Tom's Reviews

For film three of my Korean Week I watched a political thriller, and honestly I was completely baffled by 26 Years (Geun-hyun Cho, Late Spring.) It's such a mixed bag in terms of quality, and often comes across as a botched job. And yet behind all that cosmetic mishap is a truly moving story of a tragedy that occurred 38 years ago (26 in the movies time.) But I'm not sure with how much grace and finesse this film portrays its touching story, and that may be its biggest flaw. 26 Years is about the Gwangju Uprising in 1980. I wasn't familiar with the event until I saw the film, but having researched it after the film its truly saddening to hear. Student protesters were brutally murdered by military troops while protesting, something the film and many critics attribute to the president Chun Doo-hwan. And the first thirty or so minutes of the film is such a devastatingly harrowing experience as it details through animation the suffering of protesters at the time, watching as t

Film two of my Korean Week (once again, how original) solidifies my appreciation and faith in Korean cinema. Luck-Key (only slightly more original than Korean Week) is a romantic comedy that far surpasses expectations, and, in my opinion, proves that Korea has mastered cinema. I'm not a fan of romantic comedies. I appreciate why people like them, but personally I've never liked the cheesy, overly sentimental, badly written movies that they often are. But Luck-Key manages to go beyond those tropes, and be something unique, while still offering the sentimentality and cheese that people enjoy about these films. The plot is simple, it feels almost western in a way. It wouldn't be out of place to think this could be a film Adam Sandler and Andy Samberg have starred in. Hyung-wook (Hae-jin Yoo, A Taxi Driver) is a hired killer. Jae-sung (Joon Lee, Seoul Station) is a suicidal mess who has no money and is pretty content ending it all. However, just before he does he decides to

I've decided to watch nothing but Korean films for the next week. I'm dubbing it Korean Week (how original). My first thought was to scour Netflix for Korean films, and I'll be honest, I wasn't expecting to find much. But lo and behold the first film in the list stood out as something worth watching. So I sat down for 2 hours to watch Vanishing Time: The Boy Who Returned (the quality of the title is not indicative of the film.) Vanishing Time, as I'm going to refer to it as from this point forward, is a sci-fi drama film from director Tae-hwa Eom (Ingtoogi). I went into this film with very little expectation and I feel as if this was the right way to go. Knowing nothing about this made the experience that much more pleasurable as Vanishing Time has a pretty weird plot. The plot of Vanishing time feels like it would fare pretty poorly anywhere else. Essentially a bunch of kids venture out into the hills to see a tunnel being demolished. While they're there t