"Memories"
Directed by Kim Ji-Woon (The Foul King)
A banner hangs over the entrance to a sparsely populated Korean city under construction: "Welcome to New Town - Where dreams come true." Which sounds nice--as long as you have nice dreams.

"Husband" (Jeong Bo-Seok) is having dreams. Bad dreams. And he's seeing things. (Aside from the death angle, about the only thing the three films share is the recurring motif of people seeing things that may or may not be there.) He's also seeing a shrink. His wife has gone missing and, as he says several times, he has a terrible feeling that "something bad has happened to her."

Meanwhile, "Wife" (Kim Hye-Su) wakes up in the middle of the street, her belongings strewn about. As she retrieves the contents of her purse and tries to regain her bearings, images flash briefly, and we realize that she has no idea where she is, how she got there--or worse, who she is.

Time passes for both of them, but how much exactly we never know. As Husband tries to cope with Wife's disappearance, he seems to be slowly losing his mind, hallucinating and snapping at his in-laws. But as seemingly bad as he has it, Wife has it worse. Hers is a struggle to not only regain her identity, but to make it back home in spite of obstacles that seem to crop up just as she makes a bit of forward progress. She finds a home telephone number on a laundry receipt in her purse, but can't complete a call. She sees a little girl walking to the bus stop and recognizes the girl's backpack, but the bus pulls away and she is unable to catch up. After dark she manages to hail a taxi, but the mute driver takes her in the wrong direction. It's quite a good performance from the actress who, with very little dialogue, effectively communicates her inner confusion.

"Memories" is a story told well in quiet pictures. The cinematography impressed me as very precise, the visuals striking, almost clinical. But as good as it is, it's not perfect. The film is most effective when it's brooding and mysterious, and least effective when the director is just going for shock value. There are two such gratuitous scenes, and they serve only to take you out of the movie. If the elements of the scenes had been thematically related to the movie, that would have been understandable, perhaps--but I still haven't figured out what they had to do with anything.

"The Wheel"
Directed by Nonzee Nimibutr (Nang nak, Jan Dara)
Master Tao, the puppet master of a Thai village, is dying. He's also seeing the ghosts of his wife and son, who drowned in the river while trying to discard his Hun Lakorn Lek puppets because they are cursed. And there's no doubt they're cursed--after all, through the magic of movies, we're blessed with the actual voice of the spirit vowing death and destruction on anyone who messes with the puppets. Yet even the legend of the curse plus the deaths of Tao and his family are not enough to dissuade Khon performer Master Tong (a sort of "lower order" puppeteer) from coveting Tao's valuable puppets.

Tong secretly takes possession of the ornate puppets and things start going wrong immediately. Some family members start dying mysteriously, others start acting strangely, and I actually got goose bumps. Tong thinks he can outsmart the curse, but we all know the spirits aren't ones to suffer fools gladly. The title evidently refers to the wheel of karma--although under this curse, even the innocent are punished with the guilty. I guess it takes a village.

Gaan (Suwinit Panjamawat, aka the lucky bastard who got to fondle nekkid Christy Chung in Jan Dara), the young student of Master Tao, is the only one who believes in the curse--not that it does him or anyone else any good. Tong's young granddaughter, Bua, evokes the biggest reactions with her completely mute performance (she's never heard, and seen "conversing" only once, with her puppet). Hers was the performance that gave me goose bumps and later brought tears.

In the end, after a series of escalating tragedies, Master Tong is allowed what author Richard Bach calls a "mercy chute"--yet given another chance to get it right, he again lets his greed get the better of him. As a Marine buddy of mine used to say: "Never underestimate the power of man to deceive himself."

The Wheel is an entertaining diversion and an interesting look at a facet of Thai culture I wasn't even aware of. And you'll never hear me complain about returning to Thailand, even if only in the movies.

"Going Home"
Directed by Peter Ho-Sun Chan (Comrades: Almost a Love Story)
Two apartment blocks on Hong Kong's Aberdeen Street have been scheduled for demolition. But as the last of the residents are leaving, CID officer and widower Chan Wai (Eric Tsang) moves in with his young son, Cheung. Besides the manager, the only other resident of the blocks is the quiet, focused Mr. Yu (Leon Lai) and his wife, Hai'er (Eugenia Yuan), who is "paralyzed from the waist down," according to the manager. But who is little girl in the red coat Cheung keeps seeing?

With no wife and no money for a sitter, Chan has no choice but to leave Cheung--a fearful type--home alone when he goes to work, admonishing him to "be a man and stop being so scared." One day, Cheung sees the little girl on the breezeway; she approaches him and asks, "Will you play with me?" He follows her to the photography studio seen in the opening of the film. When Chan comes home and Cheung is missing, he checks with the apartment manager and with Yu, whose evasiveness prompts Chan to do a little extra digging. While Yu is out, he returns to Yu's apartment and is shocked to find Hai'er submerged in the bathtub...

Lovingly shot by WKW partner Christopher Doyle,"Going Home" plays out like an episode of "The Twilight Zone" with a decidedly Asian flavor. Mostly it reminded me of my favorite "Tales from the Crypt" episode, in which a professor plays a cruel joke on a colleague by making him think he's dead (though he's merely paralyzed).

Leon Lai has certainly moved beyond his pop idol appeal, and Eric Tsang continues to impress me with his range. I just watched him in Infernal Affairs as the cop-taunting triad boss; here he plays the everyman widower concerned more for his missing son than for his own life, even as he tries to figure out the truth behind the predicament he finds himself in. Eugenia Yuan's role was minimal, but presented its own unique demands. She does a lot with very little. The ending is, by turns, nerve-wracking, sad, shocking and bittersweet.

I love a film that makes me think. I'm still not one hundred percent on the meaning of the photography studio that bookends the film, but I've watched "Going Home" twice now, and I think I have it mostly sussed. I don't want to give anything away, so it's up to you to come to your own conclusions. Deeper meanings aside, it's a nice way to bring the story full circle.

Overall, Three is worthy viewing. I found each film to be appealing in its own way, although the stark, clean images of "Memories" are the ones that keep coming to mind. Movies like Three are why I started watching "foreign" films in the first place. If I want another buddy cop movie with lots of explosions and wisecracks, there's no shortage in America. But whether it's because of the language or the storytelling tradition, foreign films are--not to be too obvious--different. And different is good.

COMMENTS
I thought the concept of this film was very sweet. Putting three leading directors, each from different countries with their own ideas and differences into one film. Very cool. I knew right away that I wouldn't like all three stories, but I had to appreciate the way they were told and directed and that's what I enjoyed most about the film.

--
Lets first start with the Chinese film by director Peter Chan called Going Home.

This was my favorite story and also the longest in the movie, being about an hour. What I liked most about it was the story. It wasn't meant to scare, but tell an interesting tale about love and devotion between two people.

The story is about a cop and his son, who move into an old apartment building, where barely anyone else lives. The only neighbor he has is a man and his wife who is bound to a wheelchair. One day the son turns up missing, so the cop asks his neighbor if hes seen him. The neighbor acts suspicious, so the cop investigates and learns the man's dark secret.

This story was actually so popular that it actually has its own DVD that is loaded with extras. I purchased the 3-disc DVD set that contained all three stories, so I wasn't able to see what extras it may have had. If I were to rate it on its own I would have given it a 7-rating. Very beautifully directed, good music that fit well with the story, and an excellent story.

--
The next story is called Memories by Korean director Ji Woon Kim.

I thought this was a pretty decent story. It was the only story that actually had some focus on scares, but I wasn't too into the story itself. It was a bit predictable, but interesting.

The movie basically tells the story from two point of views - the husband and wife. The husband's POV is basically just him waiting for his wife to return from wherever she is, where the wife's POV shows her waking up in the middle of the street not knowing who she is or where she's going. Pretty interesting concept, but rather predictable.

The directing was good and I liked the two POVs. It wasn't scary to me, but it did have a couple decent scares for the audience. I'd probably give this story a 6-rating.

--
The final story is called The Wheel by Thailand director Nonzee Nimibutr, who actually directed another film that I liked called Nang-Nak.

Now this story was a bit weird and I wasn't into it as much as I wanted to be. It's probably the worst in the three only because it's the most boring. I really liked the directing and dark atmosphere it had, but I just didn't like the story.

This is about a puppets legend, where its said that certain performers make their own puppets and if someone tries to use their puppets for themselves they are cursed. That's basically what happens here. A man finds a puppet left behind by a previous performer and he tries to use it as his own and he ends up getting cursed.

The story tries to scare the audience in parts, but fails in my opinion. I liked the directing and the story itself was decent, but the final result wasn't as I expected it to be. It was very well directed, but it was just too boring and it left me a little confused in the end. I was fairly disappointed by this. I'd give this one a 5-rating - it was just too boring for me.

--
So is this film worth it? I believe so. It shows the talents of all three directors and I felt my money was well spent, even though I didn't like one of the stories all too much. I'd give the film an overall 6-rating.

OVERALL
A good set of three different stories from three very talented directors. A couple of the stories weren't as good as they could have been, but it's still worth a look at least once.