Seobok (2021, Lee Yong-ju)

The first act of Seobok is an espionage thriller (or the first act of one), the second act is a buddy action road picture, the third act is a Sturm und Drang superhero movie. Well, superhuman movie, at least.

The best part is the second act when spy-who-tried-to-get-out-but-they-pull-him-back-in Gong Yoo is teaching new charge Park Bo-gum the ropes of the world. Park is the world’s first cloned human, except the scientists couldn’t resist genetically engineering him a bit, so he’s also got a decent set of mutant powers. Telekinesis mostly, which looks exactly like Magneto’s powers in a fight scene.

Despite only being ten years old, Park looks twice the age. And we find out there are reasons he’s more verbose and intellectually capable than a tween. He’s awkward, constantly asking Gong questions with the Five Ws. Treacherous action scenes will fully pause so Park can ask Gong why he’s phrasing a statement a certain way. It’s not quite comic relief, but it does make for some amusing interchanges between the pair as they bond.

Gong only took the job—from former boss, Jo Woo-jin—for selfish reasons, which he’s happy to tell Park about, then surprised when Park gets upset about it. Even though all of Park’s mortality lessons have come from “mom” Jang Young-nam, the lead scientist on his project. Her chief sidekick is Park Byeong-eun, who’s kind of a wiener, but is also Gong’s point of contact in the lab. So when it comes time to show off Park Bo-gum’s superpowers, Jang gets him to demonstrate, while Park Byeong-eun tells Gong what they’re seeing.

Also involved with the cloning company is owner Kim Jae-gun, who doesn’t show up until halfway through the movie, despite having a bunch to do in the third act.

The spy stuff is okay—Jo Yeong-wook’s music covers for there not being a lot of story with it, just mood and intensity. Gong and Jo have some history, which we find out about during one of the flashbacks, and their relationship bristles just enough without the details. Especially with the music. Music’s awesome.

The flashbacks are not a particularly successful device. As something happens in the present action, the movie cuts to a pertinent flashback. Sometimes Gong is telling Park a story, sometimes Park is telling Gong, but writer and director Lee skips over giving the actors the chance to act out those moments, instead going full into flashback. There are no rules; there are other flashbacks just for viewer edification. The scenes themselves are usually compelling because Lee tries hard with them; even the worst flashbacks are well-directed sequences. But there are also some well-acted ones, particularly by Jang and Park, whose “mother and son” relationship only exists in those flashbacks.

Seobok opens with one American actor, Paul Battle, not getting any lines, just emoting and being assassinated well, which made it seem like the film would avoid bad American performances. The plot involves the South Korean National Intelligence Service working with the CIA, so more Americans seem inevitable, but it’s a long time until Andrea Paciotto shows up for a terrible monologue. Paciotto’s real bad. But predictable.

Lee Mo-gae’s photography is quite good; again, the scenes where Gong’s introducing Park to the world are the best, not just for actors, but the lighting as well. The world from Park’s perspective has a lot of personality.

Given all the narrative constraints and contrivances, Seobok starts forecasting likely resolutions before the halfway point. But the ending’s worse than it needs to be. Lee goes for visually impressive bombastic instead of anything character motivated, which was where the film got its momentum.

Despite having little to do in the third act, Gong’s a great lead. It’s a movie star-type role, and he excels. Park’s successfully essays the film’s most challenging part. Jang’s pretty good; her performance suffers because she’s barely in the movie. Sidekick Park Byeong-eun’s in it slightly more, and he’s good. Ditto Jo. Most of Seobok’s acting is solid.

There’s just not much acting to do in the third act when the VFX take over. The end’s inevitable by the third act and obliviously so, which turns it into a race against time. Is the film going to make it to the finish before its charm runs out?

It makes it. Barely. And leveraging a lot of that earlier momentum. Then the postscript’s okay, with good Jo music making it all more palatable.

Thanks to Gong and Park and their buddy action road movie, Seobok’s got a lot of good moments. They add up to a mostly entertaining, occasionally too wanting, genre mishmash.

Escape from Mogadishu (2021, Ryoo Seung-wan)

Escape from Mogadishu is almost incalculably problematic. I can't do the math, and I'm sure there's a bunch I don't even see, but it's a doozy. It's a South Korean "inspired by a true story" about the Somali Civil War, specifically the South Korean diplomats and the North Korean diplomats working together to get out. It's done in the style of a Hollywood bureaucrats in danger thriller, which bakes in a gaggle of new problems. Including showcasing African poverty for first-world consumption–it's a white man's burden picture, only it's not about the white men. Instead, it's about Koreans doing a riff on it, trying to benefit from the behavior. Only for different reasons—South Korea and North Korea need African nations to sign off on them joining the U.N., so the first act contains wacky bureaucrat comedy. Just with guns, violence, and racism.

Then there's the stuff about religion, including the allied but foolishly corrupt Somali government apparently being secular and the rebels being Muslim. The insurgents care about their children; the government bureaucrats and thugs don't even care about each other. Plus, there's static between the South Korean Christian evangelical and the Buddhists. Further complicating, the evangelical (Kim So-jin) is the wife of the ambassador, Kim Yoon-seok, and is using that unofficial position to force her religion on them.

Then all the stuff with the North Koreans and the South Koreans. The film humanizes the North Koreans—callous, jingoist bigotry is left to the dueling intelligence officers, Jo In-sung and Koo Kyo-hwan. Koo's a diehard Communist; Jo's a diehard asshole. Jo's never in it for capitalist ideology; he always just wants someone to shit on. Starting with the native Somalis (while Koo brings care packages to outcast school children). But Koo also likes pranking the South Korean embassy, something his boss, Huh Joon-ho, finds amusing. Especially since he's been a diplomat for twenty years or something and Kim Yoon-seok's just there on temporary assignment.

There's a lot of back and forth with the two sets of people learning they're just people, with some well-timed reveals about the shitty police state the North Koreans all live in. Of course, some South Korean bureaucrats are shitty people too, but not all of them. It's a mess.

It's also extremely well-made and mostly well-acted. The good performances make up for the middling ones, which is really just Jo, but he's always around, consistently middling, and always an asshole. He does get a good fight scene, though it does work to call back to an opening scene observing since Africans make racially uninformed observations about Koreans, can't Koreans really do the same?

However, the last thirty minutes are mostly phenomenally directed "real people in danger" action thriller. Director Ryoo, editor Lee Gang-hee, and cinematographer Choi Young-hwan turn in a truly harrowing sequence. At some point in the first half of Escape, I thought the movie's goal was to have a quote where someone calls it "harrowing." I never thought it'd get there, but it does. The harrowing caravan escape sequence is harrowing. It even brings the film higher than it finishes; Ryoo and co-writer Lee Ki-cheol can't resist getting cheap digs in at the North Koreans and then some macho character development.

Huh's performance is phenomenal. Kim Yoon-seok's very good, but he's mainly opposite Jo, who's never good. Or they're doing a comedy bit with Jeong Man-sik, who plays the incompetent career bureaucrat trope. Koo's okay as the North Korean spy guy, but it's a caricature part and corresponding performance.

The first half is a long slog. The second half is over too soon. But it's definitely far below "it's the best they could do regarding a complex situation." Escape's confrontational and proud of its bric-a-brac politics, which never serve the characters, just the film. It's intentionally craven. So whether or not the multiple hurdles, pitfalls, and just plain ugliness are worth getting through the rest for that great Escape sequence depends on the individual viewer.

Miss Hokusai (2015, Hara Keiichi)

Miss Hokusai is the story of real person Katsushika Ōi. Well, stories of real person Katsushika Ōi. The anime is an episodic memoir mostly about Ōi (voiced by Anne Watanabe) and her younger sister, O-Nao (voiced by Shimizu Shion). The film doesn’t specify but they’re half-sisters, daughters to famous Japanese Edo period artist Katsushika Hokusai (Matsushige Yutaka). Ōi is also an artist, working under her father’s tutelage and when the movie’s not about her and her blind, sickly sister, it’s about her and her dad’s other slightly eccentric (and obviously all male) students.

Oh, and her love life. Almost the entire second act is about Ōi not being good at the erotica art because she’s a virgin. Except it’s all done in fades-to-black-in-between episodes (to the point you can tell when one is running too long), which would be more effective if it had a lyrical structure instead of just a herky-jerky epical.

The problem with Hokusai—other than the disaster third act—is the narrative distance. It’s not a character study of Ōi, it’s a mildly cloying look at the world she inhabits. Someone—screenwriter Maruo Miho or original mangaka Sugiura Hinako—utterly punts on the character study approach, which leads to the father ending up the most compelling character (and performance by a voice actor). The most compelling character overall is the sick sister because she’s literally just there for a combination of sympathy and period empathy (the kid’s convinced she’s going to someday end up in Hell because she’s blind). Shimizu’s good as the kid. None of the performances are bad, but Shimizu’s good enough to stand out. Otherwise it’s just about waiting for the father to speak because it’s always words of wisdom; Matsushige does a great job with it.

There are a lot of effective sequences once Ōi starts showing some agency (she’s got to worry about her dad’s professional contracts because he’s an artiste and can’t be bothered with money, wives, or blind daughters—but in a soulful way… they really should’ve gotten Mickey Rourke to do a dub); anyway. The directors do an all right job with a lot of it, leveraging a bunch of CGI backdrops—but not bad until the end when it’s too late anyway—and for a while Hokusai’s somewhat jarring rising action is effective.

Until the third act when the movie gives the best stuff to the father and reduces Ōi to a narrator of his biography, then her own. In that order, obviously. The finish is reductive and truncated in the worst ways. Then there’s some terrible CGI. Plus rock music.

Hokusai’s music is a whole thing. There’s rock to show how Ōi is really a modern girl living in nineteenth century Japan. Except the generic rock music’s for some eighties movie about white kids learning to dance in rural America. The rest of Fuuki Harumi’s music is fine; I wouldn’t be surprised if the rock was added for the American releases (even the Japanese language ones). Though I also wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t.

The animation’s solid. There are some highlights when visualizing the painting of the actual historical artists’ paintings.

After a very slow burn, Miss Hokusai goes into its third act at a reasonable high and then belly flops. It could’ve been a success of cloying melodrama. Instead it’s just respectably unsuccessful.

Departures (2008, Takita Yôjirô)

Departures suffers for its DV photography. Suffers. Hamada Takeshi cannot figure out how to light for the video and, as a result, the film never looks good. Maybe if director Takita were somehow taking it into account, but no, Takita just pretends it doesn’t look like an ornate Hi8 camcorder production.

With some competent mise-en-scène, Departures might be able to get away with its other big problems. Though the score—composed by Joe Hisaishi—definitely part of the wanting audiovisual tone—would also need to upgrade. Otherwise it’s just a disaster third act and middling acting from its leads, sometimes due to the script, sometimes due to Takita not directing them, sometimes just the actors.

The film’s about failed cellist Motoki Masahiro returning to his hometown after his latest failure. Except Departures opens in a flash forward revealing the film’s actually going to be about Motoki becoming an encoffiner and the antics of the job. An encoffiner is a class of mortician who prepares the body to be placed in the coffin, including doing makeup, usually with the family watching. The film immediately establishes it’s a solemn, ritualistic, respectful ceremony.

And then veers into transphobia as a joke, though who knows how the scene would play if Motoki were capable of emoting. He’s capable of reflecting, with Takita setting up the object, event, or person for Motoki to respond to with reflection, but Motoki can’t reflect without stimulus.

Then the film flashes back to Motoki’s latest orchestra collapsing (he went with a bad one because he’s not very good) and him having to convince wife Hirosue Ryôko they should move to his hometown. There’s no subplot about returning to the hometown outside running into old friend Sugimoto Tetta, who’ll end up shunning him for being in the funeral trade, but Departures avoids a “returning home” plot for Motoki like the plague. Maybe it just cut. Like when he finds out coworker Yo Kimiko worked for Motoki’s mom for years before she died and he doesn’t tell her the connection. Motoki’s got no interest in the dead single mom who sacrificed all to raise him. He just obsesses on his dad leaving when he was five because dudes.

He’s going to have a terrible arc with Hirosue, who seems utterly personality-less (she just giggles for the first half of the movie), only to discover she’s actually got lots of thoughts she hasn’t been sharing because they’re have screwed up the narrative. Hirosue’s not good. She also doesn’t get a single good scene in the film. They cut away from potentially good scenes occasionally, but usually she doesn’t even have them set up. It’s mildly annoying.

The real star is Yamazaki Tsutomu, the encoffining boss, who hires Motoki for his initial gumption and is convinced Motoki will be great at the job for some reason. Also Motoki can’t remember what his dad looks like so is it impossible Yamazaki’s his dad? No, not impossible. It’s a mystery to be solved it turns out, because Koyama Kundô’s script goes for the predictable and obvious every single time. Sure, sometimes there’s a skipped scene to finish a character arc, but you can always guess what would’ve happened. I guess at least Departures isn’t patronizing… but it’s almost stranger it isn’t.

Yamazaki is great. Motoki is middling. Every time you want to cut Motoki some slack because the direction and photography is wanting… you realize Yamazaki is excelling under the same conditions.

Then there’s Hisaishi’s score, which you might think would leverage a lot of cello. Nope. Piano. Even during scenes where Motoki is playing the cello onscreen, eventually there’s some kind of non-diegetic accompaniment. It’s like… pick an instrument you at least want to have run the score. There’s no reason Motoki couldn’t have been a mediocre pianist. It also would’ve made for a more visually interesting scene with he sits alone outside playing to nature.

Departures is what happens when you don’t balance your character study right. And you don’t have the technicals down. And you don’t have the right leads.

But Yamazaki is outstanding and there are a bunch of great ideas. Just with a muddy result.

Deliver Us from Evil (2020, Hong Won-Chan)

The evil in Deliver Us from Evil is specifically Lee Jung-jae’s sadistic villain but generally the entire world of the film, which features drug kingpins, child kidnapping, government assassins turned hitmen, human traffickers, real estate swindlers, organ thieves, and crooked cops. At one point the film gets super-judgy about Park Jeong-min’s cabaret singer complaining about being surrounded by all the, well, Evil. Of course, since she’s a trans woman (actor Park, however, is not; he’s a cis male actor, which is just as shitty a move in a South Korean film as an American), it’s somehow supposed to be her fault. Meanwhile, all the dudes roaming around butchering people, kidnapping kids, and so on… well, it’s just the way it is for them. There’s something more wrong about Park, who’s run off to Thailand because she’s ashamed of being trans and having abandoned a young son back home in Korea.

I’m assuming the source dialogue has all the misgendering (the subtitles sure do), as the film uses Park as a showpiece for various people to discriminate against. It’s a messed up part and Park does all right, but it’s the most exploitative thing in writer and director Hong’s film, which is about kidnapping children and harvesting their organs based for xenophobes. In fact, Hong terrorizes Park’s character onscreen to get out of having to terrorize the trafficked children onscreen. The narrative needlessly tracks Park through a terrified night in jail to the morning where three cops threaten her for information, leveraging her marginalized status as an injury vector. And Hong drags it out to the point I was expecting “hero” Hwang Jung-min to somehow rescue Park from the crooked cops, but, no, it’s just more opportunities to be shitty to Park and terrorize her for sympathy. Except not exactly because Hwang’s super shitty to her too. It’s a garbage move, made even more so when Hong reveals Park to be the only truly sympathetic character in the whole movie (well, adult; well, adult who isn’t a fridged woman).

Of course, there’s an added “(South Korean) Oscar bait” aspect to Park’s performance, which makes it all the more shallow and all the more craven. It’s incredibly insincere, callous, and often mean-spirited.

Hong often tries to veer Evil away from the true meanness he’s setting on film through the outlandish characters. Calling the characters in Evil caricatures is a little too complimentary; they’re cartoonish. Often viciously cartoonish, but cartoonish. Lee’s a terrifying psychopathic supervillain who literally chops his way through crowds of people to get at his target—Hwang, who unknowingly killed Lee’s brother. Hwang spends the first act of the film, outside the hitman sequences, moping around Japan. He’s an ex-pat from South Korea who used to be a happy, well-adjusted government assassin; a bunch of non-murderous people came to power and decided they should stop killing people and disbanded Hwang’s outfit so he had to run to Japan. Where he keeps doing one last job until he can go live on a beach in Panama. Then he’ll be happy.

Except after Hwang does his last hit… someone kidnaps his previously unknown daughter Park So-yi over in Thailand, where she’s been happily living with naive mom Choi Hee-seo. Notice how much the plot hinges on previously unknown characters (Park, Lee) coming to the fore as inciting actions–Hong doesn’t really have a story, he’s got a hero (Hwang) and a villain (Lee) and various set pieces where they interact.

Both Hwang and Lee are capable of infinite violence—at one point someone injuries seem to supernaturally heal because he’s needed for the next action sequence, which involves chasing a car on foot while suffering multiple stab wounds; the leads chop through a legion of fake shemps, having both run afoul of the local crime lords in Thailand on their arrival, invincible until they have their inevitable showdown. Only Hwang’s not in the movie for an inevitable showdown with Lee, he’s in the movie to rescue daughter Park. Hong loses sight of the main plot, too wrapped up in the pretty good grisly action sequences. There are no heroics in Evil, just bloody action scenes—lots and lots of knives; it’s a third act problem because the film sets Hwang up as a tactical genius while Lee’s the bull stabbing everything in the china shop.

Hong does a great job directing Evil, Hong Kyung-pyo’s photography is excellent, ditto Kim Hyung-ju’s editing, and Hwang’s performance is outstanding the lead. Lee’s good but he’s just doing an unstoppable, unpredictable bad guy thing. It’s like an audition reel for another Joker movie or something. The different tones in the adversaries is usually a plus; it craps out at the end, when Hong turns out to have no organic way to bring them together and has to gin one up; Hong gets through thanks to his directing and his crew.

It’d be nice if Deliver Us from Evil’s biggest problem were just the third act, or just the title, instead of the transphobia and xenophobia. I didn’t even get to the xenophobia but basically the film portrays Thailand as a shithole country full stop. For a transphobic, xenophobic, exploitative revenge and avenge thriller, Evil’s about as good you can get. It’d be nice if it didn’t come with so many gross caveats.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972, Luis Buñuel)

Buñuel arranges The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie as a series of vignettes. Occasionally there will be a surreal bridging device—the cast walking in search of a meal on a highway in the country—sometimes it will turn out to be a dream, sometimes it will be another layer (a narrated flashback, a dream-in-a-dream), sometimes it will be more traditionally epical. Mostly in the first act.

The film opens with four people getting to a dinner party, only they’re a day early so they have to go out. But then it turns out fate’s against them having dinner that night. They’ll try again.

The initial dinner guests are Fernando Rey, playing the ambassador from the South American republic Miranda, Paul Frankeur as his friend, Delphine Seyrig as Frankeur’s wife, and Bulle Ogier as Seyrig’s sister. They go out to dinner with Stéphane Audran, who was expecting them for dinner the next night. Because it’ll turn out her husband, Jean-Pierre Cassel, is kind of flakey. Though everyone in Charm is flakey at one time or another, though only a few with any malice behind it.

In the first act we also learn Rey, Frankeur, and Cassel are coke traffickers. Rey brings it in via his ambassador bag—diplomatic immunity—selling to Frankeur and Cassel. The wives don’t appear to know anything about it. There’s a bunch of funny dialogue about ambassadors as smugglers. Charm is often very obviously, intentionally funny. Buñuel will occasionally break out the jokes–especially when introducing Julien Bertheau as the local bishop who moonlights as Audran and Cassel’s new gardener. Bertheau even becomes one of the dinner-seekers—tagging along to various events before his subplot goes its own way.

Because Charm’s also got a some very strong narrative arcs. The second act, after the film introduces the layering device (starting with a great narrated flashback from Christian Baltauss), slowly becomes about centering the narrative focus on Rey. He’s always kind of the lead—he’s sleeping with someone he shouldn’t be and he’s also a cocaine smuggler so he’s on edge; also there are revolutionaries from Miranda in Paris trying to assassinate him—but the process of making him protagonist and directing the narrative, even passively—takes Buñuel a while.

Every one of the dream sequence reveals in the film is a surprise. Even as the events become more absurd—eventually there’s a ghost and it makes perfect sense because ghosts are real in Charm—Buñuel never lessens the intensity of the scene. The drama is always very real. So we gradually come to understand Rey’s self-conscious about being a South American diplomat with these bourgeoisie white French people. There’s never a clarifying scene about whether or not he should be—Buñuel always leaves the judgment of the characters up to the audience; especially when it’s part of the story. Charm’s narrative distance and how Buñuel adjusts it throughout is stunning.

All the acting is excellent. Rey gets the biggest part, obviously, then probably Audran—who gets one more scene without her significant other than any of the other women—then actually Bertheau as the priest. Bertheau’s arc is one of the film’s standout successes. Because Buñuel introduces Bertheau as another angle giving insight into the main cast; he’s an observer too, one who’s socially acceptable to have out to dinner, unlike Milena Vutokic as Audran and Cassel’s maid; Vutokic gets a lot to do (and even gets one of the last big jokes) but she’s all reaction to the cast, she’s got nothing of her own, which ends up being part of the joke.

Ogier and Seyrig both get a couple really good spotlight scenes. Cassel’s always support, but getting more to do than Frankeur, which is kind of funny because from the introduction it seems like Frankeur’s going to be a scene-stealer, which raises a question about whether or not Charm is unpredictable. I mean. Ghosts exist so anything’s on the table, which affects plot anticipation.

Because even though all the dream reveals are surprises, they’re never “gotchas.” Discreet Charm is never about being fantastical; the film’s incredibly grounded. Otherwise a bunch of the jokes wouldn’t work and Buñuel makes sure they work. There’s one about Americans where it’s edited to wait for the laughs. Excellent editing throughout from Hélène Plemiannikov.

The other technicals are similarly strong. Edmond Richard’s photography is a lot less flashy than Plemiannikov’s editing, Pierre Guffroy’s production design, or Jacqueline Guyot’s costumes, but Charm’s photography is appropriately clinical in its presentation. The film never feels stagy, but it does have long scenes in single locations. There’s a personality to the photography’s lack of personality, especially as Buñuel even trades on how reliably the photography showcases the sets. It’s all wonderfully intentional.

While The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie sometimes takes darker turns, it’s always genial and well-mannered, which is just the perfect tone.

Charm’s a rare, strange delight.

Space Sweepers (2021, Jo Sung-hee)

Space Sweepers is a special effects spectacular. Director Jo keeps up the pace during the CGI space battles, but always takes the time to be excited at how the scene plays. The film’s set in a post-climate change future where all the rich people live on a giant satellite (with Richard Armitage as the “casting we could afford” evil CEO with multiple evil secrets and a very bad James Earl Jones voice impression at one point) and all the poor people live on a rotting Earth while working for the rich people somehow.

The heroes of the film are a group of… you guessed it… Space Sweepers. Interplanetary contract garbage services. All the satellites and space docks and assorted garbage the human race pollutes space with, these scrappy independents clean it all up and get paid barely enough to eat on. Sweepers is very matter-of-fact with its class politics; never cynical (heck, they think it’ll be 2092 before climate change calamities hit, which means South Koreans lie to themselves about climate change too).

The protagonist is Song Joong-ki, a former child soldier (for Armitage’s company), who gets a heart when he discovers humans are little and cute at some point and adopts a baby he’s just orphaned. Tragedy strikes—it takes a while to find out the specifics because Jo’s script loves only somewhat effective expository flashbacks—and he’s trying to earn enough money to find her little dead body in orbit before she crashes into Earth’s upper atmosphere. The technology exists to do it immediately but only if you’re rich.

It’s a weird character motivation subplot and mostly just serves as an excuse for Song to do churlish, inhumane plot stimulators throughout the film. It’s kind of amazing how likable Song’s able to remain.

Especially since the other members of his crew are completely likable without obsession, pointless subplots.

The captain is Kim Tae-ri. It’s unclear why she’s the captain as she doesn’t pilot the ship or handle the money. It’s possible she arranges the jobs, but the work is just grabbing space debris before other junk collectors can find it. She also doesn’t do much leading. Regardless, Kim’s very sturdy and when she finally gets to kick ass—she too was a soldier for Armitage, though not a child one—it’s a great effects sequence.

The most fun crew member is either Jin Seon-kyu as the crime lord turned junker or Joo Hae-jin as a robot. It’s a motion capture and voice performance from Joo and while the voice acting is good, the special effects are what make the robot so impressive. Space Sweepers has outstanding special effects, both macro and micro, out in space with Jo’s homage to Star Wars space dogfights—but without lasers, since they’re grabbing space garbage—and inside with character moments for Joo. Actually, besides Song, Joo's got the biggest character arc.

But Jin, the former crime boss who turns out to be a big teddy bear when the crew happens upon renegade child android Park Ye-rin? Absolutely adorable.

The story has the crew having to protect Park from Armitage’s malicious plans, which will take them through various well-executed CGI set pieces as the dangers increase from all directions. Including Jong’s single-mindedness.

The cast’s incredibly appealing, with Jo getting excellent moments between each of them and Park, so it’s a breezy two hours and fifteen minutes. The English language (white people) cast, including Armitage, is fairly bad. The multi-ethnic future makes perfect sense and looks great, just Jo doesn’t know how to direct them. Or they don’t know how to act. The last hurdle to South Korean cinema—though, I don’t think any of Asian cinema’s ever really done it—is getting a decent performance from a white actor.

Armitage manages never to be campy enough to be amusing or good enough to be… good, which is a bummer and hurts the third act. But a lot hurts the third act and the epilogue is too short given the enthusiasm the film’s ginned up in the characters.

Hopefully they’ll do a sequel.

Hard Boiled (1992, John Woo)

The first act of Hard Boiled is fantastic. Between Woo’s glossy, smooth jazz but with bite tone and Chow Yun-Fat’s glorious lead performance; it’s all like butter. There’s a big, intricate shootout with Woo (and his editors Ah-Chik, Kai Kit-Wai, and David Wu) doing masterful work, there’s some workplace humor with cop Chow being on the outs with some of the time girlfriend and all of the time supervisor Teresa Mo, there’s Chow at a jazz club, and there’s Tony Chiu-Wai Leung doing a cool soulful (but smooth jazz soulful) gangster. It’s awesome.

Unfortunately, Hard Boiled runs two hours and change (depending how much violence has been cut out) and while the first act lasts a quarter of it and the next thirty or so minutes is still solid—as Leung has to decide whether or not to betray nice guy (for a triad) boss Kwan Hoi-San for obnoxious but successful Anthony Chau-Sang Wong while Chow enters the orbit, out for Wong’s head—but the movie runs out of story in at about the hour mark. There’s some plotting for the rest of it, but it’s really just moving bodies to their next stunt point.

And the second hour of Hard Boiled, which takes place in one location, which gets shot and blown up to hell as Chow, Leung, and Wong (mostly through his main enforcer, a very effective Phillip Chung-Fung Kwok) wage war on each other. See, Wong’s an arms smuggler so there are all sorts of neat guns and explosives for the fellows to play with as the bad guys go from endangering civilians to holding babies hostage. You know Wong and his guys are bad because they’re willing to kill babies.

It’s a really cheap way to drum up concern for the collateral damage, but it’s fine. The star of the second half of Hard Boiled is the pyrotechnics. Things are always blowing up. Yes, the infinite ammo mode gunfights are elaborate as well, but Woo doesn’t really direct them so much as execute them. The bangs and booms are the stars of the movie, not Chow or Leung. They’re just the guys who led the camera to the best places for bangs and booms.

The movie doesn’t even take the time for big bad fights—there’s more of one in the opening gunfight than anywhere else, even though Kwok’s in the movie a lot more than Wong—because it rejects the idea any of it can be personal. Barry Wong’s script doesn’t do character development or character arcs. It just does setups to action set pieces for Woo to execute. Leung gets some pensive alone time, which is fine and sympathizing (eventually and sort of retroactively), while most of Chow’s is spent with… director Woo, who also plays the jazz club owner, who used to be a cop too.

Woo is not a good actor and the scenes—outside when they bring the main plot in—are pretty blah. Especially since Chow and Mo are a really fun bicker couple. Mo’s usually around in the film, but never with enough to do. Woo doesn’t have time for a badass female super cop, just the one dude. And Chow’s good for it. Though even he loses his energy by the third act, maybe as he’s waiting for the scene where they blow up a set while he walks through it. There are a lot of stunts in Hard Boiled and you can usually tell when it’s not Chow and when it is Leung. Leung seems to be in the fistfights more than Chow, but Chow then turns around and lets them blow up the floor of a building with him on it.

Great stunt work, great action choreography, but Woo’s directing to show off those elements, not make it part of a narrative gesture or anything. The first hour’s just an excuse for the second.

Leung’s great, Chow’s great. Wong’s low okay. Kwok’s good, Mo’s good. Philip Chan’s fine as the big cop boss. His part’s iffy.

And the rest of the cast, eventual bang and boom fodder, sometimes for set decoration sometimes to motivate Leung or Chow, they’re all solid. Wong doesn’t even take the time to make them caricatures they’re so disposable, especially after the first act.

Hard Boiled’s sometimes really good, always pretty good, and just a little long at times. It’s got a lot of expertly executed action and some good performances, it just doesn’t really have much of a movie. It turns out it is, after all, smooth jazz.

The Famous Sword Bijomaru (1945, Mizoguchi Kenji)

The Famous Sword Bijomaru is a tragedy. Well, at its best, it’s a tragedy.

The film—which runs sixty-five minutes and has zero subplots, very few close-ups, and no establishing shots or sequences—opens with apprentice swordsmith Hanayagi Shôtarô presenting his benefactor, Oya Ichijirô, with a new sword. Hanayagi is an orphan, Oya took him in at twelve, Hanayagi’s trying to show his gratitude.

Unfortunately, it turns out Hanayagi isn’t quite ready for prime time on the sword-making front, though it turns out maybe his teacher (Yanagi Eijirô) isn’t great either—the film never explains how these guys are so inept at making swords when they’re literally professional sword makers—anyway, Oya ends up shamed and then worse and Hanayagi blames himself and spirals.

Luckily, Oya’s got a daughter—Yamada Isuzu—who doesn’t thinking running off and cutting open your belly to get out of responsibilities is the way to do it and she tries to get Hanayagi to make a new sword. With this new sword, they can all reclaim their honor, not to mention getting some vengeance. Only it’s also just before—like, just before—the Meiji Restoration kicks off and there’s a lot of overarching political stuff going on. Basically Yanagi is distracted with the politics and the potential return of the Emperor, which I guess is a subplot. Sort of.

After lots of foreshadowing and lots of angst—Hanayagi isn’t just feeling incapable, it’s also his fellow apprentice sword maker Ishii Kan and, obviously, boss Yanagi—the third act entirely hinges on the battles between the Shogun and the Imperial forces. It goes from being background to foreground between two scenes; director Mizoguchi has this exceptional way of splitting the action between foreground and background and he literally shoves his protagonists into the background to bring the battle forward. At the time, it doesn’t seem too concerning because the drama is just colliding and so on, but by the end… it’s clear that point is where Sword starts stumbling.

The conclusion is fine. Mizoguchi whiffs on the resolve to the sword-making, seemingly so he can showcase the accompanying battle, but it also flushes all the character development he’s been doing to this point. Given the entire film, save Yanagi’s “subplot,” is character development… well, it’d have been nice if the sequence had been like a good sword fight at least. It’s like Mizoguchi forgets what the central tension of the film has been to this point.

And the ending is really pat.

It’s always well-directed—with the single caveat being a strange ghost apprentice sequence, but the idea isn’t bad, Mizoguchi just can’t figure out how to visualize it. Also it’s 1945 and composite photography was only so good. Really good photography from Miki Minoru and Takeno Haruo; the way they shoot the exterior scenes—often on sets—is incredible.

The acting’s fine. Since Mizoguchi stays out of close-ups, it’s mostly about blocking and moving; Ishii and Yamada give the best performances. Hanayagi is a little inert–intentionally as a character, but the performance overdoes it.

Sword is a very well-made hour of film. Mizoguchi’s direction certainly makes it seem like it’s going to be better than it finishes, but it’s still pretty good.

The Swordsman (2020, Choi Jae-hoon)

Many years ago, Val Kilmer talked about how the original Tombstone director got replaced and one of that guy’s crimes was making the actors wear accurate textiles, which doesn’t matter on film. You can have a lightweight poncho and it’ll look the same on screen.

Welp.

I don’t know if it’s the benefits of shooting in 8k or whatever, but even though The Swordsman is not a cheap movie, it looks like a cheap movie because you can tell the costumes are very modernly produced. It’s very distracting because it never stops. There’s always something else onscreen to wonder about. To be fair, of course, it’s not just the costumes. The movie looks so hyper-real the sets look like a renaissance faire; so if Korea has Joseon Faires… Swordsman looks like they filmed it on the off-season.

Some of that responsibility falls on cinematographer Son Won-ho, who shoots Swordsman way too flat. Director Choi is going for un-steady Steadicam for reality’s sake or whatever, but Son shoots it documentary-reality. Like, I would much rather watch the movie where pseudo-costar Jeong Man-sik figures out Mr. Big villain Joe Taslim is a comically bad actor and then Jeong talks about it in an interview segment, but unfortunately Swordsman is a historical action movie and Taslim’s supposed to be serious.

Even though he really adds to the Joseon Faire thing because he’s like if the owner had a talentless but good-looking enough kid who made a movie in the summer. Or winter. Whatever. Offseason. Oh, and for no reason at all brought along his white wife (Angelina Danilova). Everything except a couple times it appears Taslim laughs out-of-character with Taslim and Danilova (who, to be fair, isn’t in it much but is cringe whenever she’s around) is appallingly bad.

Swordsman runs an hour and forty. When Taslim shows up, it seems like he might just be a cameo.

Nope.

Half the movie is laughably bad thanks to Taslim. While the whole movie raises an eyebrow thanks to costumes and sets.

The other half of the movie, about former king’s guard Hyuk Jang now raising the dethroned and presumably decapitated king’s daughter, Kim Hyeon-soo, in hiding. She’s a teenager now and she wants to go into town to the mall or whatever and so Hyuk finally takes her. Oh, and Hyuk’s blind, which is entirely unimportant and just how they get him to town.

So Taslim’s dad is ruler of the Chinese Qing dynasty and they’re forcing the Koreans to give them their daughters so the Koreans have to buy them back or else. Swordsman never gets darker than when it’s fairly callous about the whole kidnapped women in cages being sent to China to be sex slaves. It’s arguably glib about it.

But Kim’s charming and Hyuk’s not bad, he just hasn’t done his returning hero arc yet so we don’t know if he’s going to be good as the Korean Zatoichi.

He’s middling?

The sword fight choreography is pretty good for a lot of Swordsman, just not like… the beginning or the ending.

For a while it seems like the film might be able to get over some of its problems for a satisfactory resolve—the second act gets good—but it does not. It’s a bummer.

Especially since everyone interesting disappears in the third act. Instead it’s Jeong not paying off in his extended cameo, lots of bad Taslim, lots of middling Hyuk, and a little bit less sword fighting than you’d want. They’re saving up for the disappointing final battle.

Gong Sang-ah is good in a small part as the shop owner of the Joseon Faire tchotchke shop who apparently wet-nursed Kim as a baby and is majorly into Hyuk. Lee Na-kyung is less good as the big city shop owner who gets duped into human trafficking because… I mean, she’s a woman and Choi’s script isn’t very good. Lots of bland misogyny.

There are also Taslim’s three goons who Hyuk has to fight his way through in the game. They look very silly because of the costuming and photography, but they’re still better than Taslim.

Having Taslim as the bottom really does make even the worst supporting performance a delight because it means the camera isn’t on Taslim.

So, lots of solid sword fighting action—even though it doesn’t seem like there will be—but nowhere near good enough to make up for the rest. And, lastly, if you do see The Swordsman, opt for a low resolution. It might help.

Not sure what would help with Taslim though. Maybe the dubbed version.”