I was just complaining elsewhere that the U.S. art-house
critics have been force-feeding us bad Korean action movies
for 20 years.* And then I caught this really impressive
Korean WWII spy drama! It was predictably dismissed by the
New York Times. Why are the critics doing this to us?
_Assassination_ has members of the WWII Korean Liberation
Army (KLA) go to Seoul to kill a Japanese general and his
Korean collaborator. Another Korean double agent gets wind
of this and hires a hit-team led by "Hawaii Pistol" to stop
the assassins. The multiple double crosses, handsomely
mounted period sets, and bravura camera movements remind me
of _The Black Book_, although the department store shootout
set-piece at the end surpasses anything there; it smacks of
de Palma, with echoes of John Woo as well. This is such
confident movie-making; the two romantic leads don't even
show up until the 10, 20 minute marks. Like many viewers,
I tune in to catch Korea's cinematic icon Gianna Jun play
against type as a stone-faced army sniper who barely lets
out any emotion. She is so disciplined she seldom even
moves her head and lets her sideway glances tell her story,
like Hannibal Lector. She cannot be more different from
the reckless lead in _My Sassy Girl_ or the floozy in _The
Thieves_, also directed by Choi Dong-Hoon, although she
gets to show off some serious stunts here. At one point
she falls off a second floor balcony, grabs her machine
pistol, and just keeps firing. She also gets to play the
assassin's twin, who is improperly a Japanese bride; here
the film veers towards fantasy territory, but the
divided-soul-of-Korea motif is evocative. Historically,
the KLA was very small, but I have no doubt the resentment
towards Japanese colonization was near universal.

The original score is bombastic and really reminds me
of _The Black Book_, but in the background there are faint
strains of Wagner, Dvorak, and Brahms too. Much of the
film takes place in 1933 Shanghai, which is a French
territory. There is even a cafe called Mirabeau. French
music would have been welcome!

It is a pity that the 2015 film did not receive a wider
following in the US; it would have given the proto-"woke"
crowd a reality check on the troubled history regarding
Koreans, Japanese, and Chinese. They were frequently
at war over the last 1000+ years. I remember reading
a Chinese history textbook (written in Chinese for the
locals) which celebrated the beheading of 10,000 "eastern
barbarians" by a Tang Dynasty Emperor. Those war crimes
were committed against the ancestors of Koreans, of course!
As recently as 1937 and 1950, Japan invaded China and
China invaded Korea. A while ago some Korean-American
pop singer, who did not experience much racism himself,
wrote in the NYT that he poked around history books
to go along with our "woke" climate, found that Chinese
immigrants were discriminated against in 1871 in the US,
and therefore exhort that "Asians" should stand together!
I'm sure he meant well, but the level of ignorance is
shocking. Most of us are alive today because our ancestors
were war criminals. If you really care about your "Asian
heritage," start by making a stand for those languishing
in concentration camps in China.

*This culminated in _Parasite_ winning Oscars. I will
don't need to see that, thanks to director Bong Joon Ho's
_Snow Piercer_, a disgusting, cannabilistic, vulgar
action film that gleefully out-tortures the European and
U.S. torture porns by a wide margin. Just in case that
isn't offensive enough, it has Tilda Swinton in a
yellow-faced, buck-toothed caricature of "Asian" stereotype.
That's the kind of stuff art-house cinema has been raving
about last decade instead of the transcendental films by
Terrence Malick. What more can you say.