American movies seem to have lost their edge in originality, deviant sex, and general weirdness. The conglomeratization of Hollywood, with its product placement mentality and four-quadrant fear of offending anyone between the ages of three and ninety-three, is partly to blame. We do have the Coen Brothers, Jody Hill, and David Lynch, but really the American multiplex is a McDonalds.

So lately I’m liking Korean movies. (That would be South Korean.  Kim Jong-il is crazy about Godzilla, slasher, and propaganda movies, and built a movie studio, but we’re not seeing much NK product on Netflix.)  If you are not watching Korean movies, you should be.  I am going to lay a few on you, but I am no expert, so please, if you’re into it, send me some recommendations.

Writer/ director Chan Wook Park first caught my attention with Old Boy (2003). He also did Lady Vengeance (‘05) and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (‘02).  But my favorite Chan Wook Park is Thirst (’09).  This is a Vampire movie that makes all our stuff look like Barney reruns.

The sex is sick, the story complex and grown-up. Maybe cliché to say an actress is mesmerizing, but Ok-bin Kim is.

And then I caught writer/ director Joon-ho Bong’s Host (’06), a thrillingly weird monster movie.  Gotta see that again.  I just saw Bong’s latest, Mother (’09) and really, it is one of the best movies. The cast is terrific: Hye-ja Kim, Bin Won, Goo Jin, and Je-mun Yun.  I don’t mind reading subtitles, but in these movies I totally forget that they are subtitled, because they are cinematic. Hitchcockian, even, in a way that America films are mostly not.

Writer/ Director Ji-woon Kim delivered A Tale of Two Sisters (’03) and The Good, the Bad, and the Weird (’08).  I am looking forward to seeing his I Saw the Devil (’10).

Sisters is cool and, compared to the American remake, subtle.  The American version, The Uninvited (‘09), while fun in its own right, uses a sledgehammer approach and comes off as comparatively ludicrous. It stars Emily Browning (the Lemony Snicket girl), an actress that has some of the smoldering waif qualities of Su-jeong Lim in Sisters. Maybe they cast her to be like the Korean actress.  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Let the Right One In, and countless others have undergone (or will undergo) the same Americanization. It begs the question:  Will Americans ever learn to accept foreign language films on their own terms? (And will distributors ever trust foreign films to draw audiences?)  It would be so cool to go to the multiplex and see names like Ok-bin Kim and Hye-ja Kim on the marquis.

You may have noticed a pattern here.  All the filmmakers listed are writer/ directors. Most American Directors are too busy making dough to deal with the grueling job of script writing. Could this have an effect on originality, deviance and general weirdness?

Ask the Coen Brothers, David Lynch and Jody Hill.

— david warfield