Save the Green Planet (Jun-Hwan Jang, 2003)

Byeong-gu, an eccentric young beekeper convinced of a vast space alien conspiracy against Earth, kidnaps a CEO — not for the first time — and, in his makeshift gadgetry-filled lair underneath a mountain farmhouse, attempts to torture him until he confesses to being an alien leader in disguise. As the cops' search for the CEO closes in, captive and captor play cat-and-mouse, and as details of Byeong-gu's violence-ridden past gradually emerge, it becomes clear that his obsession with the paranormal masks several entirely Earth-based quests for vengeance.

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I've watched me some Korean movies and I've watched me some Bollywood, but Save the Green Planet is the first I've seen combine characteristics of both. It doesn't have any songs, but it does have the same little-of-everything multigenre ethos of India's finest. Even the most cursory examination reveals traces of psychological thriller, comedy, detective thriller, horror, social commentary (Society Done Me Wrong" is certainly an element at work) and sci-fi.

This brings to mind the makings of a new evaluative pattern: don't be a genre. This isn't meant as a blanket slam against genre films, but I happen to prefer the ones that no two video stores would file in the same section. Why? Because genre films are, by their very nature, more amenable to cliché — indeed, one could argue that certain suites of employed clichés are what place any given story into a genre — and thus I'm statistically less likely to encounter a cliché, that foul thing against which all creative effort is a total war, in non-genre films.

There are two ways to avoid the pitfall of genre: eschew the conventions of all established genres, or intermingle the conventions of many established genres in such a way that the resulting interactions between them are sufficiently un-clichéd. (Bollywood mixes genre conventions, but its titles do it so formulaically that the industry has long since become a bona fide genre unto itself.) Save the Green Planet's choice of door number two makes it entertaining indeed, though I've noticed that some viewers aren't all that comfortable when a movie jumps from genre to genre without warning — comedy to seriousness and back seems an especially rough road for them — or with ones that lean tentativelt toward several genres but definitively toward none. Wes Anderson's Rushmore, one of my very favorites, was the first example I ever noticed of the latter in action. Perhaps it's some type of cognitive dissonance at work. (I admit to having acquired a taste for cognitive dissonance, m'self.)

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14. Don't be a genre. As we saw in Pattern 12, defeat of cliché is the sine qua non of goodness. And what is a genre but a prepackaged set of clichés for a story to adhere to? Liberated from genre, a story is automatically liberated from well-worn conventions.