Two Weddings and a Funeral: To Have and to Hold and to Hurt and to Heal

Anyone who says that being gay or straight is a private affair and is actually nobody's business doesn't realize what a public thing love inevitably is. Imagine never being able to state who you were with last night or why you have to leave work early or having to jump through extra hoops to adopt a kid or having to pretend that you are what you're not because saying who you are is making something private public and that's not where this private thing belongs. In short the privacy of sexuality is a cockamamie idea that really has to do with keeping people in the closet.

This hypocrisy is exactly what's being exposed by Kim Jho-kwang-su's alternately fluffy and fired-up Two Weddings and a Funeral, a gay romcom that isn't overly concerned with political correctness so much as it is with the political realities that are the core of homophobic oppression. Gay doctor Min-soo (Kim Dong-yoon) and lesbian doctor Hyo-jin (Ryu Hyeon-kyeong) marry so he can please his parents and she can adopt a baby. But the minute he gets a boyfriend (Jin Song-yong), life gets complicated because said lover doesn't want to live a life of duplicity but wants to be out in the open, join a rock band, sing in the gay chorus, etc. There's a weird mix of eroticism and shame underlying their clandestine public flirtations. For Hyo-jin and her fashionably butch wife (Jeong Ae-yeon), post-marital bliss is constantly interrupted as Hyo-jin must play house to please Min-soo's parents. But the couples' problems are nothing when compared to that of their queeny friend Tina (Park Jung-pyo), who seems to know only longing and self-loathing. What's available to a queer femme not cute enough to snag a lover nor masculine enough to pass for straight. Hard times ahead!

Endearing and enlightening, Two Weddings and a Funeral is also surprising. An animated coda especially will blow your mind as it shows the lives of the main characters not in the future so much as in an alternate universe. The world is too hard to change. Sometimes, you just have to leave what you know completely to start something new.

Be With Me: Death Was in the Cards

Horror movies are so good at introducing moments that elicit an "I'd never do that" reaction when in truth, we actually might. The framing short in the Omnibus Be With Me is a perfect example. In Kim Jho Kwang-su's "Tell Me Your Name," a slightly menacing, slightly cruise-y tarot card reader entices a series of young girls to invoke a life-changing spell with no specific promise as to what the end results will be. We see doom. They see deliverance. But if we went into the experience with strong desires, might not we too stare into the mirror and say our own names out loud? Might it not seem like a silly thing to not do if it contained the possibility of a better future?

Since the wish is never stated outright, I'm not sure what Lan (Han Ye-ri) is hoping for in Jo Eun-kyung's "The Unseen." Better friends to navigate through an abandoned building with? Less slippery cell phones? A good, three-legged stool so she can escape through the window, rejoin her friends, and adopt a box of kittens? A friendship that never dies? She certainly is SOL on all counts.

So-young (Shin Ji-soo) in Hong Dong-myong's "The Attached" has a bit better luck. Her careful-what-you-hope-for desire is probably straight out of the O. Henry canon. I'd do anything to get into Seoul University! Well, now the complicated pregnancy of her best friend (Kim KKobbi) and her primary rival's injured foot on a slippery roof could make her wildest dreams come true. What you gonna do?

The final film -- Yeo Myung-jun's "Ghost Boy" -- doesn't really fit as neatly into a death wish construct because the wish is that of a dead girl's spirit. You're going to have to let go of how she knew what her wish should be before she had her throat slit. You're also going to have to let go of why the teacher doesn't take a student's cell phone immediately after said student claims he's videotaped him beating a female peer. And you're also going to have to let go of why the dead serial killer is so fixated on the dead girl since he's already killed her once. Maybe the implied sequel will explain.