Mickey 17 (Bong Joon-ho, 2025)

Hidden Mickey

Bong Joon-ho's latest film Mickey 17 is out and disappointing some folks-- in part because it isn't making the boxoffice they're hoping from the director of Parasite ($262 million worldwide from an $11 million budget), in part because it doesn't have the sharp edge of Parasite with its literal upstairs-downstairs allegory or bloody melancholic finale. Basically the complaint I'm hearing is that it isn't Parasite, which won a goldplated Oscar doorstop for Best Picture, and that he should just do more of the same only better for the rest of his career. 

And for the rest of us? Well lemme tell you... 

Parasite (Bong Joon-ho)

Crass war

(WARNING: plot twists and story discussed in close and explicit detail)

Bong Joon-ho's Parasite hums along nicely, a Rube Goldberg thriller whose parts are polished to a shine, slide over and into each other with lubricated precision.

Burning (Lee Chang Dong)

Gone girl

I can't think of a more ambiguous elliptical unsettling film last year--or for that matter the past several years--than Lee Chang Dong's Burning. Like its eponymous action the film transforms itself several times over, from a chance encounter to a budding affair to an intricately constructed frankly mystifying triangle to something else entirely (among other things, a missing person search and a stalking)--each stage combusting material releasing volatiles sending soot and ash and smoke tumbling upwards to form sinuous suggestive shapes.

Psychokinesis (Yeom-Iyeok, Yeon Sang-ho, 2018)

Best superhero movie of the year

I know I know I know I know--if you're sick of the genre as I am you probably don't want to hear about yet another super-powered protagonist, let alone the first ever to come out of South Korea. 

Yet I think Yeon Sang-ho's Psychokinesis (Yeom-Iyeok, 2018) is different. Or different enough to be worth a look.

Peppermint Candy (Lee Chang Dong, 1999)

Backed into the future

Lee Chang-dong's emotional powerhouse of a sophomore feature Peppermint Candy (1999) is perhaps his most structurally inventive, starting with a man's suicide going backwards--an idea possibly borrowed from Harold Pinter's play and later film Betrayal, and executed contemporaneously alongside Christopher Nolan's Memento. 

What distinguishes Lee's film from Nolan's (aside from looking and feeling as far from Westernized neo-noir as a film can get, with its deceptively simple camerawork and bright Rohmerlike sunlight) is the former's deft interweaving of South Korean politico-economic history, from 1980 to 1999, with the life of one Kim Yong-ho (Sol Kyung-gu). A few days before (we learn) Kim lost his business due to an embezzling business partner, lost most of his money due to a stock market crash (The 1997 Asian Financial Crisis) the rest to a loanshark, lost his wife and child because--but I get ahead of myself. 

Films like these you know the first question that comes to mind: is the structure justified? Is the backwards time scheme just a gimmick to draw the audience's attention or a crucial tactic for presenting the film's main theme? For the first half hour you're not quite sure: we first find Kim lying on a pebbled riverside, blinking at the harsh sun. He walks into a riverside picnic and you get the sense the man is staggering drunk--he blinks uncomprehendingly even when they recognize him, shrieks words into an offered karaoke mike ("What should I do? You left so suddenly! What should I do? I can't live without you! Do you have a secret no one knew? You were so tender! Na-na-na-na! Na-na-na! Na-na-na-na!"). He walks onto the nearby railroad bridge, which worries the picnickers, one of whom pleads for him to get down. Then the train blows its whistle.

Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho, 2013)

Runaway

Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer is every which way ridiculous judging from the premise: the earth has frozen over from a global-warming cure gone horribly wrong; all that's left of humanity are the occupants of a mile-long train, riding endlessly up and down the rails of the planet.

Why a train? As opposed to, say, a city or island or mountain retreat, all of which consume less energy and are easier to maintain? Why must the train keep moving? What keeps the train moving (only power source I can think of that lasts seventeen years is a nuclear reactor, in which case where's the shielding?)? Why is there an underclass, and why are they treated so badly? 

Bong's achievement is to drive the narrative forward so that one by one--like so many hanky-waving well-wishers--each question is left behind, rendered irrelevant, even forgotten. One of the biggest though (why a train?) is granted an answer, a startling reply with disturbing implications. 

On the most basic storytelling level we have this fantastical to the point of impossible rail adventure, the siderodromophiliac's ultimate wet dream. Toss in an epic car-to-car battle involving hatchets, torches, automatic weaponry, and the odd IED--enough mayhem to call this one of the most entertaining pictures of 2014 (actually 2013, but the Weinsteins had intervened).

On another level it's political allegory, a parody of the way things are today, with head section citizens luxuriating in front and tail section tribals starving in the back (unless they nibble on the regularly distributed black protein bars of mysterious formulation ). The tail section folk, inspired by the one-armed Gilliam (John Hurt, slouched in one corner and stealing every single scene he's in), urged on by the charismatic Curtis (Chris Evans sans adamantium shield, dashing and dodging and totally unaware he's being upstaged), batter their way to where better food, a better life, and Wilford--the train's mysteriously immensely rich owner and creator (a lovely little surprise cameo)--presumably await. 

Opposing them are an army of armed and armored troopers personally led by Wilford's right hand, Minister Mason--glorious Tilda Swinton, capped with crooked cartoon dentures and speaking in the plummiest of upper-crust accents. More wounding than the troopers' bullets, more infuriating than the tyranny on display is Mason's condescension, experienced in full force when she instructs the rebels not just on the futility of their efforts but  their effrontery (in her eyes they aren't just insurgents but ingrates--they abuse Wilford's generous hospitality, he who granted them berth on his wonder train, regularly feeds them protein blocks).

On yet another level it's a travel picture that explores not so much the features of this frozen world (a mostly repetitive montage of snowdrifts and ice cliffs and frosted cities) but of the train itself, an exercise in world-building in miniature. Call it Bong's parody of what the superrich might consider essential in a postcaloric apocalypse, his idea of futuristic decadence.



There must be a prison, of course--the rich need to keep their own in line (the tail folk they simply mow down with automatic fire) only (this being a train) space is too scarce for actual cells; the convicts are stored in pull-out cabinets. One prisoner is a genuine find: Namgoong Minsu (Bong regular Song Kang-ho), the security expert turned drug addict who devised the train's many doors. With his help the rebels' progress accelerates as resistance grows fiercer and more cunning (the head folks aren't about to give up their cushy lifestyle without a struggle).

A garden--naturally the rich need not just fresh fruits and vegetables, but somewhere green to rest their weary selves (rest from what exactly we don't at this point know); a sauna, a dance club (aha (see garden)!), a walk-through aquarium and in a glassed-in bubble within said aquarium a sushi bar serving screamingly fresh fish. When the rebels pause to snack, it's almost like visiting a chapel (I'd kill for a seat)--a solemn moment, being served the possibly last plate of nigiri on Earth.

What isn't present is as telling as what is--no church or rather the classroom is their church, with the next generation raised to be a fresh batch of worshippers (the teacher, blond and hugely pregnant, functions as the church's fanatical high priest). No zoo (Bong intended one but never shot it)--seafood apparently has priority over landbound meat. No library, observatory, exploration equipment, research lab--Snowpiercer is meant, apparently, to preserve memories of what was, rather than probe and develop what could be. 

It's not a perfect picture. As action-adventure Snowpiercer is hardly breathtaking (I've seen better)--Bong's camera is at times too unsteady, too close in, the editing too confusing; as a thriller Bong himself has done tauter, far more evocative work. Call this an ambitious step up from Bong's previous science-fiction effort, but a far cry from his very best.

Beyond the dense tangle of symbols (tail vs. head; Namgoong in his prison drawer; Gilliam and his missing hand; Wilford the unseen owner-creator (you have to take his existence on faith)) is yet another level of interpretation, the one that interests me most and to my mind validates this effort (read no further if you plan to see the picture!)--the train as arena of struggle not for resources, or social recognition, or political power, but narrative control. 

Just think: the rebels batter their way up to the water source and pause--they have control now, even a means of blackmailing the head folk, but don't; they want more. When they finally confront Wilford he radiates the aura not of leader or messiah or god but of an auteur--he not only had the train built, he's puppetmastered the present situation into being (perhaps the film's most science-fictional element: revolution as a form of social engineering straight out of George Orwell's 1984). The hurtling train in Bong's hands becomes a mile-long metaphor for the film's hurtling narrative, its intricate, deceptive power structure a metaphor for the narrative's twists and turns. When you submit, who do you serve? When you resist, who do you really serve? 

Namgoong Minsu suggests a way out, a lateral move that checkmates Wilford and Gilliam and the whole messy evolutionary struggle. In its way the film declares itself a spiritual cousin to Gareth Evan's Godzilla: where Evan's monster functions as Nature's restorative agent (against which, the film suggests, we should respectfully submit), in Bong's film repression isn't an atrocity we should battle so much as blot out of our consciousness--the answer, he suggests, lies not in the front of the train, but somewhere else entirely. In either case the traditional goals of science-fiction action-adventure--power, resources, revenge--are subverted for more Asian (Eastern? Oriental?) ends.

At the film's finale their terminal position is as tenuous as ever--logically, the survivors shouldn't last long beyond the last frame--but emotionally Bong presents them as humanity's new Adam and Eve, poised to make the next great leap. Call me conned, or confused, or crazy, but I wish them luck. 

First published in Businessworld, 7.24.14

Bullet to the Head, Silver Linings Playbook, Secret Sunshine, Journey to Italy

Last Action Hero

Bullet to the Head is easily the best recent American action flick around, and Walter Hill can teach both Tarantino and Nolan a thing or two about action filmmaking.

You heard me. 

"But what about the script, a standard-issue buddy pic filled with standard-issue dialogue? What about Stallone, who hasn't given a good performance in years?" Actually the script is 1) a decent workhorse plot with a handful of fairly clever twists, the dialogue a touch more amusing than it has any right to be ("Bang. Down. Owned." "You had me at 'fuck you!'") because Stallone and co-star Sung Kang have good chemistry; and 2) if you want good dialogue and acting, go watch a stage play; the real reason to watch this is to welcome the return to the big screen of one Walter Hill, filmmaker--last reported retired, apparently not quite.

Hill speaks today's action filmmaking language--handheld footage, ADHD editing--with admirable fluency (he was after all doing hardcore action back when some of these directors were still in grade school). He knows how to shake 'em and cut 'em, only unlike some of the relatively younger turks (I'm looking at you, Nolan) he only flirts with incoherence, mixing up the footage with more stable shots that anchor the action to their confined urban spaces.

And it isn't as if he were repeating himself; the Hill that did The Long Riders or Southern Comfort or The Warriors used slow motion; Bullet does not, and you can almost hear Hill saying "That slow-mo stuff is for kids;  real men do it in real time." There's a showdown involving fireaxes that I thought was within shouting distance of Toshiro Mifune's spear duel in The Hidden Fortress--high praise, I know, but I think the choreography, camerawork and editing deserves it. A New Orleans critic called the confrontation "a choppy series of frustratingly quick cuts that end up turning the whole sequence into a generic blur of clanks and blood spatters." I say the man needs to see more Bob Fosse; Hill has the confidence to zoom in close, shake things up a bit, even accelerate the cutting rate to the point of confusion and at the right moment pull back and allow the whole thing to come together inside your head.

And Hill unlike some filmmakers (I'm looking at you, Tarantino) knows how to evoke setting; knows how to evoke atmosphere;  knows that the throwaway shots that fill the dead space between action setpieces are what help distinguish a coked-up hack from a real filmmaker. New Orleans here may be an urban fantasy every bit as unreal as New York City in The Warriors, but it's a memorably stylized fantasy--Stallone drives past an abandoned factory and it sits in the bright Louisiana sunshine like a disintegrating Czarist palace; old industrial spaces gleam with rust and dripping water, as if dipped in oil; Bobo's shack squats over the gleaming bayou like an oversized poison toad. When a car explodes and flips (we're told that Stallone's character was trained in demolitions, helping explain--barely--all the gratuitous detonations) the flame and smoke rise pyramidlike from one corner of the screen, and your spine can't help but tingle at this bit of gorgeously served mis-en-scene.  

Are the boys back in town? Not really--the film has earned the smallest amount of boxoffice of any in Stallone's career, and barely registered in the local multiplexes before being pulled out, presumably due to poor ticket sales. But from the evidence onscreen Hill is back, and he's back with a vengeance.

Lovers on Lithium

David O. Russell's Silver Linings Playbook shows how a pair of lovers meet and struggle with each other, the catch being both suffer from a mental condition. It's a romantic comedy, of course.

That takes more and less courage than one might think. No, Russell doesn't depict the extremes of the condition: Bradley Cooper's Pat is bipolar but not cripplingly so, at least while he takes his meds; Jennifer Lawrence's Tiffany has something unspecified which probably involves depression (she mentions taking Effexor) and she does just fine, more or less; Pat Sr. has an obsessive-compulsive disorder that he manages to keep undiagnosed, though after five minutes of watching him (the relentless viewing of every Eagles game; the even more relentless observance of football superstitions) anyone would come to the same conclusion. 

They're not that bad off; if they were, this would probably be a different movie, and probably not a comedy. That said, it's amazing the things they do get right--I love the scene where Pat and Tiffany start talking about their meds, throwing names like Seroquel and Klonopin and Trazadone around like so many types of Hershey's Chocolates. It's a funny way to connect that feels perfectly true, with everyone around wondering at the foreign language they're suddenly spouting. I love how Pat seems to focus on a specific topic, then suddenly swerves ninety degrees in a different direction: "I don't have an iPod. I don't have a phone. They don't let me make calls. I'm going to call Nikki." Some of the dialogue sound as if recorded or scribbled down from inmates from real institutions, then handed over for the actors to use.

I love it that the finale--a dance contest where Pat and Tiffany don't mean to win, just earn enough points for a parleyed bet--doesn't show a pair of lovers giving a great dance number, just two reasonably limber actors pouring their hearts out clumsily and heedlessly on the dance floor, letting their chemistry instead of their meager dance skills speak for them. Russell's signature brand of nervy cutting and over-the-shoulder handheld footage makes for a good fit--the style suggests Pat's precariously high-tension worldview nicely. His camera rushes the lovers like a fan shrieking for an autograph, giving them the unadulterated star treatment (he's more respectful of the veteran dancers, keeping the camera relatively still to better capture their choreography). 

This is easily one of the best romantic comedies I've seen recently--is probably the only romantic comedy I've liked recently, which is a whole miracle right then and there.

Massive trauma

Lee Chang Dong's Secret Sunshine is easily the most harrowing film of recent years; with its deceptively bright and artless cinematography (by Cho Yong-kyou, who also did Timeless, Bottomless Bad Movie and Barking Dogs Never Bite) it conceals the machinations of a vast uncaring world ready to pull the unsuspecting in, chew them up in horrific ways, spit 'em out like gristle. 

Like Ozu or Naruse it seems Lee is able to sketch with elegant strokes the complicated life of a young woman named Shin-ae (Jeon Do-yeon in a tremendous performance) who has already suffered a tragedy; with son in tow she wants to replant roots in her dead husband's hometown of Milyang, which in Chinese apparently translates to 'Secret Sunshine.' Lee is a modern master at the art of understatement, unreeling with relentless deliberation a story of suffering, anger and loss--leavened with not a bit of satire and observational, sometimes perverse, humor.

It's perhaps useless to compare Lee to a seasoned sadist like Lars Von Trier; personally I find the contrast instructive. Lee's heroines are generally less passive, more likely to possess a sense of wit or imagination (I just have to think of Emily Watson's Bess or Bjork's Selma to shudder at the sheer sense of victimization involved). Von Trier has often said he suffered from depression; watching his films I often feel he wants to dump his depression on us, bringing along all the advantages of personal involvement (strong motivation, extensive experience) as well as disadvantages (a lack of perspective). Lee from the evidence of his films doesn't seem as emotionally entangled, bringing to the table his advantages: the patience to refrain from pushing till the victim (sorry--viewer) is numbed past the point of belief or suffering (at a certain point you stop weeping and start giggling); the judgment necessary to inflict only as much pain as necessary to prove the film's thesis, not as much pain as will satisfy the filmmaker's bloodlust.

Arguably the single most painful moment in the film (skip the rest of this paragraph if you plan to see the picture) is the conclusion: as Shin-ae grasps desperately at one thing or another (church, sex, suicide) to steady herself, she finally and unexpectedly finds peace...and hence the cruelty. Some kind of resolution, even one involving death, even one involving her death, could have provided closure; instead she's granted breathing space, a moment of grace that enables her to move on, accept whatever else life has in store for her. She's ready for more punishment in short, and you feel that Lee has a varied and limitless inventory set aside waiting for her. That's the frame of mind you're in, after watching this film.

Cinema is dead

Simplest description of Roberto Rossellini's Journey to Italy: two Northern Europeans' odyssey through the mind and sensibility of a Southern European filmmaker. Second simplest description: the fracture and eventual disintegration of a middle-class marriage.

For the rest of the post (it got too big!) please go here.

2.22.13 

Man of Steel (Zack Snyder); This is the End (Evan Goldberg, Seth Rogen); Stoker (Park Chan wook)

Man and superman

If Zack Snyder's Man of Steel taught me anything it's to appreciate the Richard Donner/Richard Lester/Christopher Reeve Superman movies more. Especially Reeve--you know everything you need to know about his performance, you learn the key to his interpretation of Superman, from his stance.  

Reeve is tall; don't know if it's just his stature, or if the filmmakers built the sets/angled the camera to emphasize his prominence, or if fellow actors were cast to be markedly shorter than he is, but he's tall. When talking to someone (Lois, or Perry, or even the run-of-the-mill evil Kryptonian) he seems to look down from a position of moral authority--he's that tall.

It's more than just height, though--Reeve's performance works;  works at a glance, works for the length of the film, and the secret to the performance is, irreducibly, that aforementioned stance. You see Superman standing there, you're bewildered by the bright red-and-blue suit and intimidating height, you notice the slight stoop--and relax. He's  one of us (or if not exactly one of us at least believably on our side), and it's that stoop (he never seems comfortable in a room; his head bows forward, as if to avoid scraping the ceiling) that marks him as okay, the humanizing flaw in his godlike demeanor.  

Reeve's Superman is impressive and reassuring at the same time, but his Kent is a comic wonder--with those ridiculously thick plastic-frame spectacles for a disguise Reeves really comes into his own. He looks about helplessly, as if seeking directions; he sticks his limbs out stiffly at awkward angles as if unsure what to do with them, afraid he'll hurt someone (conversely he's constantly jostled by others, even if his elbows are nearly level with their faces); he stutters like Woody Allen on steroids, his handsomeness obviated by his harmlessness (perhaps a tribute to the character's Jewish creators?).

That's the character at a glance--or stance, if you like: Jerry Seigel and Joe Schuster in combining the qualities of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. and Harold Lloyd for their hero hit upon the essential magic formula, a mix of the quotidian and quixotic. Without the Fairbanks Kent would be just another adult Jughead; without the Lloyd Superman would be emotionally remote (if unfailingly noble) and dull. It's a balancing act that must be--but isn't always--maintained.

The Fleischer animated shorts hinted at this, though there was more Superman than Kent onscreen (their main virtues were the clean graphic lines, the sleek futuristic '40s design, the almost limitless possibilities available to animation that haven't really been matched, much less surpassed, even in this digital age). The George Reeve live-action TV show betrayed a glimmer of Kent's affability, set in low-budget surroundings (his foes were mainly gangsters and crime lords). In 1978 Alexander and Ilya Salkind managed to hire the perfect incarnation, an ubermensch with curvature of the spine, a hero with a built-in sense of humor. More than the grandiose John Williams score or (largely outdated though still impressive) special effects or huge production budget, Christopher Reeve got Superman to speak to us, made the Kryptonian superhero connect with our weak, imperfect selves.

Coming to the remake you see the problem right off. Superman Returns tried to make do with the unfunny Brandon Routh; Man of Steel has to settle for the even more muscular (and even less funny) Henry Cavill and, just to emphasize the break from Reeve, plays the young Kent as angry rebel, wandering the outskirts of America in search for meaning in his life. 

The results are kind of, well, eh. First time Kent is pushed to the ground and forced to swallow his anger it's compelling, but Snyder has to shove the allegory at our faces again and again and again. This isn't the Kent we know or love--it's a James Dean youth visibly apart from society, struggling to find his role in it. Speaking for myself if I wanted to see James Dean I'd watch James Dean; if I wanted to see Clark Kent, I'd watch Reeve shuffle two left feet. Cavill's painfully solemn transformation from disaffected youth to transcendent hero is about as interesting to watch as drying concrete.

A word on the rest of the movie, special effects, whatever: not a big fan of Richard Donner who, in spite of Reeve, creates your standard-issue Hollywood superproduction. Still Donner had his moments: when Superman takes leave of Lois Lane (Margot Kidder, a funnier and harder-edged Lois than either Kate Bosworth or Amy Adams) on her outdoor patio he floats away to the left; a pause of maybe a minute, then a knock on the front door--it's Clark in suit and tie, clutching an armful of flowers. Nowadays you just push a button and any number of Kents pop up onscreen beside their super alter-ego; back then you either failed to notice or scratched your head and asked "how did they do that?"

Likewise with Richard Lester, who with the second (and even, I'd argue, third film) brings a sly sense of fun to the proceedings. When Superman and General Zod (the inimitable Terence Stamp, who looks like he could take Michael Shannon out from between his teeth with dental floss) squared off entire buses are flung about, and we see those buses, the flash of their chrome trimmings as they fly across the huge sets. When Superman faces Zod in this installment the vehicles being tossed are ostensibly more photorealistic but there's a weightlessness, an insubstantiality to them that is, to be frank, depressing.

Mind you, I'm not saying the Donner/Lester Superman movies are great films--give me Del Toro's Hellboy or Altman's Popeye or Burton's Batman Returns any day (or even, if you like, Whedon's The Avengers or (better yet) Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog). But they're not bad, with Lester's Superman 2 as the character's big-screen apotheosis--an earthbound god with comfortingly clay feet.

As for the movie's ending (please skip the next three paragraphs if you plan to watch the movie, which I don't recommend doing): thousands maybe millions of people have just died and Superman cries over one cranky psychopath? True he's a fellow Kryptonian and our hero had just snapped his neck and likely feels all broken up for doing it...but it also feels wrong. 

Of course people have died; it would be complete idiocy for the movie to pretend otherwise, though what they do here is more interesting, a trend we've been seeing since Heath Ledger made a pencil disappear in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, continuing over to a starship plowing into San Francisco in Star Trek Into Darkness: they glide over the fact, with Superman ostensibly too busy to feel grief (or so we're supposed to think). 

Actually we're not supposed to be thinking at all--we see the pencil go up the man's eye socket in Nolan's Batman movie, we see the hurtling ship crush thousands of bystanders in Abrams' Star Trek movie, we watch thousands maybe millions more flattened by falling debris in this movie (which Nolan produced) and the act happens too fast to register properly or the camera cuts away at the last second or the steel and rock and glass fall out of frame, snuffing out innocent bystanders safely offscreen. No blood, no mess hey, no consequences, at least none you need worry about.

Getting back to the ending--so Kal-El kills, and he's upset about it? He should've been shocked at the first mangled dead body that fell to his feet (and shame on the filmmakers for not including that bit), numbed beyond emotion by the time he's up to his eyeballs in (indirectly, inadvertently shed) innocent blood. That he isn't, that despite his super hearing and super vision he reacts as if this is the first death in this whole borderline coherent affair is the single most dishonest moment in the movie. It's the new aesthetic, violence without the viciousness, having your R-rated cake and eating it in the PG-approved manner and I don't like it; it feels like I'm being pandered to and censored at the same time.

The End of the World News

Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen's This is the End is possibly the greatest twenty minute comedy ever made and what makes it great is a shot early in the movie: James Franco and his houseguests rush out of his multimilliondollar home, cut to reverse shot and all of Hollywood is in flames. I'd pay good money to see that.

Problem with the picture is that it isn't twenty minutes long; it goes on for another eighty-seven wearying minutes. And we get into the venality and cluelessness of the Hollywood elite (hold on--celebrities venal and clueless? Stop the presses!), we get Satan with a hilariously large phallus (well, that much was funny), we get Franco and Danny McBride threatening to spray their spunk all over the residence (that's funny too, and that's it, I promise). In between we get a lot of brotherly love (which you may or may not like, depending on how much you like Rogen and I don't), and cheap jabs at Rogen's phoned-in performance in Michel Gondry's The Green Hornet (which I actually liked, maybe precisely because he phoned it in and Gondry ran with it).

Otherwise--why does this movie even exist? I don't know; still trying to figure why Rogen has a career. Maybe Goldberg and Rogen felt the need to make some kind of meta-statement, their ultimate declaration of what really matters in life (your bro, and perhaps some quality weed); perhaps Rogen sensed the cold wind of mortality breathing down the back of his neck, and felt he had to stray a little into surreal comedy, toss a sop to those who polish the statues of cinematic greats. It's not much of a stretch (I'll probably be more likely to remember him for Pineapple Express); time and time again at the picture's grossest and most outrageous, I kept thinking "Monty Python did this better." Get back to me when Rogen is served his after-dinner mint.

Family ties

Park Chan-wook is off and on for me; didn't like his Vengeance trilogy much and particularly disliked Oldboy (despite moments of bravura directing), but did think Thirst was one of the better vampire movies out there.

And now this, his first English-language feature--basically Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt transplanted to Nashville, Tennessee (Matthew Goode's character is actually named Uncle Charlie). Scriptwriter Wentworth Miller improves on Hitchcock's film a little, adding that element of incestuous frisson that I felt the original needed (and probably wasn't ready to deliver at the time).

It's not Hitchcock or anywhere near as good as that; I wouldn't go that far. But Park yoked to a script that actually takes the effort to convey psychological realism or at least plausibility (whether or not it succeeds is a whole other issue) seems freer, more able to do bits of visual mischief (see photo above; the first shot of the film, of India (Mia Wasikowska) silhouetted in the horizon, in an apparently ecstatic moment; an all-too-brief glimpse of the contents of a freezer) while he trusts the storyline to make more and more sense as it unravels.

Wasikowska is wonderful; she sleepwalks her way through the picture (not necessarily a bad thing in a film that feels like a waking nightmare) and you read your own dawning comprehension of her and the film's true nature on her face as the story progresses. Matching her look for deadpan look is Matthew Goode. He made for an overobvious Ozymandias in Zack Snyder's wretched Watchmen (yet another comic book classic ruined by the man); here his creepiness is nicely balanced by a quiet charisma, and a sense of play about his role that you never got from Snyder's solemn train wreck, a hell of a lot more enticing than any mere act of seduction ("c'mon, try this--it'll be fun"). Only Nicole Kidman as India's mother is disappointing--she's basically playing Gertrude to India's feminine Hamlet, and you badly need a scene between them that clarifies or develops their relationship or at least India's feelings about her mother further (incestuous attraction don't seem right in this case--perhaps weary contempt? Patience stretched to the point of snapping?).

Some folks complain of predictability--I like to think what the picture has is inevitability, that sense that things will come into fruition and there's nothing you can do about it (which again reinforces that sense of nightmare). Will India fall under the spell of her uncle's homicidal influence? This is a Park Chan-wook film; take a wild freaking guess. 

Love the restraint--how Park withholds the crucial moment and keeps withholding it like a practiced onanist (see the aforementioned first shot, and later and even better, the shower sequence--which evokes Hitchcock, then trumps him for outrageousness). Love the gorgeous camerawork, which manages to be luscious and austere both. I'm almost wishing Park directed his own remake to Oldboy; he seems to do just fine this side of the Pacific Ocean. 

6.20.13 
 

The Housemaid (Im Sang Soo, 2010)

Domestic amuse 

Im Sang Soo's The Housemaid is a remake of Kim Ki-young's famed 1960 original, considered by many to be the greatest Korean film ever made. Which makes this new film what, exactly...?

Am traditionally suspicious of 'greatest ever' films, but Kim's black and white melodrama is possibly one of the oddest, sexiest, most fun claimant to the title--which makes its argument for the status more persuasive, in my book. The original Housemaid plays like a breathless sex thriller, a comprehensive catalogue of perversions running at flip-book speed, with the occasional pause to allow a moment of horror to sink in. Kim's camera wheels about, hurtles towards and away from its actors, constantly reframing the mis-en-scene as the characters struggle to reframe their predicament to their advantage (basically a housemaid hired to help a pregnant wife who, in falling in love with the husband, finds herself pregnant, and in competition for control of the family).

Kim borrows liberally from Hitchcock--at one point he has the housemaid deliver a deadly glass of water and Kim's camera follows it closely, the way Cary Grant's fatal glass of milk is delivered to Joan Fontaine in Suspicion (1941) (only Kim one-ups Hitchcock by using water instead of milk--nothing purer, more innocuous than water, after all). Kim also uses a massive staircase straight out of Psycho--only what am I talking about? The two came out the same year; the striking similarity in size and framing between staircases can only be a coincidence, or a case of cinematic zeitgeist. Right? Right?

Kim takes his homages only so far, though; he's a true original when it comes to over-the-top acting, to maintaining a tone that teeters between high drama and low comedy (the boundary strung tight with sexual tension), to repeatedly framing the housemaid glowering behind glass doors, a low-angled camera rushing at her, music blaring in hysterical dismay (I keep thinking of Sadako, ancestor of countless long-haired J-horror wraiths, from Hideo Nakata's Ringu (1988); have we found Sadako's own ancestor? One wonders). The film (based on the true-life case of a housemaid that poisoned her employers' child) is a no-holds-barred, no-holes-barred assault on the Korean bourgeoisie, which at this point in time held a precarious position in South Korea.

Basically willed into being by the Park Chung-hee dictatorship, South Koreans were forced-marched into acquiring all the trappings of middle-class: two-story houses, modern appliances, pianos and--significantly--domestic helpers hired straight out of the countryside. The people felt two ways about the situation; on one side modernization is a good thing (Right? Right?); on the other, they have a complete stranger in the house sleeping with them, sharing and preparing their food, taking care of their young--is it any wonder that they would feel anxious about these changes, and that Kim's erotic horror thriller (a critical and commercial hit) should strike such a sensitive nerve?

Im Sang-soo's 2010 remake doesn't emerge from an equally turbulent moment of history, and you can sense that it doesn't share the original's demonic energy, or libido, or glee. Im has rethought the situation to reflect the changing times: instead of a newly-minted middle-class we have a fabulously wealthy upper class; instead of a naïve country girl freshly trucked in from the country side we have a somewhat nebulously conceived innocent who with her employer's first advances finds a sense of giddy freedom that is, truth to tell, fetching, if not downright charming. The camerawork has settled down from hurtling rush to stately glide; the two-story house under construction has blown up into a gigantic state-of-the-art mansion. Gone are the horror-movie shock moments; instead we have more explicit sex scenes which, while not bad, don't quite have the same sense of transgressive heedlessness of the original.

The characters' situations are reversed--the housemaid is more victim than intruder, the family more malignancy than middle-class target. The film's best moments show the family's machinations, how the wife finds out about the maid's infidelities, how she and her mother plan to deal with the maid and her pregnancy. The husband (Lee Jung-jae, a successful fashion model) is a monster of selfishness and conceit; as explained by his wife, he goes after what he wants and never expects to be disappointed. When the maid bends down to fellate him for the first time, he lifts his arms out in ecstatic triumph, as if he were Superman about to receive Lois Lane's orally delivered blessing...

And so it goes. Ultimately and unfortunately the film collapses into another 'revenge of the social classes' melodrama when it promised to be so much more: a stylish black comedy about how the upper classes feed off of each other, with the hapless housemaid as their pawn. Im is conscious of class distinctions, but doesn't seem to want to do more than repeat cliches about said distinctions, instead of pushing implications to their logical limits. The last thirty minutes loses much of the film's stylish, hard-edged wit, and takes on a kind of limp idealism--pretty much a description of one's experience of this picture. Recommended, but only after seeing the yet unequalled original.

First published in Businessworld, 3.16.12