Memories of Murder (2003): This masterpiece by Bong Joon Ho is typical of the director at his best. Thus, it happily manages to contain opposites and fuses them beautifully: this is a police procedural that loathes police and policing yet still treats its terrible, violent and stupid coppers as full human beings; a film that’s often nearly cartoonishly comedic but also as dark and earnest as you get; a film about the obsession that – much like Fincher’s Zodiac but very different – suggests the obsessive search for truth can never actually reach it; and so on, and so forth.
Unlike the films where Bong goes all crazy all of the time, this is as disciplined a piece of filmmaking as I can imagine – there’s not a wasted shot, no gesture that isn’t important, no joke not dissolved into its opposite.
Smugglers (2023): Ryoo Seung-wan, on the other hand, simply is a grand crowd-pleaser of a director, and while I think this period piece about female smugglers (Kim Hye-su and Yum Yjung-ah being the most important ones) following caper movie rules to get one up on some rather spectacularly horrible men – all the good ones get killed – isn’t one of his best films, it’s still made with off-handed verve and a sense of the blockbuster style movie as a joyful thing. So I’m perfectly okay with accepting how messy this is around the edges of its script.
Idiot Girls and School Ghost: School Anniversary (2024): An idol-led horror comedy with a lot of meta jokes isn’t exactly my cup of tea, but director Kim Min Ha actually does manage to create some moments that charm this viewer the film absolutely isn’t made or meant for, particularly in a glorious guest appearance of a certain Mary, Mother of God and her cosmological buddy Buddha.
Which, as it turns out, is at least the kind of joke that’s made for me.
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