[2009] IRIS Lee Byung Hun and Kim Tae Hee *Updated 10/10/08*

I thought Open City (which did pretty well at the box office) was pretty good -- gritty, rarely dull, and the pickpocket stuff is all very well done. Most of it is intricate and requires colloborations of her whole team; you can follow what they're doing with each knick, purse snatch and hidden corner. The film is very violent though (a lot of knife slashes and an impaling or two, Kobe23 you'd approve! ), and there's this one scene with a razor blade that kinda dips into Old Boy territory. One especially nice tough is how though there's kind of an romantic storyline and kind of a storyline regarding an absentee mother, really the story stays attached to its dirty play. Dishonour before death and love, the tone is consistent and keeps the story humming.

Kim Hae Sook (the biological mother in Autumn Tale) steals the show here. When you first see her, hair cropped and arm tattooed, you know Hae Sook is FAR from the mom roles she's played in just about half the K-dramas. Emotionally present but gritty and toward the end, just visceral and a little ugly.

Son Yeh Jin delivers a complete, very thought out performance in Open City. And it's a complete misfire. She takes a risk at portraying the femme fatale/crime boss as a kind of CM queen endorsing tattoos, couture thievery, and knife-in-back deceits. Everything is mannered finely but excessively and on the surface, the way she puffs from her cigs, the contemptuous hahas, the smug satisfaction in her eyes about a good plan, the teething of certain worded sentiments, her catwalk enhanced by blank-me pumps. Her contrived "bad performance" is that only a truly talented actor would do; it takes real creativity to miss the mark like this. It's not all that much like Hye Soo's in Tazza), and it would have been spot-on marvelous in a gangster comedy. Her queen bee shtick -- and as shtick it would be a tough sell here even from a Kim Hye Soo or Uhm Jung Hwa -- is also shared by the majority of baddies here, and so it makes you wonder whether the director intended this camp thuggery.

It's also worth watching if you haven't seen Kim Myung Min yet do "Kim Myung Min." He's the very, very rare Korean screen actor that reveals no tells with his emotions or palpable anticipation with his physicality. His rage feels truly terrifying, and his acting has an awesome immediacy. (Like Kang Ji Hwan, his theatrical background kinda shows itself in the way his voice can explode with barely a wink of the eye, and how shifts in emotions are conveyed first through representative gestures and delivery, rather than through facial expressions. It can be distracting sometimes.) However he is not great here either -- you feel little rapport between him and Son Yeh Jin until late in the movie, and almost none between him and the rest of his cop buddies. It's maybe too much to ask for an open performance, and perhaps he has absolutely no sympathy towards an audience wanting to see more of his character's heart.