Gabi: Russian Coffee: A Half-Empty Cup

One man sees coffee as love.
Another man sees coffee as the dream of an Empire.

I like a cuppa joe as much as the next guy but Chang Youn-hyun's historical thriller Gabi: Russian Coffee imbues the beverage with a potency that staggers the mind. Evidently, coffee can make you fall madly in love. It can save you from being murdered. It can get you insider access to a paranoid king. And it can inspire that same king to build a cafe in your dead father's honor as a way to restore status to the family name. I always thought it was enough that coffee could help you stay awake when you got sleepy. Boy, was I wrong.

Tanya (Kim So-yeon), the court barista, knows better than me, too. She knows that the coffee-making method taught to her by her lover Illych (Ju Jin-mo) produces a brew capable of seducing — by way of its floral scent and bitter taste — even the currently in-hiding Emperor (Park Hee-soon) of Korea. Furthermore, she knows which type of cup to use, how to fold a filter, and the right way to pour. She also enjoys the philosophical small talk that can make sipping the hot beverage so enjoyable for master and servant alike.

What she doesn't know, or at least hasn't yet to come to learn, is that you don't assassinate someone just to save your own skin and you can't trust your torturers, especially when one of them — a fellow spy (Yoo Sun) — is also in love with your self-sacrificing boyfriend. Perhaps too much caffeine has clouded her judgment.

As such, Gabi: Russian Coffee is a silly movie. You can understand why actress Lee Da-hae dropped out of the production less than two weeks before the shoot began. She must have read the script and thought, "Hell, I'd rather be a barista in real life."

Glove: Take Me Out to the Ball Game (Even If I'm Bored by Organized Sports)

Saturday afternoons growing up, my brother and I would often argue about what to watch on TV. He wanted to watch the Redskins or the Bullets; I wanted to watch Julie Andrews or Bette Davis. My father would pretend to mediate while actually explaining to me why the game was more important: It was in real time whereas the movie was not. (Please note: This was before DVRs and DVDs so it's not like I could watch Star! later that day!) Today, I'm wondering... If there'd been sports movies on Saturday afternoons, could we have found a happy medium? Would matinees of Remember the Titans have made us a happier family?

Glove, Kang Woo-suk's winning baseball pic about a hotheaded professional pitcher (Jeong Jae-yeong) who gets stuck coaching a scrappy team at a high school for the hearing impaired, has drama both on the diamond and off. That means for the one who wants richly told stories (me), you've got a romance between the pitcher and the assistant coach (Yoo Sun), a bromance between the pitcher and his chubby agent (Jo Jin-woong), and some big brotherly love between the pitcher and the team's star player (Jang Ki-beom). For the one who just wants to see an athletic competition (my brother), you've got a handful of games with unpredictable outcomes and an amusing training montage. And despite his preference for sporting events over movies, I doubt my brother would be able to stop the waterworks when Glove gets soft and mushy.

Hey bros out there, you don't have to be a sports fanatic to appreciate the laudable teamwork in Glove. Aside from the aforementioned actors, fine work is done by Kang Shin-il as an indefatigable vice-principal, Kim Mi-kyeong as a pragmatic head mistress nun, and Kim Hye-song as the catcher whose mitted hand is punished by fast balls. While the rest of the young cast is more green than gold, they get the job done while looking uniformly adorable. Shout out to Kim Ki-beom for a homerun script.