H (2002, directed by Jong-Hyuk Lee) appeared right at the crest of the K-horror boom of the early aughts, so it found its way into relatively wide distribution around the world when it maybe ought to have remained a local obscurity. I mean, it's fine, I guess, but at a time when Korean films generally were carving out a reputation for impeccable film craft, it seems curiously deficient as a film narrative. It's clunky when it had the wherewithal to take advantage of a burgeoning pool of talent. Its leading actress, for example, was in the K-horror masterpiece, A Tale of Two Sisters, in the same year. That's a comparison it cannot withstand, but there are a few other touchstones before which it also shrinks in magnitude.
When I first heard the premise of Snowpiercer (2014, directed by Bong Joon-ho), I thought it sounded ridiculous. I thought, actually, that it sounded like something that would show up on the SyFi channel. Still, the director gave me pause. This is the man who made Memories of Murder and Mother, after all, to say nothing of The Host. He's proven his chops both as a gifted director and as a gifted purveyor of genre entertainments. And when you get right down to it, it's not a more ridiculous premise than, say, anything by Park Chan-Wook or Kim Ji-Woon. And then I heard that Harvey Weinstein wanted to slash twenty minutes out of it. Bong actually won that power struggle, but it limited the film's horizons. Seeing it at the earliest opportunity became for me a moral imperative. It turns out that my initial impression of the whole thing was correct: it's utterly ridiculous. It's also kind of awesome.
With The Last Stand (2013), director Kim Jee-woon makes a conditional success of a kind of film that defeated the Hong Kong directors in the mid-1990s: a big dumb action film with an intractable aging action star at the center. In this case, he's saddled with Arnold Schwarzenegger. This is admittedly a step up from Jean-Claude Van Damme, whose presence almost ruined the careers of John Woo, Ringo Lam, and Tsui Hark when they all made landfall in Hollywood two decades ago. It's also possible that the tightly controlled idiom of New Korean Cinema is less vulnerable to Hollywood derailment than the more freewheeling Hong Kong action films. Maybe.
This is part of the LBGT Blogathon hosted by YAM Magazine. It's also a prelude to next week's Queer Film Blogathon hosted by Caroline over at Garbo Laughs.
Nobody in movies knows anything, if you believe William Goldman. For instance, no one in their right mind would have predicted that the highest grossing movie in the history of Korean cinema would be a queer-themed historical drama. And yet, that's what happened. The King and the Clown (2005, directed by Jun-ik Lee), an unassuming "small" movie, somehow tickled the Korean popular imagination and became that blockbuster.
The story follows the friendship of two itinerant "clowns," though "clown" is an English descriptor. They are more like traveling acrobats and actors, whose plays are ribald. These are the rough and tumble Jang-sang, the frontman, and the androgynous Gong-gil, who specializes in playing women. When the film opens, their manager finds that he can make more money by pimping Gong-gil to the local aristocrat than he can from the play. This infuriates Jang-sang, who rescues a not-exactly unwilling Gong-gil from being sold for the night. The two escape from their troupe after killing the manager and head to Seoul, where pickings for traveling players are slim. The king has driven out huge chunks of the population to increase his hunting grounds, and there is no longer a show district where Jang-sang and Gong-gil can ply their trade. They're basically for the street, where they fall in with a rival company and stage a play mocking the current king. They make a lot of money, but the run is short. They're arrested for treason. In the course of being punished, Jang-sang challenges their jailors that the king himself should judge them. If he laughs, they're off the hook. If not, heads roll. Miraculously, they make him laugh, but then things get hairy, because the king has cast his eye on Gong-gil. So, too, has his consort. Meanwhile, the king's ministers begin using the troupe as pawns in the intrigues of court...
About halfway through The Yellow Sea(2010, directed by Hong-jin Na), I had the feeling that I was watching the best film ever made from a Richard Stark novel. True, there is no corresponding Stark novel, but the situation is one that would make a pretty kick-ass Parker yarn, at least until it turns bleak and noir-ish in the end. Up until then, it has a merciless ferocity and a willingness to paint the world red. In many ways, it's the fulfillment of the promise of director Hong-jin Na's first film, The Chaser, which had a propulsive forward momentum even if it was too clever for its own good. That film was bleak and nihilistic in calculated ways, but it was a light summer breeze compared to the sucking downdraft in The Yellow Sea. The Yellow Sea is a film that doesn't pull its punches.
Lee Chang-dong's new film, Poetry (2010), is the kind of film I would have squirmed my way through had I been forced to watch it when I was younger. It's a slow film, filled with quotidian details that summarize the life of a 66 year old woman in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. Its main plotline, summarized in its title, follows her changing perceptions once she starts taking a class in writing poetry at her local community center. The movie is a good deal darker than that might suggest, because in learning to see with language--particularly with language that she's losing--she begins to see some very dark things around her. I'll come back to that in a bit, though. First, I need to point out that my younger self was an idiot. She wouldn't have responded to the gentle, but implacable insistence of this movie because she was impatient. She wanted things to happen in a hurry. It would have been her loss. As with the protagonist of Poetry, spending a lifetime with movies eventually does teach one to see, if you're up to it.
I like movies that take a swing at the fences, movies that have ambition. Usually, this means that I like movies that examine the unbearable lightness of being human, but it also equates to an appetite for movies that examine humankind's place in the grand scheme of things. Some of my favorite movies--particularly those by Ingmar Bergman--examine humanity's relationship with god (or gods). The ones I like best are the ones about the downward spiral, whether that movie is Nightmare Alley or Unforgiven. Tales of the fall, if you will. This may seem a perverse appetite for an atheist, particularly one who is a pure existentialist, and you're probably right. I say all of this because it explains the impact that Chang-dong Lee's Secret Sunshine (2007) had on me. It takes a swing at the fences and it's a tale of the fall.
Ji-Woon Kim's new film, I Saw the Devil (2010) has already developed a rep for its elegant brutality. There's no question that it's a hard film to watch. Without the director's sense of style, it might well be unwatchable. I don't know what it is in the Korean national character that puts them so in touch with revenge, but the Korean cinema of vengeance is one of the most striking categories of film that I can think of. This is very much in the mode of Park Chan-wook's vengeance trilogy, though it is, perhaps, a shade more lightweight when it comes to the philosophy of vengeance. Kim's films are never deep. They are all style.
The story here follows Joo-yeon, a secret service agent played by the ever-elegant Byung-hun Lee, who, upon the murder of his fiance, tracks down the killer and exacts his revenge. The killer in question is Kyung-chul, played with a grungy, sick kind of menace by the amazing Min-sik Choi. Choi furthers the mental association with the Vengeance trilogy. His character here is more in line with the one he plays in Sympathy for Lady Vengeance than with his lead in Oldboy, but you get the picture. For his part, Kyung-chul is completely unrepentant. He has his needs, and he makes no apologies for satiating them. This is surprise number one. Given the nature of the film's plot, there must have been a strong temptation to render Kyung-chul in sympathetic terms. Perhaps not in terms of forgiveness, but at least in terms of pity. The filmmakers don't do this. Kyung-chul is NOT Peter Lorre's character in M. He's a full bore monster. Surprise number two is what Joo-yeon does once he finds Kyung-chul. He punishes him, sure. But then he lets him go. The film even comments on this in the actual text of the movie when Joo-yeon's sister asks him what the point of "catch and release" is. Joo-yeon doesn't answer, but the audience already sees the way the movie is going to go. Joo-yeon gazes too long into the abyss and the abyss gazes also into him.
As I say: Intellectually, this movie is kind of a lightweight. Its overall thesis is that vengeance is dehumanizing, but it never goes any further than that. Hell, revenge stories going back to the Jacobean era at least--hell, back to Homer, for that matter--have postulated the exact same thing. When the movie states its thesis outright about halfway through its longish running time, there's not much else to do but watch the whole clockwork assembly demolish itself. There is certainly pleasure to be had from watching it do so. Kim is nothing if not generous with his set-pieces, and, boy howdy, does he know how to film them. There is ONE scene, however, that suggests another direction for the film: Kyung-chul commandeers a taxi, kills the driver and his passenger, then finds a body in the trunk. This is an awesome "WTF?" moment that suggests an entire world gone mad. Does everyone have dark secrets? In the worldview of this movie, they most certainly do. For the record, the taxi scene is astonishing. It's one of those scenes where you look at it and wonder how the hell they did it, although this wonderment is all but overwhelmed by the violence of it. Much the same thing could be said of the movie as a whole. The last forty minutes are an endurance test. You can't really take your eyes off of it, but you can't really bear watching it, either. In some ways it's the equivalent of the Ludovico technique.
For their part, the leads give committed, well conceived performances. Min-sik Choi, as I say, lays on the menace. He's the kind of character who makes you want to take a shower after spending any amount of time in his presence. There's a scene where Kyung-chul attempts to rape a nurse that Choi plays with all the dead-eyed soullessness one ever wants to see. It's a kind of deadpan, and one can imagine it as the personality of Henry Lee Lucas or Richard Speck. This character approaches his needs like some kind of chore; murder and rape seem like an unpleasant biological function for him. Not like masturbating, perhaps--the film shows a different killer who masturbates to thoughts of his crimes--but more like removing a tick, or defecating. It's something he has to do to function and the actor makes you believe in him. If the film has an enduring value, it's in this performance. I can't imagine a better depiction of a serial killer. Byung-hun Lee, on the other hand, has a more difficult character. His character is a movie character. You can't really imagine him in real life. In this regard, the filmmakers rely on the screen personae of the actor's other roles. Joo-yeon's elegant lethality is a close cousin to Lee's performance in A Bittersweet Life. Lee certainly inhabits the role, but he's kind of hamstrung by the murky motivations provided for the character and by the "movieness" of it. He holds the screen--being ridiculously good-looking helps him in that regard--but if he spent more time sharing the screen with Choi, he might find himself swamped. It's Choi's movie, really, but both performances are worth the price of admission, regardless of what one ultimately thinks of the film's set-pieces.
So, yeah. I'm kind of ambivalent about this movie. I think I like it better than The Good, the Bad, and the Weird, if only because it forgoes the dizzying kinetic style of that movie. But that may be external circumstances asserting themselves, too. I don't think Kim is really growing as a filmmaker. One misses the delicate hand behind his earlier movies, rather than the bludgeons he's using these days. He's obviously still capable of delicacy. You see it in flashes in this movie, but only for short periods. The rest of the time, it's back to blunt force trauma. Blunt force trauma can be bracing once in a while, but not as a regular diet. I Saw the Devil is definitely worth a look if you have a stomach for it, though.
One of the reasons that I don't assign letter grades or stars or whatever to movies is because the experience of watching movies--for me anyway--is often unduly influenced by the circumstances of my life at the time of viewing. I don't trust myself to quantify my movie experience in those kinds of concrete terms. While I don't mind spinning a verbal impression of the experience, it may not have any bearing on the actual merits of the movie itself. This explains why I'm having such a hard time with Jee-Woon Kim's The Good, the Bad, and the Weird (2008). On the face of it, I should have had a great time. I love star Song Kang-Ho, who is one of the world's great movie stars right now. I've loved Kim's other films. Hell, the idea of a Korean quasi-remake of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly fills me with a kind of manic glee. It should have worked. I should have walked out of the film with a huge, goofy grin on my face.
But I didn't. I had a pretty bad time. I don't know that I can blame the film.
I went to this movie with my long-suffering partner. She sometimes has serious problems with violent movies. I'm not sure what triggers this, though I can make some guesses. Suffice it to say that it's pretty random. She has no problem with, say, John Carpenter's The Thing, but she can't take random kung-fu movies. Going to violent movies with her is like navigating a minefield. The Good, The Bad, and The Weird, unfortunately, was one of those movies that set off whatever internal trauma that haunts her. She had to leave the theater about two-thirds of the way into the film. She waited for me in the lobby. Needless to say, this colors my impression of the movie. I spent the remainder of the movie feeling like shit for bringing her to see it. This kind of makes it hard to enjoy what's on the screen.
The movie itself is a cartoon. It's a spaghetti western crossed with Looney Tunes and set in 1930s Manchuria. It starts with a chase, puts its foot on the gas, and presses "go" for the rest of the movie. The story follows three characters: the "good" is Park Do-Won , a disillusioned Korean freedom fighter who is drowning the loss of his country in his work as a bounty hunter. He cuts a fine figure as a cowboy.
The "bad" is Park Chang-Yi, a merciless assassin obsessed with his place as the most dangerous man in Asia. He's kind of a dandy, with hair always spiked just so, like a refugee from anime.
The "weird" is amiable thief Yoon Tae-goo, who is the object of the chase. He's the most open of the characters, but he's the one with the deepest secrets. He hides them behind a steampunk get-up that makes him seem like a clown.
Yoon Tae-goo has stolen a map that everyone in Manchuria wants. This includes black marketeers, a colorful menagerie of bandits, a spymaster in a house of love, and the Imperial Japanese army. The movie starts with a train chase, then escalates from there into increasingly complicated action set pieces in a teahouse, in the warrens of the black market, and finally in an elaborate cavalry battle in which all comers collide. As does its role model, it ends with a three-way stand-off above the treasure. It writes a slightly different ending, though, one that suggests that the violence of the entire movie has been one long exercise in futility. This isn't a new development for Jee-Woon Kim. His last film, A Bittersweet Life has a similar dialectic between the futility and the thrill of violence (and, truth be told style versus substance).
I think that last part is what turned off my companion. I think she was hip to the fact that none of the characters was worth rooting for (I don't necessarily agree) and that whatever their ultimate end, it just wasn't worth the trip. She may have a point, given that that's the conclusion reached by the filmmakers themselves, too.
Still and all, I can still watch action for action's sake, and some of the action in this movie is staged with amazing panache. The sequence where Yoon Tae-goo makes his escape from the ghost market inn over walls and roofs is a bravura piece of filmmaking and the one damned thing after another way it goes about escalating its situations has a certain droll comedy to it. The downside of ever escalating action sequences is that if they go on too long, they start to either drone or pummel. At well over two hours, this film is probably too long.
It sometimes seems like would-be horror auteur Brian Yuzna has been trying to be Stuart Gordon for all of his career. I mean, he worked with Gordon as a producer during Gordon's salad days, so you would think that Yuzna would have learned a thing or two from sheer proximity. Unfortunately, it seems like he still hasn't learned anything. 2005's Beneath Still Water, Yuzna's most recent film at this writing, finds the director taking a break from Re-Animator retreads in favor of ripping off Gordon's Dagon. Set in a sleepy little village in northern Spain nestled downstream from a dam that eradicated another town that had been full of depraved cultists, it finds whatever slumbers under the lake stirring on the eve of the dam's fortieth anniversary. In a related plot thread, the head of the cult has returned to wreak his vengeance on the granddaughter of his archenemy. The hero of the piece is a British photojournalist who is haunted by the death of his son. He finds himself drafted into the role after a disastrous dive in the sunken town delivers him into the middle of a boating "accident" investigation. It's all very convenient, and very stock.
While it may want to evoke Dagon, more often it evokes Piranha and Zombie 2 rather than anything Lovecraftian. At the very end it jumps the rails into one of those kinds of party scenes that Roger Corman used to like, only with a cast of European actors who have no qualms about getting naked and getting kinky. On balance, it has a pretty good underwater setting (and the special effects that create it are mostly convincing). It has an agreeable cast of faces familiar to anyone who follows recent Spanish horror movies. It walks an uncomfortable line by having everything in English, but that's the deal Yuzna made with the devil when he went to Spain, I guess. There are lots of gooey effects, too, courtesy of Fantasy Factory. What it lacks is mood and atmosphere, which drags things down considerably. On the whole, it's not horrible, but it all feels like the filmmakers are playing with somebody else's toys.
If I tell you the plot of Bong Joon-ho's new film, Mother (2009), without spoilers, you might be tempted to make assumptions. Here it is, for all that it might be worth: Mentally handicapped Do-Joon is arrested for the murder of a young teen-age girl. His mother, completely convinced of his innocence, sets out to clear his name in spite the airtight case the police have assembled. And do you know what? I haven't told you ANYTHING about the movie, because any assumptions you might bring to this particular plot are dead wrong. This movie unfolds with an ever more surprising sequence of events, until it climaxes with a scene that shocks the audience out of their preconceptions completely. It's a dazzling high wire act. In thinking about this movie, it strikes me that this is what Strangers on a Train might have been like had Hitchcock kept Patricia Highsmith's ending. It reminds me, too, of Max Ophuls's The Reckless Moment and of Cornell Woolrich's The Black Angel. It dwells firmly in the same kind of indifferent cosmos. This is film noir at its blackest.
Even more amazing, though maybe not too amazing to filmgoers who have seen the director's other films, is the way it sneaks up on this. The opening movement of this film is a wry social comedy, much as the opening of Memories of Murder is broadly comic. Bong is a humanist, I think, one in love with people and particularly one in love with his characters, but he's not too in love with them that he won't murder his darlings. What's the point of having characters in a thriller if not to put them through the wringer? This movie does that in spades.
At the heart of Mother, oddly enough, is not the crime itself, but rather a jaundiced view of familial relationships. Certainly, our title character's relationship with her son is deep, but it's also completely bonkers. The image of Do-Joon, an ostensibly grown man, sleeping in the same bed with his mother, hand on her breast, speaks volumes about how completely dysfunctional this family is. It's kind of creepy, actually. With this family, as with the family in The Host, the ties that bind aren't necessarily ties of love, so much as they're ties of necessity. Without them tethering these characters together, they would be adrift.
South Korean filmmakers, perhaps more than any others, put a high gloss polish on their films, and Bong is no different. This is a beautiful film to look at. As a plot construction, this is all over the place, providing all kinds of red herrings and narrative dead ends. This would ordinarily be a failing of the conventions of the mystery genre itself, but in this film, they serve as texture. Most of the loose ends tie themselves up eventually, though not in the way that you expect. As a cinematic structure, rather than as a plot structure, this is as pleasing a composition as you could like. The repetition of its opening shot late in the movie provides a satisfying symmetry, even as the implications of it sink in. The last shot of the film, however, is a marvel, in which our heroine finally lets herself become untethered from her son and joins the dance of all the other lunatics in the world. It's set against the sun in the same way as Leatherface's final dance in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The world, it seems, is spinning WAY out of balance.
Whenever I start to get annoyed at our local art house (Columbia, Missouri's Ragtag Cinema), I need to remind myself of how completely awesome they are from time to time. Oh, sure, their main features occasionally leave me less than enthusiastic--a problem with the indie sector more than with our art house specifically--but they really do go the extra mile sometimes. They have two series in particular that make me inclined to forgive everything. The first is their "Ragtag 101" series, which is similar to TCM's "Essentials" series, but which tends to be a bit quirkier than that. The other is the "Passport" series, which focuses on contemporary foreign films. Both series are a godsend to this wicked little town.
I hadn't been to one of the Ragtag 101 films in a while, but I was damned if I was going to miss The Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933, oddly enough, directed by MervynLeRoy), which is one of my very favorite films. I mean, really, what can you say about a movie that starts with Ginger Rogers dressed in a gaudy outfit made of coins singing "We're in the Money" in Pig Latin? It's one of those completely out of left-field things that makes movies from the Pre-Code era a constant delight. There were no rules yet, so anything goes (as Cole Porter would later write).
In truth, this film's predecessor, 42nd Street, is probably a better film, but this one is the better movie. It's certainly more in love with surreality. The accomplishment of Busby Berkley in this film, and others, is to reclaim the "cinematic" for movies. Most early talkies are stage-bound. They unlearned everything from the silent era and had to re-learn it all over again. The Gold Diggers of 1933 is is a stark break from that. Even though the musical numbers are presented as diegetic, as performances on stage within the film, there's no way these were ever performed on a stage. There's no way they were designed the way that they are to be seen from down in a theater audience. The camera roams too freely for that. It becomes an active participant in creating the image, particularly from deliriously abstract overhead shots in which dancers become moving design elements. Parts of this film look like it was designed by Dr. Seuss.
The musical elements alone would be fun enough. But this is an interesting movie for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with the musical numbers (or, reasons that feed them). It's a film of pretty stark contrasts, made in the deepest part of The Great Depression. Like many films, it presents an escapist fantasy for Depression audiences. Unlike many films--particularly those made by MGM, which would never have made a film like this--this film doesn't shy away from the Depression, either. Part of this stems from the movie's parent studio, Warner Brothers, who were New Deal populists (in contrast to MGM's Louis B. Mayer, who was a Hooverite), and took it upon themselves to speak for the little guy and to deflate the rich and pompous. A good deal of this film's plot is devoted to exactly that. Anyway, as a stark reminder of the world outside, the "We're in the Money" number is shut down by the show's creditors, putting our showgirl heroines out of work before the show even opens. The placement of the musical numbers suggests a kind of yin and yang, too. The film is front loaded with the exuberantly upbeat "We're In the Money" and "Petting in the Park," but it finishes up with "The Forgotten Man," which is as dark a number as I've ever seen in a musical. The host for this showing, a pretty smart guy named LokkeHeiss who teaches film at the University here, prefaced the showing with documentary footage of the "Bonus Army" that Hoover had forcibly removed from Washington (with tanks, no less), as a means of providing context:
This is the state of the Union just before this film was made, and it adds a good deal of desperation to the "Forgotten Man" number at the end of The Gold Diggers of 1933:
Beyond all that, the film itself is typical of the pre-Code movies, in so far as it has a knowing sophistication and freedom of sexuality that would vanish from American movies a year later. The double entendre is employed like a razor in this movie, often by Aline MacMahon's Trixie, the comedian, but also from squeaky clean couple Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler, and from Joan Blondell, to whom the film ultimately belongs.
Powell plays the scion of a rich family who would cut him off if they found him composing for and appearing in a Broadway show, which is the movie's McGuffin. Powell is fine, but Warren Williams has a much harder role as his uptight brother, who begins as a complete snob and thaws as the movie plays out. He manages the difficult task of becoming a character the audience actually likes.
All of which adds up to a film that would be my favorite movie musical if Singin' in the Rain didn't exist.
*****
The Passport Series brought me The Chaser (2008, directed by Hong-jin Na) last week, a Korean film in the mode of Memories of Murder. Like that film, it tracks the investigation of a serial killer. Also like that film, it goes to great lengths to show the strain the investigation exerts on the cops. But from there, it parts company. The hero of the film is Joong-ho Eom (Yun-Seok Kim), an ex-cop turned pimp who starts to get worried about the number of his girls that are disappearing. The latest to disappear wasn't even supposed to be working, and he takes it on himself to find her before the killer does her in. The rest goes to great pains to subvert the serial killer procedural, sometimes to the film's detriment. This is especially true of the film's ending, which seems gratuitous, though, admittedly, it's the kind of ending that would NEVER fly in Hollywood (there's an American remake in the works, unfortunately).
What the film lacks in, well, "heart" for a better word, it more than makes up for in forward motion. This is director Hong-jin Na's first film, but the narrative pulse he gives it is sharper than what many veteran directors can manage. It helps that the streets of Seoul at night represent a terrific noir background. There's a palpable sense of danger in the setting. The character arc of our hero is good, too, and Yun-Seok Kim invests him with a world-weariness that suggests that his choice of professions is taking a spiritual toll on him.
Posts
