The South Koreans are really hitting it out of the ballpark with some of these thriller's I've seen from them lately. This one's got a lot of political undertones, but it's really about the disintegration of the family unit and how destructive secrets are. Very pretty, very intense and highly recommended to the thriller fans.
Nice post, Michi. IMO, South Korea has been producing many of the world’s best movies for a little over a decade, and it has (again, IMO) eclipsed Japan as the best producer of films in Asia.
For some reason I can't really stand most south korean films. I find them to be great back then, but they definitely went downhill. Of course, they are destroying Japan in that regard, who were doing a terrible job with films for the past few decades. Although pretty much anything Hong Sang-soo made is fantastic.
Some of the worst films I've ever seen were from South Korea: Castaway on the Moon, anything Kim Ki-duk made, Tae Guk Gi, and My Sassy Girl. I was part of a world cup competition in the film forum, and we had to watch a mini series called Splash Splash Love. That was just insufferable.
I didn't find Tae Guk Gi nearly so bad as to consider it one of the worst films I've ever seen, though I will admit the worst film I have ever watched is South Korean. It's called Teenage Hooker Becomes Killing Machine. I know, I know, with a title like that, how could it be bad?
I found Tae Guk Gi to be like Saving Private Ryan to make war seemed "epic", but also had melodrama to such an extreme that part of me thought it was a parody.
I do enjoy my melodrama, but I really prefer it when it's the more formal kind like in 40s and 50s Hollywood.
I figured it was meant to be epic in scope but also use its melodrama to convey its anti-war (and critical of the SK government) message, which it did with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. And that's pretty consistent with how openly political a lot of SK cinema can be in my experience.
Lord of the Rings trilogy. By the time it ended, I forgot how it started. Given its one story line split into 3 parts, I consider it one movie, and at a combined 9.5hrs total this must be the longest movie in film making history. Well... there is The Hobbit too.
That special effects on Sméagol is damn amazing especially considering the year of release. I believe some people were still on Dialup internet back then!!
The Hobbit should never have been 3 films. What a horrible idea. The Hobbit was a much better story than the Lord of the Rings because it was more to-the-point and engaging. Less world-building equivalent to navel-gazing. So what did Jackson do? He LoTRed it.
marurun wrote:The Hobbit should never have been 3 films. What a horrible idea. The Hobbit was a much better story than the Lord of the Rings because it was more to-the-point and engaging. Less world-building equivalent to navel-gazing. So what did Jackson do? He LoTRed it.
I actually really like the second trilogy, but I still agree with you.
I think it would have done horribly as a single movie because it would have been forced to compress things too much. The book relies on the reader filling in details, while film, as a visual medium, needs to make many of those scenes explicit. I think, from a run length perspective, a duology would have been best. But I'm not sure where you would put the cut between the two films, where you have a climax and a resolution for the film but then have the "but there is still more to come".
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