If seeing history filtered through a melodramatic lens of dishonesty is your idea of a good time, then you may want to consider buying a ticket to The Attorney; you won’t learn very much about the events it depicts, but at least you’ll be entertained by the film’s almost completely decontextualized content. Or maybe you won’t. Anybody who has a weakness for moral courtroom dramas should find themselves thoroughly engaged by first-time South Korean director Yang Woo-seok, who appears to be merrily cherry picking his way toward crafting a thesis on the abuses of government corruption and the moral imperative of lawyers in a society tainted by it. Everyone else,…
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Last Stands and Bittersweet Lives: Getting to Know Ji-Woon Kim
January 18th came and went without much critical or commercial fanfare for Ji-woon Kim, the first of three South Korean directors to break into the American studio system this year*; that’s sort of a king bummer, at least in part because The Last Stand, his half self-aware, half self-serious, respectably actiony Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, deserves to be more of a hit than its paltry $7.7 million box office take will allow. (You may recall that we had a lot of fun with the film ourselves.) But mostly this is sour news because Kim’s a great filmmaker, and nothing would be more disappointing than seeing him shunned out of the States…