Hide and Seek: The Proper Way to Address a Murderer

One of the unforeseen but enjoyable side-effects of studying the Korean language is being able to spot when characters in Korean movies are speaking to each other with respect. And when they're not! In the serial killer thriller Hide and Seek, for example, there's a scene in which the murderer is terrorizing two children (Jeong Joon-won, Kim Soo-an) trapped in a car. Given the killer's age, expensive coat, and real estate holdings, I would've expected these two kids to speak to their attacker with greater deference. I guess the rule of thumb however is to automatically default to a more casual form of address when screaming at a murderer. I would've missed this nuance in the movie if I hadn't started taking Korean!

It could also be that writer-director Jung Huh is making an intergenerational statement in Hide and Seek. Maybe these two kids don't respect any adults because their parents are so inadequate. Their mom (Jeon Mi-seon) is a negligent whiner who lets them play in a ghetto alleyway while she yammers away with her stateside mother on the phone. Their dad (Son Hyeon-ju) is a withdrawn enigma who exhibits creepy obsessive compulsive behavior and breaks out into unprovoked violence in the middle of the night. Why speak to adults with respect when they're so messed up? Come to think of it, that's a question every generation must ask.

I'm guessing that Pyaong-hwa (Kim Ji-yeong), the pirate-patched daughter of the poor, harried mom that lives next door to the long-lost, potentially-deranged brother (Kim Won-hae) of the OCD dad, already has her own answer. From the looks of it, this little girl has taken it upon herself to is learn English -- and is taking to it quickly -- because the language doesn't require such differentiations in respectful address. She's not about to "sir" or "ma'am" anyone. Everything is casual in the US. Even, some may argue, murder.

The Story of Mr. Sorry: No Apology Needed for Good Animation

To the ever-expanding list of kooky movies about strange vocations -- Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Air Guitar Nation, The Fluffer, Ghostbusters, and Road Trip: Beer Pong among them -- you can now add The Story of Mr. Sorry. This hour-long animated feature about a professional ear cleaner looks at one downtrodden drone's days slaving away for a large corporation devoted to the excavation of waxy buildup. As you might guess from his name, Mr. Sorry isn't very good at his job. In fact, he's a source of ridicule to his boss, his clients and his fellow employees. But everyone's got to make a living, especially when you've got a pet spider to feed and an agency (hired to track down your missing sister) to pay. Sound pitiable? You're right. Mr. Sorry is that. Poor guy.

Luckily for him, a mad scientist helps turn Mr. Sorry's career around. Whether that's good luck or bad luck though depends on your point of view. Mr. Sorry doesn't make friends or earn more money or find his sister when he becomes a "star" ear-cleaner. But he does gain access to the secret place inside people's heads, where their darkest, most intimate secrets are stored. Traveling amid these gorgeously realized dreamscapes of a gemlike palate, Mr. Sorry realizes that his own life may not be so tragic in comparison. There are worse fates than being abandoned, belittled, sentenced, and executed. Probably the most horrific fate is to be a guest on a TV show that lets the audience vote on whether you're destined for the electric chair. You'll see that play out in The Story of Mr. Sorry, too.

Cryptic and creepy, freaky and stunning, The Story of Mr. Sorry is a truly unique creation that's all the more impressive when you learn that it's the collective effort of five students from the Korean Academy of Film Arts: Kwak In-keun, Kim Il-hyun, Ryu Ji-na, Lee Eun-mi, and Lee Hae-young. I hope the future allows me to see the work of at least one of these talented guys again. A+.

The Outlaw: Quitting the Force to Be More Forceful

Officer Oh (Kam Woo-seong) doesn't play by the rules. Oh, no. He's a renegade cop who believes you gotta step outside the law to serve the law. Needless to say, that approach -- while lowering crime rates -- has landed him in trouble with Internal Affairs infinite times. But lately he's gone from outside the law to off the rails. When his long missing wife (Kim Min-joo) and the daughter (Hyeon Na-gyeong) he never knew are pointlessly stabbed to death in a restaurant bathroom, he turns in his badge and picks up a torture porn mask then goes for the kill on two murdering party animals (Peter Ronald Holman, Tak Tu-in) and the negligent members of a justice departments that let those jerks off Scot free.

Catering to an audience that craves shock and gore, writer-director Kim Cheol-han packs a lot of on-screen violence in The Outlaw. You see multiple throats slit, a finger shot off, and men mercilessly beaten with chains. Whether it's good guys or bad guys inflicting the violence varies. Gannibalism? Bad guy. Rape? Bad guy. Impromptu laryngectomy? Good guy, actually. Is Kim attempting to show that too many years in Homicide will lead a cop to adopt the very methodology of those he's out to imprison? Perhaps. But he's also a director who simply likes to show brutality. Why else show Oh having a group hug with his family's bloody corpses?

Fun fact: While researching The Outlaw on asianwiki.com (which is devoted to Asian movies and TV), I discovered that the website sometimes includes the actor's blood type alongside his height, weight and age. Why this is relevant or important, I don't know but if you were curious, Kam Woo-seong is Type O. I also googled up Korean blood type personalities and learned that Type O carriers tend to be "outgoing" and "optimistic" so maybe he was miscast in this role as an anti-social misanthrope. Some actors sure love to play against type!

Jenny, Juno: Teen Pregnancy Is So Twee, Right?

I found Jenny, Juno detestable. That's right. Detestable. A lighthearted puffball about an adolescent girl who gets pregnant (but looks as lithe at six months as she did before getting knocked up) and her pouting boyfriend (who looks as though he's never had a lewd thought, never mind a pubic hair), Kim Ho-joon's YA rom-com suggests the sole repercussions of an underage pregnancy are the girl's growing appetite and the boy's desire to emulate John Hughes movies. What's weird is that Kim is actually building an oeuvre about marrying minors. His previous romantic comedy -- My Little Bride -- concerns a high school girl who discovers that her arranged marriage with an older guy might not be such a bad deal in the end. So is having both the lovers be young this time around an improvement? Quite possibly. But I'm not totally sure.

I think part of the problem of Jenny, Juno is that the two lead actors (Park Min-ji, Kim Hye-sung) don't just look super-young, they also play super-young. There's something mildly depressing about seeing a ditzy, expectant teenage girl lying on a bed piled high with stuffed animals and personalized throw pillows. The young couple's single concession to impending parenthood consist of standing outside a Lamaze class to glean instructions from the other side of a glass window. Evidently, it's enough to simply watch what's happening once to master the technique. Who knew it was this easy?

Everyone knows it's not. Which is what made the American-made Juno (similar title, similar plot, completely different attitude) so engaging. The title character of this latter movie had to struggle with physical discomforts, savage ostracism, and some painful choices that have to do with being a teen mom. That Juno managed to extract a happy ending from a complicated reality; this one includes a chaste fantasy wedding that made me want to cry like a baby. And then puke. Apparently, Jenny, Juno causes morning sickness!

Punch: Family Drama Just for Kicks

I'm predisposed to like a coming-of-age movie like Lee Han's Punch. Wan-deuk's father (Park Su-young) is a hunchbacked dwarf who likes to dance; his uncle (Kim Young-jae), a man-child who acts like a 10-year-old; his mother (Jasmine), a Filipino waitress with self-esteem issues; his homeroom teacher (Kim Yun-seok), a tough-love, community activist with a drinking problem. Growing up poor, or at best financially challenged, I too was surrounded by my own quirky extended family who, though not as colorful on the surface, were actually weird enough in their own ways for the circus-realist Punch to resonate with me on a very personal level. So much so that I'm now sitting here wondering if I'd be happier -- or at least more grounded -- today as an adult if someone had encouraged me to take martial arts to get out all my teenage frustrations when I too was 17. You could say that's why my father got me to join the Northwood High wrestling team when I was a sophomore but I didn't want to grapple so much as strike. I think, like Wan-deuk (Yoo Ah-in), I would've found greater satisfaction in kickboxing as a way to channel the rage that comes with feeling like an oddball -- Correction: Of being an oddball -- at a time when conformity is at its most crushing.

Playing the central soul-searcher, Yoo does a great job conveying his character's bewilderment at the inconsistencies of the grown-up world while discovering his own insistence to take a path not entirely delineated by those around him. (Which isn't to say he's above accepting a little guidance on occasion.) Alternately tremulous and slack-jawed, his every-teen isn't smarter than his elders; he's just electrically aware of each individualized reality. It's as if Lee and his screenwriter Kim Dong-woo aren't waxing nostalgic about adolescence as "the time before hypocrisy" so much as they're acknowledging it as an earlier time as violently chaotic as adulthood. It's an awareness available to re-experience at any time. I left Punch reconnected to mine.

The Righteous Thief: Robin Hood Has a Family

Steal from the rich. Give to the poor. That's the modus operandi of one exceedingly popular folk hero who has manifested in various forms across various cultures. In England, they called him Robin Hood; in Germany, Schinderhannes; in Korea, Hong Gil-dong. In The Righteous Thief, Jeong Yong-ki's reboot of the People's Criminal, the man (Lee Beom-su) redistributing the wealth is a latter day descendant -- 18 generations removed -- who teaches piano and courts fellow faculty (Lee Si-young) at the local high school during the day then wears black tights, scales buildings and inhales helium to rob shady millionaires at night. Lately, he's developed an obsession with one evil mogul (Kim Su-ro), an absurdly rich businessman who's developed a somewhat fetishistic obsession himself with superhero paraphernalia.

Folk hero vs. superhero? Not really. Since we never really see the needy getting a piece of the pilfered pie, a more accurate description of the central conflict here would be indie criminal vs. corporate criminal. As crookery goes this isn't the most antiestablishment. Asked to testify which crimes are the worst in The Righteous Thief, I'd say probably say, they're the ones committed by the performers, not by the characters. Someone should be slapping the wrists of two stars immediately. Would Kim Su-ro and Song Dong-il please take the stand!

It's not often you see a movie in which two actors define their characters with identical mannerisms. So lazy. So felonious. Is Song, as the prosecutor, trying to steal Kim's characterization of the criminal mastermind? Or is Kim pickpocketing the performance of Song? Who's ripping off whom? Regardless, the mirroring of a shit-eating grin and the echoing of a self-deprecating laugh halves every potential laugh in The Righteous Thief. If I were the offended party, I would have left the opening night party in a fury and headed straight to the nearest bar. There I would've ordered a double.

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.