Clever Turtles

I haven't been keeping up with my 130 Korean movies project, but I have seen some movies over the summer and fall (the last time I posted on it). I will try to make a brief comment on each.

4. "프란다스의 개" ("Barking Dogs Never Bite" or "The Dog of Flanders")

The first real release from Korea's leading director Bong Joon-ho, I have to say it's one of the best Korean movies I've seen yet, and not only because it features Bae Doo-na. It's an amazing slice-of-life story in a typical high-rise apartment complex in Seoul. The protagonist is a recently awarded humanities Ph.D. attempting to find a tenure-track professorship while taking care of his very pregnant, working wife. However, to get a Dean's recommendation one needs to pass the "white envelope". But wait! That's just the setup. The real story is the convoluted chain of events surrounding him, a worker in the complex's administration office, a janitor, and a series of disappearing dogs from the no-pets-allowed complex.

It's a little dated, but I really think it captured day-to-day life in Korea and I'm hoping to show it in my university Korean club. Stylistically, it's a really engrossing, character-driven storyline that isn't afraid to stop and hang on an interesting moment. There were several memorable scenes where the camera pulls back to show the action from the wider perspective, of little figures scrambling around a big building. I highly recommend it.

[You can probably guess where the disappearing dogs storyline is leading. Not a movie I would show at a PETA convention, and there's a "no animals were injured" disclaimer prominently featured before the title screen. It did make me wince a couple of times, but there are no real graphic scenes of animal cruelty.]

5. 남극 일기 (Antarctic Journal)

I tracked this movie down simply because I read that the screenplay was credited to Bong Joon-ho, and I've been on a kick lately. I described it to my friend as "'R-Point' in Antarctica," which is probably how it was pitched to the studio.

An expedition of Korean mountaineers is traveling to the "Pole of Inaccessibility", the point in Antarctica furthest from the surrounding ocean, that had been visited only once before by Soviet explorers.

[This is a real place, but they fudged the history a bit. The Soviets returned and built a research station there, and a couple other international expeditions made it there.]

Along the way, they discover a journal, preserved in the cold and somewhat legible, left by an English expedition decades earlier. Not long after, though, things begin to go wrong.

The movie has an ensemble cast led by the terrific character actor Song Kang-ho, and they do a fair job of making the boundary between supernatural and psychological horror very fuzzy. That said, there are a lot of Asian horror tropes, so if you're not big on ghost movies you probably won't find this one very interesting. I did think there was an interesting Lovecraftian vibe to it.

6. 마더 (Mother)

I saw this back in July, so I'm a little hazy on the details. It is Bong Joon-ho's latest movie, about a mother and her retarded son in a small town. The son is implicated in the senseless murder of a young schoolgirl, and his mother takes it upon herself to penetrate the mystery and clear her son.

I remember there being a few plot developments that struck me as being kind of weak, but overall it was a great character study. Bong Joon-ho does not disappoint and takes his time with some really great scenes. My biggest complaint, I think, is that he seemed compelled to tie up all of the loose ends. Sometimes we don't need ALL of the answers, just most of them.

7. 활 (The Bow)

It's a Kim Ki-duk movie, and like all Kim Ki-duk movies, it's fucked up. It will make you feel somewhat uncomfortable, pretty much from beginning to end. It borrows from Korea's traditions and its modern condition, as well as whatever whacked-out crazyland Kim Ki-duk always accesses, and the result is a damned good movie with some very haunting scenes.

The setup? An old man lives on a boat, with a teenaged girl. The girl is not his granddaughter. The old man makes a living running small fishing tours out to his boat. One day, a young man on the tour says, "That's fucked up." Existential crises ensue. And they play the same damned song through the whole movie.

Y'know, there's a reason why more people see Kim Ki-duk movies in France than in Korea, even though all of his movies are made in Korean. The reason is French people are awesome.

8. 해운대 (Haeundae)

The name of Busan's most popular beach, this was the big-budget, special effected, summer blockbuster disaster movie. A tidal wave strikes Busan, during the height of the summer tourist season. If only someone saw that coming! Oh, yeah, the nerdy character that everyone ignored because he had Jeff Goldblum glasses. If only someone can save the poor people! Oh, there's the lifeguard/Coast Guard hero guy. If only there were a manly man struggling with alcoholism who can pull himself together to . . . Yeah, you get the point.

Watch it with some friends when you're bored. With beer.

9. 고양이를 부탁해 (Please, Take Care of My Cat)

A quirky, touching independent movie that, despite critical acclaim from the artistic community, never got enough attention in Korea and probably will never get a real US DVD release.

I should come back to this later, after re-watching the movie, and give a more detailed synopsis and analysis. Basically, the story centers around a group of girls, just graduated from a high school in Incheon, trying to make it in the adult world. All of the girls have their own things going on that pull them in different directions, but all of them are faced with the fact that they are trying to make it in a world that they are ill-prepared for and doesn't really care for them.

In one very suggestive scene, two of the original group of five go to visit their grandparents, who are Chinese. This, coupled with the fact Incheon is the center of Korea's immigrant Chinese community, suggest that some or all of the girls are second- or third-generation Chinese immigrants. This is not really followed up in the rest of the movie, but it does make this one of the only Korean movies to give a thoughtful consideration of multi-ethnicity in Korea.

The storyline holds some of the melodramatic touches Korean dramas are (in)famous for, but it was not enough to grate at me. It is well-cast, and Bae Doo-na's great performance is one of the reason's I'm getting a celebrity crush on her. Overall, it's on the short-list of Korean movies I would recommend to outsiders.

10. 무영검 (The Shadowless Sword)

Apparently this post got lost or forgotten -- I watched this last spring. I'll mention it here just to boost my 130 K movie number.

Generic wuxia story, Korean movie. These guys are chasing another guy, he knows kung-fu, they fight. Decent action, but not fantastic -- I don't think they are specialized action actors. The action struck me as being kind of faux-samurai -- lots of people exploding thirty seconds after being struck. Okay as a late-night martial-arts movie.