Next up? Ball-swatting ape
A scene from “Mr. Go,’’ a much-anticipated 3D movie based on a 1980s comic about a baseball-playing ape. / Korea Times file
A roundup of this year’s quirky summer blockbusters that are generating serious buzz
By Yuh Suh-young
The plot of “Cold Eyes,” a crime thriller that sold more than 2 million tickets a week into its release, revolves around a police investigation unit that tracks criminals.
The emphasis is on the word “track” because this group of gifted weirdoes will find the most elusive wrongdoers and stick to them like bedbugs, only to disengage at the moment when their brawnier colleagues attempt to nab them.
This is a rare action movie that is economic with physical elements and doesn’t get much from its excuse for a mental chess match between the good guys and bad guys.
Instead, the film depends entirely on its smart editing, which rapidly shifts back-and-forth between the special police unit pursuing the bad guys and the tech-savvy bad guys monitoring the police, effectively building up to a dramatic conclusion.
The impressive box office numbers justfiy director Joh Ui-seok’s gamble to focus more on the battles between the eyes than fists.
“Pluto” is a biting commentary on Korea’s notoriously hierarchical education system. / Korea Times file
“Pluto,” which opened Thursday, is another notable experiment.
The subject this time is Korea’s notoriously hierarchical education system, which locks students into exam hell and often pushes them to the edge. The story is about a group of elite high school students who are willing to do anything to improve their chances to get into a top university, even if it means someone has to die.
The title of the movie refers to the talented students who are sidelined from the ruthlessly competitive education system, just like Pluto, which was disqualified by scientists as a planet in 2006 due to its low mass.
Director Shin Su-won, who had been a middle-school teacher for 10 years before pursuing her passion in movie-making, manages to harness just enough of all the craziness to give this movie a level of plausibility and therefore qualifying it as an effective social commentary.
“Cold Eyes” and “Pluto” will be competing with a giant, baseball-playing ape. “Mr. Go,” a three-dimensional (3D) film based on the popular 1980s comic of Huh Young-man, is the story of gorilla Ling Ling, who is signed from China by a sports agent to play for a Korean baseball team. He encounters all sorts of drama after dominating the league of hapless humans.
“Snowpiercer” by director Bong Joon-ho, which will be released in August, is another anticipated Korean movie with a unique plot. The thriller is based on a French graphic novel “Le Transperceneige” by Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette, but heavily rewritten by director Bong.
The movie is set in the future where a new ice age kills humanity except for people on a train called “Snowpiercer” which circulates around the globe. Gradually, a class struggle erupts between “the poor” living in the back of the train and “the elite” living at the front as the poor progresses to the front.