Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with the beginning of a whole shitload of Toronto reports. Seems like this year they really kicked things up a notch. Below you'll find out about a few flicks from South Korea. I've only seen OLDBOY of the titles mentioned, but after the SPIDER FOREST excitement I'm really looking forward to tracking that one down... even if I still have no idea what it's about. Enjoy, squirts!
And so that happened.
41 films in 9 ½ days later, I have emerged from the Toronto Film Festival. I live a 4 hour plane trip away in Edmonton, Alberta, and flew in just for the festival. I wanted to review as I went, but simply had no access to email nor, for that matter, time. After spending the last many hours catching up on all the movie news I missed, it’s time to make my own contribution and chime in where others have (OLDBOY), but hopefully also call your attention to some gems that will otherwise probably never be heard of in the geek community, since these festival films come and go without a trace most of the time.
Now, since reviewing takes a lot of time and that is something we all have little of, I plan on writing these in groups, so that if the first one is not published, I’ll just stop, but I'll continue otherwise. Without further ado, we will begin in East Asia.
3 from South Korea: OLDBOY, LOW LIFE, SPIDER FOREST
OLDBOY (South Korea)
Has there ever been a negative review of this movie? Excuse me, will there ever be a negative review of this movie? I went into this film, which I picked as the best of the fest, with SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE already in my collection, bought solely on Harry’s recommendation. That masterful essay on vengeance was marked, for me, first by its visual style, unique to Park and unparalleled in anything I had seen before, but secondly, more importantly, by its character work. The blending of character depth and cinematic flair is in my opinion the closest thing we will ever have to a definition of ‘geek cinema’. But not even SYMPATHY could prepare me for the miracle that is OLDBOY.
The most cinematic film at the festival this year, the key to its success nevertheless lies instead in its attention to character, mood, and tone. Park could follow a day in the life of an accountant and make it a masterpiece of cinematography, editing, and sound design, but without a good story or characters, he would just be a name among so many others. There is an indescribable way in which Park’s characters emerge from this story. Sympathy is developed for both protagonist and antagonist, and the irony of Dae-su’s seeking vengeance on the man who locked him up for 15 years, when that same man locked him for the same region—vengeance, will not be lost on audience which enters the theatre ready for something more than the most amazing images you will see in a film this year.
While I picked it as the best film I saw in Toronto, I have one gripe which I think is worth mentioning. Despite avoiding exposition for the first 2/3’s of the movie, revealing backstory and plot in more creative ways than simply telling us through cheap dialogue, Park most unfortunately includes a scene unique in OLDBOY in that it is the only scene which is not dripping with originality. Amidst this brilliant masterpiece (and those words are truly earned here), we suddenly encounter the villain-tells-the-hero-why-he-is-doing-what-he-is-doing, even including the evil-laughing-villain. I cannot express to you how out of place this lapse in brilliance feels in this phenomenal achievement. Park showed us that he could skip cheap exposition altogether, but suddenly lapses in the final act! For all the praise this film will receive in the years to come in North America, in my mind it will always fall short of reaching my ‘top x’ of all time because of this scene. Park leaves the audience with all the answers, so that we have nothing to chew on when we leave the theater except our beating hearts, in awe of his mastery of the art form. If this exposition in the final act was dropped, so that the audience would have to piece together what is instead lazily told to us by the villain, spelling it out for us, then OLDBOY might have been a film which begged multiple viewings, in my book, the best films (with all due respect to Kael) all feed off of multiple viewings.
But what does this gripe mean? It means instead of a four and a half out of four star movie, OLDBOY is ‘merely’ a four out of four star movie, easily among the best of the year, and possibly, perhaps, among the best of the decade. Which leads me to the final comment. Park does far more than give us a great movie here, he shows us, like Kubrick in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, a promise of a future in cinema with new conventions, new ways of lighting scenes, new ways of filming scenes (for the sweet love of God, the hallway fight scene alone is an illustration of what cinema truly is), and new ways of editing shots together. Park is a master of tone and mood. If an alien were to come to my door, and ask me for an example of what we earthlings refer to as ‘movies’, I would show him OLDBOY. And suddenly our primitive art form would sweep through the universe.
SPIDER FOREST (South Korea) SPOILERS AHEAD, READ AT YOUR OWN RISK
Is it Park Chan-Wook that is such a master of mood and tone, created through lighted images edited together, and passing through a projector onto a screen, or is South Korea hiding something from us? 4 South Korean movies played at Toronto this year, and I only missed one of them (scheduling), 3-Iron, which has received huge praise from those who saw it. SPIDER FOREST received a negative review from Anton Sirius on AICN a week ago, but I strongly disagree. Actually, this is the only film I did not see every minute of at the festival, showing up late and missing the first 15-20 minutes—a very bad film for this to happen with, as it is quite complicated missing that information. And yet, I loved the film so much I will probably hunt it down on ebay over the next couple years.
Anton Sirius criticized the film for playing into the cliché of the ‘trick genre’ film. The film is indeed fully of the ‘Sixth Sense’ genre, in an almost carbon copy sense. This is completely correct, the film has the ‘secret’ which a seasoned film veteran will quickly know (hell, I missed the first 20 minutes of the film) far before the director ‘reveals’ it to us, but so what: how many times have I re-watched ‘Sixth Sense’, ‘Fight Club’, and all of the trick ending movies that have strong characters, themes, and tones? SPIDER FOREST’s great strength lies not in its gimmick, if it can even be called that, but, like ‘Sixth Sense’, in the hour and a half leading up to it, an hour and a half of very strong storytelling that would make a great movie irregardless of the trick ending. SPIDER FOREST shows the same skill in very, very subtle character work that OLDBOY and LOW LIFE does. There are moments between Kang Min and Min Su-jin of very quiet non-verbal communication that will not be noticed by those not actively engaged in the movie. Indeed, it is just these non-verbal connections that characterize all the South Korean movies I have seen of late, and which give them such a strong backbone against which the excellent photography (the movie in its darkness is beautiful to watch) always plays.
I want to rewatch SPIDER FOREST (i.e. buy it on DVD) because of the quite, subtle moments of interrelations between the characters, not because of its gimmicks and secrets and labyrinthine (that one’s for Ebert) plot, which as Sirius notes is by this point in cinema history rather see-through. With ALL due respect to Sirius, his review sounds like he gave up once he realized it was a ‘Sixth Sense’ gimmick movie, but perhaps he missed, aside from the gimmick, a subtle, what PING PONG was to the sports genre quality movie in the process. Of course, I could be totally wrong here, and maybe on that particular night the movie and I just really connected, and I will never see it in such a positive light again. After all, I did miss the first 20 minutes. Either way, the film is far superior to 98% of the stuff at you local movie theatre, so don’t give up on it yet, AICN!
LOW LIFE (South Korea)
Okay, for those who have seen it, let’s get the obvious out of the way first. The ending to LOW LIFE is atrocious. I am about to give it away (SPOILER). It literally ends mid-scene, when the screen suddenly fades to black without any emotional, logical, or narrative resolution or justification, and we are treated to title cards (since I forgot his name, I’ll just call him Dae-su: “Dae-su went straight, but Korea continued to have hard times”. (END-SPOILER). In a strange (see above review) parallel to Shyamalan’s UNBREAKABLE, an otherwise amazing movie is suddenly copped out on in the last 5 seconds of the movie. This is isn’t a bad last 10 minutes, or 5 minutes, or even 1 minute. We’re talking about a the last couple seconds, in which all that had come before is suddenly mocked by this cheap pull out.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, the audience reaction aside from anger at the ending was generally positive, with some wanting ‘more fight scenes’. Um, yeah. Fight scenes were plentiful at the festival this year (see upcoming reviews), but LOW LIFE was not about fight scenes. That said, the fight scenes in the film do indeed beg for more. They are intense in their brutal violence, by which I mean there is no cartoon or Hollywood aspects to the blows given and received by the fighters. When someone is hit, it hurts, and an active audience will feel it. Think ONG-BAK. But like I said, fight scenes this movie is not.
You often see in geek reviews reference to classic movies to compare the present one with. I sometimes think this is due to geeks getting carried away (as well we should!) in the moment of watching our addictions, and getting superlative. I do this all the time verbally after I see a good movie, and in given hour I will tell you that about 50 different films are the ‘greatest movie of all time’. You know where this is leading: LOW LIFE, until its unforgivably crappy ending, is on par with GOODFELLAS and CITY OF GOD in the gangster/mob genre. Both of these masterpieces were so memorable because they gave us characters and themes that gangster-exploitation movies lack. LOW LIFE, in my opinion, has character work that exceeds both of these. It should be noted however, that its style doesn’t come close to the frenetic pace of GOODFELLAS or CITY OF GOD, which are cinematically still vastly superior. Nevertheless, the character work of South Korea, which shocked me with its impressiveness in all 3 Korean flicks I saw at Toronto, is fully present in LOW LIFE. Like SPIDER FOREST, I got the impression that other people watching in the movie were there for gangsters and fight scenes (or spiders and gore), and because both films fail to deliver on these unjustified audience expectations, the PING PONG quality character work (and especially the relationships between the characters) that are so subtle and non-verbal will be missed by those not actively involved in experiencing the movie.
LOW LIFE is a great film with an ending that should earn the filmmakers a serious reprimand. If you loved PING PONG, see this movie (and pay attention)—but just realize that pressing stop on your DVD player or leaving the theater just seconds before the movie ends will give you the same sense of resolution and satisfaction that that atrocious title card gives you.
Well, that wraps up South Korea. I loved these three movies, but no other country at Toronto this year left me with such a glowing collection, so if these continue to be published, I won’t always be sing the praises of every film I saw.
Next up:
3 from Japan: GHOST IN THE SHELL 2: INNOCENCE, STEAMBOY, ZEBRAMAN
3 from China: THROWDOWN, BREAKING NEWS, HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS
