



Director: Yu Li


Resurrection 黄泉がえり (Yomigaeri) [2002] • Japan

It's hard to believe this is a Shiota Akihiko film; it's so mainstream sentimental. Compared to the two very independent flavored films about lost teenagers he made just before and after this one—the brutal Harmful Insect and the ennui filled Canary, not to mention his twisted psycho-sexual drama debut Moonlight WhispersResurrection is mall fodder. It's not bad as far as these things go. It just surprised me. The film stars adults instead of teenagers, but in the end it is very much a teen film.





Director: Akihiko Shiota
Starring: Tsuyoshi Kusanagi, Yuko Takeuchi, Yuriko Ishida, Sho Aikawa, Keiichi Yamamoto

Japan Times
Beyond Hollywood

Red Cliff 赤壁 (Chi bi) [2008+2009] • China

A five hour holiday marathon. Period pieces, costume dramas, and films about fighting (physically or with weapons other than the heart) are a few of my least favorite film genres so I don't know how it happened but I loved every minute of this monster. If I had watched the condensed version I wouldn't have liked it. There are two 30 minute fight scenes, and since the cut version is aimed at Western audiences I doubt they would have suffered any loss, which would have then made them be half the movie and I would have been bored silly.

I love the Art of War, men of honor, tea ceremony languid pace of it which allows for fleshing out the characters and slowly developing the gravity of the situation. Sure, it's a little over-the-top at times—it's John Woo—but it's really easy to get into the film's depiction of historically important events and forgive a few personal excesses. The film is remarkably understated for the most part. All the performances are good. All the actors bring you into their world and make you care for them and their concerns. I even rooted for these guys when they went ONE against ONE THOUSAND ... something so silly I've never understood the prevalence nor appeal of it in film.

This film ignited an interest in Chinese historical epics I never thought I would develop. It prompted me to watch The Emperor and the Assassin, and that one is awesome. I've got a couple more in my queue. I think the key is picking the ones that are made for a Chinese rather than a Western audience. The long version of Red Cliff seems to be one of those films. It's slower and more poetic, which is what I like. If it's what you like and you've been keeping this one at bay for fear it's just another big, dumb Chinese historical videogame, give it a shot—and be sure to give it the long shot.

Director: John Woo
Starring: Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Chen Chang, Wei Zhao, Fengyi Zhang, Shido Nakamura, Jun Hu, Yong You


Moonlight Whispers 月光の囁き (Gekkô no sasayaki) [1999] • Japan

One of those "only from Japan" psycho-sexual dramas which explores adult themes of desire, domination, and twisted mind-fuck games and perversion ... acted out by teenagers. No comment on this peculiar film tradition.

Boy with fetishes meets girl with Dom proclivities. At first the girl, played exquisitely by Tsugumi, thinks the boy's over-zealous displays of desire are perverted, but then she realizes his fetishistic personality gives her great power over him so she makes him do pretty much anything degrading she can think of, from licking her feet, nay, her entire leg clean, to locking him in a closet while she has sex with another guy. He goes along with all of it because he is also madly, sadly, and pathetically in love with her. It's a little harder to tell what her motivation is because, well, she's a girl. Depending on the viewer's orientation to things, the film might seem erotic, but no matter which way the wind blows there's no escaping the film's ominous, eerie, and sad emptiness (in an indie good way). This film just broods along beautifully.

This is Akihiko Shiota's directorial debut and probably his strongest film. The focus is clear and concise. The powerful but flawed Harmful Insect would have benefited from such focus. It was the first one of his films I had seen and it pissed me off for days. Then I saw Canary and wasn't sure what to think. There wasn't much new to it and it seemed less well done. Now that I've seen Moonlight Whispers I have to go back and watch those two films again, and I will be seeking out all of his films. Funny how that works.

Director: Akihiko Shiota
Starring: Kenji Mizuhashi, Tsugumi


Hot Summer Days 全城熱戀 (Chuen sing yit luen - yit lat lat) [2010] • Hong Kong, China

I laughed, I cried. This is a very fun, good looking, popcorn/date flick. Beneath its light-hearted surface there are some teary eyed love happenings. If you like star-studded Hong Kong romantic comedies and sugar-coated sentimentality, look no further.

Hot Summer Days tries to be cross-cultural by setting two of its four main story lines on the mainland but it's more in the tradition of Hong Kong rom-coms than mainland fare. Most of the actors are native Cantonese speakers. I watched this twice, once with the Mandarin audio and once with the Cantonese audio. There is some dubbing in both versions but the Cantonese version has less of it.

The eye candy comes in both flavors: boy and girl. They perspire a lot which leads to some clingy clothing, glistening skin, and probably the PG (or its Chinese equivalent) rating. Vivian Hsu has never been more freakishly cute and Barbie Hsu has never been more tattooed. The most heartwarming and intricate tale is that between Jacky Cheung, as an out of work truck driver cum ice cream salesman, and Rene Liu, as a concert pianist doing foot massage (because it's a job requiring skilled hands), which gets its start from a text message sent to the wrong number. The one that anchors the film and produces the most tears is the one, not given top billing on the poster, between newcomer Xinbo Fu, as an innocent country boy and Angela Baby (that's right, her name is Angela Baby), as a factory worker assembling teddy bears. Daniel Wu, as Master Soy Sauce, and Vivian Hsu, as Wasabi, have the cutest nicknames. Nicholas Tse and Barbie Hsu's story is the most hip and tragic.

There are cameos galore, the highlight being a weepy-eyed monologue from Maggie Cheung spilling her guts to Master Soy Sauce. Blah blah blah. If this is your cup of tea, drink it. It's good (except for some well intentioned CGI maybe). I hope I got all the links right.

Director: Tony Chan, Wing Shya
Starring: Nicholas Tse, Jacky Cheung, Rene Liu, Vivian Hsu, Barbie Hsu, Angela Baby, Daniel Wu


A Blue Automobile (Aoi kuruma) [2004] • Japan





Director: Hiroshi Okuhara
Starring: Arata, Aoi Miyazaki, Kumiko Aso, Tomorowo Taguchi, Kenji Mizuhashi

Japan Times

Norwegian Wood ノルウェイの森 (Noruwei no mori) [2010] • Japan

I let myself get over-hyped about this one: Director Anh Hung Tran's The Vertical Ray of the Sun is one of the most beautiful films I've ever seen; Cinematographer Ping Bin Lee, one of my favorites; Jonny Greenwood doing the soundtrack. Almost every publicity blurb about this movie starts off with "Upon hearing the song "Norwegian Wood," Toru remembers back to his life in the 1960s ..."

Well ... that blurb may describe the book but it has nothing to do with this film. I'm not a Beatles fan but I do carry a bunch of love for that song and it does bring with it a great sense of nostalgia. Somebody paid somebody a bunch of money to play that song over the end credits, all for naught. There isn't any real sense of nostalgia in the film except for some of the fashion and the big telephones. I let myself be mislead.

Greenwood's soundtrack might be interesting to listen to by itself but in the film all the lilting strings manage to seem bombastic. I literally muted the film several times it annoyed me so much. I don't think this is Greenwood's issue, though. Tran has been known to over-saturate a film or two with torturing soundtracks (The Scent of Green Papaya). Ping Bin Lee did come through. There are many breathtakingly beautiful scenes in the film, a few of which played silently for me because of the aforementioned soundtrack's habit of shitting all over the film.

I do not like Rinko Kikuchi's acting. I've seen her in a handful of films and while she gets some moments right, she often brings too much of her blonding international star self to roles (even before she had it) and I struggle to see a character beyond her personality. She whispers a lot which is a phony way to be dramatic done by people, strangely, desirous of attention. If they have your attention a little bit they can force you to double it by whispering. Fortunately she is only half the focus of the film. Texas born Kiko Mizuhara is awesome as the main "other" girl, Midori, in Toru's life. She's cute, spunky, forward, sexually confident, and blunt, but comes off as merely an outline of a character. I wish the whole film were about her. Ken'ichi Matsuyama, as Toru, is serviceable as the supposedly nostalgic one but hardly awesome enough to be a guy that three different girls just have to fuck. Gorgeous Eriko Hatsune has a nearly film-stealing scene but that's about all we see of her.

The film contains some rather bold, and funny at the same time, sexual dialog, although it's a little sore-thumbish because the film is only punctuated with it. I loved it, and laughed, when Midori calls up Toru and says "My dad died. Will you take me to a porno film? The most perverse one." She also has a few moments describing to Toru how she'd like to be bedded by him which are entertaining. Kikuchi's Naoko, after letting Toru know that she's too crazy with despair to sleep with him asks him if it's torture to have an unserviced erection: "I can help with that", she then offers. There is a good bit of sadness and mixed up desire in the film but the characters and the story aren't developed enough to see it as more than immature angst.

I think this film will appeal to teenagers and twenty-somethings who've read the Haruki Murakami novel it's based upon because most of the holes in the film will be filled in and the sense of nostalgia might be there. Not that teenagers have a lot of nostalgia for the sixties but the film is about loss, and it is fairly good at presenting that—except the adolescent level of it is pretty thin. The film is NOT about the way things were—the last few wonderful lines of the film and a Beatles tune can't save it. It's just a young-love story which lacks the depth to appeal to those not feeling the same way, i.e., older folks. Young people experiencing the whirlwind of sexual awakening, and or those who've had a friend commit suicide, might love it.

Norwegian Wood is a great looking film but not well written or acted, and since it is also quite slow moving I don't think it will engage general audiences who haven't read the book. It's not sexy enough nor smart enough.

Director: Anh Hung Tran
Starring: Rinko Kikuchi, Ken'ichi Matsuyama, Tetsuji Tamayama, Kiko Mizuhara, Reika Kirishima, Eriko Hatsune


Winter's Bone [2010] • USA

"Here's a doobie for the road". Haven't heard that one in years. I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to sit comfortably through a couple hours of hillbilly meth heads mumbling through their problems, but Jennifer Lawrence's performance doesn't take long to latch onto. Then Uncle Teardrop shows up. John Hawkes, as Teardrop, nails the role of resident scary guy, and he almost steals the show. A young man of slight physical stature, he is nonetheless able to project frightening unpredictability and intimidation. His character is very well written with a broad development arc, from violent to thoughtful to playing the banjo. The film is worth seeing for Hawkes's performance alone, but it's got a lot more to offer.

Winter's Bone, on the surface, is a backwoods family drama about drug culture, but it's also a good mystery thriller. There are some obvious and unnatural "dialog as character development" moments, and a few scenes inserted to show a little down home familial love and bonding which are a slight cause for pause, but the overall pace is fairly swift and they are easily forgiven, especially when the it rolls out one of the saddest, most thought-provoking endings to a film I've seen in a long time ... well, at least since Confessions. And it's John Hawkes who delivers the death blow.

The ending is not ambiguous. The intended scenario seems fairly clear, but it is open to a number of possibilities. It allows the viewer to sidestep the tragedy if they want to. It's brilliantly written, not saying as much as it says, and it sort of retroactively creates another layer of emotional depth to the film as a whole. I might have been on the fence had the ending come with less of an impact. This is a film that could be a big downer, considering its subject matter, but as written and directed by Debra Granik it clings to the hopeful side of bleak, punctuated and allowed for in the end. Such is the nature of hope.

Director: Debra Granik
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, Isaiah Stone, Ashlee Thompson, Valerie Richards


Dream Home 维多利亚一号 (Wai dor lei ah yut ho) [2010] • Hong Kong

Gore-hounds and violence enthusiasts should enjoy this one a lot, except that all the horror plot points are interrupted by a lot of story and social commentary about rising home prices in Hong Kong. Dream Home is a serious and thoughtful drama with a lot of blood.

The flashback narrative technique doesn't serve the film very well except for the fact that it lets the blood start flowing from the opening scene. It feels like a cop out to me when a director doesn't have the confidence to let a film build to its climax, and feels the need to begin with the climax and then retrace the steps that lead up to it.

A few of the kills in this film are fantastic, in a "Really?!?! Holy Shit!" sort of way, especially the coitus interruptus one. The fact that mild-mannered Josie Ho is performing them adds to the effect. The only problem I had is that many of them start off as failures, to build phony tension the wrong way, become successes, and then someone who should have been dead dead dead pops up for another go at it. This produces more bang for the buck by getting, say, a dozen kills out of only seven characters.

There's plenty of nudity and some graphic fucking to round things out but the cognitive dissonance created by mixing deep dramatic story lines with over-the-top bloodletting is likely to leave most viewers sitting on the fence verdict-wise. I recommend the film more to gore hounds than to connoisseurs of fine Hong Kong cinema. The film looks great and the production values are top notch, so ....

Director: Ho-Cheung Pang
Starring: Josie Ho, Anthony Wong Chau-Sang, Eason Chan, Michelle Ye, Hee Ching Paw, Kwok Cheung Tsang

LoveHK Film

Under the Hawthorn Tree 山楂树之恋 (Shan zha shu zhi lian) The Love of the Hawthorn Tree [2010] • China

Zhang Yimou reportedly auditioned 10,000 girls in search of untarnished, innocent (old school Chinese) beauty when looking to cast the lead in this film.
"These young folks are looking worse and worse with each generation. Pretty girls obviously aren't marrying handsome guys these days. They're hooking up with this sugar daddy and that old lonely bachelor with money. No wonder the kids are lacking in the looks department.

When you look at any picture of young Chinese women from the 60s and 70s period, you'll almost always have an eager face that radiates innocent beauty looking back at you. This is now a thing of the past, young folks rarely have that innocence about them any more."
I read that before seeing this film and it put an awful lot of pressure on the young actress who passed the audition. She's cute, but she's no Gong Li. She's hardly a Zhang Ziyi either, but that may have more to do with the way the film is assembled than anything else.

I'm a BIG fan of Zhang Yimou's common people films. I love his nostalgic looks at the past and his thinly veiled commentaries on the Cultural Revolution and cultural change in general, in China. But Zhang seems to have tossed this one off before finishing a proper script. Title cards are used to fill in narrative gaps (red flag) and to allow for fade-to-black wistful shots of the girl biting her lower lip, pouting, and looking like the innocent beauty Zhang craves. I think the need for fade-to-black wistful shots of the girl biting her lower lip and pouting suggests he didn't find it.

The film is adapted from a popular mainland novel which was based on a true story set during the Cultural Revolution. There's lots of good stuff and great attention to detail concerning the period, and it satisfied my desire for that. There's a pretty standard love story plopped on top of it all, complete with a terminal disease tuggin at your heart strings. But not just any old love story, it's a Japanese styled "pure love" love story. That part is fine as well. A little Korean style melodrama mixed with Japanese pure love stylings works for me most of the time. So why didn't I love this movie?

Honestly, the title cards bothered me. Not just because the girl bit her lip and pouted going into many of them (which got on my nerves as well), but because they gave the film an unfinished quality. It's difficult to remain completely faithful to a novel when adapting it for the big screen, and just as voiceover narration can be used successfully to fill in narrative gaps or it can stick out like a sore thumb, so go the title cards.

"Sun told Jing that he would be waiting for her upon her return"

Sticks out like a sore thumb.

To be fair, dancer and senior high school girl, Zhou Dongyu, from Shijiazhuang in Hebei Province, with “eyes that are clear like the mountain springs”, is pretty fetching as the young girl who is sent to re-education camp and falls in love with an upwardly mobile land prospector. The film's theme of with whom and when one falls in love being up to the discretion of Communist Party leaders is far more tragic than the terminal disease. Shawn Dou Xiao is outrageously handsome and appealing as the young man who falls in love with her.
Under the Hawthorn Tree is delicately shot and filled with wonderful period detail. My final waffling verdict is: It's a beautiful and tragic love story with some distracting blemishes. If Zhang Yimou had spent as much time fleshing out a proper screenplay as he did finding a girl to play the lead character he might have produced another masterpiece. I recommend the film to those who like pure love stories.

Director: Yimou Zhang
Starring: Dongyu Zhou, Shawn Dou, Taisheng Chen, Rina Sa, Xuejian Li


Hear Me 听说 (Ting Shuo) [2009] • Taiwan

Hear Me 听说
This light-hearted rom-com charmed its way into my top ten of the year. It's not a cinematic masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination. It's just a rom-com, delightful and enjoyable for the characters, if not the story. I like fluff as much as the next person, if it's done well.

Boy meets girl. Girl is preoccupied caring for her handicapped sister. Boy gets girl. Handicapped sister wins the Olympics. It's feel-good from head to toe, and it's beautiful that all the love is delivered in sign language.

Xiao Peng is a swimmer in training for the Deaflympics. Her sister, Yang Yang, does everything she can for her and wrestles between being over-protective and neglectful. Tian Kuo sees Yang Yang one day while delivering food to Xiao Peng's swim team facility. He sees Xiao Peng communicating with Yang Yang in sign language and makes an assumption. Take it from there.

Tian Kuo's parents must be a professional comedy team in real life because they have comic timing down pat and an assured sense of what comic relief is.

Hear Me was Taiwan's highest-grossing local movie of 2009. A good time was had by all in this house. I have no further defense.

Director: Fenfen Cheng
Starring: Ivy Chen, Eddie Peng, Michelle Chen, Lo Bei An, Lin Mei Xiu


July 32nd (7월 32일) [2010] • South Korea

I was fooled by the poster for this one. Haha. I like black with bluish-purple highlights, and I thought I detected depth in the young woman's eye(s). I thought it might be a dark independent razzle-dazzle where the filmmakers had discovered some no-name young actress with the charisma to carry a film. I thought it might be something like Shiki-Jitsu (Ritual). In some way, it is.

There are LOTS of marvelously colored and composed frames in the film. The cinematography is almost Ping Bin Lee/Christopher Doyle level awesome. This is how it's like Shiki-Jitsu, but it's also the only compelling thing the film has going for it.

July 32nd wears its character development and plot devices on its shirt sleeve. I can handle a little bit of that, but not a whole film. I don't know if it's the script or the acting, but everything comes off like a daytime soap opera with black and bluish-purple mood lighting.

Eun-Soo Park, as a man who spends his daughter's growing up years in jail and attempts to find her when he is let out, does the best Min-sik Choi he can. He even looks a bit like a softer, smaller-headed version of him. If you see the film, the irony of that will not be lost on you. (She's five when he goes to prison, about eighteen to twenty when he gets out (looking exactly the same), and the whole film is predicated on the two of them not recognizing one another, even when they get uncomfortably close to hanky panky.)

Hye-Rim Seong, as his daughter cum prostitute ... I was wrong.

July 32nd is an eye-roller but it's not offensively bad. The production values are top o' the line. Beyond the unremarkable performances of the father and daughter everyone else acts like the way most cops are portrayed in South Korean films: unattractive bumbling idiots. The film's sought after bleakness (and man, does it seek it) is ruined by all these obnoxious low-level Fredo Corleone wannabe (albeit Korean) character choices. I laughed out loud at the really bad guy who limps through the movie as if as soon as someone yells "Cut!" he's going to say "Is this really how you want me to do this?"

I don't know anything about anyone involved in making this film but if I find out who is responsible for the photography I will look for whatever they do next.

Beyond Hollywood seem to like the film.
Director: Seung-Hyeon Jin
Starring: Hye-Rim Seong, Eun-Soo Park, Jeong-Gyun Kim











Director: Hitoshi Yazaki

Japan Times

Shanghai [2010] • USA

Solid cast, good production, engaging spy thriller with some illuminating historical context thrown in.

Director: Mikael Håfström
Starring: John Cusack, Li Gong, Yun-Fat Chow, David Morse, Ken Watanabe, Rinko Kikuchi


She, a Chinese [2009] • UK, France, Germany, China

Frustrated with life in a rural village, she's slapped by her mom, groped by her boyfriend, raped by a truck driver, moves to Shenzhen. Fired from a factory job on her first day, she volunteers to work at a Love Salon. Her lover gets killed (good thing he had a pile of money underneath his mattress). She moves to London and gets a job but her first paycheck is taken back because she has no bank account. She goes to work in a massage parlor and marries a wrinkly old white guy with a bank account who reads the newspaper too often and his cat dies. She gets pregnant by an Indian whose cultural identity is calling him home rather than pushing him away, so he leaves her. The quantity of bummers in this film is so thick it skips along too rapidly and loses credibility.

Lu Huang as Mei (The 'She' of the title) does a fine job plowing her way through the endless misfortune (she did the same thing in Blind Mountain—a great film), so props to her. The story, however, which has a heart and good intentions, asks so much of its characters it stretches the limits of credulity creating distance instead of empathy. It begins to suggest that the circumstances "She" gets into are a result of personal selfishness, or stupidity, rather than exposing or exploring the difficult climb from rural Chinese village to downtown London.

I recommend this film because many of the realities and situations it points at are worth considering. I just wish it would have pointed at a few less and explored them more deeply, or with a whisper of hope. I've got nothing against bleak films, but She, A Chinese gives the impression that once the desire to break free of tradition and hopeless circumstances begins, a stream of unrelenting nausea is likely to follow. Which in turn begs the question of whether the scenarios depicted in the film are the result of the personal characteristics of this particular She, in a sense becoming a character study, or if they are some sort of warning siren or social commentary on what a bitch life is if you begin from a certain place, look a certain way, and have unrealistic expectations concerning what can be done about it.

Broken into discreet elements—the film is broken into discreet parts with the use of title cards that offer sometimes whimsical commentary on various events—the execution is pretty good, but the overall impact is diluted. The performances are solid and the director does a good job making things appear realistic so it might just be a case of truth being harder to get on board with than fiction.

Director: Xiaolu Guo
Starring: Huang Lu, Wei Yi Bo, Geoffrey Hutchings, Chris Ryman, Hsinyi Liu


Confessions 告白 (Kokuhaku) [2010] • Japan

When I made my top ten list for 2010 I wrote I was confident that if I had seen this it would have made the list. It's a little late, but now I've seen it and added it to the list.

As par usual, I'm not going to go through a plot synopsis. Click on one of the links at the end of this entry if you want that. 

Confessions is not perfect but it's pretty close. It's dark and gorgeous. It's unsettling. It's got Takako Matsu and Yoshino Kimura; Radiohead and Boris on the soundtrack. It gets crazy and goes by quickly at times (hard to catch all the subtitles), even though a good portion of the film is in slow motion. It's a testament to the skill of the director that everything makes an impression, even fluttering by. A few times, for a moment, it seems like it might lose steam and then whoosh! There it goes again. This is hands-on film making. An audio-visual package right up there with Myung-se Lee's M. It gets physical. And that's what I like about it. Nakashima gets how to manipulate sight, sound, and time moving through time that creates both a sense of being on a rollar coaster and being suspended in time. Like being in a dream or a car wreck.

It's creepy that most of the players in the film are 14 years old, talking about killing people and their mommy problems. The film gets most of its fuel from mommy problems. Shocking that it seems so believable that these kids understand what they are talking about. Tetsuya Nakashima makes these kids smart. It's very refreshing.

The first and last acts are both tours de force. I've seen three different English translations of the last line in the film. Don't google it until after you've seen it. What an ending! Some folks have written that Nakashima throws it all away with the last line but I think it depends on how you take it. I found it eerily ambiguous and evil.

Most commenters on the film will point out the film's "social commentary", i.e., that kids under fourteen years of age can't be punished by the law for anything. I'm not big on social commentary commentating but watching the film I couldn't help but think that any thirteen year old contemplating murder sort of gets a green lit idea. And the bit about the teacher giving the unpunishable kids HIV tainted milk, as part of her revenge, is chilling but it's more that she fills the kids with a fear of their own mortality than attempting murder of her own. You'll see what I mean when you watch the film. It's just one of the many questionable aspects of the script's believability that ....

If you over think this film it can fall apart. If you're the type that does that kind of thing you won't like it as much as I did. But unless you are also sensitive to slow motion or post rock emo soundtracks it's hard not to be overwhelmed by this masterfully crafted film.

Director: Tetsuya Nakashima
Starring: Takako Matsu, Masaki Okada, Yoshino Kimura, Masakazu Ato, Atsushi Ozawa

Japan Times
Beyond Hollywood






Director: Kaige Chen

Official site
Illuminated Lantern

Kiss Me, Kill Me 킬미 (Kill Me) [2009] • South Korea

This one's very funny, one of those films in which the director and the actors do a dance of comic timing. Hye-jeong Kang is always good but Shin Hyeon-Jun turns out to be a real comic treat. This is an action flick with lots of humor.

Jin-young (Kang) is devastated after a breakup with her long time partner and wants to kill herself, but she wants to do it with flair so she hires a hit man to take her out. Hyun-jun (Shin) thinks he is hired to kill someone else and is surprised to discover Jin-young has slipped herself into the place of his intended target. Yeah, it's an "assassin falls in love with his target" story but the performances of the two leads makes this one a winner. The script is a little chaotic at times, lots of coincidences that challenge a suspension of disbelief, but if you just go with the flow it's a fun ride.

The film's ending unravels instead of tying things up but it's not a deal breaker. In a way, the whole film can be seen as a series of sketches that just parade by instead of building upon one another to form a cohesive whole, and that may be a valid criticism depending on the angle of entry the viewer chooses. Thriller? Romantic Comedy? Action flick? It's all of those, and it's one of the things I like about South Korean cinema. They do mashups, and they do them well, always playing with expectations and throwing in surprises.

If you are a fan of either of the two leads you will enjoy Kiss Me, Kill Me. It's fun and entertaining precisely because it's full of not what you'd expect.

Director: Jong-hyeon Yang
Starring: Hye-jeong Kang, Hyeon-jun Shin, Hyeon-a Kim, Do-bin Park

Beyond Hollywood 






Director: Keisuke Yoshida
Starring: Hiroyuki Miyasako, Riisa Naka, Kumiko Aso

Girlfriend • Someone Please Stop the World [2004] • Japan






Director: Ryuichi Hiroki

Jack Goes Boating [2010] • USA





Director: Philip Seymour Hoffman








Director: Ryuichi Hiroki

Japan Times
Midnight Eye








Director: Je-yong Lee

Glasses めがね (Megane) [2007] • Japan






Director: Naoko Ogigami
Japan Times
Time Out (an opposing view)

Top Ten Most Enjoyable Films of 2010

  1. The Social Network • USA
  2. Confessions • Japan**
  3. Aftershock • China
  4. Scott Pilgrim vs the World • USA
  5. Greenberg • USA
  6. Catfish • USA
  7. Season of Good Rain • China, South Korea
  8. Hear Me • Taiwan
  9. Closer to Heaven • South Korea
  10. One Day • Taiwan

