The Stop Button
blogging by Andrew Wickliffe
Tag: CJ Entertainment
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There’s no indication there’s a better movie anywhere in Operation Chromite. Director Lee just doesn’t have a handle on it. The script’s an uncomfortable mix of predictable and manipulative–director Lee and co-writer Lee Man-hee lay on the war movie jingoism so thick, it actually takes a while to realize Lee Beom-su’s giving a legitimately great…
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Narratively, Windstruck falls apart in the last thirty-five minutes. Director Kwak’s screenplay stops and starts–not vignettes really, but definitely episodic. Leads Jun Ji-hyun and Jang Hyuk have their romantic courtship, which gets off to a rocky start as police officer Jun confuses Jang for a purse snatcher, set to sixties American rock and roll and…
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Besides an utterly absurd title–and one nowhere near as clever as the film itself–A Werewolf Boy is something of a success. Jo proves one can successfully marry science fiction, werewolf romance, class bigotry and… I don’t know, ageless romantic melodrama. He doesn’t cop out at the end either, but turns the picture into some kind…
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With The Tower, director Kim redefines the possibilities of the fictional disaster genre. He maintains many genre standards, like the occasional laugh to relieve stress, a fair amount of melodrama, along with the greedy capitalists and the politicking city officials, while throwing in some gore and a breakneck action movie pace. But he mixes in…
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Sector 7 is about twenty-two years late. It’s another “Alien with sea monsters;” 1989 had two and a half major entries in that genre. It does, however, add one interesting element. Wait, I guess it’s more Aliens with sea monsters. The female lead, Ha Ji-won, is more Ripley in tough mode. Anyway, the interesting element…
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For a while during Suicide Forecast—in the first act and third—it seems like the film will be about protagonist Ryu Seung-beom discovering he doesn’t want to be a soulless business success and redeeming himself. But Forecast isn’t exactly about Ryu. A plot summary sounds like a perverse comedy—Ryu’s an insurance adjuster who discovers three people…
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For a “revealing the secrets of a small town” thriller, Moss has a number of problems. The first one might just be me. The town has six residents. It’s not a town in my American understanding. A viewer with more cultural knowledge might experience it differently. Second, and more to the point, it’s just too…
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Castaway on the Moon explores one of those great urban questions… could you ever get stuck on one of those conservation islands in a city’s river? Despite being a South Korean film, it’d be hard to find a more universal story—deeply indebted Jeong Jae-yeong throws himself off a bridge after his girlfriend’s dumped him and…
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Given Korean film sort of resurrected the melodrama as a viable genre (I can’t believe I’m arguing for melodrama, but I guess if you like cinema, you sort of have to accept it–and I mean melodrama in a neutral sense… not as a guaranteed pejorative), I was curious to see how they’d do a disaster…
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The Good, the Bad and the Weird, if the title is any hint, is an homage to Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns. Kim Ji-woon borrows liberally from all three of the Clint Eastwood films, taking a scene from one then, a little later, one from another. He takes it further than just a cheap reference–at one…
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There’s something rather deceptive about A Man Who Was Superman. It opens as a comedy drama. Reality TV segment producer Jun Ji-hyun’s disillusioned with her job, sick of people, and longing for her absent boyfriend. In short, she’s basically a female version of any late twenties, early thirties male professional in a movie (well, movies…
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The Uninvited is a technically a horror movie, I suppose. There are ghosts and all. With the exception of the protagonist finding a kindred spirit–and her seeing ghosts too–the whole thing could work as a drama about trauma. In fact, as a drama, it would work well. During the movie, when the inevitable dumb horror…
The Stop Button 