Joy Ride

Sabrina Wu as Deadeye, Ashley Park as Audrey, Sherry Cola as Lolo, and Stephanie Hsu as Kat in Joy Ride. Photo Credit: Ed Araquel

A year ago we had an Irish film of a similar name with Olivia Colman.  This couldn’t be much different.  Directorial debut by Adele Lim who scripted Crazy Rich Asians this has much the same mood and involves a road trip to China and Korea by 4 female friends. Audrey (Ashley Park) is a hotshot lawyer who was adopted by white parents from China as a child.  Now, she is returning for the first time for business.  Lolo (Sherry Cola) is her childhood friend accompanying her.  They will meet up with Kat (Stephanie Hsu) who is a star actress now in China and the fourth and incongruous member of the group is Deadeye (Sabrina Wu). In the rather far-fetched script Audrey has to prove her Chinese heritage to win a contract so she sets off to find her birth mother.  

On a train they end up nearly getting busted for drugs, get rescued in the wilderness by a basketball team they then proceed to bed, Audrey gets fired, they pretend to be a K-Pop band and finally Audrey finds family of sorts in Korea.  A final scene back in the USA shows how they move on from all this a year later.

Joy Ride. Photo Credit: Ed Araquel

What works here?  It’s a pacy movie full of jokes, which are not all funny but do raise a laugh on many occasions.  The actresses are natural comedians and it is a joy to watch the way they act.  Parks surprised me with her versatility and Cola was a star in Shortcomings.  Their energy is also vital to help us believe all the implausible plot twists such as becoming a K-Pop band called Brown Tuesday. 

You may not be so keen on the scatological references, the pussy numbers (Cardi B and other musical influences are found here) and some of the Asian jokes seem more like a clichéd stand-up comedy routine than anything else.  And of course it is good to see a comedy propelled by Asian women showing it can stand up against the best.

3 stars plus

Navillera (Series)

12-part Korean drama series. It may not be the greatest series ever but what I did appreciate about it was that it took somewhat unusual themes and wove them into a heartwarming story full of human values.

Deok-chul Shim (In-hwan Park) is a 73 year-old-man who realizes that his life is ending and wants to fulfil a dream he had as a boy – to become a ballet dancer and to be on stage at once in his life.  

This dream is triggered again when he sees a young 23-year-old rehearsing.  He goes to the head of the dance studio and asks about dance classes and ends up being taught by the younger man, Lee Chae-Rok, who is not entirely happy about the arrangement.  

As times goes by, Deok Chul, or Mr Shim as he is known, manages to progress surprisingly well and he and Chae-Rok become friends and companions to each other in their needs.  The older man has his family against him and is later revealed to have been diagnosed with Alzheimer´s. This last condition worsens as the series goes on and the urgency is for Mr Shim to get his day on stage before he forgets his steps.

Chae-Rok (Song Kang) meanwhile has various issues.  He is basically alone as his mother has died and his father is in prison for beating a teenage footballer he was coaching.  

This latter character is now following and threatening Chae-Rok on the basis that his life was ruined by the father.  Chae-Rok is regarded as having immense talent but has not fulfilled it yet due to injury and lack of discipline, in part fueled by his family problems.

We also get an insight into Mr Shim’s family life: his supportive wife Hae-Nam (Moon-hee Na), his three children, a work-obsessed elder son, a daughter unable to have children and a youngest son who has walked away from medicine after a crisis.  And there is a less extensive plotline concerning Seung-Joo Ki, the ballet coach, a once famous dancer whose career was cut short by injury and who finds it hard to adapt to coaching.

So, the film is about following your dreams and the practice and discipline required to do so and placing it in the arena of men’s ballet is indeed novel.  Adding the twist of Alzheimer’s and focusing on the elderly is also a great plus and reflects common issues in society today that are often ignored in the arts. Many other points relating to societal pressures in Korea are raised but they are relevant globally.

The acting is uniformly convincing, the script intelligent and there are some moving scenes but none are milked melodramatically.  

Song Kang is a young Korean Netflix actor and does very well as the young dancer having studied ballet to perform the role.  The older actors – Park and Na are excellent and convey the concerns of their age perfectly.

If I had a criticism it is that 12 episodes of an hour stretched the material a little thin in the end and that 10 episodes would have been tighter.  As it is, once the final issue of the race between Alzheimer’s and the ballet recital is set, there is not much space for any extra storylines and yet it did drag a little in the end.

Apart from that Navillera is a welcome addition to serious drama series and I hope to see more of the same from Korea soon.

4 stars

Decision to Leave

This Korean film has had a fair bit of acclaim in recent times.  

It concerns a detective Jang Hae-Joon (Park Hae-il) who becomes infatuated with the widow of a supposed suicide case which he is investigating.

The said woman Song Seo-rae (Wei Tang) is of Chinese origin and works as a carer in Korea.

He stalks her day and night and invites her to eat all in the cause of ensuring that she is not suspect.  However, the plot thickens and time moves on.  He and his wife move to a small town on the coast and lo and behold Seo-rae and a new husband turn up there.  New developments occur leading to a dramatic finale.

I appreciated the unpredictable plot nature of this film and what for us may be an alternative look at aspects of Korean culture.  

On the other hand, I also found it heavy going at times and I’m not sure why.  Perhaps it was the director’s clever tricks, such as placing the protagonists in the same room when they are not.

Perhaps it was the hopeless nature of the “romance”. Yes, there are flavours of Hitchcock and Wong Kar-Wai and the leading actors do a good job.  

However, I felt it lacked something extra to really convince me and I wonder if this was the emotional engagement that I needed to see on screen and that I needed to have with the characters. Director is Park Chan-Wook.

3 stars plus

Burning

I knew little about this 2018 Korean movie but now understand how it garnered so many awards worldwide.  Jung-su, the lead played by Yoo Ah-in, is a young Korean who plans to be a writer but is unable to get a start or even know what type of novel he wants to write.

  Originally from a farming village near the North Korean border, he now works in poor delivery boy jobs in Seoul.  Then he meets up with a childhood classmate who almost instantly invites him to look after her cat when she is away and also goes to bed with him.

This woman, Shin Hae-mi, played by newcomer Jeon Jong-seo, goes off to Africa and Jung-su begins to believe that the cat, Boil, does not exist.  When Hae-mi returns with a new friend, the enigmatic Ben (Steven Yeun), Jung-su feels jealous and out of his depth.  Ben has money, a nice flat, a Porsche and a circle of friends from the upper classes. 

 Jung-su seems to think that Hae-mi has fallen under his spell.  Nevertheless, he continues to see both of them, while looking after his father’s farm.  

Ben is a curious figure with no clear source of income and a professed hobby of burning down abandoned greenhouses.  

When Hae-mi disappears in the middle of the film, Jung-su starts to track Ben to see if he has anything to do with it and suspicions grow.

In the middle of all this mystery, we also get an insight into the class divide in Korea, the generation gap and the sense of a change of values or the absence of some. Jung-su is an observer of social cogs he has no knowledge of and of a legal process that is busy condemning his father for battery.  Director Chang-dong Lee patiently gives us layer upon layer of mystery but also literary and anthropological references.  While it is quite a slow and long film, we are intrigued and enjoy the way photographer Kyung-pyo Hong makes quite dirty and common street and landscape scenes seem beautiful.

  Mowg’s soundtrack adds to the effect.  Haunting and revelatory as to what may be happening underneath modern Korean society.

4 stars plus

Minari

This surprise hit in the US starts slow and builds into quite an impressive depiction of life for a Korean family, newly arrived in Arkansas and determined to make a new life on a farm.  Or at least, Jacob, the husband is.  

The family arrive to find a rectangular house on wheels and overgrown land, though beautifully meadow-like, which Jacob sets about ploughing and turning into a market garden for Korean vegetables.  

Meanwhile he and his wife Monica work as chicken sexers at a local factory.  They have two children, responsible Ann and the younger David (Alan S. Kim) who is a curious boy with a heart defect.

  As the work begins to get on top of them, Monica’s mother Soon-ja comes from Korea to look after the children.  David especially doesn’t consider her as a real grandma as he doesn’t know her and the woman does un-grandma things like swear, play cards and watch wrestling.

We follow the family as they try to adapt to a new life, fit into the local community with an evangelical church, suffer the fortunes of the weather and good and bad decisions regarding the farm and the possibility that the property is in some way jinxed.

The main objective here is to explore the tissue that makes up family.  Each one has a different role and some of the relationship dynamics seem negative.  Both children and granny think Jacob and Monica fight too much, David and Granny also fight at the beginning but then realise that they are much alike and Ann is the central serving pillar keeping the whole lot together.  

While it applies to families world over there are also beliefs that appear common to Asian families and the need of the children to serve the family and the men to be the breadwinner.  Something that Monica is not always in agreement with.

MINARI_02964 Yeri Han, Steven Yeun Director: Lee Isaac Chung Credit: Josh Ethan Johnson/A24

Steven Yeun is very solid in the lead role and Yeri Han likewise in a role that perhaps less to work with.

  Will Patton as the local jesus freak farmer and generous help to the family is fine in this 80’s context and Youn Yuh-Jung, a top actress in Korea, shines as the grandmother.

Photography is gorgeously rustic and Emile Mossieri’s music sets the right tone for this semi-biographical work by Lee Isaac Chung.

Maybe not film of the year but a valuable addition to celluloid depictions of what it means to be to be part of a family and part of an American dream.

4 stars plus

Herstory

The film itself seems a little uneven for me but the topic and the story is engrossing.  During the Second World War many Korean women were shipped to Japan and obliged to become comfort women or prostitutes which marked their futures even back in Korea.

  50 years later in the 90’s, their fate came to light and in the particular case filmed here, a group of women from Busan went to court in Japan to seek reparations, at a time when Japan was expressing regret for some of its excesses during the war.

  We follow the group led by Korean business woman Mrs Moon who ‘supported’ them for about 6 years in their case which involved 24 visits to Japan.

  They obtained a partial victory speaking volumes about the patriarchal society in Japan and the particular relationship that they have with Korea. 

 Some of the acting does seem to get a little hysterical at times but the sentiments are well-expressed and Mrs Moon, played by Hee-ae Kim

as a modern businesswoman who won’t stop at no in the search for justice is a very well-drawn character.

  A different type of movie from Korea and one that is very valuable, even if the box office results were not so encouraging.

3 stars plus

Spa Night

Recently saw the latest film by Andrew Ahn, Driveways, which impressed for its portrayal of the relationship between an elderly army vet and a young Asian-American boy staying next door.  This, his first feature, is set in Koreatown, Los Angeles and concerns David (Joe Seo) a young man who has finished High School but still needs to do his SATs before going to university. His parents run a small Korean eatery in bad straits and David’s future is on hold to a degree despite the determination of his mother that he should get ahead.  We see the conservatism of the Korean society of immigrants, church on Sundays, expensive gifts for christenings, the expectation that the children will marry within the community. 

 We also see that those young ones who have escaped to university are breaking the bonds and getting drunk and having sex with no qualms.  David is a shy devoted young man without this confidence.  But during this film he grows up a lot.  

He begins to see the limitations of his parents and he secretly gets a job at a Korean spa, one which he has visited, as many local Koreans do but which is also a place where men covertly seek sexual pleasure from other men.

  This job accompanies a sexual awakening in David who realizes that he is more attracted to men than women, another factor that creates a conflict between him and the mores of his society.

The film is somewhat minimal but always authentic.  Some will say that Seo is undemonstrative in the lead role.  But this shyness and Asian inscrutability rings true for me and makes for a very convincing small film.  There is no easy resolution but at least David is a little wiser by the end.  A nice character portrayal.

3 stars

The Taste of Money

Another slightly dated movie from 2012, from Sang-soo Im, one of Korea’s most popular directors.  This film went to Cannes and has plenty of visual style but after building up a lovely bit of tension over the first two thirds unravels in rather a ridiculous way in the final part.  The subject matter is also a Korean favourite, the excesses of the monied classes and their often despicable behaviour to maintain their wealth and status.

Here we have a family company with a father (Yun-shik Baek) starting to lose his marbles and bedding the Filipino maid which causes a big fight with his wife, the matriarch (Yuh-Jung Youn, enjoying her Lady Macbeth role). She is in fact the heiress of the company and her father still whizzes in and out in a wheelchair pushed by a sinister housemaid.  Dad is half crazy, half wise.  There are 2 kids, Chul, who wants to put his stamp on the company but keeps getting into trouble with the law and sent to prison and Nami, a divorced daughter who lives at home and is rather unimpressed with the family behaviour.  All of this is seen through the eyes of the driver/gofer Joo (Kang-woo Kim), a handsome if somewhat put upon servant. His duties include packing bribe money and bedding the old lady. As the father loses his grip, more and more duties fall on Joo and he is dragged into the family mire.

As I said, the first part is handled very well, lavish sets, subtle and not so subtle power battles and a close look at the decadence of power in Korea today.  Then, however, we have a murder, a suicide attempt, some mile-high sex, a ghost and a pointless fist fight supposedly to resolve everything and it loses a lot of credibility.  Still, it is an enjoyable watch, just needed to be a lot tighter as a story.

♦♦+

Parasite

Not sure if it is a masterpiece but it comes close.  After 2 hours you come out of Parasite feeling that a monster has taken hold of you and taken you on a wild but contemporary journey, both Shakesperean and Dickensian, and with a dose of sheer horror all wrapped up in social commentary and satire.  Bong Joon Ho achieves a seldom-seen amalgam of all of this, carefully and creatively constructed.

The basic story is how a family from the poor side of town ingratiates its way into the life of a rich family who live in an imposing architecturally designed house on the edge of town.  Without divulging their family connection, they pose as the English tutor, art therapist, driver and housekeeper of the family, assuming these roles as the original people leave  or are fired.  The ingenuity with which they manage it is one thing.  But it also highlights the gap between rich and poor.  Mrs Park (the rich mother) is gullible and naïve and yet has money to burn, Mrs Kim (the poor mother) is a smart cookie but can barely scrape two pennies together.  Other class differences and unfairness springs to light in the course of the movie.  All this is settled into place by mid-film when a plot development takes everything to another level and eventually leads to a pretty dynamic denouement. Kang-ho Song as the poor father, Yeo-Jeong Jo as the rich mother and So-dam Park as the poor daughter are among the stars in a uniformly good cast.  Photography by Kyung-Ppo Hong and Jaeil Jung’s music also add appreciably to this very complete engaging film.

♦♦♦♦++

Stoker

Leading Korean director Chan-Wook Park makes his first English language film.  It is a thriller that starts quietly and subtly and becomes increasingly violent and disturbing.  From the point of view of direction it seems to be a carefully constructed work, impeccably photographed.  We are left until the end in doubt as to the motivations of the characters and even then there is vagueness.  By the end, the sense is that the film is really quite light but does manage to keep our interest.  This is particularly due to Mia Wasikowska in the lead as the 18 year-old India. Nicole Kidman does a good job as mother while Matthew Goode is also effective as Charlie, the uncle who mysteriously arrives.  A small part is well acted by yet another Aussie, Jackie Weaver.  In all, a work that lays the foundation for better to come.

★★★