Best movie of this year hands down!

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Blistering performances.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

Uneven, marginally interesting Kim ki-Duk film. Ultimately, it is about a father coming to terms with his daughter growing up. Her "growing up" is prostituting herself to her dead girlfriend's ex-clients as a way of dealing with the grief. The film is broken up into three distinct chapters and is as tonally different as each third. The center section is the most kinetic and bloody, while the concluding section is the most protracted. The opening section focuses on the friendship between the two girls and is the most cohesive of the three. Unfortunately, ki-Duk is in danger of becoming irrelevant because his films are becoming very conventional in one sense, but very inaccessible in another sense. For exploitation fans, there is some mild female nudity, a couple of very bloody beatings, and a terrific dinner table confrontation.

Director Kim Ki-Duk gives us insight about teenage prostitution in Korea, but is this really a movie about prostitution? Looking deeper than the visual settings, I found that the movie hits more emotionally about relationships, between friends and family. The movie is basically broken into two parts. Part one is about Jae-Young, an amateur prostitute and her best friend Yeo-Jin, her manager. The second part is about Yeo-Jin and her father. Each part has its tense moments, and the director, pretty much does a good job telling the story and showing the audience: tragedy and closeness. There's not a lot of sex or violence like typical prostitution movies, but then again it is not about prostitution, it only uses it as a medium to get the point across. Happy viewing!

SAMARITAN GIRL (3 outta 5 stars) Two high school girls finance a holiday trip they want to take by turning to prostitution. Yeo-Jin lures men via internet chat rooms and her cell phone while Jae-Yeong actually has sex with them. All goes well until Jae-Yeong dives out of a three story window to evade the police. Overcome with remorse, Yeo-Jin contacts all their old customers to sleep with them and return their money. In the meantime, Yeo-Jin's father discovers what his daughter is doing when she should be in school and his vengeance against the men despoiling his daughter keeps escalating. A simple story... the plot sounds very sleazy but the emotional subtext elevates the story into a truly heartbreaking drama. The scene where the father confronts one of his daughter's clients in front of his family is extremely powerful. The sad, tender finale is also well portrayed.

This is the only Kim's movie I've seen up to this day, but after "Samaria" I know I got to dig! The story's told in a very subtle, delicate way. The movie transforms itself slowly with time, which makes it more entertaining. The script is solid and the acting is good (these young girls sure can play!), which combined gives what every movie fan probably wants to see, although you got to be in the specific mood for this one. It's not a comedy, it's not an action flick. Kim gives us fragment of three people's existence, which leaves viewer with subtle and melancholic after-effects. If you're into that kind of stuff, you should sure as hell get it.