Tag Archives: Korean movies

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No Other Choice

by Hope Madden

Few directors working today wield the craft as masterfully as Park Chan-wook. He combines genres and slides from tone to tone effortlessly, mingling humor and tension, satire and tenderness, mystery and pathos and blood like no one else. Though his style is unmistakable, somehow each Park film is wildly original, entirely its own.

No Other Choice may, in fact, be more unusual than the others, although there’s something familiar in its opening. Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) celebrates a gift from his paper company’s American owners with a barbeque in the back yard. He loves his home, he loves his family, his dogs, the greenhouse where he tinkers, the dance lessons he takes with his wife, Miri (Son Ye-jin). Man-su is happy.

This being a movie, and this scene being its opening, we know Man-su will not be happy for long. The filmmaker does nothing to hide the cinematic artifice of his prelude, introducing the buoyant corporate satire of reinvention, or the refusal to reinvent.

That gift of expensive eel was a going away present, and Man-su is about to be out of work, along with a lot of other local middle aged middle managers in the paper business.

There’s not a weakness in this cast, but both Lee and Son are flawless. Each character takes a proactive yet romantic approach to navigating this setback, both guided by their own internal logic. Her logic looks a little more logical: cut back on luxuries like Netflix and dance classes, sell the house, carpool.

Man-su’s plan is a little bigger: create an opening that fits his skills and eliminate all competition for that job. So, murder.

Park’s crafted a seething satire on capitalism but manages to edge the biting farce with strange moments of deep empathy—just one example of the tonal tightrope Park doesn’t just walk, he prances across.

No Other Choice is complicated but never convoluted, constantly compelling and almost alarmingly funny. Between the intricate detail of the thriller and the gallows humor of the comedy, Park crafts a wondrously entertaining film.

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Beasts Clawing at Straws

by Hope Madden

Who doesn’t enjoy a good bag o’cash flick?

Whether it’s the darkly humorous Lucky Grandma or lyrically tragic A Simple Plan, the terrifying innocence of Millions, or the violent masterpiece that is No Country for Old Men modern cinema has proven that you can do a lot with the combination of thrill, hijinks and dread that come along with an unexpected satchel full of bills.

Writer/director Kim Yong-Hoon pieces together just such emotions with his first feature. A nice guy, a missing person, that bag of cash, a mean tattoo, a lucky pack of cigarettes, a cool title—Beasts Clawing at Straws looks like it has it all.

Telling his tale in chapters that disjoint the narrative into a series of six interconnected plotlines, the filmmaker borrows the cinematic language of Tarantino and the Coens. If you’re going to steal from somewhere, you could do worse.

His pacing, framing, use of color and light all give the film its own swagger, though, and whether you guess where it’s all headed or you don’t, you’re bound to remain interested.

Where the filmmaker really strikes it rich is with this cast. Every actor adds a little exaggerated pathos to the mix as we ascend the ranks of smalltime crooks, each looking to score off another, all of them somehow connected to this stuffed Luis Vuitton bag.

Woebegone and hard working, Sung-Woo Bae offers the picture an emotional center. But the mid-film entrance of Do-yeon Jeon—glorious as ever—gives Beasts new life. She offers the chapters a sleek, devious tone the film had been missing.

Beasts Clawing at Straws offers mainly visceral if superficial thrills, but periodically it does ask us why it is we find ourselves rooting for the baddie. In the world created in this film, good and bad are separated by shades of grey and blood stains and no matter how you define yourself, you’re only one big, fat bag of cash away from finding out the truth.