Yesterday: Tomorrow Is Looking Doubly Depressing Today

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

Piano Man: The Keyboard to Insanity

Poor Yu Sang-wook! The director mistakenly thinks we want to hear a nightclub diva singing ludicrous covers of Mariah Carey and Roberta Flack. (We don't.) He also believes that a sub-plot involving an alcoholic detective (Park Cheol) and his Sherlock Holmes of a son (Hong Kyoung-in) is going to add emotional heft to the story. (It doesn't.) Why all the superfluities, Yu? All we really want is a streamlined thriller, a boilerplate potboiler in which one swaggering lady dick (Lee Seung-yeon) tracks down a Goth serial killer (Choi Min-su) who does ventriloquism, lights himself on fire, and sulks behind a grunge-rocker hairdo. Piano Man (1996) had the potential to be so much more; it just needed to stick to doing a little less: As is, the procedural-crime drama has kick-ass cinematography from Seo Jeong-min who shoots from retro angles and in just the right palette of lurid reds. It's also got a bad-ass female detective who can give a serious smackdown to a gang of lawbreakers hustling black market license plates. Piano Man isn't quite a poor man's Memories of Murder. It's more like a fun but sloppy copy of something exceptionally good.

Libera Me: Pyro Mon Amour

Pyromaniacs provide firefighters with jobs. They also share a common interest. Still the two groups are improbable friends, at odds with each other for as long as one side wants to fan the flames and the other side wants to douse them. Libera Me isn't about to change all that. Sticking to the obvious, Yang Yun-ho's paean to the men with long hoses is basically a classic match-up between a fireman (Choi Min-su) who can psychically sense arson and a troublemaker (Cha Seung-won) who wants to see buildings burn. The hero's got guilt over a lost partner; the villain was inevitably abused as a child. Neither guy is particularly interesting. Luckily, fire loves a vacuum so in Libera Me, the fascination of both men emerges as the star. Exploding out windows, through walls, and up elevator shafts, this incendiary diva engulfs barely sketched out secondardy characters whom we never knew and we'll never miss. As unlucky extras flap their arms in panic or lie on the ashy floor, beautiful blasts of red, orange, and yellow fill the screen. Crackling dialogue is replaced by plain crackle. Explosive drama by repeated explosions. This isn't a movie. It's a promo for Zippo lighters.

Phantom: The Submarine - That Sinking Feeling

How much do some Koreans hate the Japanese? Enough to nuke Okinawa and then some. I'm talking some serious hate. And is this rage justified? Some say yes; one says no. As least, that's the set-up for Phantom: The Submarine (1999), a political thriller that argues both for and against violence as retribution. Since the angry thesis is made not just by an insurrectionist naval captain (Choi Min-Su) but also by his entire, mutinous crew, you do wonder a little about whether the lone good guy (Jung Woo-sung) is seeing the same big picture as his shipmates. Granted, the rebel against the rebellion understands the cost of violence firsthand. (He saw his father shoot his mother then escaped the same fate once dad was popped off by the military.) Yet surely, there must be a more persuasive case to be made against starting a war than I saw my mommy and daddy slayed. After a tedious convoluted opener involving a firing squad and an Orwellian relocation program, director Min Byung-chun generates underwater tensions in claustrophic confines lit in Christmassy reds and greens. Two Japanese subs are torpedoed. Another is dragged to its death. The friendly whale swims nearby and tries to enlighten the crew by singing its ageless song but these guys would rather hear screaming than really cool music.