Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with Mr. Albert Lanier on SAD MOVIE at this year's Hawaii Film Festival. This is the first time I've heard of it, but Lanier seems to like it and since this film is being called the Korean LOVE ACTUALLY I'll probably give it a watch. Anyway, here's Lanier! Enjoy!
HAWAII FILM FESTIVAL OPENS 25TH ANNIVERSARY YEAR WITH A "SAD MOVIE"
by Albert Lanier
The Hawaii International Film Festival-which began in 1981 with the screening of a few films at the duplex Varsity Theaters down the street from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and in 2005 will screen over 200 films at the multiplex Dole Cannery theaters and a couple of other theaters in Honolulu-officially kicked off its 25th anniversary celebration on Thursday, October 20 with the World Premiere of Director Kwon Jong-Kwan's poignant melodrama SAD MOVIE.
Kwon appeared at the screening along with one of the film's stars actor Lee Ki-Woo who caused a stir and created an aura of palpable excitement when he walked on the red carpet and into the Dole Cannery theaters where the Korean mothers and grandmothers in attendance excitedly crowded around him and director Kwon taking God know how many pictures with their digital cameras.
In over 15 years of attending this festival and about 10 in covering it, I have never seen this kind of excitement and fan frenzy rise to such levels. Film festival audiences here in Hawaii are normally pretty sedate, mild and calm and not the excitable types.
Except for Thursday night.
As if the breathless anticipation witnessed at the Dole Cannery screening of SAD MOVIE held in two 400 seat theaters wasn't enough, Lee Ki-Woo made an appearance at the Opening Night Party held at Gordon Biersch Brewery and Restaurant at the Aloha Tower Marketplace complex located smack dab on Honolulu's waterfront.
The boyish-looking Lee actually followed another actor- whom Iam told by AICN's new Hawaii correspondent Michelle Smith is one of the hottest actors in Korea-Byung-hun Lee who stars in Director Jae-Woon Kim's A BITTERSWEET LIFE which was shown Out-Of-Competition at this year's Cannes Film Festival and is slated to have its U.S. Premiere here at HIFF on Monday, October 24.
The BITTERSWEET LIFE star caused a huge commotion among his fans present at Gordon Biersch setting off a bigger and more frenzied round of swarming fanatics taking digital pictures. Byung-hun Lee certainly looked like a film star with the suit jacket and t-shirt look straight out of MIAMI VICE.
Now that I have told you a little about Opening Night madness I had to put up with, I guess I should briefly review the opening night film SAD MOVIE.
SAD MOVIE opens quietly with a montage of images: a woman in a car, a female checkout clerk ringing up customers, people posing with costumed characters at an amusement park, a firefighter taking off his helmet.
The montage picks up the pace as up-tempo Korean pop music comes up on the soundtrack while a profusion of further images involving these characters and others is thrown at the audience.
Essentially, SAD MOVIE's opening montage is introducing the audience to the 4 stories and 4 couples that will form the narrative content of the film:A thirtish Firefighter and his girlfriend who does on on-air sign language for a local station during live news broadcasts, the deaf sister of the sign language interpreter and a handsome artist who is the object of her desire, a working woman and her 8 year old son and a young guy who spars with boxers for money and his hard working grocery clerk girlfriend.
Each of these couples has an issue or two: the sign language interpreter is a little tough and demanding at times with her brave,highly professional firefighter boyfriend because she is afraid his bravery and fearlessness will get him killed, her deaf sister is rapidly falling in love with the artist but she works in Raggedy Ann suit and doesn't want to take it off in front front of him since she has a reddish blemish on her right cheek, the young boy dislikes and resents his career-minded mother so much that he draws pictures at school at her as a frowning, nasty person and writes pointed criticisms about her and the grocery clerk is tired of struggling at her job and living in poverty for three years and breaks up with her boyfriend in line 15 at her grocery store while ringing up his groceries.
A couple of interesting plot points and developments turn up. The first, the 8 year old boy discovers his mothers' journals at home and reads them, plumbing the depths of her mothers feelings and emotions including her frustration with her now husband and her wish that her unborn child be born a girl.
Then, the ne'er-do-well ex-boyfriend of the grocery clerk is asked by a complete stranger to talk to her boyfriend over a public phone and break up with him for her (She apparently doesn't have the will or guts to do it herself). Reluctantly, the ne'er-do-well does it and winds up getting paid by the stranger for his services. This surprise"transaction"gives him the idea to start his own business-a separation agency-in which he tells unsuspecting boyfriends that their girlfriends want to break up.
For most of its I hour and 48 minute running time, SAD MOVIE is actually a funny movie and at times, a charming movie but getting into its final 10-20 minutes, it becomes demonstrably clear that its annoyingly simplistic title is actually accurate.
I won't reveal the plot resolutions and pay-offs but I will say I was slightly surprised by SAD MOVIE.
To be frank, I was looking forward to tearing it apart. I mean, with a name like SAD MOVIE it has to be bad, right?
Wrong. SAD MOVIE is an effective and skillfully made melodrama that although it pushes all right emotional buttons easily and demonstrates a number of clichéd romantic visual touches (a watercolor painting of a young woman falling into a small pool of water, a rain drop falling on the the cell phone of the firefighter reading a text message from his girlfriend) still manages to be touching, funny, and enjoyable enough to watch.
Director Kwon Jong-kwan does a fine job helming this feature working well with his editor Kim Sang buem to intercut and interweave 4 stories of love and loss and coaxing good performances from a cast of South Korean stars including Lee Ki-Woo, Shin Man-Ah, Jung Woo-Sung, Im Soo-Jung and Yeom Jung-Ah.
The script for SAD MOVIE also deserves praise. Credited to Hwang Seong-Gu (with adaptation work by Kwon and original concept by Eom Ju-Young), the script creates characters that are round enough in story development and overall plot progression to be interested in and moved by their problems and situations.
The real star of SAD MOVIE in my view is its cinematographer Kim Beong Seo who does a first rate job lighting this film so as to clearly highlight daylight and artificial light at night as well as rainfall (rain is the visual agent of tragedy and change in this film). Kim makes its pictorially possible for the film's progression from mirth to pain, from comedy to drama.
SAD MOVIE has been called the Korean LOVE ACTUALLY in the HIFF program guide. I liked LOVE ACTUALLY, actually and my favorite scene in that movie is the opening where real people filmed at Heathrow Airport (without their being conscious of it) hugging and greeting each other.
Hugh Grant says in character in a voice over in that what he sees when coming into Heathrow and glimpsing the people around him engaged in conspicuous displays of emotion is love.
That is what I see in SAD MOVIE: Love. Different kinds of love: familial love, love at first sight, longtime romantic love and even love that is rejected by one's intended.
Love is all around, as the opening song of the MARY TYLER MOORE show would state.
I guess we all need love and as much I hate to admit it, so do the movies and SAD MOVIE makes an eloquent, touching cinematic argument in favor of love that I hard to refute.
