Change Your Image
Michael Lindberg
Reviews
Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (2002)
Terrible, just terrible
I'm all for great action movies with no plot. Too bad this film not only had a poor plot, poor directing, and poor acting, but the action was terrible as well.
If I could go lower than 1/10, I would. This movie represents everything that is wrong with American action films. I hated it.
Go-yang-i-leul boo-tak-hae (2001)
Beautifully filmed and wonderfully acted
What a wonderful film. Take Care of My Cat has been something I've been eyeing for a long time, and I finally bought the DVD of it. I thought it was an excellent film, and was very well made.
The film is directed by newcomer JEONG Jae-eun. The movie stars BAE Doo-na (the Ring Virus) as Tae-hee, LEE Yo-won (Attack the Gas Station) as Hae-joo, newcomer OK Ji-young as Ji-young, and twins LEE Eun-sil and LEE Eun-ju (Asako in Ruby Shoes) as Bi-ryu and Ohn-jo. All five of the girls are relative newcomers, but they all played their parts with great confidence. I was especially impressed with BAE Doo-na and OK Ji-young. Their characters' relationship, seemingly formed out of necessity and circumstance, grew stronger through shared thoughts and misfortune.
In the film, Ji-young discovers a stray cat and soon takes it into her care. At Hae-joo's birthday party, Ji-young gives the cat to her as a gift. Not even a week after, Hae-joo, a busy corporate girl who is doing the best to survive in a less than satisfactory position, gives the cat back to Ji-young. Throughout the course of the film, the cat eventually makes her way through the hands of all five characters; each giving her up when changes in their lives force them to do so. The cat is used not to move the plot forward, but to externalize the movement of struggle in the lives of the girls. The girls left with the cat in the very end, the twins Bi-ryu and Ohn-jo, are the only ones whose lives require changes that are already present in their lives. Their ending up with the cat symbolizes their confidence with their position in the world. To the others, the cat remains a part of the world that they are leaving behind.
The movie itself works extremely well. The five girls are all very realistically portrayed, all trying to find their place in a world that is different than they had hoped it would be. Both Tae-hee and Ji-young live in less than satisfactory conditions, and the viewer observes these two trying to make the best of what they have. Nothing is dwelled on forever in this film. Director JEONG Jae-eun instead uses simple observation of events in the present lives of the two to frame the characters' past existence and give them a reason to leave their lives and move into the world. Sometimes this can be through tragedy, or sometimes by choice, but the justification to pack up and leave is always given.
I especially liked the music, done by M&F. It was almost German sounding, and fit the mood of the film perfectly. Although most of the music was diegetic (or coming from a source on screen, like a radio), the non-diegetic M&F music was used during turning points in the character's lives, or to frame their existence in the world.
Some may consider Take Care of My Cat a chick flick, and with no less than five main female stars and a very confident female director, this could easily have turned into another Sex in the City, focusing on nothing but men and sex. It doesn't, however, and instead loses itself in the complexities of everyday life, and the struggle between one's dreams and the reality one must face on a daily basis. The films ending, while abrupt and a little too open, shows that one must take chances in life instead of remaining where one has been told is the right place to be.
Overall, this is a great film. It may not be a film for everybody, but I found it to be very beautiful to watch. The directing is superb, with great framing and pacing. The acting is also very good, and seemed very natural. I highly recommend it. It also looks like it will be getting a US theatrical release as well, so be sure to check it out. The Korean DVD set is also worth it, and includes two short films by the director.
10/10
Fight Club (1999)
A film that tries to be meaningful
SPOILERS
Fight Club is an interesting movie. On one level, it is a very funny film. Some of the writing is fabulous. On the other level, as a meaningful and philosophical film, it fails by a large margin.
When I first saw Fight Club it was on the DVD special edition. I had avoided hearing anything about the film, and thus the inherent spoilers about the narrator's true nature were still there for me to be surprised about. When I first learned that him and Tyler were supposed to be the same person, I was thrown for a loop. I figured that there was no way the movie could pull such a cheap trick on me.
When the movie ended, I was left with a very empty feeling. What I had just seen was at once supurbly edited and very humerous, but I felt that there was another side to it. On the second viewing I finally realized that it was nothing more than an amatuerish effort to use "buzzwords" to evoke responses from people. I watched the film a second time and paid closer attention to the movie's main message. I even tried to imagine what it would be like to follow the film's message, and so I thus placed my mind into a realm so I could just absorb and obey what the film was trying to say.
After the second viewing, I realized that at most the film was trying to juxtapose two different films into one. The first sequence, before the establishment of Fight Club (some of the following scenes not directly involving Fight Club or Project Mayhem were also top-notch), was amazingly well-written. The characters interacted very well with each other. Once Fight Club began, the movie took a turn for the worse.
The sequences of Fight Club and Project Mayhem were nothing more than an amateurish attempt to create a physical representation of a philosophy that in general makes sense. It tried to say (basically) that once you lost everything, your life began to have true meaning. "Your life is not the sum of your possessions" or something like that.
While this message is powerful and inherently a "buzzword", the representation of this philosophy in Fight Club boiled down to chaos. While this was on one level a workmanlike way of handling it, I would have much preferred to see the movie evolve along the lines of discussional based philosophy (perhaps the planning of some of Project Mayhem and a nice bit of why it is ocurring would have been acceptable).
I think that Fight Club had the chance to be a very good film. It did not handle itself properly (although this would never have been fixed since it was based on a book). Some sequences were very good and very meaningful, but the handling of the philosophies in a tangible manner came off as very amateur and base. I just wish that maybe the filmmakers would have explored some of the issues in a musing style rather than in a physical representation.
American Beauty (1999)
Not nearly as impressive or as meaningful as one may hope
SPOILERS
By using a character that recognizes the beauty in the most insignificant details also be a dealer of an illegal substance (and thereby supplying Spacey's character with a means to fulfill a need), the movie is saying that by pandering to such a crowd, this idyllic character still must live in a world where you can take advantage of people and be selfish. Thus his initial characterization of a kind yet strangely observant character is rendered null by having him become part of what he begs to be rid of.
I also felt that the relationship between Spacey's daughter and the neighbor's boy would have been more powerful and connected had they not slept with each other. This clever trap helped destroy their gentle and far more interesting relationship based upon conversation rather than a purely lustful situation (had they known each other for longer, I could have accepted it as part of their evolution, but as it stands, it was a poor way to end an otherwise "beautiful" relationship).
The character of Lester is also one that confuses me. His sudden awakening to another plane of existance coexists with his wife's transformation as well. His behavior in front of his daughter's friend would certainly be party to questions. The symbolism of rose petals was also overused and too simplistic to carry a true meaning. It seemed to be more of an act of reading into the literature more than anything.
A comment about the DVD: the commentary track contained was very poor and did nothing to elevate the film beyond what I could see. It was nothing more than comments on how much they liked the shots ("and I love how his face comes into the light here") and not what they were supposed to mean. At points, they tried to come up with meaning for some of the shots, but it came off as very corny and not worth listening to.
All in all, I was very disappointed that such a poor film has generated such a positive response from the general populace. Many of the people I discuss the film with who enjoyed it (consequently, these are only other high school students) simply come up with the phrase "I liked it, but you didn't have to." Many have balked at some of my arguments and have insisted that a particular sequence was as meaningful as many think. I think that most of the movie is tied up in itself. It appears that meaning has been inserted where none should exist, and when it does exist, it usually is corny and laughable.