This film, from the point of view of the Johnnie To films that I know, is way off balance. Andy Lau is running around stealing scenes like a madman, with epilepsy tossed in as his "tragic" weakness. Simon Lam is in there, but why? He seems like an added ingredient; and his transition into a down-and-out alcoholic writer at the end of the film seems phony and unprepared for, a goofy movie device for getting out of the problem of finishing the movie. Another To actor, Kelly Lin, is in there also, but only as a lame Hollywood-type love interest with strange motivations, just a movie prop. Takashi Sorimachi is in there as the brilliant, invincible, and brooding (depressed?) glamour killer who would be more at home in an ego-driven pretentious piece of Hollywood garbage. The storyline is weird and almost forgettable. The sets are uninteresting. The music? I can't remember the music. Oh yeah, Andy Lau wears a Bill Clinton mask on his first date with Kelly Lin. Does that work for anybody on any level?

In short, this seems to be a Hollywood-type star-system movie, with the stars (especially Lau) refusing to be anything but stars, with everybody acting in his or her own movie. This movie isn't as bad as a Hollywood movie because the people involved have both talent and integrity; but it's certainly headed in that direction.

The story is your basic K-drama 18-year-old bride story, but the characters are so well-conceived and beautifully acted that it has a remarkable freshness, charm, and energy to it. Han Ji-Hye gives such an intense and complex portrayal of the 18-year-old bride in question that you worry about the drama's effect on her. She can do all the classic sassy high-school-girl moves, but textures it with some serious self-doubt and the almost-desperate need to get a clear sense of the situations that she gets herself into. She has an unshakeable love for "her man," but has to learn how to act in accordance with that love and the social strains that come with that love. She can be both thoughtful and vacant, dull and charming, loud and quiet, innocent and scheming, virginal and lustful, prudish and erotic, naïve and wise, shallow and deep, timid and bold, insecure and self-confident, elegant and crude, loving and indifferent, sincere and manipulative, playful and serious, infantile and mature, determined and hesitant, focused and wayward. What she is depends on the newness and importance of the situation to her; and she's as liable to make the "right" decision as the "wrong" one. Han handles all of this beautifully with energy, a variety of distinctive facial expressions, physical postures and movements, vocal inflections, and wardrobe changes (from hanbok to leopard-skin coat); and does so in a way that all of these many facets come together to portray one beautiful and charming high-maintenance high-school girl intent on finding her way into a new and complex world. Han's performance is beautifully over-acted, while maintaining your interest and concern every step of the way, as in a well-acted first-rate sexual stage comedy.

Lee Dong Gun does a great job as the emotionally-hesitant and confused 28-year-old husband, who proposes one of your basic K-drama situations--a purely formal relationship that will get people off his back. He can seem fierce and confident, and he can seem goofy and uncertain. He can also seem loving and attentive, then appear preoccupied and indifferent. He and Han worked beautifully together, portraying some touching moments and some scary ones. It was great to watch their sense of love develop and strengthen into something natural, unshakeable, and charming.

The supporting cast was also very good, especially The Twins, two of the Five Princesses, whom I've loved since seeing them in "Take Care Of My Cat". I have to confess that one of my main motives for buying the DVD was to see them in action again.

The quality of the scenes was consistently high, and I'm looking forward to watching the drama again. There are some scenes that I especially liked. Among them are: the final scene of the first episode; the scene where Lee, dressed in a hanbok, is mistaken for an extra in an historical film; the final scene with the bad-girl lawyer; and all the scenes that feature one or both of The Twins. My great discovery in the series, however, was Han Ji-hye; and I'm looking forward to seeing her in other things. Next stop? "East Of Eden", where I hear she's amazing.

The scenery is great! I loved that sequence where Song Kang-ho leaves his house and walks through the market, passing among a baby elephant, forlorn prostitutes, camels, fire-breathers, strange carts filled with unidentifiable goods, shabby and wobbly buildings, and plenty of grotesque-looking tough guys, and funky-looking spies.

The filming and editing are remarkable. There's great framing, beautiful lines of vision, nice extreme angles, and a rich mix of long shots, close-ups, mid-distance-shots. The camera is hand-held, stable, and moving along various supports. It's fun to watch the camera moving across a scene, then have the characters move across the lens of a stable camera. There's even a shot where the blood in a scene splatters onto the camera lens. The action scenes are painstakingly edited, with the cuts lasting 3-5 seconds, and a constant radical shift of angles of vision flipping the viewer all over the place. There are claustrophobically closed-in spaces and wide-open desert spaces. The fabulous wild 5-way chase scene towards the end makes even the desert seem crowded. There are all sorts of nice bits of action in there also.

The plot is plenty serviceable. It's a high-value, well-known, and much-used movie device. It's great for reminding us that we're watching a movie that's very aware of its movie-ness. In this case, it gives a team of remarkably talented and dedicated movie people the opportunity to show us how wonderful a movie can be.

I like it that the one word that the hero's mother (beautifully played by Kim Su-mi, whom I liked in "Marrying the Mafia") can say well is the word "shit!" The starring veteran actors, Kim Su-mi and Im Chae-mu, give good, lively, interesting performances. I liked the two supporting actors who played the hero's sister and the heroine's uncle very much also. They give a nice wacky slant to the proceedings.

The two young leads, Yoo-jin and Ha Seok-jin, were good also, giving a light engaging touch to your basic boy-meets girl, boy-and-girl-hate-each other, boy-and-girl-love-each-other shenanigans, which include, as usual, all sorts of idiotically unbelievable strategies for getting the couple to know, love, and yearn for each other (like, "I won't take your money, but I'll earn it by giving you lessons in how to make traditional Korean dolls!"). The twist on all this is that once the couple decides that they're in love, and want to get married, they have to convince their feuding parents (who are determined to break them up) to let them get married. This has predictable consequences, and is brought about by one no-holds-barred emotionally manipulative scene, jerking tears without shame; a scene, by the way, that contains some of the hilariously worst bad acting by a non-Korean that I've seen in a Korean movie. (Where do they get these people?)

The movie is a real movie; and though not a great movie, it's a nice little treat. And let's face it, though I worship the ground that Jeon Do-yeon, Moon So-ri, Song Kang-ho, and all the other deep geniuses currently blessing us with beautiful films walk on, sometimes I feel like experiencing something light, unbelievable, and pleasant. When I feel that way, "Unstoppable Marriage" will be one of my go-to movies.

The storyline itself is very engaging. The obese and bland Ko Man-soo is left at the altar by the beautiful, energetic, and popular Oh Soo-jung after he fails to pass the final stage of his law boards. He leaves Korea, and comes back eight years later as a famous, handsome heart-throb, world-class golfer. Soo-jung still has charm and beauty, but she's 34, carries more weight than she'd like, and on the dating service evaluation, she scores only 67 points out of a possible 100. There's the revenge motive and there's the love motive. Those conflicting motives get beautifully worked out in the series, with, since it's television after all, a good dose of fantasy situations.

The writing is very good. The work situations are very nicely drawn. The locations (as usual in K-drama) are very well-chosen, and used to good effect. The camera loves the remarkably and uniquely beautiful Uhm Jung-hwa, even when it reveals the make-up smudge marks covering up bits of not altogether successful plastic surgery work. That woman has a charm that will make you accept anything. I know that she wasn't born with those beautiful, luscious, and sassy lips, but I like them just the same. She's got a spirit and talent that makes everything work, makes everything truly hers!

The cast is wonderful. I liked everyone. They did a great job of bringing the remarkable writing to life. As usual in K-drama, the child actors were as good and professional as the adults. (How can children act that well? Are they really 30 year-old midgets?) The bad guys were evil without being dehumanized. The good guys were good, but with plenty of flaws. There was some wonderful overacting, especially from Bae Doo-na's mother. The beautiful, self-absorbed, calculating, ruthless, and unlovable bad girl is played to perfection.

The writing was excellent. The writers took some of the standard elements of K-drama--love between people from different classes, the family obsession with marriage, the emotionally-stunted and damaged romantic hero, the secret family relationship, the tension between social and personal rules--and created something that kept you thinking and guessing. They put their heroine in some interesting situations, and you spend a lot of time evaluating her decisions. Prince Charming had some interesting problems, and you spend a lot of time wondering about whether or not he's worth the emotional effort. It's one of the few enjoyable dramas that made me want to figure out what I thought about what happened in the episode that I just finished watching rather than rushing on to the following episode to see what happens next. That's pretty good. I like that.

The story itself is a comedy filled with dangerous people, and has a brutally comic ending. The main figure, Inspector Lo, is a kind of vicious clown. He gets brutally beaten at the beginning of the film and spends the rest of the film with the results of that beating in full view. The PTU patrol unit goes about its work with seriousness and brutality. They seem to be grouped in their movements as a kind of dance, sometimes they're dramatically spread out in ways that remind me of Italian and American westerns, sometimes they're packed tightly in the police van. They're often filmed from unusual angles, and always in an interesting artificial night-time light. The action comes to an end with a western-style gunfight reminds me of the highly stylized westerns of Sergio Leone.

With that intensity in mind, I prefer to think of "Epitaph" not as a horror film, but rather as a dramatic film about love, narrated by ghosts. It's beautifully conceived, written, and acted. Its "horror" elements are nicely imagined and executed; and its "love" elements are original, unusual, and convincing. The collaboration between the director and the actors seems ideal, which makes the slowed-down stately pacing of the film impeccable.

At the end of the film you don't feel as though you've witnessed the hard and dangerous times of people who at one time or another found themselves the victims of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, which is the way you normally feel at the end of a horror film. What you get, instead, is the sense of people who have touched the deepest, most beautiful, points in their lives; and the depth and beauty are highlighted and made more intense in the presence of death.

There are the three unbeatable good guys: the famous lady sheriff, the famous lady heroine, and the famous bodyguard. Everybody in the territory knows them, if not by sight then by reputation. When the famous lady sheriff is on your case, you can assume that your case is closed. As she says, “I don’t like not getting my own way.” Or “No crook escapes from me.” And on top of that, she’s got something special up her sleeves – both of them. The famous lady heroine (“Don’t you know that smart people live longer?”) goes around with a bunch of coffins, and she knows how to fill them. The famous (male) bodyguard, though handsome, is a very tough customer; and doesn’t show much patience for people who won’t believe that he’s not a mute, he just doesn’t like to talk. He’ll pull out of his specially prepared vest a prepared scroll informing you of the fact; and if you’re wise, you’ll just leave it at that. He has a lot of scrolls in that vest, but none of them allow for follow-up questions.

The movie is definitely operating in movieland, taking a fun-loving look at the genre, while not forgetting that there’s a plot. The famous lady heroine walks into a bar passing herself off as a man without any problems, although almost no effort was made to make her look like a man. I loved her line in that scene when she says to the lady bar owner, “I’m a good-looking guy. You’re a good-looking woman. Let’s go to bed.” The famous lady sheriff balances on a spinning umbrella during the climactic fight with the arch-villain. And the famous bodyguard, fight-ready to the end, never breaks into a sweat.

It’s a fun, high-quality lively movie, with a lot of energy. I especially liked the dialogue. The grunts are great for punctuating the punches. The verbal dialogue is fabulous. I don’t know how it came across in the original, but I enjoyed the fun tone of the English dubbing. Those voice guys were good! Some of my favorite lines:

• “That’s to teach you . . . , not to talk to me dirty.”
• “Hey mister! What do you need that for? What do you want with a big magnet?”
• “Your kung fu is pretty good; but it’s not good enough.”
• “If I’m crazy, how come I’m such a good fighter?”
• “Even if you kill me, I’ll never tell you anything.”
• “You’re the cruelest woman in the world!” - “Whatever you say.”
• “I don’t want to do this, but I have to. I’m going to start burning you.”
• “You do amaze me. A mute who likes collecting birds.”
• “You’re not a bad person. It’s just that you have an annoying look.” – “If we’re comparing looks, I don’t like yours either.” – “Huh?”

There’s also the wonderful Korean everyday realism. It was in Korean films that I discovered that it was normal for film characters to go to the bathroom. Here I find out that high school girls do have periods; and that when some people are really frightened, they wet their pants. Isn’t that perfectly normal?

Soo’s past is not made very clear. There are none of the parent-child flashbacks that we’re used to in Korean dramas. How Soo got separated from and lost contact with his twin brother is a bit murky. The exact relationship between the twins and their respective “outsider” father figures is never spelled out. And so on. What we do have, from a cinematic point of view, is a very interesting character. As an apparently orphaned kid, he developed his view that with money, you could solve any problem, making him willing to risk and undergo any amount of physical violence to get it. Watching him rob the drug dealer in that early scene, you get the impression that you’re not dealing with a brilliant criminal mind, but rather with somebody who is so determined and focused that the physical beating he gets doesn’t really matter. That’s probably what made him such a good fighter. In that early scene in the garage where he frightens the businessman into signing and handing over documents, he doesn’t care that he himself is in that car that he’s jerking around and smashing into things to scare the businessman. The final battle scene is remarkable. He goes and goes against about a dozen knife and sword-wielding, kicking and punching gangsters. But he’s also the kind of person who, as a kid, would jam an afro wig on his head, join up with three veteran lady club singers about twice his age, and jump around the stage in front of a bunch of drunks, singing the song, “Money!”

This is not a kind of cold-blooded assassin/leading man that I’m used to. Ji Jin Hee portrays him beautifully. There’s no clear intelligence in his eyes; not much emotion; no sense of ambition; no flow of ego. No snappy quips to the bad guys; no kick-ass talk to one and all; no tender looks for the ladies; no fancy kicks, cool punches, or smoothly-executed slices to wherever. He just gets into that adrenalin zone and goes. What’s his motivation? Redemption. How does he get it? Revenge. This is pure stuff, and I’d love to see him in action again.

Other aspects of the film are very good also. The use of music was especially good – spare and understated for the most part; and slightly mournful in general; not the bang-bang-bang of the typical action film. It was beautifully directed and acted, with every gesture and image having significance. The suspense is good, and gets resolved with believable actions. The use of locations, as usual in K-Flix is great. The dark corridors, dead-end alleys, and the criss-crossing narrow streets make for great action scenes that you love to enter and follow in your imagination – the underside of Seoul, the paths of the outsiders.

The film reminds me of the films of one of my favorite French directors, Eric Rohmer. In Rohmer’s films the main activity is talking, the main theme is love, the main issues are of non-heroic everyday life, and the main problems are of truth and honesty. Rohmer’s films very often have a vacation setting. (One of his more well-known early films is called "Pauline at the Beach".) Both Hong and Rohmer make beautiful use of their locations, making them almost characters in themselves, though in different ways. I loved Hong’s use of the wonderful, slightly overcast seaside natural daylight. His nights on the beach were also very nice, and distinctive.

As for the quality of talk, both Hong and Rohmer are working with languages that are among the four or five most beautiful in the world. Korean, however, has a much richer set of sounds and emotional possibilities than French; and the serious Confucianism of Korean culture makes for unlimited daily drama. (Where else could you create dramatic tension around calling someone "big sister" ("onnie")?) Ko Hyeon-Jeong, playing the Composer, is one of the most wonderful beautiful talkers in a culture of beautiful talkers; and she has a range of tones and textures in her voice that can’t be matched by French actresses. She’s amazing! Her laugh alone belongs in a museum of beautiful things. Hong uses her very well; and her conversations with the two male characters sound almost like musical compositions written for contralto, baritone and bass. The French also like to create these music-like conversational compositions.

What about truth and honesty? There are the obvious lies that the characters tell, the obvious dishonesties. But there are also the statements and actions that seem honest, but which arouse suspicion once you think about them. Should we believe the Director when he says in his hilarious complaint about the attractiveness of Asian women to Western men that he doesn’t feel inadequate regarding penis size? Or is penis size the reason he hesitates to strip completely when they decide to have sex? Is the Composer really only upset about the possibility of the Director and "that bitch" "walking over" her (which didn’t happen), or is she really upset because they slept together while she was sleeping at the door. So humiliating! Was she just trying to be cool? Was the Director telling the truth when he "confessed" to her while she pretended to be asleep? He knew she wasn’t sleeping. And if he was telling the truth, could the friend who brought the Composer on the trip be the "best friend" who slept with the Director’s wife before they were married? And, if so, did he seduce the Composer just to get even, and not because he was especially attracted to her? And was all that talk of love that developed so quickly during those couple of days simply a set of games to keep from getting bored during some free time? As film viewers, we can’t be sure what’s going on; but that’s a problem we share with all the characters in the film, especially the liars themselves. Voilà. There you have it; the quiet chaos of everyday life. Thanks, Hong. Beautiful film! I’d give it more stars, but the most I’m allowed is 5.

This third “Public Enemy” is funnier, more energetic, and more violent than the first two. Seol has returned to the sloppy loser look that he had in the first one and dropped in the second. He’s ready to rumble rough again. And rumble rough he does, against the always-fantastic Jeong Jae-young’s (Has that guy ever been in a bad movie?) playing a character who’s proud to say that he was born a gangster and remains a gangster, no matter how expensive he looks. He makes a great self-assured complex-character opponent for Seol’s rough-and-tumble, scraggly, determined cop. The fabulous Yoo Hae-jin is back as the stabbing expert (now a butcher), and his performance is beautiful. Lee Moon-sik is in there as an ex-con turned successful honest businessman; and, as usual, he does it up right. The young actress who plays Seol’s smart strong-willed daughter is great, and so is the actress who plays his no-nonsense mother.

The dialogue is lively; with nice tough talk from both from the gangsters (“I’m a thug to the bone!”) and the cops (“Tell me the truth; or don’t bother talking!” or “I don’t need any evidence. Never have.”)

And as for being cool? What does the movie have to say? It says this: Cool is superficial. When push comes to shove, and it usually does, what counts is something much deeper than cool. Having a bad temper also helps.

I liked the new texture that Han gives to his portrayal. There's the familiar restrained cop Han under a lot of tension, but there's also the new aspect of the unrestrained cop who howls, squeals, mocks, wisecracks, insults, abuses, intimidates, and is arrogant and excitable. Han slips from the cool into the crazy with ease. It's a nice contrast with the always cool Cha, who's always up to the situation; and who in the end, has to set up his own arrest in order to make it happen.

The film has a wonderful texture: high style, great lighting, rapid scenes (some almost at the speed of thought), hand-held camera shots, multi-split screens, spare but effective dialogue, great music, and Han with never a hair out of place sporting a jacket-coat that he could have borrowed from a very stylish big sister. It's a male-bonding film with homoerotic overtones. The major "female" character in the film is a male transvestite, and the last image that we have of Cha is in a photograph that he sent to Han from his Island retreat, showing his handsome face and his bare manly chest. The photo accompanies a plane ticket and an invitation to Han to join Cha and his buddies in their island paradise.

A distraught debt-ridden, greedy woman, abandons a 4-year-old child on a train, only to have her show up 15 years later as the love object of both her sons; forces her out of their lives because she’s poor; only to have her show up again four years later, finally discovering piece by piece that she’s not only the abandoned child, but also the daughter of her most important business partner, who, by the way, is slowly overcoming the amnesia that keeps him from remembering the key past characters and events. It might sound like your basic K-drama filled with coincidences, but the intensity and quality of the performances coupled with the brilliance of the writing makes it unforgettable and deeply human.

There are also beautiful shots of Seoul, especially the Han River at night.

The story elements themselves are unusual enough. There are gangsters who can’t be killed, but who are easily embarrassed; small-town hillside farmers who terrorize the gangsters instead of the other way around; a murdered girl’s ghost who is more concerned with being warm in her grave than in getting revenge; an ex-monk-turned-gangster who gives out hilarious bad spiritual information; and diamonds that travel the whole route through the digestive tract – front to back.

The location is great, and is beautifully and cleverly filmed. The acting is remarkable, especially in the way the actors make absurd situations seem natural. Each character is clearly portrayed and directed towards the situation at hand, and not mugging, overacting, or playing to an audience outside the scene. They make you believe. And when it’s over (with a nice human touch), you step back and say “Wow!”

The spies are all everyday people – middle to upper management types – who go to church, try to fix colleagues up with dates, wash their car, watch baseball on TV, go to batting cages, eat in not-t-o-charming neighborhood restaurants run by not-too-picturesque owners. But they’re all clearly spies, and would shoot, stab, torture, or beat you to death without hesitation if the job called for it.

Weather is featured, and the rain scenes are very beautiful. The lead couple quietly falls in love without emotional fireworks or scenes of passion. The tension necessary to spy films is clearly there, however; and the film grabs you from the very beginning and keeps your heightened attention to the very end, past the end even.

Han Suk Kyu is at the center of this; and his performance as a strong, serious, smart, committed double agent fully aware of his vulnerability in a world that could never be under anybody’s control, is very beautiful to follow. I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen.

1. Good boy meets bad girl.
2. Boy and girl don’t get along.
3. Boy and girl fall in love as bad girl reveals her heart of gold.