siff hotties: dasepo sonyeon

The sixth installment of SIFF Hotties! (Previously, Hommes de Paris, Juan José Ballesta, Lee Young-hoon, Boys of Cashback, and Quim Gutiérrez.) And now we're back in Korea.

Today's men are from the bizarro highschool comedy Dasepo Naughty Girls. The movie made no sense, but that's okay, because there was more than enough eye candy. On the left, Lee Yong-joo. He only had a small part in which he pretended to be a teenage girl to get dirty pics of another teenage girl over the internet only to find out that... Well, I don't want to give it away, but it's pretty obvious from the beginning. Yong-joo is 25 and that's all I know about him. In the center is Yoo Geon (sometimes spelled U Gun for fun), my favorite among the three. Yoo Geon is 24 and hails from the colorful city of hope, Daegu. In his teen years, presumably before he attended Konkuk University, he was a part of the late-90s boy band OPPA under the name Kuk Chul. In the movie, he was friends with the lead male character, who was played by the man on the right, Park Jin-woo. Jin-woo is 23, almost 24. And that's all that I know about Jin-woo too, except that his blood type is AB.

Just one review today.

Dasepo Naughty Girls (Dasepo Sonyeo). Rating: 3. Sure, it was funny in parts, but it was just so out of nowhere all the time that by the end I just about gave up on it making any sense. It was based on a web comic about the goings-on at a weird alternative high school, so I guess that's a little understandable, but still. It had nice visuals, and it was a lot of fun at times, but I just felt like it could have been better.

siff hotties: quim gutiérrez

The fifth installment of SIFF Hotties! (Previously, Hommes de Paris, Juan José Ballesta, Lee Young-hoon, and Boys of Cashback.) Today, it's back to Spain.

This is surly hottie Quim Gutiérrez. He plays a surly young janitor in DarkBlueAlmostBlack. He is 26 and from Barcelona. That is all I know about him.

Another couple of great movies.

For the Bible Tells Me So. Rating: 5. It is important that you see this movie, and you get everyone you know to see it too. It's a documentary about homosexuality, religion, and how the bible has been used in relatively recent years to legitimize homophobia. It profiles several families that had to overcome their religiously-based intolerance to accept a member of the family that was gay, including New Hampshire bishop Gene Robinson, former Missouri Congressman Dick Gephardt's daughter Chrissy, and Soulforce's Jake Reitan. No matter who you are, you will recognize a lot of what's going on in this movie in yourself and in the people you know. This has got to be one of the best documentaries I've seen that deals with homosexuality since The Times of Harvey Milk, and all the issues covered are very now, and what we have to triumph over today. After seeing it, I wanted to get out there and tell everyone to see it. Director Daniel Karslake said to expect it to hit theaters later this year, probably sometime this fall, so look out for it.

DarkBlueAlmostBlack (AzulOscuroCasiNegro). Rating: 4. A young man gets a college degree while working as a janitor for the building in which he lives in order to support himself and his father, disabled by a stroke at the beginning of the movie. Meanwhile, his brother (Antonio de la Torre from Volver) is in prison and has fallen in love with a woman who wants to get pregnant so she'll get to live in the maternity area in the prison. There are a couple childhood friends thrown in too. I went into this film not expecting it to be the kind of movie it was. I thought it was going to be a meditative and plodding movie in which nothing much happens, which I like sometimes, which is why I decided to see this movie (oh yeah, and Quim Gutiérrez). But it turned out to be a slightly quirky and touching story about a guy finding himself stuck in a life he didn't choose, looking for a way out. This movie was put together very well, and I liked the ending.

siff hotties: boys of cashback

The fourth installment of SIFF Hotties! (Previously, Hommes de Paris, Juan José Ballesta, and Lee Young-hoon.) Look at these headshots.

These three guys are from the British movie, Cashback, the feature-length version of the Oscar-nominated short of the same name by Sean Ellis. You might recognize the first, Sean Biggerstaff, from the first couple Harry Potter movies where he played Gryffindor quidditch captain Oliver Wood, and the second, Shaun Evans, was in Being Julia with Annette Bening. The third, Michael Dixon, I have personally seen nowhere else. Don't they have nice headshots?

I liked the following movies.

The Ten. Rating: 5. This comedy from the guys that made Wet Hot American Summer was just as funny as I thought it would be. Each of the ten vignettes take one of the Ten Commandments as their theme, and it goes from there. It was hilarious and sure to be referenced repeatedly. There's nothing quite like watching Winona Ryder making out with a ventriloquist dummy, or hot Justin Theroux playing a Mexican Jesus. I'll definitely go and see this again when it comes out in regular release (and not just for Paul Rudd, Adam Brody, Jason Sudeikis, and Bobby Cannavale).

Cashback. Rating: 4. A guy is dumped by his girlfriend and develops insomnia, so he decides to use the time in which he would usually be sleeping by working at a grocery store on the night shift. His insomnia may or may not also give him the ability to stop time. This was another formula movie that I liked. Because it was a formula movie, the film was laid out in such a way that after 20 or 30 minutes, the rest of the movie fell right into your expectations for what was going to happen. But it was fun to watch. One thing I would change though, would be less female nudity and more male nudity. I don't think I've spent as much time in my entire life looking at naked women than in the hour and a half that I spent watching this movie. The camera slowly sweeps up, down, across, and lingers all over various women's bodies, and yes, it bored me a little. But the rest of the movie wasn't as boring.

Tell No One (Ne le dis à personne). Rating: 4. Based on a novel by Harlan Coben, this thriller is about a guy who gets a mysterious email from his supposedly murdered wife after eight years, plunging him into a dangerous world of low level thugs and high level cover-ups! Was that description exciting enough? This was a really well done movie, directed by studly Guillaume Canet (the hot Frenchman who swam to The Beach with Leonardo DiCaprio), with the right amount of tension, mystery, and a little bit of humor. The reveal at the end wasn't terribly surprising, but who says that it has to be?

Nanking. Rating: 4. This is an American-produced documentary about the Nanjing Massacre, where after taking the city of Nanjing during the Second World War, the soldiers in the Japanese army proceeded to pillage and raze the city, and rape and murder the civilian population, men, women, elderly and children alike, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Chinese over the course of several months. This is one of those war atrocities that a lot of people in the US seem not to know about for whatever reason, and I encourage everyone to go see this movie and learn something. And then pick up the book The Rape of Nanking by the late Iris Chang (she suffered a nervous breakdown and shot herself in 2004), and learn even more. It's extremely important that we acknowledge what happened (regardless what some Japanese nationalists might want us to believe), so that these sorts of things don't happen ever, ever again. The accounts by survivors were absolutely heartbreaking, as was the archival footage from hospitals of Chinese children mutilated and disfigured by Japanese soldiers. However, for the documentary, several actors were hired to read the writings of real-life figures who had experienced the Massacre as it was going on while they were in the city of Nanjing, and I have to say it was a little distracting, but it didn't lessen the impact of the movie. That was my only qualm. I hope to see this movie in the collections of school libraries in the coming years.

goodbye my takohachi

Two evenings ago, I went to eat at one of my favorite Japanese restaurants in the International District (formerly known as Chinatown), the great Takohachi, for the last time ever. It closed yesterday as the owners decided it was time for them to retire. Takohachi was one of those small restaurants where you'd go periodically for the inexpensive, delicious food and the friendly atmosphere. I almost always got the same thing here, their o-bento box, which included a bowl of miso soup, a bowl of rice (steamed, fried, or curry), and edamame, lotus root, squash, carrot, sweet omelette, salmon, shrimp, and their famous chicken karaage (always cooked perfectly). It was exactly the right portion, for when I finished, I never felt too full or not full enough, and it provided me with a lot of comfort. It will take me a while before I get over this loss.

This was the second of such been-there-forever, hole-in-the-wall Japanese restaurants to close in so many years. Not too long ago, the best ramen (or saba, if you pleased) in Seattle was taken away from us when Koraku closed up shop after decades of dedicated ramenship. All I'm left with now is Maneki, and I don't know what I'll do with myself if Maneki were ever to go away...

siff hotties: lee young-hoon

The third installment of SIFF Hotties! (Previously, Hommes de Paris and Juan José Ballesta.) Today we travel to Korea.

This is the adorable hottie Lee Young-hoon from the rent boy-rich boy love story, No Regret. I can't seem to find out much else about him except for the fact that he's 25. He did a wonderful job in the movie, and I hope to see more of him. A friend tells me he's going to be in Kong Su-chang's (the director of R-Point) next horror flick, GP 506. I hope he doesn't die too terribly in it...

Embedded video alert! It's the trailer for No Regret.

A couple of reviews.

The Cloud (Die Wolke). Rating: 2. I didn't like this movie, and my main problem with it was that none of the characters seemed to be very well-drawn. Their emotions were never very true to them and seemed to turn in whichever direction the plot required of them. You two, start kissing! You, you're now stubborn! You, run into the radioactive rain in despair! Why? Because then the plot can move along. What was the plot? Two teenagers who had only talked to each other once previously inexplicably fall in love just as a nearby nuclear power plant melts down. They must escape before the radioactive raincloud reaches them and changes their lives forever! While most of the emotions were counterfeit, the acting ability of the main characters was not. Both the leads Paula Kalenberg and Franz Dinda did a terrific job with what they were given, and it was probably their performances that allowed me to sit through the entire movie. Again, a car hitting something it shouldn't be hitting is used as a plot device in this movie. Surely, there is nothing more horrible than someone being hit by a car! (See previous usage in Doghead.)

No Regret (Huhoi haji Anha). Rating: 4. A rent boy (Lee Young-hoon, seen above) leaves his orphanage and tries to make it in big city Seoul. Finding it hard to make ends meet after he is laid off from a factory job, he turns to working as a rent boy in a host bar, one that the rich boy businessman son (Lee Han, a hottie in his own right) of a business executive happens to frequent. A slightly bizarre love story emerges from there. I liked Leesong Hee-il's movie, but I'm kind of wondering why I liked it as much as I did, because I had a big problem with the interactions between the two main characters. Their motivations felt authentic, but the way in which they talked to and acted with each other was so stilted and weird. And it's not that the director can't pull of interactions between people, because I liked everything that was going on between everyone else: between Su-min (the rent boy) and his fellow prostitutes and his pimp; between Jae-min (the rich boy) and his fiancée and his mother. But somehow whenever Su-min and Jae-min were dealing with each other, it just didn't feel realistic. Other than that point (which I guess is kind of major...), I quite liked the story and both the actors did a great job in their roles. It might be that I just need to watch it again, but we'll see.