THE TREACHEROUS (2015)

The way this film tells it, King Yeonsan of Joseon was the Korean Caligula. That doesn't mean that Min Kyu-dong's history play is Korea's Caligula, though the mad king himself (Kim Kang-woo) is a kind of amateur pornographer, compelling his concubines to assume Sapphic positions so he can paint the scenes. Whatever his politics were, if this film teaches you anything it's that Yeonsan was sex mad. Another favorite artistic subject is the mating of horses. Also, he has an infantile fixation on a favorite concubine who has become a power in the palace, finding comfort by suckling on her breast. The poor king has mommy issues, it seems, because his own mother was murdered in a past palace intrigue.

By the time of our story all his hard-working concubines -- it's challenging to hold those porno poses for long -- aren't enough for Yeonsan anymore. He demands a roundup of promising females from across the land, hundreds of whom will serve as his "comforters." That's got to be a sensitive subject for a Korean movie, given how the Koreans continue to hector the Japanese for recruiting Koreans as "comfort women" during World War II. Of course, any film featuring an insane absolute ruler will have special significance for South Korean audiences, given what they have to deal with north of the border. I'm surprised the Kim dynasty didn't treat Treacherous, a film portraying a conspiracy to kill an absolute monarch, as yet another provocation justifying missile launches. But for all we know, they did.

Anyway, Yeonsan entrusts the comforter search to his two top henchman, the father-son Im team. Most of our attention goes to the son, Im Sung-jae (Ju Ji-hoon), the king's boyhood playmate who still goes in for the occasional round of sparring. Feeling guilty about enabling a monster like Yeonsan, Sung-jae discovers a diamond in the rough in Dan-hee, a pretty butcher (Lim Ji-yeon) who makes an entertainment out of animal slaughter. Secretly the daughter of an official killed on the king's order, this woman of many skills could make the perfect assassin. But first she has to rise through the ranks, meeting the strict standards set for the king's new number-one bedmate. To get her big chance, she has to win a sex fight with her main rival as the king orchestrates probably the most demoralizing lesbian sex scene since Requiem For a Dream. Min Kyu-dong lavishes a lot of attention on the training process for the comforters, which ranges from sword dancing (Dan-hee's lead role in one performance gives her an early opportunity to kill the king that goes to waste) to dildo testing. Again, none of this rises (or sinks) to Caligula-level explicitness, at least in what Netflix is streaming, but while that might make it more erotic for some viewers it might also make viewers complicit for any arousal they feel as Yeonsan puts his comforters through their paces.

Finally, Dan-hee gets the break she's been waiting for, but if you'd begun to suspect that Treacherous was going to be a tragedy your suspicions would soon be confirmed. While her mission fails, however, this isn't a nihilistic "resistance is futile" tragedy like, say, Curse of the Golden Flower, but something more Senecan or Shakespearean in its ultimate grotesquery, as Yeonsan, after getting the Carrie prom night treatment from Im Sung-jae, ends up in a disquietingly vague scrum with a room full of pigs. And then you get an epilogue that wraps up the running quasi-operatic narration in a manner that suggests that things didn't turn out entirely as you'd just seen.

The best word to describe The Treacherous is ravishing. It describes the king's antics as well as the gorgeous art direction and Park Hong-ryeol's cinematography, not to mention all the beautiful women and their often-opulent costumes. It's almost Italian in its combination of luscious craftsmanship and almost unflinching brutality. I don't know how it works as history, but as a wild work or cinema I recommend it highly.

THE SILENCED (2015)

Lee Hae-young's picture belongs to a subgenre popularized if not invented by Guillermo del Toro: the fascist gothic. The year is 1938 and the setting is Japanese-occupied Korea. Cha Ju-Ran (Park Bo-yong) is the tubercular daughter of a privileged family that has dumped her in a boarding school while they go to Japan, which is apparently where all ambitious Koreans want to go. Like all the students -- like all Koreans, I assume -- Ju-Ran is given a Japanese name, Shizuko, which makes things awkward with her new classmates, on top of all the travails of the new girl,  because there had just been a Shizuko there who went away abruptly. There's a heavy emphasis on athletics at the school, because the two top athletes will go to Japan. Those who know history might think this has something to do with the 1940 Olympics that were supposed to take place in Tokyo, as Koreans would compete under the Japanese flag as they had in previous Games. But there's something more to it than that, and that something moves the film away from its gothic trappings and toward the realm of Marvel Comics movies.

 

In a twist strongly reminiscent of origin stories told about the Black Widow, it turns out that the school is trying to create super-soldiers, the gimme being that teenage girls are the ideal test subjects for the wonder drugs that will do the job. The effects on Ju-Ran are miraculous. On her first day of track and field she can't even make it to the end of the long jump track without succumbing to a coughing fit. After some treatments she proves a prize pupil, leaping far past the pit. But she doesn't like what's happening to her and her schoolmates, or what the treatments are making her do to others. When she and her one real friend try to escape, and the friend comes to a bad end, she likes it even less. That sets up the inevitable reckoning with the headmistress and the Japanese soldiers behind her.

 

Overall, The Silenced -- the generic English title hardly approximates the original "Gyeongseong School: The Lost Girls" -- manages the balancing act of mixing gothic horror and comic-book sci-fi by maintaining an overall mood of mystery and dread that should carry the viewer through the presumably preposterous moments. Inevitably the story must resonate more with Korean audiences still conscious of the history of Japanese rule, while the contempt some characters express for Korea must have made those audiences almost as queasy as the more violent moments. It's an allegory for both the nation's exploitation by the colonial occupier and the latent power that would make South Korea a global economic competitor later in the 20th century. For the rest of us its a modest hybrid picture that manages somehow to transcend its derivative nature through an earnest lead performance and an indispensable willingness to take itself seriously as if all its ideas were new.

THE PIRATES (2014)

The idea was probably more like The Good, The Bad, The Weird at sea than Pirates of the Caribbean Korean style but whatever the motive the results were fun. Lee Seok-Hoon has made a good old-fashioned adventure flick with modern effects and an Asian attitude toward human prowess that would make Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn gape with envy at the antics of these Korean pirates and bandits. I think they'd recognize the film's spirit as kin to their own, however.

Two parallel storylines eventually converge as we follow a 14th century hero and heroine who become treasure-hunting rivals and, inevitably, partners and lovers. Jang Sa-jung (Kim Nam-gil) is an army officer who doesn't go along when his general supports a coup d'etat. Jang fights his way out of immediate peril to become a forest bandit, the Crazy Tiger, complete with a comedy-relief monk with a big appetite. Yeo-wol (Son Ye-jin) is a pirate princess who leads an uprising against her mentor Captain Soma (Lee Geung-young) when he conspires with officials to save his own ass by selling out loyal crewmates.

 

The bad guys (above) and the good guys (below)

 

The coup being successful, the new regime receives legitimacy from "Ming," aka China. Legitimacy comes with a new country name, Joeson, and a new royal seal. The latter gets lost at sea and swallowed by a whale. The new ruler offers a huge reward for the recovery of the great seal, attracting both pirate Yeo-wol and bandit Crazy Tiger to the treasure hunt. Crazy Tiger is a total lubber but he has the expertise of ex-pirate Cheol-bong (Yoo Hae-jin), who quit Soma's crew due to chronic seasickness but often falls landsick as well. He proves helpful to the bandits even though he has a hard time making them understand just how big a whale is. Yeo-wol has a competitive advantage not just because she's a pirate but because she has an affinity with whales going back to her childhood. But she finds herself fighting with Crazy Tiger over equipment, most importantly over imported European explosives. Meanwhile -- wouldn't you know? -- the vengeful Soma and Crazy Tiger's old commander have joined forces to catch the whale and take the treasure for themselves.

 

That's the framework for some oldschool swashbuckling with a wuxia edge as well as FX setpieces more reminiscent of the Caribbean movies. The main such event comes fairly early: an urban chase scene with Yeo-wol pursuing Crazy Tiger, using an aqueduct as a flume ride until Tiger wrecks it with an antique rocket, setting an attached giant water wheel rolling through town, in and out of the heroes' path. I'm not sure of the physical logic of the wheel's wanderings but it's an amusing spectacle. There's good comic chemistry between the leads, too, who go through a lot of adventure tropes together, from Defiant Ones style shackling to mutual seduction through boastful comparison of battle scars. The comic relief is solid throughout, especially the award-winning Yoo Hae-jin as the cantankerous misfit who bridges the pirate-bandit divide, but the monk is cool as well. There's also some presumably veiled political satire, with the usurping Joeson regime an analogue for North Korea, though the usurper is offered redemption with advice to shun the influence of Ming that seems directed at modern China. For foreigners, the film doesn't suffer if you don't get any of that. The spirit of high adventure that prevails translates pretty well into any language.

On the Big Screen: SNOWPIERCER (2013)

Despite all the positive buzz this spring I couldn't bring myself to see Edge of Tomorrow. I just couldn't shake the feeling that I had seen it all before, time and again. I didn't feel that way about Snowpiercer, but while I went to the local arthouse to see it today, its American distributor felt that Bong Joon-ho's wintry apocalypse would have the opposite problem: it would not seem familiar enough to American audiences. As genre movie buffs know by now, Snowpiercer has been "dumped" into arthouses in its director's cut after Miramax could not compel Bong, one of South Korea's star directors, to cut the film and make it more U.S.-friendly in some way. For all I know, the controversy was a clever ploy that may salvage what otherwise might have been a catastrophic bomb had it rolled out wide in the multiplexes. It had a good holiday crowd in my town, at least, but it probably never would have been a blockbuster, even with Chris "Captain America" Evans in the lead. It simply isn't cool in the right way. Instead, it's weird in a way that has become a sort of Korean national style, even though Bong nods quite obviously to Anglo-American influences. Put another way, it's weird in a way that makes it genuinely fantastic rather than merely cool, but that may take it out of many people's comfort zone. One person's weird is more people's "stupid," alas.

In case Korean cinema is all a blur for you, Bong Joon-ho is the one who made the classic procedural Memories of Murder and the monster comedy The Host, among others, both of which star Song Kang-ho, who is the lead Korean in Snowpiercer. Bong and American writer Kelly Masterson adapted a French graphic novel that at first glance might appeal to Republican conservatives, since it portrays the disastrous unintended consequences of an attempt to reverse global warming. The effort to cool the atmosphere proved too successful, causing a global deep freeze survived only by those thousands who managed to board the Snowpiercer supertrain, which now circles the globe constantly. The story proper begins a generation later, when the train's designer, Mr. Wilford (Ed Harris) is worshipped, to use a Korean analogy, like someone from the Kim dynasty. Wilford is no communist, however; the Snowpiercer is segregated on class lines, an elite living luxuriously toward the front, the majority living like shit toward the rear. The poor live in filth and feed on a daily allowance of "protein blocks" that look nasty even before you learn their key ingredient. They haven't taken it lying down, however. There have been periodic uprisings and Curtis Everett (Evans) is planning the latest. The spark is the armed seizure of two small children for purposes unknown and the atrocious punishment of one child's father (Ewen Bremner) for throwing a shoe in protest. His right arm is put through a porthole to freeze while Mason (Tilda Swinton), a spokesperson for Wilford, lectures the rabble on accepting their predestined places in life and on the train. The man's arm is removed and shattered with a hammer; it turns out that many older passengers in the rear cars are missing limbs, though not for the reasons we first assume. Under Curtis's leadership, the rebels weld barrels together into a part battering ram, part tunnel for the moment when three security gates open simultaneously. To go further, they must liberate imprisoned security expert Namgoong Min-su (Song) from a morgue-like prison. He knows how to open the gates all the way to the lead cars and the Great Engine, but he's hopelessly addicted to Cronol, a form of industrial waste with hallucinogenic properties. As long as the rebels can keep him and his daughter in the nasty stuff, they'll keep pressing forward with Mason as their hostage.

The Snowpiercer is a microcosm of our class-based society with spectacular luxury cars that stun the rebels and the movie audience alike. The film occasionally loses its sense of urgency as the rebels pause to eat sushi, gape at an all-encompassing aquarium car and sit in on an elementary class teaching the genius of Mr. Wilford, but the spectacle almost justifies the delay. While the dystopia train tells a pessimistic story of the perpetuation of inequality even at the brink of human extinction, the reduction in scale inspires Curtis's thought that now, finally, it's possible for the masses to "take over the engine" and finally control society. To do so, they have to go through well-armed guards -- though not so well-armed as they wanted people to think -- and one nearly-indestructible badass boss (Vlad Ivanov), before Curtis has his Apocalypse Now-meets-2001 encounter with Wilford and has his sense of mission subverted by some unexpected revelations. Fortunately, just as Curtis has his moment of doubt, Namgoong has an alternate idea: instead of trying to take over the train, why not just leave? Wilford preaches that it's death to detrain, but Namgoong has noticed from year to year that the ice is actually melting. Mankind could actually start over again, but it may be necessary to abandon the old society altogether to get a proper start.

Naming Curtis's mentor (John Hurt) "Gilliam" is a pretty obvious homage to a fairly obvious influence on Bong, but there's also a lot of superficial Kubrick elements here, including a direct musical quote from The Shining. Bong is clearly closer to Gilliam's sensibility than Kubrick's, though Snowpiercer as a whole looks like an attempt to acknowledge influences while leaving them behind. Somewhat more dimly, I was reminded of Roger Corman and Nicolas Roeg's Masque of the Red Death by the spectacular transitions from car to car, while any violent cinematic quest to meet a mad mastermind, as I've already noted, harkens back to Apocalypse Now. So Snowpiercer actually is "familiar" in some ways, at least to movie buffs. But Bong synthesizes all these influences to serve a vision that is distinctly his, in a film that has the freshness of a distinctive visual imagination. Cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo, who worked with Bong on his previous film, Mother, and production designer Ondreij Nekvasil, for whom this is a major step up in stature, deserve their shares of credit for realizing Bong's vision. In front of the camera, Snowpiercer further confirms Chris Evans's maturing into an authoritative leading man and action star, just as he's contemplating retirement to behind the camera. In a role more showy than substantial, Tilda Swinton echoes Jodie Foster's invocation of Margaret Thatcher, or a generic reactionary female, in last year's disappointing dystopia Elysium, but Swinton is unafraid to go for over-the-top caricature and gives a far more memorable and entertaining performance. Song Kang-ho makes a solid impression without having to speak English -- apparently the need for subtitles was one of Miramax's problems with the director's cut -- and despite his relatively late appearance becomes a virtual co-lead with Evans, getting a big speech in his own language to match the American's showcase confession of cannibalism and admission of sacrifice-envy. A global ensemble of character actors fill out the picture with the broad-stroke portrayals it needs. Overall, Snowpiercer is as much a roller-coaster ride -- often literally -- as any Hollywood sci-fi adventure, but I suppose it's too blatantly and honestly carnivalesque about it to be blockbuster cool, and that makes it an arthouse film in America. Ironically enough, Miramax thinks that this parable of inevitable class struggle, climaxing with the utter destruction of luxury and the idle rich, would only be enjoyed by the people in the front of the train.

In Brief: THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE WEIRD (2008)

It's easy to label Kim Ji-woon's Koreans-in-Manchukuo action epic an homage to spaghetti westerns; there's a guy running around through the film in a cowboy outfit, after all, and the English title obviously references Sergio Leone's most famous film. It's also tempting to compare Kim's movie with Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, since both films graft spaghetti-western motifs onto a World War II playing field. But Kim's choice of location brings to mind a wider, older range of associations. The Chinese setting as a stomping ground for foreign freebooters (not to mention the Japanese invaders) reminded me enough of Terry and the Pirates to make me think the grand old comic strip could yet be made into a movie -- maybe by Kim himself. We're also in the same general geographic and chronological neighborhood as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Kim's film partakes of some of the same pulp spirit, above and beyond the obvious spaghetti influence.

The story, however, is straight out of spaghetti-land. A badass mercenary with anime hair is hired to take a treasure map from a Japanese official on board a train. The money man can put him on the train with a ticket, but Mr. Bad, Park Chang-yi, says bandits don't use tickets. Instead, he's going to stop the train and sack it with the help of some rough customers. It's a fine plan, but our mastermind didn't reckon upon another bandit getting on the train earlier on the route. This is Yoon Tae-goo, "the Weird," the earthy, occasionally bumbling but always dangerous counterpart of Tuco and other "Ugly" characters in Italian westerns. He ends up with the map, with only a vague idea of what it means, after a tense standoff with the Japanese and their collaborators that has a literally jolting climax when the train finally hits Mr. Bad's obstacle. The chase begins with the Bad guys in pursuit through cities and deserts, along with the aforementioned cowboy, "the Good" aka Park Do-won, in pursuit of the Bad. The cowboy's a bounty hunter, of course, who suspects Bad of being the infamous "Finger Chopper." Along the way Weird and Good join forces for a time before all three protagonists gather at the map's destination for one big plot twist and the archetypal three-way showdown.

Before that, however, comes the highlight of the picture, a stupendous mounted and motorized stunt-happy chase scene that transcends the spaghetti signifiers to remind you for a moment of The Road Warrior, a moment later of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and later yet of Stagecoach. It may also remind you of Tarantino for a moment when Kim borrows music from anachronistic sources as the cowboy intervenes. Like everything in this film, the chase through the desert goes on a little too long, but there's so much going on, such constant inventive activity, that you wouldn't want to take a chance cutting footage. Certain films should be allowed to err on the side of excess, especially when excess seems to be the point of this particular project.

Despite the wartime setting, when Korea was still ruled by Japan, Kim's film doesn't have a deep thought in its dear little head. It does strike the requisite cynical note for a spaghetti homage when the Weird falls in with an avowed independence leader who only wants to sell the map back to the Japs. The characters are ciphers, the acting exercises in fashion, except for Song Kang-ho as the Weird. In his motorcycle outfit and goggles he comes the closest to period authenticity, and Song (who played the Catholic priest-turned vampire in Thirst) really taps into the exuberant exasperation actors like Eli Wallach and Tomas Milian brought to the original "ugly" template. He also seems to be the audience-identification character, rebelling against the absurdity of some of the situations and eager if not desperate (with good reason, we learn) to avoid the obligatory shootout finish. I've seen Song in two films now and liked him both times, and this is now the second Kim Ji-woon film I've seen (after A Tale of Two Sisters) that I can recommend. The Good, the Bad, the Weird is not profound, and it never quite taps into the cruelty that some say defines the spaghetti genre, -- and it cops out on its ending, which would have been perfect otherwise -- but when you're in the mood for energetic action in a different-yet-somehow-familiar setting, this will make two hours pass pretty easily.

Here's an English-subtitled trailer, uploaded to YouTube by hyxr.

MAY STORY (Soon-ji, 2009)

On May 18, 1980, the Gwangju (or Kwangju) Uprising broke out against South Korea's military dictatorship. In 2008, the city of Gwangju staged a mass re-enactment of the events that are now celebrated as a milestone of South Korea's quest for democracy. While the uprising itself has been dramatized in Korean cinema, director Park Kwang-man used the re-enactment as a backdrop for a story that suggests that, for some people, history hasn't been as neatly reconciled as the civic commemoration might proclaim.

The Korean title names the film after its main character, a chicken farmer who runs a roadside restaurant. While she's attractive, she was unpopular in school because she was a bit of a hick who, as one classmate says, smelled of chicken shit. Her father disappeared during the 1980 uprising, and she goes to the nearby big city on every anniversary date to see if the authorities have fresh info on his fate. In a way, she's stuck in the past, sneered at by the same classmate who moved out and up in the world. That woman gets a plate of food dumped on her head for her trouble, while Soon-ji has to catfight another female customer who thinks she's flirting with her husband. Jung, a local cop, has his heart set on her, but she's about to be swept off her feet by an unlikely suitor.

Jang Se-yoon as Soon-ji.

One night, three guys in grungy period costumes drive up to the restaurant in a jeep just after closing. She sends them away, but after listening to the radio, which is rebroadcasting its original coverage of the uprising (much as American TV reprises its 2001 reporting every September 11) she decides to whip up some poultry and take it to where the three knuckleheads are camping out. They're reenacters, two of whom are in it for fun. The third, Jagu, is either quite the amateur Method actor or barking mad. He talks about the Uprising as if it's happening now. His passion on the subject, on top of his good looks, attract Soon-ji, and after helping them break into a police armory (and beat up Jung) to get weapons for the re-enactment, she makes love with Jagu. There's an eerie quality to these scenes; Jagu's confusion of past and present, perhaps provoked by the radio broadcasts, seems to make the past present, so that what unfolds is not so much reenactment as recurrence.

"When the lying Buddhas stand up, a new world will begin." Soon-ji discusses a dream with Jagu (Kim Yoon-seong). We will only see the dream itself, sort of, at the end of the film.

After promising Jung to make up for her misdeeds, Soon-ji travels to Gwangju, where her own mental balance is challenged by the disorienting blend of serious reenactment and public celebration. Jagu and his cronies are in the front line of the reenactment, ready to take fake fire. But when one goes down, Jagu freaks out, despite the obvious ritualistic activity going on around him. He really thinks the government has killed his friend, and his panic, if not his delusion, spreads to Soon-ji. Before long he's out looking for revenge -- and his gun, unlike most others, has live ammo in it....

Jagu and company recon the scene in Gwangju before hitting the street with dire consequences (below).

Some of the story details are a bit contrived -- do these guys really need to break into an armory to play their parts better, and are some people going to be staging their own private reenactment games inside of buildings away from the main action? -- but that doesn't compromise the tone of Park's picture. He had a brilliant idea to exploit a massive public event and the idea of historical reenactment itself. Reenacting a recent event like the Gwangju Uprising creates more opportunities for a meaningful collision of past and present than, let's say, a Civil War reenactment would. Park intuited a possibly inevitable consequence of an entire society's insistence on pretending that the present had become a past that's still painful or provocative for many Koreans. It put me in mind of William Faulkner's quote: "the past isn't gone; it isn't even past." The fact that Jagu has no rational backstory motive for his delusion that we know of may dilute the impact a little, but Park may be saying that the re-enactment itself may be a mild act of collective insanity, and that people like Jagu or Soon-ji are a kind of collateral damage from events that can't substitute for the closure she needs (regarding her father) and he may not be capable of feeling.

Above, a scene from the Gwangju reenactment. Below, Soon-ji and Jagu's private drama nears a bloody conclusion above the celebration.

Soon-ji is no classic -- the early part before Jagu arrives is often inane -- but Park's inspired use of the uprising reenactment and good performances from Jang Se-yoon in the title role and Kim Yoon-seong as Jagu make it worth a look for anyone interested in Korean cinema or Korean history, or for tourists through the wild world of cinema in general.

Here's a pretty long trailer for Soon-ji, uploaded to YouTube by m2m129:

Wendigo Meets THIRST (Bakjwi, 2009)

There's my friend Wendigo's vampire collection (big), my collection (small), and then there's the Albany Public Library, which gave us a fresh subject when it acquired Park Chan-wook's recent horror film. Wendigo has never seen a Korean film before, (except, as he corrects me, for A*P*E) but there isn't really that much of a cultural hurdle here. It's very much a western-style vampire film, as might be telegraphed by the protagonist being a Roman Catholic priest. His vampiric attributes don't seem particularly Korean or Asian, though he doesn't have the complete Euro-American package either. He has no fangs and, as far as we know, no aversion to holy symbols, but he does have superhuman strength and leaping ability, as well as a vulnerability to daylight.

Song Kang-ho as the afflicted priest in Thirst.

The most distinctive thing about the movie, in Wendigo's opinion, is our hero's dysfunctional co-dependent relationship with the female lead, an orphan girl raised like a drudge in the household of the priest's sick friend, now her husband. They descend into a kinky romance that is really more reminiscent of modern "urban fantasy" fiction than many American vampire films. It spirals out of control after she goads him into killing her husband, when he kills then turns her. While he struggles against his growing temptation to "all kinds of sinful pleasures" and refuses to hunt for blood (he siphons it in small portions from hospital patients), she instantly embraces her predatory nature -- a nature that was arguably there all along.

Kim Ok-bin as Tae-ju first experiences the thrill of the ride across the rooftops, then the thrill of the hunt on her own.

Vampirism is an escape for her, and she's not the only character who sees the accursed priest as an ironic source of salvation. Because of his "miraculous" survival of the Emmanuel Virus via the infected transfusion during his sojourn in Africa, our hero has a small cult that craves his healing touch, little knowing of the real power inside him. A senior priest learns of the curse and its physical benefits and asks for some blood to cure his blindness.

Everybody wants a piece of our hero, whether they know what they're getting or not.

Overall, it's a film of its time in its portrayal of the perverse attraction of vampirism. For the priest himself the curse is like a consequence of a masochistic compulsion to contract the virus that he sees tormenting patients at his local hospital. Whatever his conscience tells him, he has an impulsive instinct to ask for trouble that dooms others (including almost all of the mah-jongg club he joins) no matter how he tries to control the consequences. In a way, the hero is another "noble" vampire, but Thirst shows that nobility will only go so far when pitted against all the insatiable impulses of our time and condition.

Vampirism has an erotic power at times (above), but a vampire's own dreams are sometimes less than erotic (below).

Wendigo also notes that vampirism here might be seen as a sick parody of Catholicism, with our hero as a kind of anti-Christ figure who returns from the dead, who performs miracles, whose blood is power, yet can't help destroying other people's souls. I don't know if Park is Catholic himself, but he wouldn't be the first person to equate the mass with vampirism, I suppose. Catholicism may be an exotic element to him on which vampirism can piggyback, but we don't think the film is anti-Catholic. The priest's flaw isn't his religion but his masochistic streak, his embrace of suffering as a kind of self-indulgence.

Wendigo finds a resemblance between Thirst and Let the Right One In in their common emphasis on the troubled nature of whoever might become a vampire's follower. Just as Oscar in the Swedish film is profoundly maladjusted, victimized yet alienated in a way that limits our sympathy for him, so goes Thirst's female lead. A feral girl who runs through the night barefoot (leading us to intially wonder whether she was supernatural herself), she's troubled and hostile in a way that telegraphs that turning her can not be a good idea.

Technically, Wendigo likes the way the film looks, including its mix of wirework and CGI for the leaping and strength-feat effects. He also likes the location work and art direction for its portrayal of the girl's confining living space and neighborhood. The screenplay succeeds in making character development make sense, and from what he could tell not knowing Korean, he liked the performances. As far as global vampire cinema goes, Wendigo still prefers Let the Right One In as a creepier film, but he thinks horror fans will enjoy Thirst, too.

Here's the official English-language trailer, uploaded to YouTube by TheMovieJunk:

THE DIVINE WEAPON (2008)

Back in the fifteenth century the hottest arms race on Earth was being waged by two nations that didn't even know what century it was. The Ming Dynasty of China and the Korean kingdom of Joseon kept their own time, which is only fair, since they were way ahead of Christendom when it came to technology. Dwarfed by the Ming, Joseon sought any advantage available, despite the efforts of appeasers who counseled submission to China. The equalizer was the "divine weapon," which was a rocket-powered delivery system for masses of arrows. Joseon has been working on such a system for a while as Kim Yoo-jin's film opens, and one powerful family has been demoted for failing to perfect a weapon. Sul-ju, the scion of the disgraced family, now hustles for a living as head of a merchant clan. Fate, if not national strategy, makes him the host of Hong-li, the daughter of the current Divine-Weapon designer. He was killed by Ming agents, who took his design manual and are now after his daughter. She was her father's assistant and has much of his technical know-how. Hong-li and Sul-ju are reluctantly thrown together in an emergency effort to build Divine Weapons before the Ming figure out how to build them first. In the process, Sul-ju will get over his grudge against his government and his now-mercenary impulses, Hong-li will come down off her high horse and lose some of her self-righteous attitude, each will learn from and fall in love with the other, and a hella lot of Mings and barbarian Jurchen tribesmen will find themselves in a pointy metal deathstorm without their umbrellas.

Woman of learning, man of action: together they conceive the Divine Weapon.

This Korean production doesn't have the budget Zhang Yimou had for Curse of the Golden Flower, though Divine Weapon is an expensive film by national standards (costing something like $10,000,000). The limitations show when Kim resorts to subpar CGI, but for the most part the film benefits from its smaller scale and more personal, sometimes more visceral violence. It's a patriotic film, arguably an epic, but far less pretentious than the Chinese film. Divine Weapon has more of a Hollywood feel in its focus on two attractive, initially mismatched protagonists who fall in love, and the personable quality of the leads, Jeong Jae-yeong and Han Eun-jeong, keeps you interested during the buildup to the big battlefield unveiling of the title device.

Your Divine Weapon comes in three models. Your basic Divine Weapon will shoot scores of arrows through the air to punch holes in the enemy, but their penetrating power's not so great. A guy on horseback carrying a small shield in one hand can take a hit on the shield and keep on riding. That's when you want your Standard Divine Weapon. This is actually the original version before it was redesigned, and the objective originally wasn't to pin some enemy mook to the earth. The idea here was to blow him up. This baby comes with an explosive charge on each arrow that'll bring down the man and the horse. Stick a guy with four or five of these and it ain't pretty.

But sometimes it's just not enough to blow up a barbarian on a horse. Say you've got a bunch of the enemy all in one place. That's when you can really use the Grand Divine Weapon. Let's keep this simple: it's a ballistic missile. Joseon had'em three hundred years before Europe did, the film says, and when our heroes bring it on to mop up the retreating enemy, it's a genuine "you have got to be shittin' me" moment, but in a good way -- apart from the botched CGI of the explosions. By comparison, the clouds of arrows on the first volleys have a certain lethal elegance.

Choose your poison.

Some critics (particularly Chinese) have questioned the accuracy of the film and the claims made for Korean inventiveness, but Divine Weapon is guilty of no more than the usual cinematic license. Before watching, I wondered whether a film that shows Koreans sticking it to China would have contemporary political overtones, but having watched it I don't think so, unless some Chinese have real thin skins. The English subtitles, at least, scrupulously refer to Joseon's oppressors as "the Ming" rather than "China" (and it's a great name for a villainous entity, isn't it?) and the enemy could just as easily be seen as a generic tyrant rather than as specifically Chinese.

If anything, I had a stronger impression that the Jurchen barbarians were meant to stand in for North Korea, in which case the film's focus on wonder weapons has obvious relevance. The subtext might be that the South could match the North bomb for bomb, missile for missile, and even overmatch the dismal bolsheviks if not for geopolitical constraints. Strangely, Divine Weapon reminded me of 1950s sci-fi movies in which the Japanese save the world with super weapons in subconscious do-overs of the end of World War II. In this case, South Korea looks to its historic past for assurance that it can deal with the Northern enemy if it comes down to a fight. But you don't need to read any politics into it to enjoy this unartistic but effective adventure film. It isn't on the cutting edge of Korean or Asian cinema by any measure, but it's a piece of pop cinema that might be popular anywhere, depending on how you translate it.

This English-subtitled trailer was uploaded to YouTube by ArtsAllianceAmerica.