Commitment: Boy Band Boy Is the Man

What's the most effective way for a K-pop singer to be taken seriously as a movie star? Follow the example set by Choi Seung-hyun, a.k.a. rapper T.O.P. from the Korean boy band Big Bang. Here, in director Park Hong-soo's espionage thriller Commitment, Choi has winningly taken on the role of Ri Myung-hoon, a North Korean assassin who's been so indoctrinated into the cause that he can barely register emotion on his face. From the outside at least, he's a killing machine. Bullied at high school? No reaction. Stabbed in the side? Not even a wince. Killing someone? Closed lips. At most, a glare. Admittedly, there's one scene in which Ri breaks down and cries -- his two sisters, one blood (Kim Yoo-jeong), one not (Han Ye-ri) -- have both been kidnapped, after all. But soon enough, this teen assassin is back to serving up stoic face. And you know what? It works.

Haven't we seen enough tongue-in-cheek James Bonds and Jason Bournes, enough smirking Bruce Willis anti-heroes and improbably cheerful Jackie Chan clowns. Choi's cold, merciless, unfeeling take on the spy abroad gives more by giving us so much less. It also makes the fights scenes -- of which there are many -- more intense. When the good guy doesn't have time to weak or make a wisecrack, you know that the martial arts action is taking his utmost attention. It's all about your level of commitment.

But then the South Koreans have always taken the North Koreans seriously, whether it's as estranged friends (J.S.A.: Joint Security Area) or respectable foes (The Berlin Files). Only the Americans have insisted that the North Koreans were bumbling idiots, most notably in the Seth Rogen/James Franco misfire of a frat boy comedy, The Interview. And we saw where that arrogance landed them. North Korea may be off the grid (and even off its rocker) but that doesn't mean they're incapable or incompetent or impotent. And now Hollywood knows that too. Might I recommend a few documentaries?

Camp 14: Total Control Zone: Levels of Persecution

Do not, I repeat, do not watch the emotionally-draining, aliens-please-come-and-obliterate-Earth-or-at-least-mankind-already Camp 14 before bedtime, for while this despairing documentary about the labor camps in North Korea keeps its torture scenes off screen and shows the bleak life therein largely via effectively colorless motion comics, survivor/escapee Shin Dong-Huyk's reluctantly related recollections of his childhood and young adulthood as an apolitical prisoner will still give you nightmares. And it's not just the descriptions of punishments inflicted that will ruin your sleep. You can also credit the many horrors that accompany living in a culture where there is no sense of family or friendship or fun. Truthfully, though, it's not the hope for freedom that drives him to flee for China (after climbing over the dead body of a compatriot stuck on an electric wire fence); it's the desire for chicken or beef or something new besides his ration of corn and occasional rat that might leave him with a full stomach for one day.

If you think that means that life in the labor camp wasn't so bad then you haven't been listening to the two prison guards director Marc Weise has also enlisted to tell their stories for his film. Well-dressed and self-composed, each relates a chillingly glib history of shooting, killing, torturing and raping as if they were discussing the regrettable but inevitable excesses of the teenage bullies they once were. You get a sense that both are embarrassed more than ashamed of their pasts. Why either would agree to be filmed for Camp 14 is baffling to me. Perhaps an inner sense of guilt informed their decisions but if so, neither shares much to that effect in this movie (or Weise has edited it out!).

Are they living the good life now without repercussions? Strangely enough, Camp 14 undermines that very idea too by having Shin repeatedly state his desire to go back North, back home, back to a simpler world (if not an identical one), free from the despairing realities he must grapple with now in South Korea where the dollar rules and his heart feels, while definitely broken and hopefully mending, infinitely less pure.

Crossing the Line: American Defects

The American Dream doesn't always happen in America. Sometimes, it happens in North Korea. In one of the more bizarre examples of truth being stranger than fiction, Crossing the Line tells the real story of PFC James Dresnok, a soldier who defected from the United States military to North Korea in the 1960s. He wasn't the only one to do so either. One of four soldiers who ditched Uncle Sam for Kim Il Sung, Dresnok truly lived out a weird rags-to-riches fantasy, a man who grewing up an orphan then ended up a movie star, albeit one typecast as "white-faced devil" for the duration of his big screen career.

As for his co-stars and fellow defectors -- Pvt. Larry Allen Abshier, Specialist Jerry Wayne Parrish, and Sgt. Charles Robert Jenkins -- they too became tools/trumpets of the country's propaganda machine (which included a magazine entitled Fortune's Favorites that featured the foursome having a good old time across the border). Whether they all came to revere their adopted homeland as much as Dresnok is anyone's guess. Parrish and Abshier died before Crossing the Line was released and Jenkins' condemnation of the fascist government may have been a pre-condition to being granted citizenship by Japan where he fled to join his Japanese wife, who claims herself to have been abducted to become his bride.

What is clear is that Dresnok has brought an immigrant's traditional values with him, wishing nothing better than to see his children get a better education than he did and taking pride in having carved out a decent living for himself. There's something sweet about that, even if the way it's done seem utterly preposterous. But would you expect anything less than pure craziness from a documentary narrated by Hollywood kook Christian Slater. Crossing the Line is actually the third in a series of North Korean documentaries which include The Game of Their Lives (about the World Cup team that went to the quarterfinals in 1966) and A State of Mind (about two girl gymnasts). Based on Crossing the Line, I'd see either.

Kimjongilia: The Flower of Kim Jong Il: Dancing on the DMZ

Kimjongilia is one weird-ass documentary. Not content to only serve up "talking head"-style interviews with people who have escaped from North Korea, director NC Heikin splices up the talk with some of her own modern dance sequences and some homegrown movie/TV clips from the hermit nation. If you're wondering how such a strange structure came to be, consider this: Heikin is a dancer-choreographer as well as a filmmaker. Unconventional? Yes. But so is every documentary about North Korea. Since you can't legally bring cameras inside the country, filmmakers are forced to be inventive both in how they get their footage and how they present it. And to be honest, Heikin's robotic dances inspired by Korea's automaton crossing-guards are a lot more chilling than the slow motion sections of Pieter Fleury's Day in the Life or Yang Yong-hi's distasteful interrogation of her father in Dear Pyongyang.

Not all Heikin's kinesthetic commentary is that effective but no matter. The muscle of Kimjongilia remains its very personal confessions from which we learn of a soldier who slid under barbed wire (along with his friend who didn't make it), a woman carried across the Chinese border (by a brother who also didn't make it) and a man who took his entire family across the water to South Korea. (Against all odds, they made it!) Every story is gripping, especially when you consider that escape isn't just dangerous for the defector but for all the members of the defector's family as well. (Three generations of relatives are imprisoned in labor camps for the rest of their lives when someone defects.) To say that these refugees are universally haunted would be an understatement.

Famine. Fascism. Fanaticism. You can see why some attempt to escape despite the cost. One small compensation: In a culture of paranoia, everything is suspect. Which means that imprisoned relatives never really know for sure why they've ended up in Hell. Maybe it was something they said, something they didn't say, something they did or something they didn't do. They'll never know for sure. And that's a small blessing for those who have left them behind. A very small one.

National Geographic Explorer: Inside North Korea - Finally, a Look Behind the Curtain

Inside North Korea, the short documentary by the folks at National Geographic, is a really good snapshot of the most enigmatic country on Earth. Dubbed "the hermit nation," North Korea has long closed its borders to the outside world. As such, it remains what reporter Lisa Ling dubs "an intelligence black hole." Despite existing without cell phones or internet access, the Communist stronghold is hardly an industrial throwback given its nuclear missiles and its possession of the fourth largest military in the world. How'd it get this way? And how has it managed to sustain its completely xenophobic existence?

In a way, part of this totalitarian regime's success is due to the evangelical fervor of its populace. Substitute "Jesus" for "Our Great Leader" and the extreme devotion to the Kim family suddenly isn't so inexplicable. And why shouldn't Kim Jong Il, and his father Kim Il-sung before him, inspire reverence? Both have instilled the fear of God into their population by threatening lifelong prison sentences to extended family members of people who defect or fail to exhibit the requisite loyalty and devotion. And both have also stood up to the U.S. and the rest of the world and said "Screw you!" after being enslaved by the Japanese for the first half of the century and suffered through a million gallons of napalm in the Korean War. This adamant self-sufficiency, this refusal to accept "conditional" help from abroad may lead to famines that decimate the population but it also instills a certain amount of patriotic pride.

Ling rightly asserts that maybe there's no difference between fear and belief here, maybe nobody's lying because everybody's too scared to entertain a different idea. This is a very Old Testament empire. And if there's a certain short-sightedness for North Korea in refusing to be cooperative with anyone, at least they've got Dr. Sanduk Ruit from India to perform 1000 cataract surgeries in 10 days. (This medical expedition is what allows Ling and company to get cameras over the border so she can visit what's clearly a "model" family putting on a talent show to her dismay.)

Footnote: Years later, journalist Laura Ling, Lisa's sister, was detained in North Korea for 140 days -- a none-too-subtle way to let Lisa know: Don't mess with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea!

Dear Pyongyang: A Daughter's Quest for Love From a Father She Fails to Respect

In the Japanese documentary Dear Pyongyang, you do learn some important basic facts about the history of Korea, like how it was occupied by Japan in 1910 then liberated after World War II then split in two shortly thereafter, a split which became more definitive following the Korean War in the 1950s. The film also talks about the Zainichi, the ethnic Koreans who continued to reside in Japan after their homeland's liberation. In the land of the oppressor, these proud nationalists set up Korean schools or emigrated to repatriate as citizens in North Korea. And while director Yang Yong-hi professes to want to know the story that led to her father's and mother's fervid revolutionary efforts on behalf of the Zainichi and North Korea for 50 years, she's actually a lot more interested in getting her dad to accept her complete disavowal of everything he stands for.

Because of that, Dear Pyongyang can feel painfully personal. The seemingly good-natured teasing that exists between parent and child -- as they discuss whether she can marry outside her nationality or devote her life to something outside the cause -- eventually deteriorates into something akin to psychological torture. As the years pass, Yang Yong-hi's quest for acceptance recognizes no limits; her persistent needling of her father eventually veers into the horrific. Late in the movie, her father bedridden with some unnamed disease and his face half-paralyzed, Yang persists in pressuring him to confess his regrets, to let her be who she is without question, to recount old memories he's already shared, until he's finally driven to tears. As he pulls her hand to his mouth, it's as if he's trying to get her stop by biting her. There's something downright ghastly about it. And pretty riveting.

So while Yang spends much time dismissing North Korea, the lives of her relatives who live there, the selfless support they receive from her parents, she ultimately ends up this movie's villain more than commie leaders Kim Il Song or Kim Jong Il do because her mercilessness is depicted so intimately. This is an expose of the filmmaker as much as one about North Korea or a man who fought hard on that country's behalf.

North Korea: A Day in the Life - Not Real By a Long Shot

"A day in life" implies a certain level of realism that this documentary certainly doesn't attain. That's in part because, in order to shoot this documentary about North Korea, Dutch director Pieter Fleury had to get the sign-off of the North Korean government. As you can imagine, much of the footage has a staged quality as drill teams perform inspirational flag routines outside factories and the central family's grandfather passionately recounts the American bombings of a local school that resulted in the death of his father and brother. What the communist censors failed to foresee was that composer Maarten van Norden would create an anxiety-producing score that would lend fairly nondescript footage a sinister aspect and that editor Michiel Reichwein would work similar wonders by re-appropriating video from national broadcasts.

Both sides would've benefited from a little more honesty. No one is about to believe that a staff member is going to mortify his or her self at a staff meeting then have those self-incriminations be met with blank stares as if this were just a normal everyday occurrence. Similarly, a women's military choir doesn't really become Satanic simply because you slow down the frames per second until you freeze one singer's face in an expressionistic scream. The truth peeking out from behind both these pretend presentations is so much more interesting.

Count how many times you see representations of Kim Jong Il and/or Kim Il Sung, the "great leaders" of the nation. You'll see their portraits being dusted by the son in the family's living room, various murals of one or the other throughout the city, a towering gold statue that towers over a city square, and illustrated images being referenced as a teaching tool in an elementary school class. This doesn't include the patriotic songs or the rote invocations by family and workers. The two Kims' omnipresence says a lot more to me about life in North Korea than any stylistic imprint that Fleury has imposed. One scene in which each of the little children bow to portraits as they enter school is infinitely more bizarre than any sped-up footage of factory executives gathering for a meeting at which truth reigns supreme. Why impose Orwellian imprints where they already exist?

The Schoolgirl's Diary: Being This Good Feels Just Awful

There's something discomforting about The Schoolgirl's Diary because it seems to be talking not just about one teenaged girl's struggle with poverty but about that struggle within a whole nation. The impoverished reality of living in a house where the doors fall down if you lean on them and faulty electrical outlets burst into flame doesn't feel like a portrait of the lower classes in North Korea. It just feels like plain old North Korea. Your heart goes out to Su-ryeon (Pak Mi-hyang) because she's struggling for a better life. Yes, and that's just as director Jang In-hak intended. But you also feel for Su-ryeon because you're not so sure that a better life is out there waiting for her. After all, you see her father (Kim Cheol) thanklessly toiling away at a factory for the greater good with only his wife (Kim Yeong-suk) according him any respect. As to mom herself, she's a martyr who's been diagnosed with a cancer that you doubt her socialized medicine will be able to cure. Su-ryeon's sister Su-ok (Kim Jin-mi) is the only happy member of the family. And where will her soccer skills take her? The North Korean women's team has been banned from the World Cup in 2015 for doping; the best the team has ever done is the World Cup quarterfinals in 2007. (Other years, it's been banned, didn't qualify or didn't enter.)

Amid this dreariness, Su-ryeon's pursuit of a better life is achingly optimistic if you can even say she's looking for a better life at all. Any personal goal eventually becomes so subordinate to the needs of the community that dreaming of better days can only mean dreaming of a better world...for everyone. In some ways, The Schoolgirl's Diary's selflessness stands in direct contrast to the egotism that reigns supreme in American pop culture today. Try to name a movie that depicts the nobility of good for goodness' sake without being framed as a satire and you're left drawing a blank. Far be it from me to wish for a stoic life in which luxury translates as potato taffy and warm soy milk is the reward for a hard day's work. Distasteful as it feels, the humility underlying The Schoolgirl's Diary is admirable. Now if only it weren't so depressing. Two red thumbs up for this one, my comrades.

The Tale of Chun Hyang: Ever Hear the One About the Hooker and the Rich Man's Son?

Filmmakers Im Kwon-taek, Han Sang-hun, and Shin Sang-ok each made movies inspired by the tale of Chun-hyang. (In fact, Shin did it not once but twice.) In this North Korean version, director-actor Yu Won–jun puts yet another unique spin on the rags-to-riches fable. The basics remain the same: A prostitute's daughter marries a nobleman only to get dumped before the honeymoon glow has faded from her alabaster cheeks. But Yu has introduced some changes, too. First off, Chun-hyang is now a master weaver from the working class, not just some courtesan's daughter trained in the art of embroidery. Secondly, her rich suitor goes to a heck of a lot more trouble during their courtship which makes his subsequent (temporary) abandonment of her all the more painful. Clocking in at two-and-a-half hours, The Tale of Chun Hyang certainly isn't in a rush to make these points. It's also mercifully free of the propaganda that you might expect from a North Korean film. Why the movie chooses to downplay the sadistic behavior of Chun-hyang's second suitor may be because Yu has taken so long to get to this point in the story or because Yu cast himself in the role. Perhaps, he simply didn't feel like being a big screen meanie for any length of time.

My Look in the Distant Future: The Motherland Is a Barren Woman

I like message films. Not because I want a filmmaker's intent to be blatantly obvious but because I get off seeing where and how a polemical artwork betrays its creator. In the North Korean agit-prop flick My Look in the Distant Future (1997), Yui Ung-yong's screenplay is supposed to be about an over-aged slacker whose lust for a revolutionary girl transforms him into a model citizen in the Communist party. In reality, the pseudo-romance is more about how becoming a zealot will rob you of your sexuality. In each stage of this derailed courtship (an offer to dance, a lakeside proposal, then another proposal in a city park), the chaste yet coy ingénue (Kim Hye-gyong) belittles her petulant suitor (Kim Myong-mun) by letting him know that he’s never done anything worth taking seriously. By the final sunlit moment, when these two go running hand-in-hand through the wheat field, it's hard to imagine this pair taking a roll in the hay. They seem infinitely more likely to pick up a guitar then burst into an oppressive teaching song about solidarity. Love doesn’t stand a chance after martyrdom takes hold. This unintended perversion of patriotism into a neutering device makes what might have felt like a dogmatic romance into an oddly touching portrait of what happens when you lead with your convictions and not with your heart. That’s not a totally bad thing mind you. But wow… being an ideological idealist doesn’t look like much fun.

Hong Kil Dong: Spaghetti Eastern

South Korea's Golden Age of Cinema doesn't date back to the 1980s so you can't fault their North Korean brothers for cranking out equally subpar fare during that same decade. Hong Kil Dong (1986), a martial arts fantasy—that plays like Robin Hood without the tights or the joy—registers as some sort of Eastern variation on the Spaghetti Western. Times are grim. Corruption is rampant. It'll take a special kind of man to reinstate a semblance of justice...or at least to settle the score. Doors may slide instead of swing, men may kick instead of horses, but the bandits still cackle, the punches still land with a smack of pleather, and the sound of the flute eternally signals that the hero is somewhere nearby. Is director Kim Kil-in as close to Sergio Leone as Pyongang is ever gonna get? Probably. Because even if outright communist propaganda is kept to a merciful minimum, the didacticism, the xenophobia, and the anti-individualism still bleed through. The title character isn't so much a loner as an outcast; his victory isn't his own so much as one shared with "the people." The closest you'll get to sexy is an orgiastic birth scene at the beginning. Clearly making new soldiers is the best a person could hope for in this life.