A Blood Pledge

A Catholic chapel in a girl's high school, in a stormy dark night. Four young faces are illuminated by candlelight. Friends who have made a pact to commit suicide, they proceed to climb to the roof of the building. However, only one of them, Eon-joo (,), jumps to her death, her mangled body to be discovered by her shocked sister Jeong-eon (Yoo Shin-ae). The surviving members of the pact, So-yi (Son Eun-seo), Eun-young (Song Min-jeong) and Yu-jin (Oh Yeon-seo), begin to sense the presence of the dead Eon-joo.

A Blood Pledge The redoubtable Whispering Corridors series, not only one of the few successful film franchises in Korean cinema but also a platform through which many talented actresses have been launched into stardom (Gong Hyo-jin, Kim Min-seon, Song Ji-hyo and Kim Ok-vin to name just a few), is celebrating its tenth anniversary in 2009. Given the disastrous environment in which Korean filmmakers have struggled in the last few years, perhaps we should just be thankful that the series was able to come back at all. Unfortunately, the fifth installment is probably the most generic and lackluster of the lot.

This does not mean that A Blood Pledge is devoid of any merit. Director Lee Jong-yong, promoted from assistant work for Park Chan-wook's JSA, while taking on an ultra-topical subject of group suicide, goes for the jugular. I find his refusal to burden the film with superficial discussions of the malaise of Korean school system as well as his decision to resolutely stick to the conventions of Gothic horror (this is the kind of movie in which an important prop symbolizing political power is a key to the Catholic chapel, preserved in a velvet-inlaid, ornate jewel box) rather admirable. Sure, some of the scare tactics are obvious, but what do you expect from a summer horror film?

And yet, director Lee also takes some critical missteps, avoided by all other helmers of the series so far. He over-burdens his young actresses with reams of convoluted, emotive expository dialogue, few of which actually serve to enlighten the viewers. Poor girls struggle through the breathless sentences like rookie recruits in a boot camp with extra-heavy backpacks: only Yoo Shin-ae emerges relatively unscathed. Despite his visible effort to construct a decent psychological mystery, director Lee's failure to create three-dimensional characters leave us rather blas? about the ultimate motivation behind Eon-joo's haunting. Finally, the film has two or three truly embarrassing moments of non-special effects, including a laughable "exploding head" gag that I sincerely hope will be deleted from the export version.

While not the worst Korean horror film in recent memory by a long shot (Are you kidding? Oetori? Death Bell?), A Blood Pledge is nonetheless a disappointment. Lacking the elegant lyricism of Memento Mori, the disturbing metaphysical implications of Voice, or even the lurid psychodrama of Wishing Stairs, A Blood Pledge is an obtusely "sincere" horror film in a series known for a remarkable mixture of ingeniously induced frisson and unexpectedly moving art-house touches.

English subtitle:soon
See online:HERE

Thirst

Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho), a tormented priest, volunteers as a human guinea pig at an African research facility, working on the vaccine for a virulent virus called EV (which only infects celibate or sexually inactive men). The virus kills him, but he is miraculously resurrected by blood transfusion. Unfortunately, the miracle comes with a serious side effect: he turns into a vampire. Only continuous supply of fresh human blood can reverse the symptoms of EV infection. While grappling with his disturbing new habit-and superpowers-Sang-hyun becomes attracted to Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin, Dasepo Naughty Girls ), unhappily married to his childhood friend Kang-woo (Sin Ha-gyun, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), a bizarrely infantile hypochondriac living under the thumb of his manic dressmaker mother Ms. Ra (Kim Hae-sook, Open City).

Thirst Thirst, which, along with Bong Joon-ho's Mother, is 2009's most anticipated Korean film, opened to good if not spectacular box office performance (0.8 million tickets sold in the first weekend for the Seoul theaters). Unlike Park Chan-wook's "revenge" trilogy, however, the movie is generating extreme reactions from both viewers and critics. Some reviews have blasted it as a pretentious bore or a poorly conceived adaptation of Emile Zola's Therese Raquin (from which this film borrows certain plot points and a love triangle central to the plot): only a few critics have hailed it as a masterpiece. Among the viewers, the chasm is even wider: internet comments freely range from "a piece of trash" to "the best movie I have seen in 10 years."

Even for someone like me, a rabid-crazy Park Chan-wook fan, the initial reaction to Thirst was that of deep unease: I literally could not name what it was that I was feeling as the end credits rolled up. All I knew for sure was that I had to see it again immediately. Only after the second viewing did I understand that the unease came from my inertial inability to acknowledge that I'd just watched a bewildering but awesome work of art, well-nigh indescribable in its insane, alchemic melding of disparate genre elements.

Thematically, Thirst is as a straightforward and relentless exploration of Catholic guilt as any Euro-American film I have ever seen--as painful as Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant, as scorching as Bunuel's Viridiana-- with its profoundly contradictory attitude toward the glamour and agony of desire. The protagonist Sang-hyun, like Graham Greene's Scobie in The Heart of the Matter, is tragically, sympathetically flawed. He has enough dedication to face certain death in the service of humanity yet cannot stop his pity toward a beautiful, unhappy young woman growing into passionate love. He is powerless to stop the faithful who regard his vampirism as a sign of being touched by God: having committed a mortal sin out of love, he figuratively and literally drowns in guilt.

Song Kang-ho gives yet another brilliant performance (I don't think he can just walk through a role even if his life depended on it), but it is not a flashy one: as was in Secret Sunshine, it's a catcher's turn that perfectly anchors the emotional content of a particular scene and at the same time generously puts the spotlight on other actors. I can only hope that Euro-American critics are not lazy (or foolish) enough to mistake the essential passivity of Sang-hyun's character for the lack of talent on Song's part.

A lot of media attention has been paid to the explicit sex scenes between Song and Kim Ok-vin, an interesting choice on Park's part. He seems to have had a young Isabelle Adjani (The Story of Adel H was allegedly one of the films Park recommended to Kim as a research material) in mind: fiery, heartbreaking, maybe a bit raw. Kim is stunningly sexy and gorgeous in both wilted-housewife and full-blown femme fatale modes, and throws all of herself into the role, but I cannot help but seeing Yeom Jeong-ah (who appeared as a fictional vampire in Park's "The Cut" from Three Extreme) or Lee Young-ae as Tae-ju. Kim strikes me as a bit too young and contemporary: she does not strike as someone who could have tolerated long years of indentured servitude in exchange for meager domestic comfort. She is blindingly beautiful, I must admit, in a blue hanbok dress.

The rest of the cast is equally superb: Oh Dal-soo, Sin Ha-gyun, Kim Hae-su, Kim Jee-woon regulars Park In-hwan (The Quiet Family), as a blind senior priest with a wry sense of humor, and Song Young-chang (the head-rocking section chief from Foul King), as a hard-nosed former cop. Their ensemble acting in the sequence where a character tries desperately to alert the presence of a vampire to other unsuspecting guests is a piece de resistance, superior to any similar scene in Sympathy for Lady Vengeance.

By now we expect not just high quality jobs but extraordinary aesthetic achievements from Park Chan-wook's regular staff, and Thirst certainly does not disappoint. Production designer Ryu Seong-hee is responsible for the uncommonly reined-in colors-bleached white and faded green-of the religious and medical institutions as well as ever-so-slightly off-kilter hues of Ms. Ra's domain-deranged blues and slick browns. Lenser Jeong Jeong-hoon weaves pure magic with shadows and light, culminating in the stunning vista of the ocean spreading in scarlet red, illuminated by the setting sun, as looked on by the eyes of the doomed protagonist.

Oh, is it a good vampire film, you ask? It sure as heck is- the tomato juice flows abundantly in horrendous, cringe-inducing scenes of violent exsanguinations, and there are many insanely creative twists on the familiar genre staples that will either stun you into silence or make you gape in disbelief. Have you wondered how a vampire can convince a blind person that he is one? Watch Thirst. Have you ever wondered whether becoming an immortal creature will heal calluses on the soles of your foot? Again, watch the movie. There are at least two sequences in this film that matches in sheer audacity and jaw-dropping hutzpah the notorious "long-take corridor action" set piece in Old Boy.

But Thirst is not an exhilarating showcase of directorial vision and filmmaking pizzazz that Old Boy was. Despite occasional insertions of absurdist deadpan humor, it is at its basis a tragic romance. And despite much bloodletting, the film is not interested in generating frisson of fear, but a deep sense of melancholy. In the end it returns, perhaps in a purer form than ever, to Park Chan-wook's starting point: the torturous reflection on the impossibility of salvation, the moral weight of sin and desire, and the agonizing scream of a man against God who may or may not exist, and may or may not love him. If Thirst were a book, it probably deserves a whole shelf of its own: regardless of one's likes or dislikes, it is a true work of art that calls out for the defense of its artistic honor by those who are taken with it, way beyond the question of one's taste in specific genres or stylistic choices.

English subtitle:soon
See online:HERE

Private Eye

I'd heard some positive things about Private Eye before actually catching the movie in the theater. A detective story set in the early 20th century under the Japanese colonial rule! With Hwang Jeong-min, Ryu Deok-hwan, Uhm Ji-won, Oh Dal-soo in the cast! And the screenplay picked up some kind of award! Well, the last bit was not so intriguing. It's not uncommon for an acclaimed screenplay to turn out to be disappointing. Still, the first two pieces of information were enough to get my expectations up.

The Private Eye The details of the story go like this. Hong Jin-ho, the character played by Hwang Jeong-min in this film, is a pro at things like tracking down missing people and exposing illicit love affairs. He doesn't call himself a private eye, but that's basically what he is. He usually tries to avoid tight situations but is one day pushed into a rather sticky murder case, when Jang Gwang-soo, a med student who collects abandoned bodies for dissection, asks Hong to find the murderer of his latest cadaver.

Wait. I mean, wouldn't it be obvious to a med school student that if you find a body with a knife wound in it, it was probably a victim of murder? The film begins to lose its footing this early on. The story wouldn't make sense even from the viewpoint of early 20th-century Seoulites. Any moderate reader among them would have been familiar with the ABCs of detective novels. This would have included a cadaver-hungry medical student, by the way. It could be that Jang was simply thinking that his actions were fine if the body belonged to some insignificant fellow, but less so if it turned out to be the son of a high-ranking official that spells out mortal danger for him-- but then the audience wouldn't be able to like him as much.

If it's all an excuse to bring together a private eye and a doctor-to-be as a murder investigation team, well, I can't say I don't understand. The folks who made this film were indeed aiming for a Holmes and Watson partnership, colonial Seoul-style. The names match somewhat, with a little stretch: Holmes - Hong Jin-ho, John Watson - Jang Gwang-soo, see? But there's a fatal flaw here. As you Baker Street Regulars already know, Holmes and Watson are highly distinctive characters. Just a few pages into the story and you know what kind of people they are. In Private Eye, it's much harder to figure out the two main characters. Especially Hong Jin-ho. What is he, anyway? A man of "the little gray cells" like Hercule Poirot? No, he's too dumb for that. Or an eclectic super-hero like his namesake Holmes? He doesn't have half the skills. Maybe a tough guy like Sam Spade? Not so. Hong can't hold up in a fistfight, nor does he have the guts to handle the life underground. Then why in the world is this man the hero?

Hong's plight springs from the fact that the film denies him a chance to reveal his unique features or skills. In other words, the screenplay was not very well thought out. The film doesn't have much mystery in it. There's no foreshadowing that lasts more than ten minutes, and most clues are explained away in the very next sequence. On top of that, there's just one suspect. Or were there two? In any case, there's no room for a detective to do anything, much less show himself off. Even that snazzy toy that looks like something Q might make for 007 is simply no good if the man doesn't get to use it.

And who makes these toys for Hong? It's the inventor Soon-duk, played by Uhm Ji-won. Soon-duk, although not very realistic, could have been an interesting character: a lady of noble birth that gets hooked on modern Western science and sets up a lab in an abandoned church to cook up all sorts of inventions. A personage of these dimensions might well be the heroine in a sensible screenplay, but here she remains underdeveloped and misused in a supporting role.

Another badly formulated character is the police officer Oh Young-dal. As always, Oh Dal-soo turns in a fun, top-notch comic performance, but his character really does not deserve such cutesy treatment. It's always a bad idea to put together in one character the roles of a harmless clown and an accomplice in crime. No amount of good acting on Oh Dal-soo's part can pull it off, however excellent an actor he may be.

The film attempts to cover up gaping holes in the story and characters with action scenes, but those aren't so well-crafted either. The chase scene between Hong and a mysterious pursuer is a glaring example. The city-stomping stunts on the fabulous open sets could have been "cool," or so the makers must have thought, but it did not work. The rhythm is awkward and the timing a mess. The entire sequence here is meant to end on a clear slapstick note, which might have looked good in the script. But where one second would have been enough, the film drags on for a few more seconds and the result is a boring scene. This is just one of many such unwise decisions. All in all, I don't believe that the makers of Private Eye are giving film as a medium its full workout.

Top 10 Korean Films In the 21st Century

The small sphere of cinema fans plugged into the World Cinema know something of the new and surprisingly good works coming out of up and coming nations like South Korea every year. As one of the burgeoning powers in world wide pop culture, South Korea became not only a major force in the online gaming sphere in the past few years, but have grown in the animation fields and in countries like China and Japan, their music industry is exploding rapidly. The films aren’t all pop and circumstance though (though, they manage to pump out their fair share of goofy romantic comedies) as a small circle of directors has begun to affect not only those of us attuned to film from afar, but winning the top prizes at Cannes and more. For those of you still wholly unfamiliar to Korean cinema, I’m compiled for you a list of some of the best films to come from our Far Eastern neighbors in the 21st century. These are all films released in the last 7 years that display where and how Korean Cinema is going and why you should pay attention.

My Sassy Girl – The first film of Jae-Young Kwak, My Sassy Girl is the quintessential romantic comedy out of Korea. It’s important to remember that in South Korea all young men are expected to serve a short term in the military. For a country on the border of a communist country under the leadership of a psychopath, conscription is necessary. So, there’s been a long tradition of a 20-something cinema that makes light of the young men and their situation and their futures that are always abruptly cut out from them for a couple of years in their twenties. This film takes that anxiety and crafts a brilliant comedy, in which our nimble, anxious young man can’t quite keep up with his energetic, straightforward girlfriend. The love story is powerful and shortly after this film was released, a few hundred more copycats were made, none of them nearly as good, but all of them pocketing cash in handfuls. As one of the first true crossover college age hits to America, there’s currently an American remake in the works (which I beg you all to boycott).

Attack the Gas Station (and Kick the Moon) – Two films here. Both from Sang Jin Kim, and both amazing. I group them because they kind of take on the same ideas. And Attack the Gas Station was released in 1999, so it’s pushing the requirement. Anyways, it’s the tale of youthful indiscretion and anger in young men, once again the youth culture of Korea out of control and striking out. Four young men in need of money attempt to rob a gas station for the fifth time and run into a few troubles. They get stuck in a hostage situation and hilarity ensues. The key to Korean comedy is that it’s never fully about the comedy. They don’t forget the reality of the characters’ situations or what will happen to them after things are over. It’s very dry in that regard, but at the same time that much easier to feel a part of. One of the defining films of the generation, and its follow up Kick the Moon, which is about returning to youth after this period and confronting for the second time those youthful urges, is a better film if not quite as funny.

3-Iron – This film is one of the newer films from Kim Ki-Duk, who at this point is probably my favorite Korean filmmaker. His mastery of the subtle, washed out tones of contemporary life is genius. This film in particular is about a young man who travels from house to house of families on vacation and breaks in to use their home, himself homeless. That is until he accidentally makes a mistake and breaks into a home that isn’t empty. The sparse detachment of this film is what makes it so effective. One of the growing trends in Korean film is the ability to step back and just show, to have an outside force affect your life without you knowing its there. Once again, I attribute this to repressed awareness of the neighbors to the north and the imminent danger they represent, but must be ignored for the sake of a routine daily existence. The main character here becomes just that. Something of a shadow, capable of being in a room with four walls and no furniture and not allowing anyone to see him.

Oldboy – Going in a completely different direction is Oldboy, part two of Chan-Wook Park’s revenge trilogy, consisting of Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. This was the best received of the three, winning the Grand Jury Prize in Cannes and wooing American splatter king Quentin Tarantino to its cause. It’s the quintessential revenge flick, a genre in and of itself in Korea nowadays, in which the Dae-su Oh is kidnapped and imprisoned for 15 years and then released and given 5 days to discover who did it. The shear animal rage that Park manages to capture in his characters, such raw emotion makes this one of the greatest films to come out of Korea period. Unfortunately his other two piece to the trilogy, while carefully crafted and amazingly filmed, fall short in terms of strength and power of story.

Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... and Spring – Another of Kim Ki-Duk’s films, this tale of a young Buddhist monk raised on an island in a lake finding sexual awakening in the arrival of a sick young woman in need of healing, follows his fall from grace and return to the lake to heal his own spirit. It’s a powerful film, beautifully shot, like any of Kim Ki-Duk’s films, and also like those films is sparse in dialogue or action. But the subtlety that he masters in each and ever scene makes his films that much more powerful. Some might find them boring, but the key to his films is not listening or watching, but really becoming part of it and observing to the point of living along with the characters. And his characters force that reaction. The feeling that you’re somehow entwined with their fate.

A Bittersweet Life – From Ji-woon Kim, A Bittersweet Life is yet another masterful revenge epic, this time from a Korean horror director. This film takes from the style and direction of Park, and ups the anti to look at the characteristics of a life much more established and attached to others, a rich man of sorts taken down to the ground for no apparent reason other than crime lord politics. The results are a bloody terrifying good time, and another reason why this sort of film should never be made in America, except by Tarantino of course.

Save the Green Planet – As one of the oddest movies of the list, Save the Green Planet tells the story of a young man who believes the world is about to be invaded by aliens and subsequently does a lot of horrible things to try and prevent it. It’s a cross between sci-fi, torture horror, and Korean comedy (i.e. very dry), but it still manages to be upbeat and funny most of the film. You find yourself liking the poor Byeong-gu despite what he does in the name of protecting the earth, and in the end the film maker surprises three fold with half incredible, half incredulous ending. A must see for all Korean film newcomers.

Memories of Murder – Based on a true story of a Rapist/Serial killer in the 80s in South Korea, this film tells the story of two cops whose methods become more and more extreme as they attempt to unravel the crime. The fear of violence, the impatience to stop it and Joon-ho Bong’s masterful direction make this film one of the best to come out of Korea from that year. It managed moderate crossover success and you might even be able to find it in your local video store. If not though, try and find it elsewhere, because this is a film well worth your time and interest. And keep an eye on this director.

Joint Security Area – The JSA, part of the DMZ in Korea is a border post where North and South Korean soldiers share and guard the border. The two sides might meet and become friends as they are essentially neighbors. When two soldiers turn up dead from North Korea, a South Korean is blamed. The Swedish delegates are brought in to oversee the case and when the pieces don’t add up the entire case starts to get a little weird, revealing a much more complicated tragic answer. It’s a good movie that takes a solid look at DMZ politics as well as presenting a thriller worth the time involved.