6 Korean Films From Third Window

I’d like to thank Third Window for sending me all these Korean DVDs.

For the unfamiliar, Korea is somewhat unique among Asian countries. A peninsula bordering on China and just a short leap across the pond from Japan, it has long been subjugated to foreign rule. And for the last 60 years, it has been fractured into two parts, North (communist-run and with comedians’ favorite Kim Jong Il) and South (the democratized state).

During the Korean War, most local film equipment was destroyed. After the war, foreign aid grants allowed new equipment to be purchased, and tax breaks and protection lead to a thriving film scene. The cinema was an important part of their lives, and most of the films in theaters were Korean. Relaxation of political censorship in the 80s and 90s allowed Korean filmmakers to tackle previously taboo subjects, such as reunification and political unrest. The government also relaxed rules governing independent productions, allowing a new generation to experiment.

Korea’s isolation has allowed it to develop a vibrant homegrown film scene. The government has always strictly controlled the showing of foreign films. The Screen Quota System required theaters to show Korean films 106-146 days of the year. Beginning in the 80s, these restrictions were gradually relaxed, and more competition from The U.S. and Hong Kong reduced the ratio of homegrown films shown.

But by the 90s viewers outside the country began to take notice. With the international success of SHIRI, OLDBOY, TAE GUK GI, JOINT SECURITY AREA and other films and the emergence filmmakers such as Chan-Wook Park and Ki-Duk Kim, the Korean film community has gotten some well-earned worldwide attention. Hopefully that attention will not be responsible for the community’s own demise. The U.S. has pressed hard for the quotas to be relaxed, which means more American films in the theaters, and less room for Korea’s homegrown artists. While it’s hoped that an important auteur such as Mr. Park would be recognized in any sort of climate, it’s not clear that newer Korean filmmakers will have the support enjoyed by previous generations. But Koreans do continue to go to see Korean films, and their international success suggests that Korean cinema is not going away any time soon.

Hollywood, always on the lookout for foreign properties to remake, has discovered the peninsula, and has optioned a boatload of Korean films. Just as it did with the recent trend of Japanese horror remakes, Hollywood is making glossy soulless big-budget versions of Korean films, divorced from any cultural sensibilities that may have made them work in the first place.

It’s always interesting to immerse yourself in a bunch of films of similar origin at once. To watch these 6 DVDs, you would think all Korea lives in Seoul, and gangsters and punks run the whole place, and everything revolves around food. Everyone in these films are either eating, or thinking about eating most of the time. All of the films, with the exception of Killing Machine, which is an indie, I believe, are slick and professional studio productions with large casts of skilled technicians and big-name Korean actors. None were bad, and all were well-done and exciting action films, worth checking out for fans of international action cinema.

Third Window is a British company, and puts out its’ product in the Region 2 format, so you’ll need an all-region player. Most of the films are available in the U.S. in Region One from other distributors, but not Green Fish and Wild Card. Support this worthy company at: http://www.thirdwindowfilms.com/main.htm or on myspace at http://www.myspace.com/thirdwindowfilms.

SAY YES is one of the films I enjoyed most of the bunch; it’s a downbeat 2001 Korean take on themes in the Vanishing, Se7en and The Hitchhiker, a well-made thriller with a slow burn that builds to a disturbing and vicious conclusion.

To celebrate selling the husband’s first book, a young newlywed couple takes a trip into the countryside where they pick up a disturbed hitchhiker, M, who becomes obsessed with the pretty wife, Yoon-hee (Chu Sang-mi). They kick him out after he gets weird and asks the husband, “How long do you want to live?” He ends up following them across the countryside, cutting them off with his truck, showing up where they are and generally playing mind games on them. “Does she taste good?” M asks the husband.

The actors are just fine in their roles. The young couple are innocent and unremarkable enough, but are forced to dig into their dark sides to defend themselves against this monster. The husband, Jung-hyun (Kim Joo-hyuk) is fresh-faced but impulsive and just arrogant enough to fall into M’s trap. Park Joong-hoon is excellent as the creepy hitchhiker M, and at the time was more known for comic roles. You can almost feel him dialing down his natural charm.

In the best movie baddie tradition, M is seemingly unstoppable, everywhere at once and thinking 3 steps ahead of the unlucky couple. He tails them on the highways and harasses them, and shows up at a hot springs they go to (almost drowning hubby Jung-hyun), but all without any witnesses beside the unlucky couple. He eventually tricks Jung-hyun into attacking him in broad daylight in front of a bunch of neutral witnesses. He even calls and taunts him inside the police station, when he gets arrested. In exchange for dropping the charges, he wants to travel with them on their trip.

OK, I’m sorry, maybe it’s just me, but when some guy has been threatening my wife and I for hundreds of miles, I don’t see a ride-along as a viable solution; I’d rather stay in jail. But this is a movie, and we do need to keep the story moving, so they take him with them. It doesn’t last very long before he does something socially unacceptable, saying, “Kill me or I’ll kill you.” They try to ditch him by sneaking out of the hotel room, but the car dies 20 minutes away.

M finally abducts Yoon-hee, but the police won’t allow hubby to make a missing persons report for 24 hours. He wakes up cuffed to the bench, with a murdered policeman at his feet. M wants to meet somewhere on the highway, but rams Jung-hyun from behind with a big truck and tries to push him off a cliff. Now the poor schmuck is wet, without a car, and wanted by the police. As if that weren’t bad enough, he’s clobbered on the head (poor actor Kim takes a lot of abuse in this film!) and wakes bound and gagged next to his wife. M tells him he’ll let him live if he asks him to kill his wife. (The “Say Yes” referred to in the film’s title.)

More blood and some nice car crashes and pitchforks still don’t stop him. He’s a calm, quiet, and relentless creepy stalker. He even comes after Jung-hyun in the hospital – oh shit, I really have told you too much already, and can’t give away anymore, but M is a memorable villain. The couple and the cops are so dumb, and the killer so clever, I found myself rooting for the brutal killer. Asked why he did all this wickedness, M replies, “Because you looked so happy.” Sick and cinematically satisfying, it has an increasingly violent last 30 minutes and a somewhat predictable twist ending that cannot diminish the mayhem we’ve just witnessed. Recommended.

2003’s WILD CARD starts as a buddy cop picture, with the seasoned pro partnered with the young hothead, but turns into a more satisfying ensemble piece about the squad of detectives that work (and practically live) together. The standard story is enlivened by the excellent cast and enjoyable script, and of course, very top-notch production values. There’s also a good deal of outdoor street locations. The film has lots of chases and action, mostly with fists or knives. The narration here is only at beginning and end, as I remember,and is not as intrusive as in GUNS AND TALKS (reviewed below). There are a gang of 4 young lawless street punks who commit a couple of murders and a rape using a weapon made of a baseball-sized metal ball in a sling.

The subplots involve the smug Bang Je-Su (Yang Dong-geun) awkwardly trying to hit on a pretty girl who turns out to be a higher-ranking cop (the gorgeous Han Chae-young, who could have been used a little more), and Oh Yeung-Dal (Jung Jin-young, who was in Ring Virus) and his internal affairs investigation for use of excessive force. Yeung-Dal shot a fleeing suspect in the back (well, the perp did shoot first) and is now hesitant to draw his gun, and quick to stop Je-Su from doing the same. Undermining that humanitarianism is the fact that the cops don’t mind beating the shit out of suspects. Wimpy detective Chi-Soon also turns out to has been stabbed real bad, making him deathly afraid of knives, which is important to the story later on.

The cops do “intensive enforcement” – much like a gang sweep, and pull in all the hoods down to the station, but learning nothing helpful. Eventually, they go to see Sang-chaan (Lee Do-kyoung, in a gleefully sleazy portrayal), who is a metrosexual gangster prone to brightly colored shirts. The cops tell him his operation has to find the killers. But they only have some police artist sketches and as the campy Sang-chaan demonstrates, “1/3 of Koreans look like these pictures.”

Sang-Chaan’s men eventually find the punks, and a funny scene involves Sang-Chaan’s negotiating terms with the two detectives, picking and choosing from a list of his operations for the police to stay away from.

The fact that the picture works as well as it does has a lot to do with its’ appealing cast. The cops bond closer as a group, especially Je-soo and Yeung-Dal, who help each other gain some maturity. Yeung-Dal jokes that Je-Su’s future wife will become just like his own, who receives threatening phone calls from criminals, and just yells right back to them, unafraid.

Food is central to this movie, as it is with Korean culture in general. In the film, they eat on the streets, in restaurants; they even get food delivered on a stakeout. (The cook says something like, “I’ll make rice, the noodles will be uneatable by the time I get there.”)

They eventually confront the hoods in a crowded nightclub (looks cool, but maybe not the most strategically sound idea?), and Je-Su learns a lesson and chooses not to shoot the punk, but go hand to hand. He may get his ass kicked, but he gets the girl.

For a movie called WILD CARD, the story seems to be critical of individuality and serves to confirm the organization itself, even though the cops seem kind of dense, waste time on unfruitful surveillance and rousting the usual suspects, complain about using outdated technology, and don’t even find the crooks themselves. They don’t even think to look at the convenience store videos.

Has Korean racetrack action, lots of cigarette smoking, and gratuitous eating.

1997’s GREEN FISH is a subtle character piece and parable of Korea camouflaged as a gangster picture. Makdong is a naïve 26 year-old fresh out of the military, trying to find his way. He goes back home and moves in to the run-down old family house with his mom and retarded brother. He has two other brothers, one an alcoholic cop and one who sells “hygienic” eggs out of the back of a truck (“They’re not just for rich people anymore.”) (yet again, Jung Jin-young from WILD CARD). Things are different from when he was a kid. The area that used to be fields is now a slum where he has trouble finding a job. He wants his brothers to move back in together as one big happy family, but they are not as close as he’d like.

Makdong falls into working for a mobster known as Big Brother who doesn’t think of himself as a mobster. He tells Makdong he won’t have to do anything illegal, and wants to know what ambitions he has. Makdong falls for the boss’ tragic flower of a girlfriend. He quickly goes from being a driver to a trusted confidant of the boss, Big Brother, who has troubles of his own. An old “friend” from prison, Yang-il Kim, is out and trying to take over his turf. He’s opening a club across the street and starts harassing Big Brother’s men.

The girlfriend wants to leave Big Brother, but can’t. She has deep scars on her back. “I’m sorry I did this to you.” Says Big Brother. She teaches Makdong to kiss, and after Big Brother has her sleep with the prosecutor, tells him it’s OK if he wants to sleep with her, since everyone else has.

His efforts to re-unite his family meet with mixed results. His older brother is a violent alcoholic detective, who causes a fight at the family picnic for his mom’s birthday.

His gangster boss is trying to be legit. Big Brother asks his henchmen, “are we gangsters? “ “No.” is the answer he wants. He slaps ‘em for fighting with Kim’s men. But Kim keeps harassing Big Brother and his men, kicking in a windshield, even slapping him in front of his own crew. In a tense and humorous scene, Makdong takes things into his own hands and does what Big Brother won’t –he stabs Kim to death in his nightclub’s restroom. He furiously tries to clean up afterwards before anyone enters, and just as he finishes, a drunk emerges from the stall oblivious to the entire struggle that had just taken place. His efforts to unite the crime family mirror his own struggle to unite his family; he accomplishes both in an act of supreme sacrifice.

More low-key and character –driven than most gangster films; a melancholy and realistic drama. Not for everyone, but I found it refreshing.

NO BLOOD NO TEARS is a frenetic and enjoyable 2002 Gangster/noir caper film with two female leads. Touted on the box as a Guy Ritchie type crime thriller (I guess that would be a fair description) about a botched robbery of an underworld dogfight game. There are plenty of colorful characters, solid acting, double-crosses, comic relief and lots of violence, with, of course, a Korean flavor to the production.

The two female leads, first meet each other when Soo-Jin (pretty star Jun Do-yeon) crashes her car into her Gyung-Sun’s cab. She’s escaping her violent boyfriend Bulldog, who just beat her and three do-gooding martial artists, and doesn’t mind hitting the cabbie, either (tough-girl played by actress Lee Hye-young, who’s hot in a more-world-weary, tomboy way). The unlikely partners bond over noodles at a small restaurant and stop the drunken owner from hitting his wife and son. Soo-Jin’s boyfriend beats her, but she hates to see others doing the same. The lady cab driver Gyung-Sun is an ex-gangster girl. It seems her husband lost money gambling and disappeared; leaving her the only one the mob can get the money back from.

Bulldog is an arrogant asshole gangster that runs a dogfight ring for his boss Kim Geum-Bok, better known as KGB. Many people have a reason to rob his club. Bulldog’s long-suffering girlfriend Soo-Jin wants surgery to remove a scar from under her eye, so she can go to Japan and become a pop star. Cabbie Gyung-Sun just wants money to get the mob off her back and see her young daughter she’s been long separated from. Three unlucky young slackers, who work at the club and have had enough of being slapped around by Bulldog. Also decide to rob his club. If that’s not enough, the boss KGB has sent his own guy, a tall kickboxer known as The Silent Man, to rob his own place, too. “Know what’s the saddest thing in the world?” Asks KGB of Bulldog before he tries to kill him. “Being stupid” he tells him.

A superb job is done by the actors who play the three old gangsters. Still lowly and ineffectual collectors who some say are too soft, they are given one last chance to intimidate Gyung-Sun for the money. These geriatric losers convey more meaning in an eyebrow twitch than others with an entire speech. Throw in some cops and miscellaneous gangsters and you have a very full cast. “Can’t you tell the difference between soybean paste and shit?” one dumb hood asks another..

Another great scene involves a showdown with the United Handicapped Democrats, a group of old and disabled gangster rejects that no other gang wants. When threatened, instead of fighting, they all fall down in the street and scream that the other gangsters hit them. It was such a fun idea, I was disappointed they didn’t return later in the film.

The film includes lots of bloody hand-to-hand combat, a lively gun battle, and some nice car chase scenes. Near the end there’s an epic battle in the dog cage between the two toughest tough guys, The Silent Man and Bulldog. There’s the inevitable girlfight at the end, as well as a brutal man vs. woman brawl.

The film utilizes chopped-up time and parts are told in flashbacks, with slo-mo action scenes, freeze-frames, lovely crane work, speed-up film, split-screen and other flashy techniques. Not the knockout blow the film’s hype may lead you to believe, but it’s still quite entertaining. Parts of it were a little confusing, and the comic relief of the slackers wore thin, while some of the directors’ constant technical trickery seemed show-offy. But it has a hearty energy and ingenuity, and the professional cast and persistent and increasing level of violence kept me watching.

And yes, being a Korean film means it does have smoking, karaoke and eating scenes. And shockingly enough, someone in a car actually asks the driver if they mind if he smokes! Of course, no one does.

2000’s TEENAGE HOOKER BECAME A KILLING MACHINE is really the odd man out in this group of films. Unlike the other, this is not slickly produced on a studio in Seoul. It’s got more of an indie vibe, and looks to be shot on digital video. The box art promotes it’s reputation as a Tetsuo of Korean underground film, which is big shoes to fill.

Unfortunately, even at it’s short 45 minute running time, it feels padded. They should have trimmed some things, like maybe the old woman talking or the dance between the creepy teacher and the Teenage Hooker. The dance goes on for uncomfortably long, though that may have been the intent. I think this and other mistakes to be the action of an inexperienced filmmaker, perhaps he’s since come up with something more substantive to go along with the weird and disturbing imagery. The crew did an excellent job of making the film look weird and cool on an obviously low budget. And although they spend a lot of time on talking, there is not a lot of time spent on character development or story. The Teenage Hooker (Lee So-yun) has to refer to the past and say things like I always liked you best teacher, and explain the plot that way.

I was looking forward to this film most out of the batch, perhaps that is why I was disappointed. What kind of film is it? Seems to vacillate between a serious and a camp approach. The imagery of the teenage hooker/killing machine is great and iconic, but it can’t carry the whole film.

OK, story. The girl is in a typical Japanese schoolgirl outfit, banging some middle-aged salaryman in an alley against a wall, and the old lady living there calls her son to stop it. He is the teenage hooker’s teacher from school. He trades his silence about her activities for sex with her, right against his old momma’s wall. Afterwards, she tells him she that she can tell he just impregnated her, so he pulls out a gun and shoots her!

A lab team of weirdos takes her body and resurrects her into a robotic killing machine. She is cut in half with a huge saw, but is put together later. She has wires and stuff hanging out of her.

It’s a Korean stew of pervy sex and little bit of violence. Visuals: sepia, green tint. Over/under-lit, slo-mo and swirling camera around subject. The music is a big part of the film – rock n’ roll, but also lots of opera, which made it (to me) a bit precious and self-important, and slows things down even more. (She dreamed of her child becoming an opera singer.)

It recalled La Femme Nikita when she goes to a bar to get a gun from a contact (as a killing machine, she doesn’t have any built-ins? Man, those mad robot designers suck!)

She’s programmed to not be able to kill her creator, but manages to shoot him in the crotch. It’s a cool visual, but made no sense. What gives? There’re some other moments like that, which preclude me from totally recommending it. And strangely enough, we don’t really feel much empathy for her character.

Included on this disc is the director’s similarly weird and too-talky 30 minute short “featurette” KAANG-CHUL. It’s also vague and confusing, appears to be a long deathbed confession of a defensive android.

GUNS AND TALKS is probably the silliest, most formulaic film on the list, but still an enjoyable trifle. Thanks to the charming cast, they can pull off the ridiculous “killers with hearts of gold” story. As an occasionally annoying intrusive voice-over narration by the youngest brother tells you throughout the 2001 film, our heroes are a gang of 4 hitmen, or “assassins’, as they fancy themselves. They have an uncle (in kind of a wasted role), who makes James Bond-ish gadgets for them, and they all live happily together, the two brothers and the other two friends.

Not the violent bullet ballet the box art may suggest, it’s more of a light family comedy-drama couched in the crime genre. They dress as guards and repairmen as they infiltrate their objective and leave behind a bomb. With nice cinematography throughout, and attractive actors. Slo-mo Matrix-style action as the camera follows the bullet. Use of split-screen for storytelling purposes. Filter and moving cameras, and lots of wonderful location shots.

The trouble starts when one member can’t follow through on his mission and kill a pretty pregnant woman. He hesitates in the hallway pretending he lives there, then later runs into her again and hits it off with her in some charmingly awkward scenes. Then, a sad schoolgirl keeps showing up wanting them to do a contract on another female. The boys deny they know what she’s talking about, but she keeps popping up. She pops up in the marketplace, and convinces the younger brother to let her cook for them, since he’s such a lousy cook, and so insinuates herself into their lives.

The cop is Jung Jin-young, the guy from WILD CARD and GREEN FISH! This time he’s a humorless bloodhound on the trail of the foursome. He breaks into their house, and after digging around and taking pictures of their plans, leaves a cryptically worded message in English for them as a screensaver… “I Never Miss You”. He’s pissed and acting outside the law because a gangster he’s been trying to arrest for years just got set free. The cops need a surveillance vehicle that doesn’t look like a cop car, and “borrow” the gangster’s wheels and they get “made” by the assassins.

The boys start everyday by watching luscious newscaster Young Lan-Oh and commenting on how beautiful she is. Later she turns up as a client, wanting them to murder someone in a very dangerous public setting with cops and cameras everywhere, at the end of an opera version of Hamlet. The police are there waiting for them, but are easily distracted, and our young “heroes” get away with killing the man in front of an audience and escaping afterwards. The play seems like a relevant match for Koreans, with its ancient royal family and themes of revenge, death, certainty and action.

The film’s slickness lets it almost get away with some outrageous behavior. (It seems unlikely that Big brother Sang-yon would keep a wall full of pictures of him with his “clients,” and that the cops would allow a thug to come into the station and shoot a computer and a phone and just walk out after paying for the damage. And how ‘d they smuggle the gun into the Opera House, not to mention get out afterwards? We just aren’t shown. There are a lot of these suspension-of-disbelief moments in the film.

Hey, it’s an enjoyable but unbelievable popcorn movie, good for kicks.

With trailers and a Bon Jovi music video!