The Spirit of Jeet Kune Do: Bruce Lee Can't Get You a GED

In the law of the jungle known as high school, you can gain a decisive advantage over the school bully if you're willing to stab him in the leg right before the big fight. That said, you'll have an even bigger advantage if your father is a Taekwondo instructor and you're willing to hit your opponent in the back of the head with a pair of nunchucks before the battle begins. Such are the lessons of The Spirit of Jeet Kune Do, Yu Ha's wistfully violent coming-of-age film about a painfully shy student named Hyeon-su (Kwone Sang-woo) who evolves from a simpering sidekick to rough-and-tumble classmate Woo-shik (Lee Jeong-jin) to a formidable Bruce Lee disciple tough enough to take on an entire gang of meanies entirely by himself.

Hyeon-su's a lover, not a fighter though, for while his training regimen does get him great delts and a sweet set of abs, his luck with the ladies leaves something to be desired. His big crush Eun-ju (Han Ga-in) thinks of him as a friend, a kind of eunuch she can hang out with while talking about music and getting drunk. The super-hot cougar (Kim Bu-seon), who runs the local cafe and wants to get down his pants, doesn't strike his fancy. (Something she learns the hard way after unzipping his pants.) This is one young man who's going to have to make do with gaining the respect of his father by kicking ass. Since Dad's made a business out of his own fists of fury, he knows all about the power of the punch. Violence is the answer!

The notion that muscles reign over the mind recurs throughout The Spirit of Jeet Kune Do: Teachers brutalize wayward students for being stupid or disobedient; hall monitors shove anyone who dares to make eye contact or talk back; Hamburger (Park Hyo-jun), the fat kid who sells bestial porn to earn tuition money, slaps a girl repeatedly who won't dance with him at the local disco. In Seoul in the '70s, smarts didn't get you much as a teenager. Better to hit the weights, kick the heavy bag, and learn to do pushups on your finger tips. Pining for the pretty girl on the bus is a waste of time. Re-enacting a scene from a Bruce Lee movie is a lot more fun. So is running through the hallway breaking windows and screaming "All the schools in Korea are fucked!" Now that's a total blast.

A Frozen Flower: This Love Triangle Is a Fading Pink

My heart goes out to this King (Ju Jin-mo). He needs to sire an heir to protect his kingdom but he can't get it up for the Queen (Song Ji-hyo) or his concubines. My heart also goes out to Hong Lim (Jo In-seong), the King's male lover and bodyguard. After being enlisted to impregnate the Queen, he fatally discovers that he's got a taste for the ladies -- as one 69 scene graphically illustrates. And because I've got a big heart, my heart also goes out to the Queen. Horny and unhappy, she's trying to make the best of a bad situation. Which, for a time, she does. (After being pimped out by her Lord and Master, she falls head over heels for the royal sperm donor and demands that they do it again and again in as many different positions as possible.) As love triangles go, Yu Ha's costume-drama/softcore-melodrama is ingenious in how it inverts a familiar forbidden love setup by having the straight couple sneak around while the gay man gets bitchy and suspicious. If A Frozen Flower might seem to side with the straights, it also illustrates that whether you're hot for men or women, everyone loves to kiss with a lot of tongue.

Marraige Is a Crazy Thing: She Pushes Love to Extremes John Donne Never Considered

Yeon-hee (Eom Jeong-hwa) shows the depth of her love for Jun-young (Kam Woo-seong) in a weird way: She stages a whole faux relationship with him from courtship to marriage, then from honeymoon to separation -- even as she marries someone else in reality. All these pretend dates and pseudo-life-stages are intended to get her dimpled, English poetry professor to realize that he's the one that she truly adores. But when you think about it, her elaborate playacting is a major turnoff. While it's easy to peg Jun-young as a selfish commitment-phobe who uses Yeon-hee for sex and money, it's just as easy to call Yeon-hee a callous two-timer who never makes herself truly vulnerable and whose stab at martyrdom is a glib one. The tortured relationship that develops between these two is exactly what each deserves. He's a jerk who doesn't deserve a pretty, self-sacrificing wife. She's a greedy manipulator who shouldn't be getting unconditional affection from her well-educated gigolo. The final moment of Yu Ha's Marriage Is a Crazy Thing suggests a reconciliation but the white picket fence ahead for these two is likely to rot and fall apart.

A Dirty Carnival: How Do You Say Brando in Korean?

If the only Korean movie you ever saw was A Dirty Carnival (and frankly you could do a lot worse), you'd probably think to yourself, "Oh, I get it. Korea is the Italy of the Orient." This would be of course because you'd never set foot in Korea (or Italy) and had founded your interpretation on the films of Francis Ford Coppola and a passing knowledge of both countries' cuisines. And it's not just that A Dirty Carnival is so clearly an homage to the Godfather trilogy with its electrifying depictions of violence, its detailed deconstruction of family dynamics, and its paranoid portrayal of working for the syndicate. Once you engage in Korean-Italian associations, you realize how much the two nations have in common: noodles, a shoe fetish, a sense of pageantry for funerals, a love of public singing and drinking, even the art of film-making. If Yu Ha's mafia epic feels Italian (or at least Italian-American), it's because on some level that's what it wants to be. You can easily imagine Talia Shire cast as the sickly girlfriend played by Lee Bo-young, Al Pacino in the role of Zo In-sung's overly ambitious gangster and Brando in the role of the mafia don (ably embodied by Chun Ho-jin). Re-cast to your heart's content, people. A Dirty Carnival remains great on its own terms because the substitutions or cross-cultural counterparts never feel like inferior replacements. They feel like they demand respect. You respect what inspired it? You'll respect this, too.