Schmollywood Babylon

Snowpiercer (Joon-ho Bong, 2013)

Joon-ho Bong have previously directed two films I consider two of the best films ever made. Those are of course Memories of Murder and Mother. I really love The Host, but I tend to prefer more human stories somehow. Even if The Host is a very human story, it can’t stand up to the last shots in the above mentioned films - which still gives me chills, not because they're scary, but because they’re so emotionally strong AND simple at the same time. That’s storytelling to me. With Snowpiercer Bong makes his first English language film, but don’t worry - it’s far from the typical mainstream bullshit. Based on a French graphic novel, Le Transperceneige, from 1982 - or maybe, I haven’t read it, it’s more set in the same universe, not the same story. The film is also a co-production between South Korea, France, Czech Republic and the US - so it’s stays on the right side of quality country-wise.

The setting is actually quite absurd. After the earth suffers from a brutal decrease in temperature and everything becomes deadly cold the last survivors boards a train, a train that forever will drive round and round and round and round. During the course of time, or maybe even from the beginning, a class system is formed on the machine, with the elite, the rich and powerful at the front, and the poor and starving at the back. But a revolution is on the way, and lead by Curtis (Chris Evans) and his best friend Edgar (Jamie Bell), the people are slowly pushing themselves through the train - but not without the help by the constantly high locksmith Namgoong Minsoo (the always brilliant Kang-ho Song) and a bunch of other misfits…

Famous already before its release because the American producers wanted to cut it down, to make it more easy accessable for the (according to them it seems) less intelligent American audience. Which is just silly. This is a timeless story, no problem to understand it and the character developments are perfect. They’re needed and they’re important. I’m not totally sure if the Weinsteins got what they wanted, but what I saw was high on both action and drama, which is the perfect combination. Because if you wanna see people kill and get killed, you really wanna know why. Simple mathematics.

For being a film almost entirely set inside a train it’s not that claustrophobic. I mean, it’s a big fuckign train - but width and length. Bong carefully constructs an absurd reality where life goes from darkness and dirt to places so clean it by itself becomes dirty. Chris Evans is a damn fine hero, but far from perfect - which of course is according to plan. No one likes perfect heroes. He also faces a couple of very interesting challenges along the way, and here Snowpiercer goes into Deep Blue Sea territory with killing of characters in an order you just don’t expect. No spoilers really, but it’s a nice detail and it keeps you and characters on the edge. Killing yeah, there’s a lot of it here. Not the most graphic movie I’ve seen, but it delivers on the body count and there’s blood - so don’t worry genre fans. In a couple of places it actually reminded me of Eugenio Martín’s Horror Express, but it’s probably just something far-fetched a person like me could dream up.

Snowpiercer is a visual roller coaster (sorry for that platitude, but I had to use it!) with a fine cast - oh, don’t miss it, because Tilda Swinton is absolutely genius in it! almost forgot her! - and spectacular scenes of carnage, drama and absurdity. It’s fun to see Bong use Paul Lazar again for example, a man who previously showed up in Bong’s The Host in another bizarre role!

A lot of fun, a lot of brilliance. I know it was officially released in 2013, but most release dates is actually during 2014, and that’s my excuse for claiming this to be one of the best genre films of this year. In your face, haters!

Kongsploitation: A*P*E (Paul Leder, 1976)

I once had a good friend, a pen pal you can call it, from South Korea. He's a slightly famous poet, at least so famous he can survive on his writing. One of the first things I asked him was if he'd seen Yongary (he had, and he hated it), if he had seen Wangmagwi (no) and if he ever heard of a American-South Korean co-production called A*P*E. He never heard of it and was extremely surprised to even learn something like that existed. Paul Leder, the father of Hollywood blockbuster director Mimi Leder, was a prolific exploitation director during the 70's and 80's and A*P*E (which stands for "Attacking Primate Monster") was meant both as a spoof and a cash-in on Dino De Laurentiis King Kong. There's even a movie director called Dino in Leder's film. To add to the exploitation vibe it was also shot in 3D.

Now, this is a very ambitious project which obviously never was meant to leave the script stage, but thanks to South Korean investors and the enthusiasm of Leder it went ahead... and it's a completely, wonderful disaster! Like Goliathon it spends a little bit too much time on pointless melodrama and love affairs, but this time it's faster into absurdity and very cheap miniatures in a story that goes like this (kinda): Dino is shooting a drama in South Korea. He brings his star there, Marilyn Baker (Joanna Kerns) and everything goes well...until the giant ape that escapes from a boat (and battles an enormous shark!) in the beginning of the movie stomps closer to Seoul to create mayhem and scare children. The military, including the Americans, doesn't believe in the ape from the beginning but soon they need to battle this terrible, awful, horrible ape suit with everything the got!

This is stupid. It's very stupid. It's close to mentally challenged. It's also very entertaining and just watching the effects - none of them are good - embarress themselves in front of the camera is a beautiful thing to behold. The ape suit - or maybe more the person inside the suit - is extremely uconvincing and does a remarkably bad job imitating a primate. Also watch out for one of the seamen in the beginning - he's probably THE worst actor ever. Not kidding. 

What makes A*P*E fun is how it rarely stops to think. The drama is washed away by retared dialogue and lame attempts at comedy, the directing his highly questionable. Or maybe it's more the editing? It's hard to say, because everything is so sloppily executed. Now it seems like I'm hating it, yeah? The Evil A*P*E Hater? No, that's not just true. I love this flick. It's "special", but it's obviously made with some kind of misdirected passion and hardly any budget at all. To be fair, there's a couple of miniature scenes that look okay-ish, probably because they was shot in sunlight and not in studio, which adds to the realism. 

Come to think of it, Mimi Leder's Deep Impact is just like Paul Leder's A*P*E but with a tidal wave instead of a big ape. That's a fact according to me and you have nothing to say about it. 

Children... (Kyu-maan Lee, 2011)

I'm a fan of true trime - both books and movies - and it's a bit of a suprise how this movie could have eluded me since 2011, especially since South Korean cinema still is THE cinema that affects me emotionally like no other cinema. Children... (difficult title I must say, as we say in Sweden "ogooglebar" almost) is based on a true mystery. In 1991 five boys disappeared from their village. 300000 cops was sent out to find them, the area was search over 500 times - but no trace of them. Ten years after their bodies are found inside the searched area, not far from the village... This movie is part fiction part true. It's told from the point of view of a ruthless but skilled documentary filmmaker who gets obsessed by the mystery. He involves a local professor who seems to have a lot of good theories and soon the hunt is on, but that also means they show no respect toward the parents - which ultimatly leads to... well, I don't want to tell you. 

Children... is both a very straightforward AND complex character study. Part good old murder mystery, part drama about obsession, part a criticial view on media's behaviour. It's difficult not to think of Memories of Murder when watching this one. Set in the countryside, murders, incompetent cops and obsession to solve something - even if it means innocent people will get hurt. I can't say Children... is as good as Memories, but it's damn close. The biggest fault is the last half hour, not bad - but also something we've seen before. I have no problem with the last scene's tear-jerking visions, but the solution of the mystery itself could have been done better. Now it feels a little thrown in just to have something to give the audience. The case is still unsolved. 

But hell, it's still a great movie. I love how things are built up, often very powerful - just to make us wake up in the end, feeling the carpet of safety pulled from under our feet, and we're back on zero again. It's rarely you see this in American - or even European - cinema. It's an investment in characters and story that's just means nothing suddenly, but it's also a powerful feeling. Something very few dares to do. And somehow it kinda ties together in the end, but never in a completely satisifying way. I've written it before, it's the triggering of the imagination that turns me on.

I'm a softie and towards the end I could feel the tears rolling down my cheeks. I don't like being emotional about movies. It's an illusion. It's not real, it's just emotional porn that will fool us we still can feel something. Maybe that's why I've stayed away from this kind of South Korean dramas for quite a while now, focusing on monsters and disaster. Anyway, I feel ready to watch some more in the genre now - if I've missed this one since 2011 I must have missed something else of quality. 

A find cast rounds up the movie, amazing faces and eyes that tells more stories than their mouths say. That's acting. The location, those winding streets in the village, the mountains filled with dry leaf. It's poetic in it's grittiness. It never really works doing this in Sweden, with red houses and green forests - it takes away the haunted quality of the stories. Everything feels cleaner and more... polished. Nothing beats a sad Korean face to the background of a snowy street. Nothing.

There's something special with South Korean cinema. I think it's the emotional quality of the scripts. There can be how many twists or wild character developments, but the main thing is still the human part of the story. The finely written personalities, the subtle - and sometimes the totally opposite - dialogues, hinting of something darker - but never being to clear or "on the nose". That's why the movie works better when everything is unknown, when there's no suspects or the obsession actually goes in the wrong direction. The truth has never been as interesting as the mystery. 

Memories of a perfect ending...

Spoilers of course. Lots of them.

Joon-ho Bong's Memories of Murder from 2003 is one of the best movies ever made. I know many loves The Host - and it's a good one - but the only one he made after this one I felt talked to me emotionally is the stunning 2009 drama-thriller Mother. One of the finest dramas ever actually.

One thing that draws me back to Memories of Murder is the ending. One of those few perfect endings ever made. So far from spectacular, twisty or silly. This is frames that says so much about human nature. Our anti-hero, Detective Park Doo-Man (Kang-ho Song) has finally grown-up. Far from the lousy, incompetent drunk he's in the beginning. This is many years later and something draws him to the scene of the first crime. They never caught the serial killer and then everything was forgotten. 

A little girl approaches him and tells him another man was there recently, looking at the same place. A plain, ordinary man. Park Doo-Man analyzes the information and then looks straight at us, the audience. It's not just a matter of growing up for him, the killer did the same thing. Grew up. And he can be anyone. 

A family father. An ordinary salesman. A middle-aged, nostalgic man - just like detective Park Doo-Man. Or you and me.

The ending actually reminds me of Camillo Teti's 1986 thriller L'assassino è ancora tra noi, based on the real life The Monster of Florence killings. But Memories of Murder handles it with a lot more taste and elegance. 

Endings like this stays with him. They trigger my imagination, which is more or less the reason why I watch movies.

The Tower (Ji-hoon Kim, 2012)

It's always nice when new disaster movie release, and especially if it's from some other country than the US. In The Tower, a new South Korean blockbuster, we're introduced to all the clichés from the American 70's counterparts, but with a healthy dose of typical, happy, wonderful local acting and extremely spectacular action slash destruction. 

We all know that disaster movies are made after the same formula: a bunch of people stuck somewhere and then they die one by one. This is exactly what happens here, intercut with the heroic firemen of course! It's Christmas Eve in a 108 stories high skyscraper in Seoul (that's just a guess, the city... but I guess so) thousands of people are preparing for a nice evening of fake snow (from helicopters), performances, food and mingle with the rich and famous. But when one of the helicopters loses control and crashes into the building, setting off a deadly chain reaction of fires and explosions... well, of course: shit hits the fucking Kim. Or fan, I mean!

It's basically The Towering Inferno in South Korea. With some stuff from The Poseidon Adventure and even Earthquake. So it's nothing new at all, but the filmmakers knows thats. What they've made is a full-blown 70's disaster movie with modern technology, and the result is refreshingly entertaining and spectacular. The Koreans like some comedy, but here the comic relief just is a group of crazy Christians praying to god (and getting their wishes met in funny ways) and a few funny faces here and there from the supporting cast. Ji-hoon Kim keeps it straight and that's a wise decision. There's a lot of action and destruction, from fires and explosions to lots of water, climbing, jumping, a dangerous glass bridge going from the main tower to it's sibling, lots of elevators (including a terrible death for a dozen of victims) and of course crying and more crying.

This IS a South Korean movie. And it always needs crying.

So is there something to complain about? Well, yeah. But it's a common problem in the genre. It just exhausts itself towards the end. We've seen every kind of action, self-sacrifices, kids in danger, greedy politicans... so it just gets a bit too much. If it slowed down a bit, worked a little bit more on the human drama in-between the fire it would have earned a lot of quality. Now it's just a helluva lot of fun. 

Another thing that strikes me - and it something that might offend Americans - is the constant 9/11 references. I welcome that, it's powerful emotions, powerful images, but some might not understand the use for it. First of all, we have the twin towers, we have machines crashing into them, there's people falling from the windows and smashes to the ground and in the end there's a couple of scenes that's almost identical to the WTC towers crashing down, including the debrise and dust rolling through the surroundings, wide shots of the city with smokes coming up... it looks fantastic and I would of course do the same if I was the director. I wonder if it might hurt the distribution in the United States? 

Nah, I doubt that. Hopefully people can separate facts from fiction. This is just entertainment, and it happens to be a skyscraper on fire. Nothing else. 

Anyway, I think this is one of the best modern disaster films ever made. I'm very fond of another South Korean movie in the same genre, Haeundae, but this one delivered even more disaster for the money. An fine addition to the genre. A must the fans!

The Kick (Prachya Pinkaew, 2011)

Last year I visited Thailand for the second time and even if I bought at least 50 movies there, met movie legends and had a blast in every way possible, I think The Kick one of the first Thai movies I've watched in almost a year. It's not that I got tired of Thai films, it's that I miss Thailand (and Bangkok) so damn much. Watching these flicks makes me go into some kind of post-Thailand depression - and it happens every time. I never travel to Thailand to drink cheap booze or lay on the beach, for me it's about meeting fanastic people, getting lost in the labyrinth of Bangkok streets... I feel at home there, which is odd - I dislike when it's people everywhere. But Bangkok makes me feelt at home. Need to go there soon again...

The Kick is director Prachya Pinkaew (Ong-Bak, Tom yum goong) latest movie to be released, and it was in 2011 (I'm ignoring Elephant White from the same year, which just felt like another boring American action film). But it's never been released in any easy accessible English (or Swedish)-friendly release - until I noticed that Swedish company Njuta Films would release it! One way or another it found it's way to me and hey, this isn't bad at all!

A South Korean Taekwondo family have emigrated to Thailand to (I guess) run a school and stuff like that. By a coincidence they help saving a national treasure, an ancient knife (the McGuffin of this movie, it could have been an elephant, a Buddha or something else - it's just not that important). The baddies wants revenge and the knife, and attacks the family and kidnaps their youngest kid - and the family is forced to help them steal the knife again! But of course they want to make everything right - together with their Thai relatives, masters of Muay Thai!

The films of Pinkaew (and stunt choreographer Rittikrai) have never been famous for their elaborate plots and it's the same with The Kick. It's a very simple story, almost too simple, but works because one of the best casts so far in one of their movies. The South Korean actors are all very good, and handles both the drama and action very well. The main Thai actors are the BRILLIANT JeeJa Yanin, one of the best female fighters I've seen and also a fine actress, and the famous comedian Petchtai Wongkamlao aka Mum Jokmok. I like him, but he's a very aquired taste - and I'm happy to say that he's bringing us a low-key, realistic performance here with very little of his trademark comedy - and he's great. I hope to see him do stuff like this more. He's perfect as a grumpy middle-aged uncle.

But like all of these films the action is the number one star. Now, this is a family friendly action film so don't expect the bloodshed and ultra-violence of the Ong-Bak or Born to Fight, but it doesn't mean it's spectacular. The fights are as usual filmed in a way so we can see what's happening and they're getting gradually more spectacular the further the story goes. The highlight is the when the teenage son uses his dance moves to fight a bunch of baddies in the jungle. It's a brilliant example of how Pinkaew and Rittikrai always tries to evolve the fights, makes them a bit more unique than the usual stuff. Another fun scene is in a kitchen when Mum Jokmok and the South Korean mother creates a chaotic symphony by destroying everything around them in order to kick the shit out of the bad guys. 

It's a lot of action and some very fine stunts during the last half of the movie. So I'm sure you won't be disappointed. It's a fine co-production between South Korea and Thailand and I'm surprised I haven't it seen it getting better distributon outside Asia. I hope more fans of creative martial arts will get a chance to see it.