Woman Is the Future of Man: So Real It Hurts

If asked, I'd say I had a bedgrudging respect for autuer Hong Sang-soo but after re-watching Woman Is the Future of Man, I'm going to let the begrudging part go. Although I may never be able to rally around Night and Day or Woman on the Beach (too many cliches; not enough plot), I actually liked the violently jarring The Day the Pig Fell into the Well and his melancholic The Power of Kangwon Province unreservedly. Woman Is the Future of Man, I downright love. A character portrait of a trio of people, Hong's film makes you cringe and ache so often you may think you've got Tourette's, surfacing as it does the little cruelties we inflict and little pains we experience on a moment-to-moment basis when we're in the thick of it. No one is the hero. No one is the villain. No one is the antihero. Art professor Lee Mun-ho (Yu Ji-tae), budding filmmaker Kim Hyeon-gon (Kim Tae-woo) and the woman they both once loved many years ago, bar manager Park Seon-hwa (Seong Hyeon-a) are three flawed humans trying to get through life, unable to free themselves from the daily treacheries that make survival a small scale war. As such, they're constantly betraying each other and themselves so that eventually the small fortresses that they've built to protect themselves are completely smashed away. Sad? Yes. But electric, too.
You can't really pick out a specific actor as the best one here. Hong has cast astutely right down to the lady across the street from the cafe and the guy in the back of the restaurant where Lee gathers with his students for an ill-fated meal. That said, Yu's professor is a fascinating mixture of bumbling and smooth, Kim's filmmaker can't quite shed the hipster edginess that you pray one day he'll outgrow, and Park conveys a quiet bewilderment as she relives the misguided choices of youth all over again one snowy, sloppy weekend. I'd also like to give a shout out to both composer Jeong Yong-jin for his hauntingly wistful score and to Mary, the black Labrador Retriever, who has so many perfect moments as a background player that you'd award her an Equity card (deluxe edition) if animals got those types of things. In terms of film-watching, 2012 hasn't been a great year for me but Woman Is the Future of Man restores my faith in Korean movies. So thank you, Hong Sang-soo, and sorry about any slights I made to your work in the past. Next time, I'm coming in an unreserved fan.

Pirates: High Seas Hilarity

Some movies are elaborate meals, some movies are pure puke, and some are complete confections. Squarely in the candy category is director Lee Seok-hoon's deliciously silly Pirates, a salt water taffy of a movie if there ever was one. To extend this sugary metaphor, Lee's tasty adventure pic manages to be chewy and colorful as it stretches plausibility beyond belief. The individual ingredients may be neither good for you nor even particularly good but the sweetness here is undeniable. And yes, you will want more. Okay, enough toothsome metaphorical talk. On to the motion picture.

Though there's a lady swashbuckler (Son Ye-jin) front and center, Pirates doesn't break new ground in comedy or gender-blind casting. To the contrary, it serves up stereotypes and cliches unapologetically. There's an evil, petty guy (Kim Tae-woo) with the requisite eyepatch, a despotic, vengeful patriarchal figure (Lee Kyeong-yeong) who drowns only to reappear having not drowned after all, a king who must learn life lessons from his patriotic servants, and a pair of mismatched lovers (Son and Kim Nam-gil) who find out they were meant for each other. Which isn't to say the film has no novelties. It abounds with them! A momma whale who bonds with a young girl? A tethered shark that can turn a sailboat into a motorboat? A drunken bandit-monk (Park Cheol-min) who drinks gasoline without consequence? Pirates is nothing if not full of quirks.

Quirks and gags, that is. A running joke about peeing in the ocean while standing next to your beloved gets increasing laughs as does a bumbling thief (a marvelous Yoo Hae-jin) whose promotions and demotions occur with every changing tide. The utter, unending preposterous is Pirates greatest asset. As stupid comedies go, this one does dumb jokes smartly. Something Lee did before with the high school comedy See You After School and the equally corny, campy Dancing Queen. But if See You After School and Dancing Queen are good examples of ridiculousness, Pirates is ridiculousness at its best. Practice makes perfekt.

Saving My Hubby: See Jane Run, See Dick Drink, See Me Yawn

In my self-deceiving imagination, I honestly believe that before the digital age the only foreign movies that made it to the USA were the really good ones. A bad or even a mediocre movie from Europe, Asia or South America would never be exported because it wasn't cost efficient. Maybe a so-so movie by a famous director would occasionally sneak through but generally speaking if you stuck with foreign pics, your chances of seeing something worthwhile were greater. Not so anymore. Those days are unquestionably over.

Now when movies can travel (and even get translated) online, the ratio of good to bad is the same whether a film is homegrown or imported. Every country produces its proportionate fair share of junk and even South Korea, my favored nation for cinema, cranks out a fair bit of total crap. That's how I end up watching a poop of a movie like Hyeon Nam-seob's Saving My Hubby. Without the natural attrition caused by economics and with only a handful of directors' names to inform me, I'm taking pot shots at what to watch. Why I feel compelled to suffer through whole thing with movies like Saving My Hubby, I'm not sure. Call it optimistic masochism?

Bae Doo-na, who plays the hapless wife -- and former volleyball star -- running around the red light district in search of her husband, has been so much better so many times before: The Host, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Barking Dogs Never Bite... So has Kim Tae-woo,the actor who's portraying her drunken, on-screen spouse and who's helmed a number of Hong Sang-soo pics. Under Hyeon Nam-seob's direction, together their now completely charmless, and despite all the slapstick involving massive alcohol consumption and an overextended chase scene, exhaustingly unfunny.

It took me days to get through this one, days I'll never get back, and yes, I'm pretty annoyed about it. But it took irretrievable months of time from the lives of Bae and Kim and I can only assume that they're pretty annoyed about it too.

Like You Know It All: Just One Second... That May Change

There's something unconcernedly unplanned about Like You Know It All, as if director Hong Sang-soo had daily provided his actors with a single page of rushed dialogue then let them go at it for a few hours. Hong lets his actors loose on the story, lets their impulsive reactions build into something bigger, lets a random idea in the performance or an ad libbed line used to cover a flub as the guiding force for what follows. Or so it seems. Is art-house darling Gyung-nam (Kim Tae-woo) destined to clash with festival programmer Hyeon-hee (Uhm Ji-won) then doomed to reunite with a former lover (Go Hyun-jung)? These encounters hardly seem inevitable. (Who else would throw in a series of arm wrestling matches?) Instead, the realities almost come out of nowhere, as if the unexpected always lied just around the corner. So while the film starts off as a satire about a film festival, full of ass-kissing, back-stabbing, and self-congratulatory artistes -- Like You Know It All ditches that party just at the point when you likely would've grown weary of it yourself. Hong recognizes how boring life is, how repetitious, how squalid, how petty, how hilarious, how misdirected, how laughable. Oh, how wonderful he is!

I laughed a lot during Like You Know It All, perhaps more so than in Hahaha. But Like You Know It All doesn't have that latter film's clever framing device -- a boozy flashback shared by two friends recounting congruent memories. Hong's great at framing devices. Think of the films within films of Oki's Movie or Isabelle Huppert in triplicate for In Another Country. But when you come down to it, I like Hong equally -- if not better -- without the structural cleverness. Meandering, his movies feel fresh and human and vulnerable and ridiculous. Like You Know It All is hardly his most brilliant piece of filmmaking to his credit but it's brilliant all the same.

Footnote: Like You Know It All was shot on HD but is that even newsworthy anymore?

Woman on the Beach: Writing What You Know When You Know Nothing

Writer's block is a drag. But when the condition becomes the inspiration for a movie, like it does in Hong Sang-soo's arty Woman on the Beach, audiences tend to suffer right alongside the struggling screenwriter. Admittedly, the case depicted here isn't a particularly crippling or painful one: Hong's stand-in (Kim Seung-woo) is able to work through his creative paralysis in less than a week thanks to some trusty tools familiar to many artists (and moviegoers who frequent biopics of same). How's he do it? Well, he betrays his close-friend/producer (an underutilized Kim Tae-woo) by sleeping with his girlfriend (Go Hyun-jung) then betrays his new girlfriend by seducing a lonely divorcee (Song Seon-mi). Blame it on the soju! As portraits of womanizing artists go, Woman on the Beach is fairly tame stuff because the creative cad at its center neither ruins anyone's life nor exhibits self-destructive behavior on a grand scale. He just makes the lives of those around him a little messy and his own life, a little lonely. We can only hope that the art which he produces by stirring up all that trouble is better than this document of his creative process.

JSA: Joint Security Area: Blood on the Border

When I first saw JSA: Joint Security Area a few years ago, it left me restless and unimpressed. Having seen Park Chan-wook's flashy vengeance trilogy, JSA struck me as too slow, a novice work at best. On second viewing, I feel a bit contrite about that assessment. Today, I'd say JSA is a pretty great movie. Who care that it doesn't have the adrenaline thrills of Lady Vengeance or Oldboy? It delivers just as suspenseful a story, albeit one grounded in political realities instead of quirky fantasy. As a result, JSA proves an engrossing meditation on the same extreme violence that Park is always obsessing about in his more outlandish flicks. His oddly credible story (he co-wrote the screenplay) concerns the unlikely friendship that develops between four Korean border guards -- two from the South (Lee Byung-hun and Kim Tae-Woo) and two from the North (Song Kang-ho and Shin Ha-kyun) -- as they defy nationalized enmity. Since the movie is constructed as a flashback, you know their rebellious brotherhood is ultimately doomed. Like us, a Swiss military investigator (Lee Geum-ja in a truly fab Louise Brooks haircut) is determined to figure out what led to the final bloodshed that will leave all but one dead. Like her, we're moved by an outcome that feels tragically inevitable.