Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with some more Hawaii International Film Fest stuff for you folks. We have an AICN virgin here, so treat her gently you big, mean talkbackers! Enjoy her thoughts on SAD MOVIE and A BITTERSWEET LIFE!!!!
There are some real gems at this year’s LVHIFF. Good excuse to write off a trip to Hawaii next year, HARRY. For this first go I’ll tell you about A Bittersweet Life and give my go at Sad Movie, which Albert reviewed on opening night. SM ties in, so I’m leaving it.
A Bittersweet Life: SWEET!
Director Kim Ji Woon’s latest offering is deliciously violent. “Violence for entertainment’s sake,” he described it, and baby, you’re not kidding. A Bittersweet Life is a grandiose, over-the-top, exhilarating, delightful bloodbath of a film, with beautifully shot fight scenes and a brutality that will make the most hardened Tarantino fan wince on occasion.
Lee Byung Hun brings a cool humanity to the film’s antihero, Hotel Manager/Gangland Enforcer Kim Sun Woo. At the beginning of the film, he is completely cool and collected, spooning chocolate into his mouth with near-erotic concentration. Every step, every move is perfectly calculated. By the end, he’s been beaten, tied up, set on fire, buried alive, beaten with various and sundry tools, and has discovered beauty. The frailty he reveals midway through is all the more effective because of the cool, superhuman demeanor and amazing fighting prowess. Some of his fans were upset that there was no love story in the film. But Lee’s character does have the capacity, revealing through flashback at the end the reason for “all this”. This is followed by a window-boxing scene that doesn’t make a lot of sense. But I’m beginning to notice a pattern in Korean Film: end the movie with an inexplicable scene to confuse the white girl. I first noticed it in April Snow and it keeps on happening.
It’s all about justice, honor and revenge, with as much mayhem as possible. If you loved Kill Bill and Scarface, there are really no big surprises here, but the fight scenes are truly delightful, especially when fire comes into play. Director Kwon said he was influenced by Tarantino. No kidding, really? But here’s the difference: when I’m doing Tarantino, I’m watching the film, thinking: “Wow, Tarantino!” When I watched A Bittersweet Life, I got completely sucked into the story, and the elements of design that Dir. Kwon used, the film noir camera work, the uses of repeating grids, the almost relentless sense of order in the Gangster world broken by the chaos of the collection of ugly lamps in the errant girlfriend’s house and the squalor of the Russian gun runners’ hideout.
Kim Young-Chul oozes evil as Kim Sun Woo’s boss, who sends Kim to find out if his cellist girlfriend is cheating on him – and to execute her and her boyfriend if it turns out to be true. For reasons we don’t completely understand til the end of the film, Kim fails at his mission and becomes a target himself. Director Kwon’s signature black humor comes into play with the part of the plot dealing with a Russo-Korean gun smuggling ring. Lee is the perfect deadpan foil to the eccentric group, and the resulting carnage is hilarious.
This film will not make you ponder the meaning of life. It’s an “eat popcorn and cheer when the bad guys get flaming stakes plunged into them” film. It knows what it is, and it does it well.
Sad Movie: Truth in Advertising
This Korean melodrama…wait! Where are you going? Mighty Hercules can wait another eighteen seconds while you read this – there’s a perfectly good reason I’m posting this review on Fanboy Central. Just trust me, okay?
This Korean melodrama is the freshman work of Director Kwon, but doesn’t look it because the studio really opened its wallet for this one. The stars are top-notch, the cinematography impressive, and the camera work simply brilliant. This doesn’t play like a “formula” film, in that it’s a major studio release without a happy ending. There’s a note of hope, but mainly, the purpose of this film is to club you, emotionally, like a baby seal. The director tells me there’s four love stories involved here, and it’s about how all these people who love each other are eventually separated from each other. After seeing the film, I disagree. There are five relationships here, if you include the viewer with the people onscreen. The separations at the end of the film are far more heart-rending because of the way Director Kwon uses humor and pathos to build our relationships with the people onscreen.
There are four relationships inside the film: a loser who rents himself out as a punching bag to boxers-in-training, with humorous results, who finds himself on the outs with his girlfriend of three years because she sees their dead-end jobs (she works as a cashier in a supermarket) leading them to a life of poverty. After being hooked into breaking up with a stranger’s boyfriend via payphone, he gets the idea to start a separation service. Seeing others’ reaction to breakups fuels his desire to save his relationship with his girlfriend.
The second story involves a fireman trying to find a way to propose to his girlfriend, who works as a sign-language interpreter for a newscast. She is terrified of him dying on duty, and hopes daily for rain, so he’ll be safe. The pressure gets to be too much for her and she decides to end the relationship. She met him when he saved her sister from a fire.
The sister received a facial burn in the fire, and is deaf. She plays Snow White (in a Raggedy Ann costume, inexplicably) at an unnamed theme park (filmed at Everland). The “seven dwarfs” are in ghost costumes for some reason, probably licensing. She has a crush on the park’s portrait artist, played by Lee Ki Woo. Her thoughts are done in voice-over, and it’s kind of funny to hear what she’s thinking.
The fourth relationship is that of a career woman and her troubled young son. The boy seems to hate his mother, until she becomes ill. While she’s in the hospital, he finds her diaries and learns secrets both heartbreaking and empowering.
Dir. Kwon weaves these stories together almost seamlessly. I found myself completely absorbed into the movie, which doesn’t happen often enough. He has a magnificent eye for both small details and action. His next film, he tells me, will probably be a gangster film, a popular genre coming out of Korea these days. If he can do what he does in Sad Movie with a ring falling down the stairs and fire blasting through a building, room by room, I can’t wait to see what he does when the feet - and bullets - start flying.
Shelly Smith is a Korean Fangirl based out of Honolulu, Hawaii
Email her here, but keep a civil tongue, you pervos!
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