Vanishing Twin: Sisterly Rivalry Continues Even After Death

Before this movie, I'd never heard the term "vanishing twin." A poetical pairing of words, this medical anomaly (also known as "fetal resorption") is what happens when a fetus dies in the womb and then is absorbed by the surviving twin. It's also the only fact I was able to glean from writer-director Yun Tae-yeong puzzling movie of the same name. Because Vanishing Twin, the movie, has strictly less-than-absorbing realities. Is what we're seeing the life of dissatisfied novelist Yu-jin (Ji Su-won), her dream, her awakened imagination, or a re-enacted scene from her novel? Nobody knows. Nobody cares. As to the protagonist, she's unhappy with her husband, her suicidal sister who inspires jealous feelings even from the grave, her brother-in-law (Kim Myeong-su) who may have killed said sister, her perhaps imagined lover (Koo Pil-woo) and her novel, which likely is drawing on her various discontents as she nears her book's completion. For the record, she seems to have an okay relationship with her daughter (Choi Ji-eun).
One excerpt from her book, which we can safely assume is not reality, is presented as a bit of animation. In this retelling of a supposedly Native American folk tale, a lazy dog's penis detaches itself from its owner and goes for a walk only to get stuck on a thorn bush. When the dog awakens ready to pee but with his penis gone, he searches for it, finds it and reattaches it. All is not well, however, since his crotch itches terribly. So he prays to the goddess of the desert and... Oh, who cares. The story's a metaphor for sex. And the sex in this movie is really bad. It's weird to see a woman comically faking an orgasm over and over and a man making love to her over and over with complete indifference. Acting schools don't teach lovemaking, which means you have to learn it on your own. Considering the inordinate amount of time spent describing the lower lip as a sexual reveal, screenwriters don't learn much about lovemaking either. Everyone involved with this project needs to get laid.

The Divine Move: Go Ahead and Hit Me Again

In the iEra, the nerds may have risen to power but they still don't know how to take a punch or land a roundhouse kick. So when a poorly-groomed gamer (Jung Woo-sung) whose specialty is Go ends up unjustly sentenced to the slammer, all he wants in exchange for giving master boardgame tips to his jailer is to receive ongoing martial arts training from his fellow convicts so he can kick some serious ass when he gets out. The prison fighting lessons in The Divine Move are built around the philosophy that good fighters must be beat up to learn how to beat up others. Sound crazy? Well, my grandfather took a similar approach with my father and it worked for my dad so I had no reason to doubt that it would work here too.

When you see Jung remove his shirt during one of his final prison brawls, you'll likely gasp at how effective such training can be. The actor is shredded to a point that makes you think this prison comes with a nutritionist/dietician, too. His character hasn't let his Go skills deteriorate while in the big house either. As luck would have it, he's sequestered next to a blind genius of Go whenever he ends up in solitary confinement; the two square off by tapping out moves through the wall. Further luck: Someone's left behind some chalk. And so he's a Go graffiti artist. He's a street-style fighter. He's an uncharted player. Plus he's a master networker.

That last talent allows him to entice a fine crew to exact his grand revenge, my favorite of the lot being a one-handed techie (Ahn Kil-kang) who has a nice variety of attachable parts including a hammer for self-defense. These are nerds who are no longer satisfied with outwitting former tormentors. They want blood on their knuckles, not just on their hands. Those jerks who killed our hero's brother (Kim Myeong-soo) are going to get iced, one (Lee Beom-su) quite literally in a freezer showdown to the death. Getting the girl (Lee Si-young) — a master Go player herself — is just Cho Beom-gu's fantasy fulfillment for all the nerdy gamers watching the movie (which they should!).

The Humanist: Thick as Thieves, the Thickheaded Ones

The line between tragedy and comedy is a thin one but for some reason it's much easier to cross in a single direction. There are plenty of "serious" movies awful enough to be funny. The horror genre abounds with them. But there aren't many comedies so unfunny, they're downright serious. Which brings us to The Humanist, a comedy-thriller hybrid that broadly indicates "kooky" without ever being so. The problem is probably directorial since the script was co-written by auteur Park Chan-wook. Park never goes for the laugh even when it's indicated. In his hands, lives and stories spin crazily out of control but they feel surreal, not silly; with Park, every crazy step between the accidental killing of a cop and the internal death threats among three friends would've been guided by a lushly filmed fatal determinism. And the extreme violence, especially the flashbacks with kids brutally smashing each others' heads with rocks, would have been gorgeously horrific. Here, in Lee Mu-yeong's hands, the grownup brat (Ahn Jae-mo), the oaf (Park Sang-myeon), and the nutjob (Kang Seong-jin) seem forced to amputate a beggar (Kim Myoeng-su) and rape a nun (Myeong Sun-mi) without real cause. Withhold applause.