One of the ironies of the Tribeca Film Festival is that, if you're a member of the press who wants to just watch movies, you tend to spend very little time in Tribeca. Most of the press screenings take place at the Loews 14-plex on 34th St. between 8th and 9th Avenues. But that brings about another irony, at least in the case of the movie West 32nd, which I saw at that the Lowes; even though much the movie takes place only a few blocks away from where I was sitting, it might as well have been half a world away.
West 32nd, which premiered on Saturday, is a slick production that was directed and co-written by Michael Kang, who has been writing about his festival experience for HuffPost. In it, John Kim (John Cho, best known as Harold from the Harold & Kumar movies), a young Korean-American lawyer who's more American than Korean, tries to make headway at his law firm by taking a pro bono capital case, defending a 14-year-old accused of murdering the manager of a Korean "salon room" club. In order to help exonerate his client, he begins to get involved in the Korean underworld that has its roots both in Queens and in the Manhattan's Koreatown, which centers around 32nd Street. Kim tries to get in the head of Mike Juhn (Jung Sun Kim), a brash but smart up-and-comer in the "business" world he inhabits.
What's interesting about the movie, besides it's effective use of both Korean and English to convey how the people in this hierarchy are upholding a lot of Korean traditions as second- and third-generation Americans, is how very little in the movie is black and white. Kim begins to fall for his client's beautiful sister Lila (Grace Park of Battlestar Galactica), affecting his judgment. He also seems to be both enamored and disgusted with the antics of Juhn and his crew; Kim wonders if he would be part of that crew -- drinking, womanizing and getting into fights -- if his parents didn't detach him from the Korean community by moving away from Queens. Juhn isn't a pure molten-evil bad guy, either; he's making his way and trying to advance in his field, just like Kim. It just so happens that Juhn's field happens to involve illegal and violent acts. Suki (Jane Kim), one of the escorts that work Juhn's club, wants to see justice done, but for reasons of love rather than hate. And even the movie's resolution defies standard Hollywood conventions, showing how people sometimes compromise themselves to get to a particular result.
In many respects, West 32nd is a traditional mystery, albeit one with a hip-hop soundtrack and a fair amount of action. It's not as much a whodunit as a "who's protecting who" kind of mystery, with misdirections and plot twists that the viewer should be able to follow without much difficulty. There are a couple of plot holes that confuse matters a little, and one hole that really might make you say "oh, come on!" when you see it. But Kang does an entertaining job of showing audience aspects of a society that New Yorkers, much less Americans, don't know much about.
For more HuffPost coverage of the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival, go here.