Lifting King Kong: Feel-Good Girl Power in Spandex

I was ready to yawn, to gag, to roll my eyes, to multitask on my iPhone, to vacuum, to fall asleep and upon waking again to basically loathe Lifting King Kong. You see, this feel-good sports pic has such emotive acting and such an obvious narrative arc that I was sure I was going to be bored (i.e., feel bad) despite the movie's best intentions. Well girlfriend! I was wrong. Here's how the movie defeated the skeptical me. (Why do I keep thinking I won't like movies about athletes when I so often do?!)

The first surprise is that Lifting King Kong focuses on a sport that's rarely the center of a movie: Weightlifting. The sport is one in which individual athletes compete against their own best efforts instead of other teams. So while there's a ragtag group at the center of Lifting King Kong, there's not a team in the conventional sense. The second surprise is that Lifting King Kong not only spotlights an atypical sport but it also features the women who practice it. No. Not women. Teen girls. Outcasts who take up the sport because they've got no families, no futures, no friends. You could subtitle this movie "From Pity Party to Pumping Iron." The third surprise is that the fat girl (Lee Hyeon-kyeong) who poops on herself actually gets the cute boy (Ahn Yong-joo).

So 40 minutes in, I went from sneering to cheering as the various budding athletes -- orphan/Olympian-to-be Young-ja (Jo An) among them, progressed from junior high chumps to high school champs. That their devoted coach (Lee Beom-su) is a seriously injured former bronze medalist who appears to be wearing a fat suit for part of the movie as a way to bond with his mentees only allows you to tear up more as the girls develop muscles as well as self-respect and inner strength. The acting doesn't get any better mind you but this one will trigger the waterworks nonetheless. Kleenex required, for sure.

And before you write the movie off as preposterous, you should know that Lifting King Kong is based on a true story that's also pretty dramatic. In reality, Jeong In-yeong -- SPOILER ALERT! who also died of a heart attack -- coached a girls weightlifting team to a record number of medals and went on to also discover the flyweight Olympic Medalist Jeon Byeong-gwan who won a Silver in Seoul and a Gold in Barcelona. I can see why writer-director Park Geon-yong and his writing collaborators Jeong Ik-hwan and Bae Se-yeong decided to combine all the stories into one. The truth is always a bit messy.

Muoi: The Legend of the Portrait: Seeing the Bad Side of Things

Way back when, some time before the widespread use of electricity but after the invention of acid, Muoi (Anh Thu) -- the tenth-born child of a very poor family -- had the great misfortune of falling in love with a man named Nguyen (Binh Minh), a handsome, young swain with a gift for portraiture and a talent for womanizing. Both skills came into play when Nguyen decided to seduce Muoi while painting her picture. One mission accomplished (the seduction), he abandoned the other (the picture) and hurried off to resume his romance with a richer, former love. Back home, this original girlfriend (Hong Anh) caught wind of Muoi and decided to break her rival's ankle and throw acid in her face, as a way to let her know "You don't mess with my man!" Muoi took revenge by killing herself then returning as a ghost with a bone to pick. Nguyen then tricked her ghost into becoming an artist's model again so he could finish her portrait. Then some priests entered banging on gourds and Nguyen stabbed the picture to trap the evil spirit inside. End of legend.

Unlike me, the character Yun-hui (Jo An) thinks this story has the makings of a really good novel. Her last book, a thinly-veiled pseudo-memoir called Lies and Secrets, did pretty well but not so great that she's worried that Seo-yeon (Cha Ye-ryeon), the friend who she mercilessly defamed in it, would have read it since moving to Vietnam. So Yun-hui stays with Seo-yeon and asks her to help research the book. Hallucinations follow as part of the creative process. Eventually, Yun-hui realizes that even if you've betrayed your friend, who far from being a slut was videotaped -- being raped -- by the guy you have a secret crush on, you still have to kill your friend if she's possessed by a demon.

How does she knows there's a ghost at work? Well, a doorbell rings in the middle of the night right after a shower goes on mysteriously. That's one sign. Wallpaper uncurls off the wall in her bedroom, and lights flicker when there's a storm outside. Those are two others. Admittedly, they're not conclusive evidence, but fueled by the gossip of Seo-yeon's co-worker (Hong So-hee), who's half-Korean, half-smirk, Yun-hui doesn't let loose logic or a lack of lucidity get in the way of her mission. Her ex-best-friend may not be the kleptomaniac slut that she made her out to be in her mud-slinging roman a clef, but Seo-yeon did have the nerve to dance with that passably attractive white guy at the bar who Yun-hui had her eye on. Some betrayals can't be forgotten, no matter how many shots of Black Label you consume. Bring out the daggers!

Sorum: If a Strange Man Offers You a Free Ride, Does It Matter If He's a Cabbie?

I watched Sorum because I wanted some K-horror. But Sorum isn't a fright flick despite the ghosts, the creaky stairs, the constant rain, and that ever-flickering light in the dirty hallway. Sorum is a creepy thriller that gets its chills from the real, not the supernatural. At its center is Yong-hyun, a soulless cab driver (please-take-your-shirt-off-again Kim Myeong-min) who seduces convenience store cashier Sun-yeong (please-throw-out-that-winter-coat Jang Jin-young) shortly after she murders her abusive husband. True to noir, such a romance is predestined and doomed. He may help her bury that wife-beater but that's not enough to keep them together forever. You see, she's got issues with intimacy and he's got hangups around commitment. It takes awhile for each to discover that the other isn't exactly his/her ideal and director Yun Jong-chan takes his time as he reveals not just two disturbing psychologies but a whole shabby apartment building full of them. Aside from these twisted lovers, there's also a failed publisher-turned-plagiarist (Gi Ju-bong) who drinks alot and a widow (Jo An) who lost her baby as well as her husband. The movie's ending is a bit baffling but there's so much good that precedes that who cares.

Wishing Stairs: This One's (Not) for the Fat Girls

Now that makeup artists are obsessed with making ingenues look like walking whales, the roles for obese actresses are fewer than ever before. But contrary to the art department's claims, these pretty young things never look like real fat people. They look like women in fat suits topped by faces plumped up and disfigured by putty. It was true for Gwyneth Paltrow in Shallow Hal. It was true for Eddie Murphy in Norbit. And it's true for Jo An in Wishing Stairs. This makeover movement has no color boundaries! In Yun Jae-yeon's freaky fable about a staircase that grants wishes, the faux fat girl (who wishes--can you guess it?--to lose weight) simply finds her true self post-transformation. Lee Soyoung's script may insist that she's now totally bonkers but she looked crazy beforehand, too. Who walks around in a padded dress and adds prosthetic blubber to her neck? To actress Jo An's credit, she keeps her fat mannerisms when she's skinny but nowadays with all the makeover shows, why not just hire a XL tween and then really have her lose the weight? Anyway, that's the subplot. The central (slim) story is about two (slim) ballet students who are in love and in competition. Kind of fun actually.