Host and Guest [siff] opens with a study of doorbells and ring tones. Ho-Jun is depressed about the depression, loneliness, his difficulty in securing a full time teaching job to support his film-snobbery, his custody arrangement, and about being interrupted by missionaries while masturbating to internet pornography. A faulty lock on his bathroom door paired with Gye-Sang’s persistent [possibly] Jehovah’s Witnessing ignites an oddly-matched friendship between the earnest devout young man and the bitter angry professor.

For those red-staters in the audience, you might like to know that the director of Host and Guest and his characters are not fans of George W. Bush. The president’s image gets tarnished in unsubtle throwaways and his policies incite a major taxicab altercation. But the film isn’t really about the feelings of South Koreans about American Empire and these elements stick out like unnecessary panderings to a liberal audience.

Or maybe it is the point. If so, it’s not especially well realized. After a series of vignettes — the guys go to a movie, eat pork skin for dinner, sing karaoke, and make a visit to the country to talk about the problem of an indifferent god — there’s an abrupt narrative shift that had several people in the screening audience wondering if the projectionist skipped a reel. Unfortunately, it seems that by trying hard to do too much, the film is stretched to thin to do any of it completely.

(31 May & 01 June)