Review: 2011 San Diego Asian Film Festival: GLove

The usual ghost-town that is the UltraStar Mission Valley almost certainly hadn’t been as bustling as it was last night since the same time last year. Why I have skipped out on the annual San Diego Asian Film Festival for so long, I don’t know — I have been routinely impressed by the Asian Film Foundation’s seasonal screenings and the festival gets nothing but praise from local critic friends. But this year, I’m righting my past wrong and making it my mission to see and cover at least ten features. It’ll be film festival madness here at Bucket Reviews for the next three weeks; keep in mind that I will also be in Hollywood for AFI Fest from November 3-10.

Unfortunately, my first SDAFF selection was not very good, but it wasn’t a travesty, either. GLove is the well-meaning, “based on a true story” tale of a fledgling baseball team at South Korea’s Chungju Sacred Heart School for the Deaf. They are a ramshackle group who can’t even come close to winning a game, but things start to turn around when they get a new coach — champion LG Twins pitcher Sang-Nam (Jae-yong Jeong), who begrudgingly takes the job in order to revamp his public image after being thrown out of the league for bad behavior. As you would expect, the boys at Sacred Heart end up changing Sang-Nam’s life just as much as he changes theirs.

The chief problem is that the script, by Kim Ki-Beom, adheres to every sports movie cliché in the book, almost as if he wrote it by filling in a chapter of the book Mad Libs for Screenwriters. The character transformations occur right on cue, and the plot is driven largely by fabricated coincidences (needless to say, if  the real Sacred Heart team’s first tournament match went down as it does in the movie, I would be gobsmacked). Furthermore, Kim does next-to-nothing with the most unique element of the story: he merely treats the fact that the boys are hearing-impaired as a way to further exploit the audience’s love of the underdog, not as a means to explore the unique experience of a group rarely seen on film.

That all said, GLove is not without redeeming features — namely director Kang Woo-suk’s polished direction and the cast’s strong performances. Having helmed nearly 20 features, Kang is no hack — for as rudimentary as the film’s writing is, the end product still feels weighty and sophisticated due to assured direction. Not only does the widescreen photography make GLove look like a legitimate blockbuster (thanks also to D.P. Yong-heung Kim), the pacing is immaculate as well. Kang pulls something of a miracle off in this respect — in spite of the the film’s whopping 144-minute runtime and the fact that the audience knows all of the story-beats in advance due to the conventional plot, it is never a real slog. How exactly he accomplished this, I’m still not sure, but Kang undoubtedly knows how to construct a scene and stylistically create the illusion of consequence, even if the substance isn’t there to support it.

The only source of substance in the movie, in fact, is the cast. In the lead role, Jeong Jae-yong verges on compelling, not taking the easy way out by playing an over-the-top ‘bad boy,’ as so many less skilled actors do with this type of role. Instead, Jeong captures the narcissism that comes with his celebrity-status, and his transformation is less about ‘bad boy’ to ‘good boy’ than it is about rediscovering human empathy. Jeong has the keen ability to be understated when necessary, saying more without words than with (a must, given the artificiality of Kim’s dialogue). Alongside Jeong, the kids of the Sacred Heart team, most of them making their acting debuts, are uniformly excellent — not an easy task given the disability of their characters. They are reduced to melodramatic pawns in one too many scenes–the one fault of Kang’s otherwise accomplished direction–but even so, they never lose their heart.

Alas, you can classify GLove as your average sports drama, peppered but not completely saved by worthy elements. Hopefully, if the movie finds a U.S. distributor, they will scrap the silly capitalization of the title — which (yes, you got it) is a way to accentuate the word ‘Love.’ (Then again, said title’s Hallmark Greeting Card-level appeal is pretty indicative of Kim’s screenwriting approach, at least letting viewers know what they’re in for.) GLove was not a great way to begin my first SDAFF experience, but it’s better than a lot of festival fare I have sat through over the years — upward and onward with Day Two!

GLove screens again on Wed, Oct 26 at 7 p.m.