Korean director Park Chan-wook may be best known for directly ultrabloody revenge fantasies like Oldboy, though he proves he has a softer side in I'm a Cyborg, but That's Okay, a weird-but-whimsical drama-romance that recalls the work of Tim Burton.

The storyline follows Young-goon (Lim Su-jeong), a twentysomething girl who suffers a psychotic episode and nearly kills herself in the opening reel.  (Trust me, it's more watchable than it sounds.)  Afterwards, Young-goon is admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where she is treated for her delusional belief that she is a cyborg.

This is not One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.  The people in the hospital are more endearing than threatening, and the environs the patients live in are warm and calming rather than cold and clinical.  Naturally, we are introduced to a large cast of characters, including K-Pop star Rain as Park Il-sun, a patient who believes he can steal people's characteristics.  Rain sports a variety of silly hairdos (note the photo above) and some cool handmade masks but doesn't demonstrate a lot of acting depth.

Young-goon, for her part, mostly meanders through the picture in a daze.  This is appropriate for her character, since, as a self-professed cyborg, she has stopped eating food.  Her  most active movements are CGI enhanced, when she imagines she is using her cyborg powers to kill the hospital staff.  (The gore that follows is also the most "Park Chan-wook"-ish part of the movie.)  Eventually, her behavior reaches a crisis point, but her life is saved by Il-sun in one of the film's most touching moments.  At the close of the movie the two develop a kind of proto-romance.

While the acting and storyline are a bit on the shallow side, the visuals are, as always for a Park Chan-wook film, amazing.  The special effects sequences smoothly integrate into the rest of the film, while the color palette is otherworldly, as if every scene has been handpainted.

I can't say I liked I'm a Cyborg... a great deal, but it does prove that Park can successfully helm a film that doesn't involve brooding anti-heroes or torture.

Rating:  2.5 out of 5 stars

Korea's main contributions to Asian cinema seem to be gangster movies and gangster movie spoofs. Among these films, the slick action/drama/comedy My Wife Is a Gangster is pretty representative: somewhat funny, and definitely Korean. It, too, features a marriage arranged for the sake of a dying relative, only in this case it's a female gangster who gets married to a schmuck to please her sister.

The humor in the film is schizophrenic. Sometimes the filmmakers go for physical comedy, other times situational humor, while other times it seems gross-out jokes (mouth to mouth on a cat) or sight gags (the world's biggest lighter flame) are on the menu. While haphazard, this is pretty much the standard of most Korean comedy -- even the excellent My Sassy Girl mixed and match humor types.

The plot of My Wife Is a Gangster is nothing to write home about, but the actors do a decent job. The female lead, Mantis, played by Eun-Kyung Shin, swaggers about in a masculine manner (as female gangsters should), and it's her husband that winds up being the wife in the marriage. (The scenes that follow when she decides that it's time to get pregnant are among the film's funniest and remind me a little too much of certain persons I knew in Tally.) I think I can stand this role-reversal stuff better because I'm watching a Korean movie and therefore can tolerate way OTT characterization. If this had been an American movie -- and sadly, a remake of this is coming to Hollywood soon -- I woudn't have enjoyed it nearly as much.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Oldboy. What can I say about Park Chan-wook's Oldboy? It is an award-winning film -- it took the Grand Prix at Cannes -- and it stands on its own even though it is adapted from a Japanese comic book. It is a deeply troubling film that forces us to ask big questions about identity and destiny. It is visually striking without the use of extensive CG or over-the-top violence. It is, above all, a strikingly plausible rendition of the classic Greek tragedy and vengeance drama -- and that is what makes it so mind-blowing.

The picture begins in 1988. A drunken man named Oh Daesu disappears as his friend is taking him home from a police station. Korea is on the verge of a major societal change, but Oh will not be around to see it, for he's been kidnapped and imprisoned in what appears to be a strange hotel room. For the next 15 years he lives in solitude, with a television set as his only companion. Through the television set he sees how the world is changing, is exposed to all manner of terrible TV programs, and most importantly learns that his wife has been murdered and that he is the suspect. Like an animal, Oh beats against the walls of his cell as his main form of exercise and also as a method of catharsis; like DeNiro in Cape Fear, the end result is to harden his body. The world outside of his cell only enters his space to feed him food through a slot under his door, or to ocassionally gas him or hypnotize him. Using a single chopstick to tunnel through the bricks of his cell, Oh spends his years digging and digging, but before he can have his own Shawshank moment, he's gassed again and wakes up on a rooftop with a suicidal man.

Thrust into the remarkably different society that is South Korea circa 2003, Oh hunts the man or men who imprisoned him, to seek revenge and to find out why he was plucked out of society and sent to hell. In the first few scenes in the outside world, he puts his "imaginary" martial arts training in prison to good use, making short work of street thugs half his age. (Oh's time in prison was a kind of chyrsalis which foments his metamorphosis from Korean everyman to grinning, wild-eyed badass, and we quickly see what a poisonous butterfly he's become.) After acquiring a cell phone from a mysterious bum, Oh soon comes across a fetching young sushi chef, and procures a live octopus from her, which he consumes, squirming tentacles and all. Then he passes out.

In the scenes which follow, Oh reunites with one of his old friends, discovers the identity of his tormentor, and discovers a few things about his own identity. He finds himself facing both demons and dilemmas, and goes to extremes to overcome both. The film is violent, to be sure, but never doles out the violence in excessive quantities; the signature sequence of violence in Oldboy is a fight between Oh and a small army of thugs in a narrow hallway, but unlike the Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves in Kill Bill, this scene unfolds without excess gore and seems downright realistic, though it's as darkly comical as Tarantino's scene and, as it was shot in a single take, demonstrates a lot of technical proficiency on Park's part.

Without spoiling the story any further, I'll simply say that a main twist of the film is deeply unsettling in a manner different from the in-your-face perversion of Ichi the Killer (to which Oldboy has been compared), and the twist coupled with how you see the ending may leave you hating the film. Or it might leave you thinking, which I believe was Park's intent.

Much can be said about the cast. As Oh Daesu, the grizzled Choi Min-sik glowers, seethes, and otherwise bubbles over with the rage of a man denied his humanity for 15 years. I've read that Choi's voice has a deep impression on native speakers of Korean; I'm unable to judge this myself. At the opposite end of the spectrum is Oh's baby-faced tormentor, Lee Woojin, played by Yu Ji-tae, who glides through his scenes with a effortless slickness, as if he hasn't a care in the world. Yu's acting isn't nearly as good as Choi's, but he adequately plays the icy yin to Choi's firey yang. The cast is aided by an impressive and sometimes funny musical score, Christopher Doyle-esque cinematography (everybody in Asia is doing it!), and an unimpeachable sense of style.

On the whole, Oldboy is not only worth watching but worth owning -- it only gets better with repeated viewings.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I sat down to watch Park Kwang-hyeon's Welcome to Dongmakgol fully aware of the anti-American overtones of the film, but I still decided to take off my Yankee hat and absorb it as a piece of cinema without chewing too much on the politics.

The story, which takes place during the Korean War, finds a downed American pilot, three North Korean soldiers, and a pair of South Korean soldiers the unlikely guests of a tiny, unspoiled Korean village, Dongmakgol. The people of the village know little about the outside world and even less about war, with their innocence symbolized by a crazy, carefree girl named Yeo-il. The soldiers, all of which carry emotional scars, learn from the villagers, overcome their mutual distrust, and build bonds of brotherhood. It all happens so neatly and quickly that one has to suspend disbelief.

Thematically, the movie comes across like a mix of The Thin Red Line and Princess Mononoke. Both films were profoundly anti-war, and Mononoke was anti-modern on top of that, and in Welcome to Dongmakgol both of these ideas are up front and center. Like in parts of The Thin Red Line, the soldiers find an escape from the war among villagers who closely follow the Rousseauian archetype of the noble savage. The similarity to Mononoke is reinforced by the score, written by Joe Hisaishi, who contributed scores to many of Miyazaki's films, including Mononoke; by the CG, which gave the film an anime-like feel in several sequences; and even by the set design of the village, which could've been lifted straight out of Mononoke.

That beautiful CG and the beauty of the countryside -- the film was recommended to me because it resembles the area near a friend's hometown -- help to make Welcome to Dongmakgol a visual delight on par with Amelie and other surreal comedy-dramas. One thing to look out for is a CG-rendered attack by a wild boar about halfway through the film. From reading other reviews I've decided that this is a love/hate scene -- it will strike people as either very cool or stupid and cartoonish. I fell into the latter category. Still, the story is sweet and the character development of the five Korean soldiers has all the markings of a fine war comedy. The actors give a fine performance, though the scene-stealer is arguably Yeo-il. Alas, the second half of the film moves away from comedy and into drama, and being a war movie, one naturally needs to have villains. Here the movie is controversial in that the primary villains are the UN forces, i.e. Americans.

And therein lies the flaw of the movie. It's not that Americans cannot be bad guys. They most certainly can and should be depicted as such if the story demands it. It's that the director and writers present the Americans as such flat, cold-blooded villains that they call to mind the typical Germans we used to see in old World War fiilms. In fact, they might as well be Nazis, especially the "rescue squad" that comes looking for the pilot in the village and winds up threatening everyone there. Only the Korean members of the UN forces seem to have conscience; by comparison, the Americans are all kill-happy murderbots.

The crappy dialogue and even crappier delivery of lines by the Americans -- most of which I suspect are played by English teachers living in South Korea, the majority of whom aren't even American -- add insult to injury. With the exception of the American pilot character Smith (played by an unknown named Steve Taschler), every "American" delivers their lines in their best "tough guy" voices and ends. every. word. with. a. full. stop. as. if. they. are. talking. to. children. even. when. they're. swearing. Besides the horrible performances by dubious "actors," every single piece of English dialogue, including Smith's, is written in modern vernacular. No one sounds like an American should during the timeframe of the movie, and I'm wondering why the screenwriters couldn't have taken more care.

If this all seems like so much nitpicking, it's worth considering that Welcome to Dongmakgol is likely to be South Korea's submission to the Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards. One would expect such a high honor -- basically, an admission that it's the best film in South Korea in 2005 -- to be bestowed on a film that is excellent across the board, but Welcome to Dongmakgol clearly is not.

The movie ends on a sad note, and like the boar scene, the final confrontation will be of the love-it-or-hate-it variety to the viewers. It certainly imbues the movie with war realism missing from the lighter first half, yet I'm not altogether certain that's a good thing. What's more, the climax is followed by an exceedingly short denouement, which seems odd for such a long movie. People who have a bad taste in their mouth thanks to the end battle will find only a little sweetness before the credits roll.

Overall, I'd say Welcome to Dongmakgol is a beautiful-looking war fable with a wonderful first half that slowly unravels in the second half due to plotting and acting problems. It's good but not great.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars