Son of a General II: Ex-Con Gets His Kicks From Raising Hell and Reading Literature

Im Kwon-taek's General's Son was such a big hit that the next year, the director slapped together a sloppy sequel that neither furthers the story nor fleshes out its hero. Gangster-activist Kim Doo-han (Park Sang-min) is back after a short stint in the penitentiary and he's fighting mad! Motivated by either patriotism or petty thievery, he's fallen right back into the same behavior that landed him behind bars: He's executing roundhouse kicks on the Japanese and flirting with the geishas at the local bar. Shame on you, Kim! It's one thing to beat up foreign thugs for your country but a little maturity is called for too. You should pick a single prostitute to be your gal and settle down. Didn't all that time in the clink teach you anything? Well, maybe Kim's judgment and his memory (he seems to have forgotten his lineage again) is clouded by all those congratulatory shots of liquor he's always receiving. He's older now. He's more circumspect. But he can't handle liquor like he once could. And since he's also developing a love of literature after two hired students read the novel Pure Love out loud to him, everyone in town knows his days as a kingpin in a double-breasted suit are numbered. That purple prose is deadly.

Oldboy: Revenge Is Sweet, Repeatedly

I'd always been afraid to watch Oldboy a second time because I loved it so much the first. This movie, along with Save the Green Planet, is why I'm the longstanding fan of Korean film that I am. I didn't want to mess with that memory. I didn't want to rob Oldboy of its stature. In a nutshell, I was secretly worried that knowing the "shocking ending" beforehand would diminish the pleasures ahead. Would it end up feeling like a gimmick flick? Not to fear. Park Chan-wook's revenge masterpiece works equally well when you're clued in to the horrific plot twists. It's still creepy, lyrical, and deranged but now it's also deterministic. That main guy is doomed! Choi Min-sik gives what's likely the performance of his career as a man who, imprisoned 15 years for crimes unknown, is driven crazy by his need to discover why he was captured and confined. He's more than ably supported by Kang Hye-jeong as a blameless femme fatale and Yu Ji-tae as his pretty boy nemesis. The whole spiral downward is stunningly shot, paced, and performed. And does anyone not like perfection simply because they know where it's going? Not me. If an ending's any good, it's good whether you know it's coming or not. The spoiler is a term reserved for second-rate films.

Witchboard: Burning Down the Schoolhouse

For the young school girls of Ahn Byeong-ki's Witchboard, fear of possession is a trifle when compared to the terror of having one demonic teen (Lee Se-eun) hypnotize you into committing suicide by placing a plastic bag over your head and lighting it on fire. Nor is the local psychic (Choi Jeong-yun) safe when confronted by the deceptively passive new art teacher (Kim Gyu-ri) who herself is possessed by the spirit of the dead mother (Kim again) whose child was murdered by the townsfolk 30 years ago because they hated how the kid looked with glaucoma. Sound discombobulating? Well, there's another teacher (Choi Seong-min) -- studies unknown -- with cheekbones as high as his moral standards who shares the audience's sentiments. He's trying to figure it all out but he's always one step behind the carnage. Plus his dad won't tell him the town's ugly secret. Heads burn. Buildings explode. A body is bludgeoned by a pair of scissors over and over again. (That part's really bloody!) Yet teacher never saves a soul except those of the murderers themselves. This is the price that comes with being uninformed. It makes sense that the subtext of a movie set in a high school would advocate educating yourself promptly.

Nowhere to Hide: Look at the Crime; Don't Attend to the Crime

Nowhere to Hide certainly looks good. It's got a grainy black-and-white prelude in which one high-energy police bust periodically freeze frames into Crayola-colored stills. It's got slow, arhythmic pans that slide across glass surfaces reflecting autumn leaves, street lights and garish neon. It's got one extended fight sequence shot in silhouette so that it looks like cool shadow puppetry. All of this is good. It's also got a villain (Ahn Sung-kee) who despite being a murderer doesn't seem to justify the extensive manhunt. It's got a main cop (Park Joong-hoon, a kind of poor man's Song Kang-ho) who's technique is limited to swagger, smile and run. The detective has an ineffective sidekick (Jang Dong-kun); the bad guy, a teary-eyed girlfriend (Choi Ji-woo). All of this is bad. Does it balance out in the end? I'd say Nowhere to Hide is the perfect party video; director Lee Myung-se's movie is the type you want playing on a wall at a nightclub or a rave, its periodically flashy visuals acting as conversation-starters and boredom-preventers. Minus the dialogue (and there isn't much, frankly), Nowhere to Hide is fit to be seen and danced to.

Deaf Sam-ryong: He Can't Hear You Say Stop Loving Me

People say you can make your own family but I don't know. I think you're pretty much born with whatever it's going to be and that the best of everyone else is just really good friends if you're lucky. You can't make someone a blood relative aside from marriage. From the looks of Deaf Sam-ryong, director Shin Sang-ok agrees with me. His effective weepie about a servant (Kim Jin-kyu) with no hearing and only half a brain shows that you can be the best-behaved son to the man you wish were your father but he'll always choose his own offspring first, and that you can be the most chaste, self-sacrificing idolizer of a well-bred lady (Choi Eun-hie) but she'll always side with her husband even if he beats her and sleeps with the maid. Maybe if this surrogate son/lover wasn't such a simpleton that wouldn't be the case but poor Sam-ryong has only the cards he's been dealt by life and those add up to a losing hand. Although his performance is painfully over-the-top, Kim creates a sympathetic character eventually. I guess you can't be this downtrodden and not merit a handful of hankies. Choi, for her part, must be credited for keeping a straight face during Kim's shameless mugging.

YMCA Baseball Team: This Diamond's for Sports Fans

One of these days, I'm going to get around to reading Pindar. Maybe if I'd read the Olympian odes of literature's first sports fanatic, a don't-think, feel-good movie like YMCA Baseball Team wouldn't seem so mystifying. It's not that I don't get it: Korea's first baseball team (circa 1906) unifies the nation by defeating their Japanese opponent-oppressors; it's not that I don't enjoy it: Is it ever bad to see a film with Song Kang-ho in the lead? It's just that I don't buy it. I never experience an epiphany when an athletic underdog overcomes the odds, in a fabricated context. Sports have neither the drama of theater nor the grace of dance. In short, they're not art...especially baseball which has to be the slowest organized sport out there after golf. The best you can say about a baseball movie is at least it doesn't draw out every inning. Only the final one. And if you're second-guessing who's going to win in the rematch between Korea and Japan here, you've probably never seen a sports movie before. Should that be the case, Kim Hyeon-seon's popcorn confection is a giggle-inducing introduction to the genre. Call it a hit and I'll agree. Call it a home run, and I'll accuse you of fudging stats.

Volcano High: The Remedial Students of Chopsocky

I sense two possibilities here. The first is that writer-director Kim Tae-gyun commissioned a storyboard for Volcano High but was given a manhwa (a Korean manga) instead. The second is that he found the manhwa first and used it as his storyboard. Either way, this movie is really just a series of four-color panels in which actors do everything overemphatically as they strive to become cartoons. There's plenty of talk about destiny, screams shouted at the heavens, and even guys with superpowers and Matrix coats. But character development and a nuanced plot.... Well, you'll have to look elsewhere for those. You won't find much comedy either despite all the hammy acting and a ludicrous storyline about rebelious students who want to rule the high school by getting access to a magical scroll. I'll be damned if I could figure out who I was supposed to cheer on: the dorky blonde transfer student (Jang Hyuk), the ice princess (Shin Min-a) who helms the Kendo team, or a group of adult outsiders brought in as disciplinarians. MTV re-edited the film then dubbed it with hip hop artists (Snoop Dogg, Method Man, Mya) and I say why not. For all its excesses, Volcano High has very little to recommend it in its original form. It's hyper-boring.