dcdave1 Reviews

Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War (2004)

Hollywood polish, but much better.

[10/10 · 7 September 2004]

This was far and away the best, the most powerful, the most moving war movie that I have ever seen, and I have seen quite a few of them. The only ones that come close are the great David Lean epics like Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia.

Those critics who have compared the movie to Hollywood efforts like The Deer Hunter and Saving Private Ryan could not be farther off the mark. Tae Guk Gi is what war is really about; those movies were not. War is not about endless, irrelevant, pointless games of Russian roulette, and it is not about top brass going all touchy-feely at the expense of their mission because one family seems to have paid too high a price for the war. It is about simple young men being swept up into desperate situations that they had nothing to do with creating, about the horrors they face and the horrible choices that they are often forced to make, and about survival.

The Deer Hunter's characters all seemed too old and jaded for their roles. They were not at all like the typical American rifleman in Vietnam who averaged 19.5 years of age and typically could not have found Vietnam on a map if his life depended upon it. I didn't care about any of that movie's characters. They might have possessed the requisite ignorance, but not the innocence. The characters in Private Ryan were all cardboard, with the possible exception of the reprehensible sniveling coward.

Not only was Tae Guk Gi ten times more moving on account of its realism and its character development, but it was a movie with several important moral messages, messages about which one can reflect for a very long time. The Deer Hunter seemed to me to be simply a slow, dull movie about some Pennsylvania blue-collar types that had very little to do with the real Vietnam, not at all like the French movie Indochine, for instance. I couldn't see the point of it. The only message that I saw in Private Ryan was an extremely pernicious one, that is, that war crimes are fine if Americans commit them against Germans.

Remember the episode of the captured German who is released because the patrol is behind enemy lines and they can't take him with them. The choice is to kill him or let him go. He begs his way out of getting shot and they release him. He ends up killing the main American hero in a gun fight after he, the German, has rejoined his unit. He gets captured again, and the coward then summons the "courage" to shoot the disarmed man dead in revenge, even though they are no longer behind enemy lines. The audience is supposed to be happy at this act of vengeance and to regret that the Americans didn't kill the stinking German when they had the chance, when, in fact, the German has behaved honorably throughout and has done nothing to "deserve" his fate. A movie like Saving Private Ryan could easily override any lectures on the Geneva Convention that a young American soldier might get in boot camp.

War crimes also occur in Tae Guk Gi--on both sides--as they did in that nasty internecine conflict known as the Korean War, but the victims are made real and the audience recoils in horror. Chalk up one important positive message.

Tae Guk Gi is also very instructive, not just about war in general, but also about the Korean War in particular. It does an amazing job of outlining the history of the war and capturing it as Koreans experienced it from a number of different angles. It also provides great insight into the strong bonds in a traditional Confucian Korean household, the sense of obligation felt by the oldest son, and the sacrifices that a family might make to advance the anointed intellectual "star" of the family, a carry-over from the Chinese scholar-official system.

One aspect of this family system gets lost in translation. Throughout the movie, in the English subtitles, the two brothers address one another by their respective given names. In fact, in the spoken Korean the younger one always calls his brother by an honorific expression that means "older brother." The nearly illiterate shoemaker might be the intellectual inferior of the star student, but he is, and will always remain, "older brother."

This truly great movie deserves that kind of respect, and I think it will get it as time passes.

The Hours (2002)

Good acting, but tendentious, boring, and offensive movie.

[6 April 2003]

Admittedly, I went to see this movie with the wrong expectations. I knew only that it had been generally praised by the critics, Nicole Kidman had won an academy award, Meryl Streep was also in it, and I had seen it described as a "chick flick" and a story about the "cost of conformity." Those last two points I thought should make it enjoyable to my wife and to me, respectively.

I was wrong. About 15 minutes into the movie I came to the same uncomfortable realization that I once had upon dropping in for a drink at an open-air bar that had a magnificent view overlooking San Juan Bay in Puerto Rico. This is no place for a normal, mentally healthy, heterosexual person. Well-acted though it may be, the movie is clearly by, about, and for homosexual militants. It strongly suggests that homosexuals are by their very nature superior beings, but at the same time generally miserable creatures. Their misery, however, is mainly a consequence of the pressure that straight society puts upon them to be something other than homosexuals. That's where "the cost of conformity" comes in.

I'm sorry, but I'm simply not interested in people who are all wrapped up in their petty little selves and their petty little personal concerns, whatever their sexual preferences happen to be. That this movie should have been foisted upon the public and that we should be told that we are supposed to like it is a very unfortunate sign of the times.

Die Another Day (2002)

A movie aimed at the mentality of a George W.

[4/10 · 2 January 2003]

When I was a child and might have enjoyed it, they didn't have the technology to make an actual movie out of this sort of comic book stuff. Now they do. Too bad.

The viewers' ratings are bound to be heavily biased upward by the fact that anyone spending his time and money on a Bond movie should know by now what he is letting himself in for. My excuse was that it was a cold, rainy day and I was curious as to what the Koreans were so riled up at. Curiosity well nigh killed this cat.

Chocolat (2000)

Hollywood's hit piece on traditional France.

[1/10 · 25 March 2001]

If you are pleased with what has happened to American prime-time television, where strong, stable families with admirable fathers providing proper guidance to their offspring have long disappeared, this movie is for you. The movie will also find its adherents among those who might have enjoyed Terms of Endearment, The Color Purple, Bridges of Madison County, The Piano, or other movies such in which it's open season on husbands and fathers. The main difference with Chocolat is that it is set in a quaint old French town (the rustic beauty of which is the movie's only redeeming feature from this reviewer's perspective), and it throws in a buckshot load of popular Catholic bashing as something of a bonus.

Bringing our comparisons up to date, this slightly surreal film is American Beauty with the town's patriarch and mayor playing the role of the ex-marine across the street. Traditional French small-town society, we are shown, can be as disfunctional as modern, suburban America, while the only solid, well-adjusted people are those whom society usually scorns for no good reason.

If you want to see a realistic portrayal of rural France with real people behaving less than virtuously, go see a real French movie like Manon of the Spring/Jean de Florette. Don't waste your time and money with this perniciously tendentious Hollywood fable.

Chunhyang (2000)

Korean culture in one very enjoyable, 2-hour lesson.

[10/10 · 18 March 2001]

There is nothing bland or pastel about Korea. It's traditional decorative colors, like the contrasts in its seasons, are vivid. In adapting social and political mores, as in the flavoring or food, Koreans tend to take things to extremes. South Korea, with its advertisements on pedestrian overpasses and across the bottom of the television screen, is in many ways more commercial and capitalistic than the archetype for such things, the United States, and its Christians are among the world's most fervent. North Korea, as we well know, has outdone Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse Tung with its rigid communist orthodoxy.

Korea's national epic, the intensely romantic Chunhyang story, a tale better known in Korea than, say, Cinderella in the West, takes place in an old Korea that was almost a caricature of Confucianist China. The king was a complete autocrat and the social order was extremely hierarchical. Confucian norms, however, were supposed to ensure that the despotism was an enlightened and high-minded one. One could not be a part of the ruling bureaucracy without passing rigorous examinations that required knowledge of the Chinese classics and an ability to employ them in artistic expression along strictly prescribed lines. Education and refinement were supposed to translate themselves into wisdom and virtue in public administration.

Although the lower orders may never have had it very good, for the most part the system worked. Strong, stable dynasties ruled for centuries in China and Korea, but no system created by man can guard against all human frailties. The temptation to abuse the power acquired through rising in the governmental organization was great, and Chunhyang, the "Cinderella" of this classic tale, runs afoul of one of the abusers. In the process, two Confucian requirements come into conflict with one another, loyalty of the wife to the husband and loyalty of the subject to the king or his duly vested agent.

This is not a straightforward David and Bathsheba, story, however. There is just enough ambiguity in the husband-wife relationship to make it a close call for Chunhyang as to which loyalty should prevail. To her worldly courtesan mother it's not a close call at all. She counsels the easier route. But our heroine takes deeper counsel from within herself and follows the harder path that we know, as generations of Koreans have known, is in closer accord with universal moral law.

To say more would be to give away the plot, but one wonders, with such a chastening tale as this as a part of their heritage, how any Korean officials could succumb to the temptation to abuse their authority and engage in corrupt practices. But East or West, the flesh is still weak, and the tale still needs retelling there as much as it needs telling here.

Plays as we know them were unknown in Korea until the first decade of the twentieth century. The Chunhyang story was typically performed by a single p'ansori artist. P'ansori, which is quite foreign to the Western ear, is a sort of stylized chant in which the rasping tones of the performer help convey the setting and the emotion of the characters. The "singer" is accompanied by one other person who occasionally interjects exclamations and encouragement but mainly keeps time with a small barrel drum. P'ansori performers had to undergo even more rigorous training than opera singers in the West, though the purpose seemed to be to tear down the vocal cords rather than to build them up. A single P'ansori performance, lasting sometimes as long as eight hours, was a prodigious feat of stamina and memory. Thought to have grown out of the shaman performances of the southwest province of Cholla, p'ansori was acted out by both men and women. For most of the twentieth century the art form was kept alive mainly by kisaengs, or females of the roughly-translated "courtesan" class of which the Chunhyang character was a part.

In the later twentieth century in Korea, while p'ansori was taken up by a broader spectrum of society interested in preserving Korea's traditions, the Chunhyang story was brought to the public in play, opera, and repeatedly in film form. In the early 60s, an Irish priest, a professor at the Jesuit Sogang University in Seoul, even wrote and directed a critically-acclaimed English-language Broadway-style musical version of the story.

Director Kwon-taek Im for the first time combines p'ansori and drama in this latest film version. In so doing, he has produced an authentic work of art worthy of a Yi Dynasty scholar-official. Also, in the best Korean tradition, he has gone Hollywood one better at tugging at our heartstrings. The Korean audience on the screen applauds the p'ansori artist at the film's conclusion, and the audience of which I was a member, in a full opening-night movie theater, found itself joining them spontaneously. I think you will, too.

Note: Don't be alarmed when the opening p'ansori monologue lacks English subtitles. They'll come soon enough. To provide them at that point would give away part of the plot. That's not a danger for the native Korean speakers, all of whom would know the plot by heart.