The Truth Beneath (2016)

Lee Kyoung-mi's The Truth Beneath (비밀은 없다) is a mystery film that doesn't really work and doesn't have much to it except the ancient Greek tragic structure it's playing with (Park Chan-wook was one of the screenwriters). I liked it ok, but it's scripted strangely and the direction doesn't usually work. More than anything I left this film very confused still about what the solution to the mystery was. What actually happened still wasn't clear at the film's end.

The Handmaiden

Park Chan-wook's The Handmaiden (아가씨) is sexy and surprising and mysterious. It is also beautifully composed and gorgeously directed, while also managing to be quite funny on occasion. This is an erotic lesbian thriller with many nods to the Marquis de Sade that also stars the gorgeous (and brilliant) Ha Jung-woo. It is a mystery film that changes genre at least once and still revealed secrets all the way up to its great ending. Absolutely not to be missed!

Ha Jung-woo

"Stroker"

It is funny to me how certain things can push me in the direction of liking a movie or disliking a movie. Of course, a movie is not just itself, right? A movie is also how we happen to feel the day we watch it, or the expectations of greatness we bring to it, or the way other people have built it into something. Our enjoyment is also deeply affected by anything we happen to be going through at the time we watch a movie, and how we continue to feel about a movie can have as much to do with specific associations from the first time we watched that film as it does with anything "good" or "bad" about the movie.

(I really liked It's Complicated at a time when my ex-boyfriend and I were trying to get back together and make things work. The film resonated with me, whereas when I saw Love Actually I spent the whole time cringing at its treacly sentiments. But this kind of thing is totally arbitrary, really.)

What I am trying to say is that Stoker is really not that good. 

But.... I was really excited for Park Chan-wook's first English-language feature.

I love the cast: Nicole Kidman, Matthew Goode, Phyllis Somerville, and Jacki Weaver, especially. And the opening credit-sequence is kind of wonderful.

And then the rest of the movie just isn't.  

Stoker is slow, and it is creepy, and it is beautifully shot – with Park's typical gorgeously picturesque blood-spatterings, neck-breakings, and death throes.

Ms. Weaver in Stoker

The movie could be filled with tension, and I think Park is trying to be very suspenseful, but the characters are so washed out, they feel so hollow, that I just didn't care about any of them, and it's fairly difficult to have a lot of feelings about what is going to happen when none of the characters seem like real people and I don't actually care what happens to any of them. As it turns out, every person in this movie is a homicidal psychopath. So I wasn't very invested.

As it happened, though, I was kind of into this movie for quite a while. And this was because of the awesome cast, the beautiful photography, Clint Mansell's score, and the fact that the movie was Park's. I gave Stoker a lot of leeway. But by its end, I had had enough of its constant delays and numerous tiny cliffhangers. I needed something finally to happen... and nothing ever did.

Mother and Son

Last weekend, Dartmouth brought a whole bunch of films here from the Busan International Film Festival, which means I stopped everything and went to see Kim Ki-duk's latest movie Pieta.

The film was much more horrifying than the Kim Ki-duk movies to which I have grown accustomed. Pieta is a kind of riff on the narrative of a film like Bong Joon-ho's Mother. A gangster who gets money by maiming poor machinery workers (he forces them to put their hands or other limbs in their machinery in order to collect insurance money) begins to be followed by a strange woman. The woman tells him she is his mother, and begs forgiveness for having abandoned him thirty years earlier.

Of course, the young man is a gangster and so he has plenty of enemies and has continued to cultivate many more. Having family just complicates the kinds of revenge that can be wrought. And Pieta is a revenge film, a kind of high tragedy, Jacobean revenge story where everyone is brought low by the tale's end. It is horrifying and psychological and plenty disturbing, with – and this is Kim Ki-duk's skill at work – some beautifully surreal imagery.

I had seen three Kim Ki-duk films before (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring, Time, and 3-iron), and so I wasn't really expecting a film that was much more violent and disturbing than thoughtful and intellectually provocative. I asked the curator of the festival about this after the film, and she told me I was out of my mind. "Pieta is like a Park Chan-wook movie", I said. "Where's the Buddhism? Where's the sensitivity?" I asked.

"It is not like a Park Chan-wook movie", she said. "It is like a Kim Ki-duk movie. You need to see Bad Guy, or my favorite, Crocodile."

Busan's festival programmer (her name is Cho Young-Jung) told me that the films of Kim Ki-duk's that I like are the period of time when people though he was "losing his touch" or "gone soft". She totally schooled me. It was great. I found the whole thing pretty hilarious. (Then some professor emerita woman from the Theater Department came and interrupted so that she could tell the curator all about how it was "just like Greek tragedy".)

At any rate, I rather loved Pieta, too, so maybe I just like Kim Ki-duk no matter what: maiming people in machinery, meditating on the Buddha, doing disturbing things with plastic surgery, whatever.

L.A. Update #2

I've been keeping busier. Last night I went to see Luisa Fernanda at Los Angeles Opera. It was delightful. I hated the set, but I had never seen a zarzuela before, and this was a really cool experience particularly because I got to hear Plácido Domingo sing the lead male role. Boy does that man have a voice!
Being downtown made my heart ache to live in Los Angeles again. There's Southern California and there's Southern California. I realized today that I like living in Tallahassee a lot better than I like living in La Verne (where my folks live). Everyone is so white out here and it all feels so... I don't know how else to describe it except by using the word fake. Everything is a chain store: chain coffee and chain restaurants and chain clothing stores and more chain restaurants. Chain hardware stores and chain movie rental stores. Chain jewelry stores, chain bagel shops and chain auto mechanics. It's a town without a bookstore. At least Tallahassee feels lived in. It's an eerie feeling: like living in a big Hollywood movie where everything is predictable.
But downtown doesn't feel like that at all. It feels different and new and messy and unpredictable. I went to the opera with Derek. We didn't even dress up: jeans and dress shirts. And we had a great time. It's just so nice down there. And the weather! I love Los Angeles.

I finished Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's book Epistemology of the Closet which is really brilliant. And I started Foucault's The History of Sexuality Part II: The Use of Pleasure, but I am getting a little bored. I need some fiction in my life, I think. Maybe I will pick up some Noël Coward for a lark.

I've been watching movies too. Melville's Bob le Flambeur (1956) is easily as good as his later masterpieces Le Samouraï and Le Cercle Rouge. I am in LOVE with Jean-Pierre Melville. This man makes some brilliant fucking movies. Bob is an über-cool heist film without a heist. And it's an obvious predecessor to what would be called the French New Wave. The French New Wave would have been unthinkable without Bob le Flambeur (or, I think, Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows, another must-see from the 1950s.) It's a mid-1950s noir, betraying Melville's fascination with all things Yankee, but it's attitudes and self-satisfaction are unmistakeably French. Add this one to your Netflix queue.

Captain Blood is your standard Errol Flynn swashbuckler. The first one, I think. I'd never seen it, and I liked it a lot. There isn't quite enough swordfighting for my taste, but it's totally fun nonetheless and the cinematography is amazing. It also stars Olivia de Havilland, who was in all of those 1930s Errol Flynn pictures with him—before she finally escaped with Gone with the Wind and started racking up Oscars for her shelves.

Everyone's been hailing Once as a new kind of movie musical. It's a really good film, but it isn't really a watershed event in movie musical history or anything like that. Actually, it's not even really a musical so much as it is a movie with a lot of music in it. The movie follows an aspiring musician in Ireland as he records his first album and falls in love. It's filled with songs that he strums out on a guitar. I really liked it, and it has a near-perfect ending, but don't go in expecting it to change your life. It's just a really cool indie.

And Sympathy for Lady Vengeance is no Oldboy. That's all I'm saying.

Grammar

Sometimes I wish I didn't know the language so well. If I didn't I wouldn't object to someone saying "less than a fraction" on the radio yesterday, and I wouldn't have been troubled by Oldboy's big quote "Even though I'm no worse than a beast - don't I, too, have the right to live?".

Now in Korean, I am sure this made sense, but whoever translated it, obviously missed something.

Awesome

Justin and I went to see Park Chan-wook's Oldboy. It's quite a film. Justin, who has had much more exposure to the fucked-up Asian shock/violence/gore genre didn't like it nearly as much as I did. I tend to get excited about things more easily than he does... no, actually, I tend to get excited more easily about movies than he does.

I feel refreshed by this movie. It reminds me how alive I am. Plus it has a cool style and some serious money-scenes.

Also... there seems to be nothing new under the sun. Park Chan-wook is doing what Sophocles did 2500 years ago when he wrote plays. Knowing theatre as I do made me appreciate Oldboy more. This is how Greek tragedy needs to be done nowadays for it to have an impact on audiences. It was very cool, so if you can stomach the gore involved and you like revenge flicks, you really ought to go see Oldboy. It will play in Pasadena for at least another week.