The King and The Clown: A Daisy Chain of Tops and Bottoms

Indigent circus performers strike it rich. Now that's a cause for celebration, right? Sure, it is. But for some lucky clowns, it's also a cause for consternation. You see, when this particular tightrope walker (Kam Woo-seong) and his cross-dressing sidekick (Lee Jun-gi) find favor with a somewhat crazy, petulantly sadistic emperor (Jeong Jin-yeong), they also find themselves drawn into more than one troubled love triangle and some life-threatening political intrigue. But can the rope-walking acrobat help caring so deeply about his cross-dressing cohort? And can the cross-dresser help inspiring lusty thoughts in that kooky king? And, for that matter, can the royal courtesan (Kang Seong-yeon) help being jealous of that role-playing pretty boy who's also good with puppets and has a unique calligraphic style? No. No. No. A magnificently told tale based on a true story from the 16th century Chosun dynasty, The King and the Clown is a topnotch, romantic costume drama that knows when to be comic even if it's headed for tragedy. The performances are uniformly excellent, right down to the minor characters. Needless to say, I'll be checking out other collaborations of director Lee Jun-ik and writer Choi Seok-hwan.

Yesterday: Tomorrow Is Looking Doubly Depressing Today

The year is 2020 and two kindred spirits (Kim Seung-woo and Kim Yunjin) raised during the 1980s are having a rough time of it. Consider the headaches, the memory lapses, and their inability to have a sparkling conversation. A desperate, combined search for their father and a serial killer (Choi Min-Su) isn't about to make their lives easier. And despite all the years that have passed for them (and for us), tomorrow looks suspiciously like yesterday. Cops still fire machine guns, fat girls still sing in discos, and everyone still loves their cellphones -- which now come with constant advertising! In this all-too-familiar future, the most screenworthy character is secondary, a tough lady cop named May (Kim Seon-a) who likes to shoot firearms in a short sporty haircut and a tight-fitting leather tanktop. Maybe in some alternate universe, audiences will get to learn her storyline too and movies -- like video games -- will come with multiple plots we can follow and not just the one chosen by director-writer Jeon Yun-su. For today, we were stuck with Yesterday, his middling scifi flick about three siblings drowning in a messed up gene pool. For something more buoyant, check out Jeon's delightful comedy Le Grand Chef.

Voice: Ghost Girls Gone Wild

Complain all you want about the misery of the paper cut. In Choe Ik-hwan's horror movie Voice, pretty young thing Young-eon (Kim Ok-vin) has her throat slit by a flying piece of sheet music. Now that stings! And before you have time to question whether that's even remotely possible, this fourth installment in the Whispering Corridors series will have you completely wrapped up in its strange tale of lesbian girl ghosts and Darwinian power struggles. And it's not just dead dolls doing battle either. You see, Young-eon's gal pal Seon-min (Seo Ji-hye) is being lured away from a posthumous romance by the high school's resident kooky girl Cho-ah (Cha Ye-ryeon) who, as luck would have it, shares Seon-min's recently acquired ability to hear voices from the grave. Cho-ah at least has the sense not to chat with spirits in front of her classmates -- a year in the madhouse provides useful life tools -- and now she has to impart that wisdom to her new BFF before some angry phantom shoves the two girls down an elevator shaft. So who do you trust? Your old best friend who never invited you over her house but has a promising future in opera or you new best friend who's clearly crazy? Which one would benefit your own career in radio?

The True-taste Show

트루맛쇼 (Te-roo-mat-syo)

 Directed by Kim Jae-hwan (김재환)

Screenplay by Kim Jae-hwan (김재환)

•Documentary

70min | Release date in South Korea : 2011/06/02
Synopsis
Opening Date : Jun 02, 2011

It starts with the challenging narration, “I know why the food at restaurants introduced on TV isn’t that good”. The film shows us the process of setting up a restaurant to expose the truth about food programs and liaising estaurants for a show. Let’s take a look at the astonishing reality of food shows.

S Diary: Love Is Tragic, Love Is Funny, Love Is Something Else

Sheesh. S Diary is one strange hybrid. Half romance, half comedy, the movie doesn't congeal as a romantic comedy because it tends to keep its genres separate. The first half is lightly serious stuff: a doleful tale of a young woman (Kim Seon-a) out to make boyfriends of three men she's perhaps not suited for. And as she gets closer to something deeply romantic, the movie gets slightly heavier with each subsequent rejection carrying with it a deadlier, more debilitating sting. By the third heave-ho, this unlucky lady is a real casualty of the heart. That's also when the writer-director Kwon Jong-kwan defies expectations and jumps tracks by turning what was a melancholic romance into a humorous revenge fantasy. Gone is the sat-upon sad sack unable to get a guy; in her place is a willful nut job determined to get financially recompensed for the emotional expenditures visited upon her by the choir master (Lee Hyeon-woo), the cop (Kim Su-ro) and the graffiti artist (Kong Yu). Kwon doesn't leave the weightier first half behind entirely though. There's a nice coda too in which our protagonist, a budding authoress, learns that you can't rewrite your past and that love is something best experienced in the moment. Try as we might to define our lives, we're better off just experiencing them.

Chunhyang: Famous Courtesan Returns Better Dressed, Less Tragic

Oh no, not her again. Yes, it's another movie about Chunhyang (Lee Hyo-jeong), Korea's favorite daughter of a hooker, bride of the governor's son. And once again, she's too proud, too loyal, and too good for her own good. Because of that, she's still getting jilted when her young husband moves to Seoul. And she's still getting beaten by cudgels when the new governor (Lee Jung-hun) comes to town. So what does director Im Kwon-taek bring that's new to this torturous romance? A much younger leading man (Cho Seung-woo), lots of fabulous hats and robes, and a singer who narrates the action in front of a contemporary audience that acts like an Evangelical congregation. There's less tension here for both real and filmed audiences, as the director rushes the initial courtship as well as the subsequent punishment. In place of the venial and the penal, Kim shares excessive footage of the characters getting from Point A to Point B, which since they're always splendidly costumed, comes across as a dynastic fashion show in the great outdoors. There's also a strange brief moment when rainbow sperm shoot across the night sky but that aside, Kim's version is adamantly folksy, not flashy. Of the three renditions of this popular tale I've seen, this one's the least popular.

Cadaver: Have a Heart; On Second Hand, Have Five

K-horror rarely frightens yet it does regularly disturb. In director Son Derek's Cadaver, the disquieting moments all occur at a teaching hospital where six cocky medical students find their boozy disregard of the Hippocratic oath -- on the eve of getting a corpse for dissection -- will lead to a series of gruesome deaths, all seemingly self-inflicted by a scalpel. As each once-giggly undergrad succumbs to the merciless knife, creepy skeletons emerge from their collegial closets like the inhumane heart transplant done by one student's dad, the necrophiliac longings of another student (who happens to be the mystical son of a funeral director) and the patricide by yet another who has trouble sleeping. (Can you blame her?) As to the inappropriate posthumous grope of the corpse's breast, this may be more medical than criminal. How, after all, does formaldehyde affect the fatty tissue of the tit? Some budding doctors need to know! From what I could tell (and Cadaver can be confusing), one guy (whose worst crime may be two-timing) escapes the curse of the cadaver. As to the rest, they're guilty as charged if less so than the possessed serial murderer among them.