamy underside of the town. Jin-tae enjoys himself: "This is in my blood!" he exults after beating up a couple of "suspects," "I should have been a cop." In jail, Do-joon tries to dredge up details from the sieve of his memory, often coming up with details that make matters worse, while his mother closes in on the girl's real killer ... or maybe not ... before returning to that grassy field.

Kim Hye-ja is famous for playing mothers on Korean TV, and it must have been interesting for her to play such a double-edged role. Taking the melodramatic archetype of the Mother to extremes, Kim plays a mother whose symbiosis with her son is nearly complete, yet Bong and Kim manage to keep the character from being monstrous. (The archetype isn't just Korean: the mother who sacrifices everything to save her accused son is a mainstay of American country music, for example.) She does a great job, and one of the main pleasures of the movie is watching her. Won Bin's Do-joon seems like a change from his usual pretty-boy roles, but since the people around Do-joon comment ruefully on his good looks (another of Bong's jokes, I suspect), it's not that big a leap. Jin Ku plays Jin-tae energetically, full of frustrated vitality, and by the end turns out to be a bit more sympathetic than you'd expect.

If you've seen Bong Joon-ho's earlier movies, you'll have some idea what to expect from Mother. Bong says that he chose the English word mother as his title to avoid the associations of the Korean word omoni, but it's probably no coincidence that the Korean pronunciation of mother also sounds like the Korean pronunciation of murder. He likes to build his stories around ordinary people; the characters of his first feature Barking Dogs Never Bite -- a college professor and his salarywoman wife -- were as upscale as he gets. Since then his protagonists have been small-town cops (Memories of Murder), a family that runs a food stand by the Han River (The Host), and now a small-town widow. His manner is operatic: reactions, facial expressions, sound design, even the weather (see the use of rain in Mother) tend to be over the top. Even Won Bin's stupefied look is rapturous in its dullness. Typically for Bong, there are plenty of small jokes at the expense of movie clich?s - misrecognitions, comically inappropriate reactions - jokes that make you wince as you laugh.

In this and in his operatic excesses, Bong is reminiscent of Pedro Almodovar - think of All About My Mother - and if you like Almodovar you may like Bong. (Come to think of it, Lee Byeong-woo's music reminds me of the music in Almodovar's films.) Hong Gyeong-pyo's photography captures the grittiness of decrepit small towns and the working poor; there's a lot of grey and murk, and even the blood looks dark and muddy. Mother is a retreat in scale after the CGI-heavy science-fiction blockbuster The Host, but an advance in confidence and style. It even contains his first sex scene! It's been obvious since Memories of Murder that Bong is a director worth watching, and Mother confirms it.      (Duncan Mitchel)

    A Blood Pledge

A Catholic chapel in a girl's high school, in a stormy dark night. Four young faces are illuminated by candlelight. Friends who have made a pact to commit suicide, they proceed to climb to the roof of the building. However, only one of them, Eon-joo (Jang Gyung-ah), jumps to her death, her mangled body to be discovered by her shocked sister Jeong-eon (Yoo Shin-ae). The surviving members of the pact, So-yi (Son Eun-seo), Eun-young (Song Min-jeong) and Yu-jin (Oh Yeon-seo), begin to sense the presence of the dead Eon-joo.

The redoubtable Whispering Corridors series, not only one of the few successful film franchises in Korean cinema but also a platform through which many talented actresses have been launched into stardom (Gong Hyo-jin, Kim Min-seon, Song Ji-hyo and Kim Ok-vin to name just a few), is celebrating its tenth anniversary in 2009. Given the disastrous environment in which Korean filmmakers have struggled in the last few years, perhaps we should just be thankful that the series was able to come back at all. Unfortunately, the fifth installment is probably the most generic and lackluster of the lot.

This does not mean that A Blood Pledge is devoid of any merit. Director Lee Jong-yong, promoted from assistant work for Park Chan-wook's JSA, while taking on an ultra-topical subject of group suicide, goes for the jugular. I find his refusal to burden the film with superficial discussions of the malaise of Korean school system as well as his decision to resolutely stick to the conventions of Gothic horror (this is the kind of movie in which an important prop symbolizing political power is a key to the Catholic chapel, preserved in a velvet-inlaid, ornate jewel box) rather admirable. Sure, some of the scare tactics are obvious, but what do you expect from a summer horror film?

And yet, director Lee also takes some critical missteps, avoided by all other helmers of the series so far. He over-burdens his young actresses with reams of convoluted, emotive expository dialogue, few of which actually serve to enlighten the viewers. Poor girls struggle through the breathless sentences like rookie recruits in a boot camp with extra-heavy backpacks: only Yoo Shin-ae emerges relatively unscathed. Despite his visible effort to construct a decent psychological mystery, director Lee's failure to create three-dimensional characters leave us rather blas? about the ultimate motivation behind Eon-joo's haunting. Finally, the film has two or three truly embarrassing moments of non-special effects, including a laughable "exploding head" gag that I sincerely hope will be deleted from the export version.

While not the worst Korean horror film in recent memory by a long shot (Are you kidding? Oetori? Death Bell?), A Blood Pledge is nonetheless a disappointment. Lacking the elegant lyricism of Memento Mori, the disturbing metaphysical implications of Voice, or even the lurid psychodrama of Wishing Stairs, A Blood Pledge is an obtusely "sincere" horror film in a series known for a remarkable mixture of ingeniously induced frisson and unexpectedly moving art-house touches.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    Chaw

Patrolman Kim (Uhm Tae-woong, Handphone, Family Ties) is kicked off to a mountain town due to a jokey report he filled in, supposedly idyllic and crime-free. The town's mayor and other bigwigs are scheming to bring in and scalp the Seoul folks eager to experience "organic farming." There is only one problem: the surrounding area's food-chain imbalance has unleashed a steamroller-sized boar that has developed taste for human flesh. After it devours a few townies, including the veteran game hunter Cheon Il-man's (Jang Hang-sun, Tell Me Something, The Foul King) daughter, the big-shots reluctantly organize an ad hoc team of boar hunters, led by a Finland-trained professional Baek Man-bae (Yun Je-mun, The Host, Mother). Tagging along with Il-man and Man-bae, who promptly rekindle an unresolved father-son conflict from the past, are hapless Patrolman Kim, wild boar expert Soo-ryun (Jeong Yu-mi, Family Ties, Blossom Again) and the shades-wearing Detective Shin (Park Hyuk-kwon, Open City, TV's The Great White Tower).

Chaw (This apparently means "trap" in Chungcheong Province dialect) is a mighty strange movie, even considering that it is about a man-eating pig(Seriously, a wild boar is plenty persuasive as a movie monster, as Russell Mulcahy's Razorback, among others, testifies). For about its first third, the movie seems willing to stick to the conventions of monster-on-the-rampage films, introducing innocent victims to be slaughtered and showing the town's effort to whitewash real dangers for the tourists, a la Jaws. Then the film begins to mutate into a horror comedy with positively bizarre setups and wildly surrealistic touches.

For sure, some of the film's off-kilter humor had the preview audience in stitches: an Aliens parody in which a snickering local cop, sequestered in a cockpit-like driver's seat of an excavator, gets down mano-a-bestia with the very angry boar, for example, is simply priceless. Yet, for every one of these winners, there is another totally mind-boggling scene like Baek-man's dog hurling sarcasm at him telepathically (?) in Russian (??), or the town's resident madwoman smoking opium (?) reclining in her forest abode, where multicolored mushrooms (???) sprout everywhere. By the two-thirds of the film, you might indeed be wondering just what substance Director Shin Jeong-won (whose previous film, To Catch A Virgin Ghost, was dopey-crazy in the same style, but not to this extent) had himself been partaking of in the course of production.

The surprise, then, is that, despite all these bizarre touches and weird goings-on, Chaw ultimately registers as superior entertainment. Let's be clear about one thing, though: Shin displays little aptitude for an action thriller. He's no Spielberg--shucks, he's not even Joe Dante: Chaw's big monster is simply lame, especially whenever it has to ever so slowly chase after hapless humans. In terms of special effects, too, the hog ranks somewhere between the levels of "Acceptable" and "Pathetic."

Chaw's strengths lie elsewhere. For one, it is blessed with an excellent cast who convincingly rattle off its insanely colorful dialogue. Even though the characters are sometimes thoroughly unrealistic, they are nonetheless hugely attractive. Most importantly they don't insult the viewer's intelligence: for instance, Detective Shin actually deduces that there is indeed a man-eating pig from the clues he put together. Their arcs intersect in pleasantly surprising ways, too: Soo-ryun's relentless sunny disposition turns out to be a perfect antidote to Man-bae's camouflage of hardened cynicism. At the center of all these crazy antics, Uhm Tae-woong is perfect as our (relatively speaking) normal hero: his absurdly commonsensical response to the surrounding chaos becomes mercilessly hilarious by the climax.

Part Monty Python-like parody of Hollywood disaster films, part conventional monster horror, part surrealist situation comedy (?), Chaw is the kind of film that makes you shake your head in disbelief more than once, but also keeps you laughing. I do wish Shin had reined in some of the film's excesses (including an afterthought-like epilogue that explains the ultimate fate of a character) and was given a chance to improve on the creature design and execution of special effects, but what ended up on screen, while lacking in bite, has a pleasing, unique flavor of its own.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    Haeundae

Haeundae became the fifth South Korean film to break the 10 million admissions mark. It made a lot of money, but it didn't make much else.

That's a trite statement, I know. Typing such a statement requires I ignore the fact that in making a lot of money, that money spread around the Korean peninsula like the pixilated tidal waves of the film throughout the beaches of Haeundae. And depending on how that money was spent elsewhere in the economy, it made other things. By creating a financially successful blockbuster, it allowed for friends, families, and both well-trenched and tentative romantic partners to create an eventful evening. And more with the money, they possibly ate before or after the film at an independently-owned restaurant or drank coffee before or after the film at a corporate coffeehouse. But as for giving us something to talk about as a cultural touch point with lasting power, there's not much there. Even Shiri brings up even more interesting things to discuss than Haeundae.

But talk about it we must, because this website is as much a film aggregator as it is a place for pinpointing the significance of South Korean films. So let's get the plot out of the way. Claiming to be South Korea's first disaster movie, director Youn Je-gyun (Sex Is Zero and My Boss, My Hero who also goes by just 'JK Youn') takes advantage of Busan's tourist beaches as an opportunity to destroy tall buildings and holiday-goers with a tsunami. With the devastation caused by a tsunami in Thailand a few years back, non-diegetic fears and images travel along the current of the computer-generated images of insanely-storey-ed waves.

Here are the characters we are asked to care about. There is a wealthy young woman on holiday with friends from Seoul who falls for a local member of the Coast Guard. We also have a seaman (Sol Kyung-gu, a great actor choosing yet another bad film, although I'm sure he got paid nicely) who longs for the daughter of a fellow seaman. Unfortunately, that fellow seaman died while at sea during a tsunami years ago and our surviving seaman feels responsible for his death, which leaves our survivor hesitant in consummating his affections for the daughter. Then there's the geologist (Park Joong-hoon returns!) who has a genre-demanding, outlandish theory about mega-tsunamis which the genre equally demands his colleagues find unconvincing. Plus, he provides a third love interest storyline when he runs into his divorced wife who has a daughter he thinks he's seen somewhere before (such as his mirror, because it's his daughter but his daughter doesn't know that). Still more, we have an ambitionless adult child frustrating his mother. And rounding things off is the misunderstood hotel developer.

As for all subgenres of the larger porn genre, the interest lies in the haptic pleasures of the expected spectacles. And Haeundae does have some impressive waves. Polygon Entertainment in California was responsible for the water effects, having proved themselves adept in films such as The Perfect Storm and The Day After Tomorrow. But ever the patriot, Youn commissioned other CG scenes to be done by Seoul-based Mofac Studio. ('Mofac' stands for 'Motion FX and Creativity'.) As Youn noted in the September-October 2009 issue of Korean Cinema Today, "Creating water images with computers is one of the most difficult tasks in visual effects." Since such technology has yet to be developed in South Korea, Youn went to the experts at Polygon. Yet, Youn also provided Polygon with a challenge. "The most notable factor is that the movie takes place during the day so that we had to describe all the details of water flows and delicate water sprays." This is why most previous disaster movies have waves hit at night time. So Haeundae took water CG technology further. Plus, Youn was able to convince Hans Uhlig at Polygon to permit Mofac Studio to have access to Polygon's water effect technology in order to complete many of the scenes in the film. In the end, according to an article on Mofac Studio for the November-December 2009 issue of Korean Cinema Today, Mofac Studio completed around 600 of the 700 CG cuts and ended up redoing all but 2 of the CG cuts done originally by Polygon. As a result, Youn's cinematic diplomacy has assisted in further developing South Korea's CG technology and the industries attached to it. In this way, the tidal waves become a metaphorical and literal representation of what we can expect from South Korean cinema technologies in the future.

So it looks like I can talk a little bit about this film. That is, as long as I ignore the importance of a nuanced story like the principals of Haedundae did.      (Adam Hartzell)

    Possessed

Hee-jin (Nam Sang-mi, The Spy Girl), a college student, confronts her evangelist-Christian mother (Kim Bo-yeon) about the sudden disappearance of her younger sister So-jin (Shim Eun-gyung, Hansel and Gretel). The mother obtusely keeps praying to the Lord, and the police detective Tae-hwan (Jang Jin regular Ryu Seung-ryong) dismisses the missing girl as a runaway. To her increasing consternation, Hee-jin uncovers disturbing details about the neighboring apartment residents and their possible exploitation of So-jin's "spiritual gift," led by a witch-like local shaman Kyung-ja (musical actress Moon Hee-gyung). She is plunged into a full-blown nightmare, when the neighbors begin to commit suicide in most gruesome manners, apparently "guided" by the presence of So-jin.

Possessed, a feature film debut of a former architect Lee Yong-ju, is, simply put, one of the best horror films to come out of Korea in recent years. Although not entirely free from influences of the popular genre staples (one nightmare/vision sequence directly riffs on Ring), the film is strikingly original in its design and conception, and shrewdly restrained in its manipulation of the generic elements as well as audience expectations. At the core of Possessed lies a surprisingly serious exploration of the ontology of the supernatural and the dark consequences of blind religious faiths, Christian or shamanistic. The ultimate meaning of So-jin's seemingly supernatural abilities, illustrated with hair-raising visual flair by director Lee, in the end remains obscure, although he makes sure that the viewers leave his movie with the definite impression that something or somebody is out there, observing and even listening to us, perhaps not always with a benevolent intention.

Yet Possessed does not stint on the boogaboo factor either. Atmospheric and moody, but also mercilessly pushing Pavlovian buttons whenever called for, it is full of impressive set pieces, including a startling shamanistic-ritual-gone-horribly-awry sequence, poetic and austere in equal measure. In a few scenes, such as Hee-jung's frightening vision of a crane-like spectral bird, Possessed scales the peak of horror aesthetics that successfully combines beautifully lurid neo-Gothic sensibilities of a Michele Soavi or a Dario Argento and Zen-like contemplative creep-out of Kurosawa Kiyoshi.

Possessed is not perfect: Tae-hwan's sudden hostility toward Hee-jin, for instance, is less than convincing. I also wish the ending was less "tastefully ambiguous" than it is. In the end, though, the film is so strong and well-made that it is difficult not to look forward to Lee Yong-ju's next project. If Possessed is Lee's Knife in the Water, then one shudders (with anticipation) to think what his Repulsion or Rosemary's Baby might be like.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    The Pot

Hyung-kook (independent film veteran Yim Hyung-kook) and Young-ae (Yang Eun-yong, Inner Circle Line) have recently moved to Seoul, with a young daughter. Hyung-kook takes on the responsibility of a factory chief, while Young-ae tries hard to fit in with the local church network, befriending Deacon Park (Choe Jeong-u, Marine Boy) and his wife (Kil Hae-yeon, Seven Days). Dark shadows begin to haunt Hyung-kook's dreams, however, specifically in the form of a faceless figure emerging from black waters of a fog-bound lake. Young-ae is disturbed that their daughter (Ryu Hyun-bin) displays unusual closeness to the deacon's demented mother. She is then confronted by the possibility that the latter might have been assaulted to death by Deacon Park and his wife, in the name of faith healing.

The unfortunately titled Pot (the Korean word, "dok," carries the dual meaning of "pot" and "poison") was one of the few pleasant surprises in the 2009 summer season. It, along with Possessed, is a superior horror film that reconfirms the resilience and elasticity of the genre and its capacity to showcase talents of the debuting Korean directors. Intriguingly, it shares a few thematic threads with Possessed, most notably a critical stance toward certain fundamentalist (to be precise, fanatical) Christian practices. If anything, The Pot is even more uncompromising in exposing the shocking excesses that some evangelical Christians in Korea have resorted to. And yet, it obviously reflects the viewpoints of practicing Christians: unlike Possessed, which treats its supernatural presence as an impersonal and ultimately incomprehensible force, The Pot zeroes on the sins committed by the protagonists and the guilt invoked by them, but with a welcome dose of (dare I say Christian?) compassion and forgiveness. As Hyung-kook's fa?ade of a happy middle-class family crumbles around him, the movie unflinchingly examines the way in which the so-called "church elders," blinded by their own sense of authority, (mis-) leads him away from a path of reconciliation. Indeed, the horrific (and bloody) climax of the film is triggered, not by the vengeful return of the ghost, but by an ostensibly noble ritual of spiritual cleansing gone terribly wrong, grotesquely corrupted into a rite of psychological and physical abuse.

The Pot is not as technically and aesthetically accomplished as Possessed: it more glaringly displays limitations of low-budget filmmaking, and the scare tactics it employs are pretty standard. Writer-director Kim Tae-gon, however, compensates this lack of sophistication and pizzazz with well-considered direction of his cast, who delivers uniformly good performances. Yim Hyung-kook is very impressive in a role that could have easily turned into an annoying genre clich?: it is a testament to his meticulous characterization (under Kim's direction) that the viewers don't feel like secretly rooting for his early demise, no matter how unreasonable or deliberately obtuse his character becomes. We would like to see more of Yang Eun-yong, too, a strikingly attractive but unconventional presence who has flown under the mainstream radar so far: she deserves her own vehicle a la Kim Ji-soo in This Charming Girl. Even the child actress Ryu Hyun-bin is admirably restrained.

The Pot is in the end more of a psychological thriller than a straightforward horror film, but let's not split hairs here: we will accept a good movie when it comes around, regardless of its genre pedigree. And we will be awaiting Kim Tae-gon's next film with high anticipation, as well.

I should add that the film is a Graduate School of Advanced Imaging Science, Multimedia and Film at Chung-Ang University production: the program deserves kudos for helping director Kim complete his project and introduce it into the larger public.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

    Paju

Paju is a small city located to the northwest of Seoul, quite literally a stone's throw from North Korea. These days it is being developed into a kind of artists' community, with the city government trying to attract book publishers and the like. But the film Paju takes place somewhat earlier, between the years of 1995 and 2003. The city we see in the film is a kind of in-between place, no longer rural but not yet urban, with the fast-paced development attracting gangster types and causing disturbance among long-term residents. For one of the film's main characters, it starts as a place of escape and eventually becomes his home. For another character, it is a childhood home, but the need for escape beckons.

Paju is about the complicated relationship between a young girl and her brother-in-law -- and by "relationship" I don't mean to imply that this is a love story. These are two people whose lives have been upended by freak accidents. The man, Joong-shik (Lee Seon-gyun), is burdened with guilt over a tragic event that took place at the home of his lover in 1995. Later he moves to Paju and marries a woman named Eun-su (Shim I-young). But her younger sister Eun-mo (Seo Woo), who lives with them, has an instinctive distrust of her new brother-in-law. Soon another freak accident will take place, which will lead to additional bouts of trauma, guilt, confusion, and eventually, suspicion.

It took seven years for director Park Chan-ok to complete this follow-up to her critically praised debut film Jealousy Is My Middle Name (2002), another slow-burning drama about people concealing inner emotional storms. Paju is recognizably the work of the same director, but it is broader in scale, more difficult, and, in my opinion, a greater accomplishment. It is without question one of the best Korean films of 2009.

In part, it is the film's willful obscurity that gives it its strength. The narrative is laid out in a patchwork of flashbacks and flash-forwards that replicate the jumbled manner in which the brain stores painful memories. Making sense of it all at first is a mental challenge, but the film gives back at least as much as you put into it. Personally I liked that the story's misunderstandings persist through to the end: this is not a film where all characters come around to accept the same interpretation of the events we have witnessed. Because each character carries a different understanding -- and no character possesses complete knowledge of what happened -- there is a layered complexity to the film's emotions.

Park is also quite skilled at structuring her story in a manner that suggests broader themes without pushing them into your face. The concept of home reappears throughout the film, notably in a plot thread about a group of displaced residents, led by Joong-shik, who fight against construction workers and hired thugs to prevent the demolition of an apartment complex. At the same time Eun-mo is fighting to keep her own home, not because she needs a place to stay but because it represents the memory of her deceased parents. For Joong-shik, the fight to save the apartment complex is grounded in his political beliefs, and the pitched battle that breaks out towards the film's end, with rocks and Molotov cocktails being hurled at bulldozers, recall Korea's political battles of recent decades. But eventually he faces a situation where his social ideals come into conflict with his personal feelings and responsibilities towards Eun-mo.

Paju's other key strength is the sheer cinematic pleasure of watching it. It is a beautiful film, not in a glossy colorful sense, but in the grainy quality of its foggy, unsaturated tones and shadows. Cinematographer Kim Woo-hyung, who has collaborated in the past with Im Sang-soo and Jang Sun-woo, deserves much of the credit for this. The acting is also top notch across the whole cast, with actress Seo Woo receiving particular notice for her performance. She is not a complete newcomer, having won a couple awards for her portrayal of the daughter in last year's Crush and Blush, but this is clearly her breakout role. The character of Eun-mo fits her like a glove, and given that this film is at its core a coming-of-age story, she projects an emotional vulnerability and independent-minded determination that represents what is most memorable about Paju. Seo will probably go on to make many more great films, but I suspect she'll always be best remembered for her performance in this one.      (Darcy Paquet)

Koreanfilm.org, last updated Feb 1, 2010.