Friend 2: The Legacy: Before and Before That but After That

Ready to get ever-so-slightly confused, my fellow Korean movie fan? Well, Friend 2: The Legacy picks up exactly 17 years after the action in the original Friend movie, even though only 13 years have actually passed since the first movie was shot. Why the discrepancy, I don't know. Furthermore, the movie isn't just a sequel (with some flashbacks to old footage we've already seen). It also flashes further back to an extended prequel that predates part one, as well to a kind of latter-day prequel with action that's post-Friend but pre-Friend 2. With all this jumping back and forth (if you're anything like me), you're going to question which is the primary storyline and whether you truly need to know so much ancestry about so many characters. I mean, The Godfather this is not. Plus there is no Old Country.

So what's supposed to be the focus here? Is it the current-day partnership between newly released con and mob heavy Lee Joon-seok (Yu Oh-seong) and fatherless, aspirational teen hood Choi Seong-hoon (Kim Woo-bin) OR is it the familial dramas of Choi and his posse of warrior wannabes OR is it the well-appointed mob history of someone's grandfather? I am frankly still unsure. The present-day ending doesn't resolve any of the stories so much as it positions the characters for a threequel during which it seems likely that the layering could expand to include a scifi future scenario examining the offspring of Lee, Choi and maybe the illegitimate offspring of a character killed off at some point in time. Please don't let these comments dissuade you from checking out Friends 2 if you've already seen its predecessor. Even with all the complications, auteur Kwak Kyung-taek's delivers some undeniable and simple pleasures -- one being the joy that comes with witnessing how much better an actor like Yu has gotten (which isn't to say he wasn't good before) and how much sexier he's gotten too; the other is getting to see a new, young talent like Kim glower in scene after scene with one of the best '50s style Elvis coifs to hit the screen in many a day. This movie has left me with a serious care of hair envy.

The Show Must Go On: A Thug's Life

The Show Must Go On is definitive proof that Song Kang-ho is one of the greatest actors of his generation. It's a fantastic mob movie that, because of Song, plumbs unusual depths, too. What makes Song such a genius performer? Well, this may sound like a funny place to start but I don't believe there's another actor who can play sleepy (or mine it for its comic possibilities) as well as Song can. And there's something about all the correlatives that go with sleepiness -- overworked, overanxious, overburdened, overwhelmed -- that strike me as emblematic of our times. In The Show Must Go On, Song's putting that somnolent skillset to good use as an overextended mobster who is so sleep-deprived that he conks out repeatedly -- including at the driver's wheel of his car in the midst of a noisy rush hour.

Not one to rest on his laurels, Song's also a master of drunkenness, too, which when you think about it, is simply a gateway to sleep. But look at the variety of intoxications that Song can do: He's funny drunk, nasty drunk, sloppy drunk, violent drunk and, in one awfully humiliating interaction between his character and his character's daughter (Kim So-eun) -- who has him arrested for disorderly conduct -- contritely drunk. Song can make reprehensibly sloppy behavior consistently sympathetic. Naturally, Song can do much more than drowsiness and drunkenness. But whatever he does, this actor always feels like he's doing it right on the spot. Maybe that's why his drunken and drowsy scenes are so impressive. Both states give way to irrational behavior that's abnormal but still firmly rooted in who we intrinsically are. If you think that Song can only do showy stuff then re-watch his married mobster here when he turns on the charm for his wife (Park Ji-yeong), a woman who's got wise to his ways and wants out. Who else can mix lightness and desperation so effectively? How in the world did he do that? What'll he dream up next? I'm always ready to see.

4 Toes: Comedy on the Fly

You get the feeling that writer-director Gye Yun-shik neither wrote for nor directed the actors in his jopok comedy 4 Toes but rather that he set up a couple of cameras then threw out spur-of-the-moment ideas for improvisation until he'd amassed enough material -- at least in terms of footage -- to cobble together a feature film. To that end, you've got skits about blood type, about a car's CD player, about a car accident with your buddy, about a mythical golden axe... You've also got skits based on locations, like a nightclub, a parking lot, a photo portrait studio, and a sauna which means for this big fight have the guys are naked, although never full-frontally so. Most scenes are super-short. Nothing really adds up. Nothing really goes anywhere either. There's no larger vision at work here outside of the desire to make a movie fast and cheap with some friends. And actually, it's a technique that could work but you'd have to have luck on your side and some actors who were a bit more naturally funny.

Fortune isn't smiling on Gye, however, or his four male leads, all of whom feel too old to be playing high school students in some scenes and too goofy to be gangsters in others. And yet, as ineffective as 4 Toes is, and as lazy as the script is (there's so much voiceover you'd think Gye was filming a novelization), I still appreciated the ballsiness of the undertaking. The willingness to risk, though it didn't pay off here, certainly explains why some members of the cast have gone on to much more successful comedies: Jeong Eun-pyo (Le Grand Chef), Kim Kap-su (She's on Duty), Lee Won-jong (200 Pounds of Beauty). Which suggests to me that sometimes there's something to be said for just practicing your craft in public or on celluloid or in this case what looks like digital video; and that there's no shame in having a little egg on your face if you're aiming to eventually get a part in an enjoyably frivolous movie that's light as a souffle. Even Gye went on to greater success: My Wife Is a Gangster 3 may not be a work of genius but it's a threequel in a fairly big film franchise.