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Boksuneun naui geot (2002)
"I know you're a good guy... but you know why I have to kill you"
Handing out a 10 star rating for a film is not something that should be undertaken lightly. Each rating affects the overall score of the film. People may be persuaded to watch the film or avoid it based upon this score and the comments behind it.
A perfect score handed out to the most undeserving of Hollywood trash dramatically lowers the credibility of a rating system and takes away attention from genuinely deserving masterpieces. Sympathy For Mr Vengeance is most certainly one of these masterpieces, and deserves every single star there is going.
Here's the story.
Ryu (Ha-kyun Shin) is deaf and mute. His sister is dying. She needs a kidney transplant quickly or she'll die. Ryu, an intelligent sort of guy, gave up his education to work in a factory (which is eerily reminiscent of a vision of Hell itself) to pay for his sister's medical expenses. He has very little, but he is focused and motivated and never once whines about the myriad misfortunes that plague his life.
His girlfriend, Yeong-mi (the extremely cute Du-na Bae) is a minor league anarchist and activist intent on 'bringing down the corporations'. She is quite the rebel. Her relationship with Ryu began when she was a fellow student at a deaf school from which she was later expelled after it became apparent she was only pretending to be deaf.
After conversation with his sister's unhelpful doctor, Ryu decides he'll turn to the black market to get his sister a kidney. But his transaction with the organ traffickers ends catastrophically, propelling him to get involved in the kidnapping of his boss's young daughter so that the ransom money can save his sister. This kidnapping, of course, goes tragically wrong, and at this point we become ominously aware that all of the heart-breaking things we have seen so far are nothing compared to what's coming.
Things quickly spiral downwards into a magnum opus of misery for all concerned. Ryu's boss, Park (Kang-ho Song), grief-stricken and furious, haunted and genuinely mystified why anyone would do what Ryu has done, is set on an irreversible path of brutal vengeance.
Ryu, meanwhile, has his own tragedy to deal with quite apart from Park's rampage. As things around him disintegrate, he is also compelled towards vengeance, primarily on the organ traffickers, but later (in an idea we would see taken to dizzying extremes in Oldboy) he decides to take revenge on PARK for taking revenge on HIM.
Needless to say, none of this ends well for anybody. I've tried very hard to get the themes and ideas of this film across without spoilers, but really, it wouldn't matter if you knew what was coming. Surprises aren't really important here. You know right from the outset that nobody's getting out alive. What matters here are motives, emotions, reasons, and, ultimately, extreme and brutal displays of violence.
The director, Chan-wook Park, gives a story with no easy answers. In fact, it's debatable whether he's asked us any questions. He presents a group of characters in a certain set of circumstances and sets them loose. He never passes judgement over any of his creations, leaving the audience to judge for themselves. That's the mark of a masterful director who has faith in, and respect for, his audience. The actions of his characters take place in a moral vacuum, where there is no right or wrong, only choices and consequences. There is no divine or poetic justice, only revenge.
The title of the film relates to perhaps the only real question in the whole film - who do we sympathise with? Do our loyalties lie with Ryu, who is motivated only by love for his sister and subject to misfortunes on a massive scale? Or with Park, who has always tried to be a fair and honest man, only to have his beloved daughter kidnapped and killed, albeit accidentally? Both men do deplorable things. Both men become savage murderers. Both men are, ultimately, the 'Mr Vengeance' of the title. So to whom to we give our sympathy?
The acting in this film is of uniformly excellent quality, from the main characters to the smallest of walk-on parts. Ha-kyun Shin and Du-na Bae learned sign language for this film and give such effortless performances you'd believe they'd been doing it all their lives. Kang-ho Song's turn as Park is heart-breaking, particularly the scene where the camera stays on him and only him as he looks on in horror at his daughter's autopsy, complete with sounds of cracking bone and surgical saws.
The photography is beautiful, showing the beauty and the ugliness of South Korea in equal measures. There is no real soundtrack to speak of, only the background sounds of the city and the various locales within it. There's traffic, howling wind and trickling water, depending on where we are.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about this film (doubly so if you've read this review to this point) is that it's a comedy. A very, very black one, but still a comedy. Chan-wook Park has given us the most tragic of revenge dramas through the filter of humour, and that's part of the reason it works so well. Unrelenting misery can only be tolerated for so long. Sooner or later you'll walk away from it unless you can give a wry smile or a genuine belly-laugh now and again. There are many of those here, although a few are definite guilty pleasures.
To sum up, this film is a solid gold masterpiece, vastly superior to anything spewed forth by Hollywood these last few decades.
The future of cinema is rising in the East.
It seems it set in the West a long, long time ago.
Sexy Beast (2000)
I am now mortally afraid of the man who played Ghandi
Ben Kingsley played Mahatma Ghandi. He got an Oscar for it. He was globally recognised as being a dead ringer for the most peaceful man on earth.
Ben Kingsley also played a man called Don Logan, who is not a peaceful man. Don Logan is the only fictional creation I have ever feared might lean out of the screen and kill me in an unnecessarily painful way. I am actually afraid of him. I watched this film in a constant state of fear. Not fear for the other characters in the film - fear for ME PERSONALLY.
There's no way I can describe Don Logan to you in a way that will accurately convey his psychosis and terrible screen presence. And when I say 'terrible', I use it in its truest sense - that which inspires terror.
Don Logan argues with himself. He pees on the floor of other people's houses. He is foul-mouthed but mostly soft-spoken. He says funny things but has no discernible sense of humour. He is shorter and smaller in frame than Gal (Ray Winstone), but utterly dominates him without question for the entirety of their scenes together. He swings from quietly jovial to a raving monster, always a second away from extreme violence, crackling with maniacal energy. He's a terrifying man, and perhaps his most frightening trait is his persistence. NOTHING can turn him away from his objective. Jesus, I watched this last night and I'm still shaking. It's half past three in the afternoon and I'm still shaking.
Of course, Kingsley as Logan isn't the only thing in Sexy Beast, and not the only good thing either. In fact, everybody in this film turns in a great performance. Ray Winstone toning down his massive screen presence is quite an achievement. He's far from the two-snooker-balls-in-a-sock Daddy he was in Scum. Here he's still a cockney geezer, but he's retired from crime and lives only for two things: his beautiful ex-porn star wife Dee Dee (the gorgeous Amanda Redman), and lying in the Spanish sunshine, roasting.
The plot of the film, not that it's really that important in a film with characters like these, is the hoary old 'one last job' scenario. But, as we all know, everything's been done before. It's how you use the material differently that matters. Ostensibly, this is a heist movie. But the actual heist is only on screen for about five minutes. The rest of the film is Gal being menaced by either Don Logan or Teddy Bass.
Ah... Teddy Bass. Now, Teddy Bass is played by Ian McShane. Now, for readers outside the UK, Ian's major acting role before Sexy Beast was 'Lovejoy', a TV series about a cheerful, scheming antiques dealer with quite a hardcore mullet and a nice line in witty asides to the camera. The most menacing he got in that was a half-hearted frown and a 'never mind, tomorrow's another day' shrug.
In Sexy Beast, McShane plays Satan.
Teddy Bass is not as immediately frightening as Don Logan. He works his magic slowly, turning up the frighteners gently so that you don't realise you've been terrified of him until you look down and become aware you've peed in your pants. He is like a refined version of Logan - dapper, urbane, quiet, and infinitely more dangerous. After all, Logan works for this man, not the other way round.
If Teddy Bass told me to pull my own head off I would, because the result of disobeying him would be far, far worse. Need proof? Watch the end where he asks Gal for £10 change from his twenty. A simple thing like that becomes a matter of mortal danger. Incredible.
But still, the most kudos has to go to Logan for his inventive excuse for being thrown off a plane for smoking. I challenge you not to crack up in nervous laughter when he describes the male flight attendant's attempts to 'touch me on my front bottom'. Or when he uses the sentence 'I had to sit down, I was so perturbed'.
Overall, this film is good, but no classic. Kinglsey's performance, and to a very slightly lesser degree, McShane's, ARE classic, however. Kinglsey was nominated for an Oscar for this and only the fact that 'Iris' was about somebody dying of a lingering disease (and was therefore extremely Oscar-friendly) meant that he missed out. McShane deserves recognition too, but then, I don't suppose there'd be any Al Swearengen from 'Deadwood' without Teddy Bass, so I suppose you get what you deserve in the end. And Don Logan will be a performance talked about for years to come. If genuine audience appreciation means anything to Ben Kingsley, he'll be perfectly happy for a good while.
Good stuff.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Don't be fooled. The emperor is naked. And a total fraud.
Let's just get one thing straight: The only reason I've given this film 1 star is because the option for none isn't available. This film makes me feel ill. Here's why.
You can bandy around all the 'before-its-time' and 'visionary' platitudes you like, but the simple fact is that this film has no plot, its actors are on autopilot, its themes could have been drummed up by a four-year-old, and it's all directed with the kind of pomposity with which Stanley Kubrick was terminally afflicted.
"Kubrick? Pompous?" I hear you cry. "But what about The Shining? What about A Clockwork Orange? What of Doctor Strangelove?"
Well, let's see. The Shining is good, but only for one reason - Jack Nicholson. Without his quiet madness and eventual raving, axe-wielding, snarling, cackling insanity, this film would just be an hour and a half of slow tracks through corridors broken up by scenes of people you couldn't give a damn about.
A Clockwork Orange? Boring. The book is superior (as was The Shining, now I think about it). Humourless, dull, meaningless and dangerously close to juvenilia. Fourteen-year-old boys love this because people get hurt with sticks and there are boobs in it.
Doctor Strangelove? Ah. Now I come to a problem, because Strangelove is a great film. However, I make no apology for saying that it's a great film DESPITE Kubrick, not BECAUSE of him. Peter Sellers is excellent in all three of his roles, George C. Scott is an acting powerhouse, and Sterling Hayden is a joy. The story is from a novel by Peter George. Kubrick brings nothing to the party.
So, I think it's fair to say that Kubrick is a mediocre director with delusions of grandeur who rode to stardom on the back of exceptional performances from actors far better than he deserved. He wasn't a visionary. He was a hack.
Now, back to 2001: Overrated Excrement. Sorry, I meant A Space Odyssey. That's another thing: comparing this dross to The Odyssey is like trying to make people believe 'Ernest Saves Christmas' is on a cultural par with Alfred Lord Tennyson.
I started out a few paragraphs ago trying to explain why this film is so bad. Let me try again. There are a few themes in this, but they really boil down to these visionary gems:
1. People are bad to each other. 2. Technology is evil. 3. There is more in the universe than we can see.
Hmm. Even in 1968 these theories were old hat. So, needless exploration of thoroughly explored themes aside, why else is this film pathetic? Well, the acting is sub-par for one. Keir Dullea's performance as Dave the Astronaut was practically non-existent. The film would have been much the same if he'd been replaced by a houseplant. Possibly better. And he was the protagonist. The film had to hinge on him and a computer, apparently voiced by somebody on massive amounts of lithium. Understated and slowly unnerving or just dull? I know which one I think. I like slow burners. I much prefer the build-up of tension to the shoddy action fluff made famous by the Bruckheimer/Affleck pairing, but this film has no tension. It has no build-up. It has nothing.
The oft-heralded special effects are nothing special, even allowing for the thirty-five year time gap. The universally fawned-over shot of the bone turning into the spaceship actually made me embarrassed at its ineffectiveness. It was definitely amateur-hour at Stanley's house when they cobbled that together. The use of classical music is decidedly underwhelming. The 'Ballet In Space' scene with the ships spinning around each other set to Strauss's Blue Danube Waltz looks like an episode of Battlestar Galactica with the wrong soundtrack. Frank Poole floating off into space after being killed By HAL looks like a little plastic action figure being flushed down the toilet. The ape at the beginning who hurls the afore-mentioned bone into the air looks like a hired strippogram. Pathetic. Absolutely pathetic.
You know what? I've had enough of reviewing this rubbish. It doesn't deserve a detailed critique. It deserves to be put out of its misery with a hammer to the temple.
I can't urge you strongly enough not to waste your precious time on this god-awful film. I hate it with a passion born not of misunderstanding, but adherence to the idea that a film should not, under any circumstances, be a chore to watch through virtue of its extreme tediousness and pomposity.
I stuck through this until the end (even past the ludicrous ending that lasted for about four hours) and gave it every chance to redeem itself. At the end, I sat back, disgusted, and felt a deep sense of gratitude that Stanley Kubrick had gone to a better place - a place where he couldn't do this type of damage again.
This film is utterly without merit. Kubrick should be ashamed, and so should you for watching it. If you haven't watched it yet (and I sincerely hope you haven't), please, please, please don't do it. I'd rather you watch Affleck than this drivel.
Well, perhaps not, but you get the idea.
The Warriors (1979)
Eight men... hundreds of gangs... one bop back to Coney
THERE ARE SPOILERS IN HERE FROM THE GET-GO. WATCH THE FILM FIRST, THEN COME BACK AND BASK IN MY GENIUS. MIND YOU, THIS FILM IS 26 YEARS OLD. I DON'T THINK THERE'S MUCH I COULD DO TO SPOIL IT BY NOW.
"Warriorrrrs! Come out to PLAY-I-YAY!"
There. You knew I'd have to put that into the review somewhere, so I'll get it out of the way early. Now for the review proper.
Man, what a film! A horrible little alcoholic I know had told me for years to watch this film, but I resisted because the only bit he seemed to find entertaining enough to relate was the bit where Fox gets hurled in front of a train by a cop. I found this idea interesting, but pretty pedestrian as rumble movies go.
What he didn't tell me about was the gloriously cocksure Ajax threatening to introduce a baseball bat into a man's rectum and turn him into a Popsicle. Or Vermin punching a woman in the face while Cochise smashes a wooden chair over another's head (in the interests of self-defence, of course). Or Cyrus repeatedly shouting "CAAANN YOUUUU DIIIIG IIITTTT?" just before being gunned down by the FANTASTIC David Patrick Kelly (who grinds out the 'come out to play' line in a voice I hope nobody EVER uses on me).
He didn't tell me about the savage brawl in the public toilet with a gang of what appears to be kids' TV presenters (one of whom chooses to fight in roller-skates). He didn't tell me about the Baseball Furies, who look like the Marylin Manson Little League. Neither did he mention the soundtrack, the cinematography or (some of) the acting, all of which were damned impressive.
I don't think you need me to give you the plot. You can find it in a million other places, not least elsewhere on this site. But if you're reading this, then you're reading it for a purpose. You want to know if The Warriors is worth two hours of your time, probably in response to the new game version from Rockstar. The answer? Yes it is. And let me tell you, you haven't lived until you've seen a man dressed as a toddler hurled, upside down, through a wooden toilet door.
There are a couple of things I wasn't too keen on. The first was Mercy, the smack-talking gang ho who hooks up with The Warriors after deserting her own gang, The Orphans (whose colours seem to be dirty green T-shirts). She seems unable to make up her mind whether she's a tough, independent woman at the forefront of female empowerment or a convenience to be used by any gang member who comes along until the next alpha-male turns up to give her a slap and tell her what to do. Interestingly, she failed to be in the least attractive until she emerged from a Subway tunnel covered in oily filth. Hmm...
Another thing that upset me was Ajax's early departure from the film due to obviously unlawful entrapment by a female police officer (later to be seen as 'Dirty Girl' in Frasier). The best character was out in a deeply unfair way. Still, that's no criticism of the film. I think being disappointed by the loss of a character just shows how strong that character was.
So there you go. Nine stars for a great film, one taken away for Mercy, who was an irritating shrew. I'd much rather have seen her disappear under the wheels of a train.
The Warriors is a good film with occasional lapses into brilliance, and it's refreshing to go back to a time when gangs weren't comprised of self-aggrandizing retards like 50 Cent and Jah Rule. The Greek connection makes for interesting reading too, if you're one of the dwindling few whose attention can still be held by the written word.
Can you dig it?