by ·Comments Off on TV/Q3/2024

The Sympathizer (2024)

Park Chan-wook lit-adaptation miniseries, take two. Everything looks extremely slick until CG helicopters start falling from the sky. Hoa Xuande is good as the lead, but each Robert Downey Jr. is worse than the last one. The highlight comes halfway through when our guy is advising on a Vietnam War movie with John Cho and David Duchovny, attempting to inject hidden messages by coaching the extras’ dialogue. After he gets blown up on-set, timelines start bleeding.

Co-created by Don McKellar, who brings along Last Night star Sandra Oh. Park directs for a while then the City of God guy takes over, then the guy who made the Steve Buscemi episode of Electric Dreams.

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Random Acts of Flyness season 2 (2022)

Not a sketch show anymore, a psychic spiritual sci-fi therapy gaming narrative.
Extremely ambitious blend of history, myth, realism, and virtual worlds.
Intriguing yes, but does it work… is it fully successful? Also yes.
Najja is now Alicia Pilgrim of last year’s A Thousand and One.
Most of the directors are from the music video world, and Nuotama Bodomo made Afronauts.

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Painting With John season 3 (2023)

Potatoes!
Flea goes to jail.
Kenny Wollesen and the rest of the band hit the studio.
Sometimes there’s still some painting.
Great show (and soundtrack).

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Smiling Friends season 1 (2022)

101. I think I missed the pilot where it’s explained that the main characters are cheery helpers for hire… anyway, here they succeed in rehabilitating the career/reputation of an evil racist frog.
102. A gaming-addicted shrimp misses his ex.
103. Pim gets lost in the spooky woods and chased by a forest demon while gathering firewood on Halloween.
104. They solve the case of a fast food manager murdered by one of his mascots.
105. They’re sent to cheer up the Princess of the Enchanted Forest, led by a stalker hobbit.
106. Frowning Friends move in across the street and turn the whole block pessimistic.
107. Charlie goes to hell at Christmas, feat. cameo by Gilbert Gottfried as God.

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Smiling Friends season 2 (2024)

201. They help a 16-bit 3D video game character find a new job.
202. Managing a presidential election vs. Mr. Frog.
203. Red office guy Allan on a quest for paperclips.
207. Journey to colorful capital-punishment town, the boss’s son becomes a malevolent butterfly.
208. Garbage snowman fears death.

I know I’m missing some but these are very short episodes and if I ever need to know which one had the boss marrying an evil demon I can just google it. Creators/voices Pim and Charlie come from, respectively, a Rick & Morty parody called Bushworld and hit youtube series Hellbenders.

by ·Comments Off on Shorts watched March 2024

Out West (1918, Roscoe Arbuckle)

Bullets and arrows to the ass and bottles to the head are minor invonceniences, if that. Roscoe is a vagabond thief sharpshooter who takes a job at Buster’s saloon and helps fend off the invincible but highly ticklish Wild Bill Hiccup. A very silly movie.

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Life is But a Dream (2022, Park Chan-wook)

Pretty good for a phone ad. Coffin maker steals wood from a famous fighter’s coffin to bury another famous fighter, the two ghosts agree to marry and be buried together. Ends on an underworld dance party, all pretty extravagant for a short.

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Wrecked (2013, Benson & Moorhead)

Shitty pilot crashes/destroys his plane in desert, needs water, makes radio contact with a bizarre unhelpful individual quoting annoying platitudes, who turns out to be a stoned music festival participant. Cute, better than the Park.

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The Heron and the Crane (1975, Yuri Norshteyn)

Animated birds and live-action fireworks. Crane would like to marry Heron, she refuses, then reconsiders but he refuses, then reconsiders, and so on. I thought there’d be some reconciliation and compromise, but nope, narrator says they go back and forth eternally.

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Hedgehog in the Fog (1975, Yuri Norshteyn)

Hedgehog gets distracted on his way to bear’s house to count stars, when he sees a white horse in the fog. Wanders in there, gets terrified by all the creatures, but they keep helping him and he makes it out. Beautiful movie, abrupt ending. How’d they do the fog? Characters remind me of the Winnie-the-Pooh Russian shorts (Khitruk was Norshteyn’s mentor).

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25 October, The First Day (1968, Yuri Norshteyn)

Ah, glorious October 1917, the people marching in one mighty red undistinguished blur while cartoon priests and fatcats run in terror. Lot of text slogans. Not my kind of thing, but neat layered images. Newsreel footage at the end with red flag waving over it, exclaiming that the people now run the country with no exploiters. Did it still feel that way fifty years later?

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Cowboy Jimmy (1957, Dusan Vukotic)

Wow, exaggerated looney Wild West characters, Jimmy arrives and kills a whole table of card cheats with one shot then throws them his smoke rings as wreaths, chases down the blackhat villain, who trips Cowboy J so he falls out of the movie screen and into the audience in front of a pipsqueak fan. The kid takes J to his wild west playhouse, where the child villain brutalizes the real cowboy until the kids all lose respect for him and carry him to the kino to throw him back through the movie screen.

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Cow on the Moon (1959, Dusan Vukotic)

Soccer hooligan smashes a girl’s model rocket, so she builds a full-size rocket to get even, knowing he’ll steal it, then she scares the hell out of him by pretending to be a moon person. The tormented cow thinks it was a pretty good joke. An even better frame-breaking gag than Cowboy Jimmy when she zooms out and tilts the movie’s background to get a cart up a steep hill

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You Ought to be in Pictures (1940, Friz Freleng)

While the animators are at lunch, Daffy talks Porky into telling Leon Schlesinger he wants to quit and go into features. While Porky is getting chased by security and thrown off sets, Daffy is auditioning for Porky’s job in Schlesinger’s office. Terrific live/anim hybrid. Top Looney story writer Michael Maltese played the guard.

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Happy Go Nutty (1944, Tex Avery)

Armed with a Napoleon hat and giant hammer, Screwy Squirrel breaks out of the nuthouse and gets chased all over by a guard dog. Good meta jokes, only one racist bit.

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Lambert the Sheepish Lion (1952, Hannah & Geronimi)

Lion is raised with sheep, “he was big but he was yellow.” Rhyming narration by Sterling Holloway. More tame / less fun than the others, but very professional looking, and who doesn’t like Holloway (reprising his stork role from Dumbo).

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Felix in Exile (1994, William Kentridge)

A person sits in a bare room while a bunch of others bleed to death. Ah, he is a writer, either inventing or recounting the deaths, the animation leaves half-erased trails – a cool effect when you know it’s done on purpose, less so when you’re not sure if you got a dodgy MP4. His walls become covered in paintings of a woman in water, the bleeding bodies transform into landscapes, the woman is connected to telescopes and sextant, and appears as a constellation. It’s all depressive-obsessive. Honestly I messed up watching this after Tex Avery shorts – even though I noted it was from the 1990s I had Felix the Cat in my mind when I hit play.

by ·Comments Off on Oldboy (2003, Park Chan-wook)

One of those movies (see also: The Game, Hypnotic) where people have to behave exactly as predicted by the supervillain for the plot to work – though there is a hitch in the plan when our man on the run (Choi Min-sik, who’d return in Lady Vengeance) and his sushi chef girlfriend/daughter (Kang Hye-jung of Invisible Waves) discover and remove their tracking devices, and the bad guy (Yoo Ji-tae, the married guy in Woman is the Future of Man) kills one of Choi’s friends with a “you made me do this” sort of speech that I didn’t buy, figuring that killing all of Choi’s friends was part of the deal. The deal is that Young Choi spotted Yoo smooching his sister in high school, told others then forgot about it, she killed herself, so Yoo becomes a rich maniac devoted to tricking Choi into fucking his own daughter. Good ending: they end up happy together after he gets the illegal prison’s house hypnotist to make him forget the girl’s identity. I can forget things just fine without hypnosis, so I’ll happily rewatch this in theaters every 20 years and be surprised each time.

by ·Comments Off on Decision to Leave (2022, Chan-wook Park)

Entrancing detective/seduction story that only lost me when Tang Wei buries/drowns herself on the beach. We’ve previously seen her in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and if I can find the director’s cut it’ll be time to rewatch her in Blackhat. Lead guy Park Hae-il (brother of Song Kang-ho and Doona Bae in The Host) exonerates her in her husband’s rock climbing death, falls for her, then discovers how she’d committed the crime and manipulated evidence. A year later another of her husbands has died, the evidence again shows her innocent, but further digging reveals she killed someone else to provoke the husband’s murder. Now Detective Park is fully messed up, losing his own wife and chasing after the murderess, who is pretty far gone herself, what with the beach finale. As with The Handmaiden, each scene is beautifully constructed, and if I lost the overall thread while watching, I’ll just have to rewatch in a few years (might as well give Stoker and Thirst another spin while I’m at it).

by ·Comments Off on The Little Drummer Girl (2018, Park Chan-wook)

Park’s followup to The Handmaiden doesn’t reach the same heights as Stoker, his other English-language movie, held back by the writing and the six hours of buttoned-up spies underplaying to survive. Big actory dialogue though – by episode three I decided I wasn’t buying any of it, but it’s pretty fun so I watched to the end. On the plus side, cool sets and costumes and cars. Park can really throw light exactly where he needs to, is excellent at photographing multi-level architecture. Michael Shannon has a wonderful laugh, but we maybe hear it once, given he’s playing a tormented Israeli agent on a convoluted revenge mission. Most importantly, Florence Pugh has the most openly expressive face of any actor right now, so what’s she doing in a spy movie? Well, it’s complicated, but she plays an actress hired by Shannon to get caught up with the Palestinian bombers so they can eventually be trapped or killed. Kidnappings and love letters and multiple fake relationships as she becomes a terrorist-in-training… as far as U being who U pretend to be, I wonder if Mother Night is out on blu-ray.

Pugh dances with Alexander Skarsgård:

Pugh practices with evil mastermind Khalil:

by ·Comments Off on The Handmaiden (2016, Chan-wook Park)

Couldn’t enjoy this as much as I should because I was in a weird state of mind, but it’s supremely entertaining, recalling Bound in its story of fortune-seeking men double-crossed by crafty female lovers.

The first half is told from the perspective of Sookee (Tae-ri Kim), a pickpocket working for handsome Jung-woo Ha (Ki-duk’s Time), who has his eyes on bigger marks, posing as a Count and getting Sookee hired as handmaiden to Lady Hideko (Min-hee Kim of Right Now, Wrong Then). The plan is to convince the Lady to marry the Count, then commit her to an institution and share her wealth, but Sookee is double-crossed and committed instead. The second part follows the Lady, who lives with her book collector uncle (Jin-woong Jo, only 40 but given gray hair and mustache) at his increasingly sinister estate, revealing her own moments and motives, some of which I’ve now forgotten because it’s been a very long month, but it’s an audacious and elegant movie and when it comes out on video I’ll happily get lost in it again.

Well-presented to English speaking audiences with Japanese and Korean dialogue in different colored subtitles. This is the year of Hokusai – first the animated biopic, then his wave appearing in Kubo and his porno octopus in this movie. I double-featured this at the Alamo with a 35mm screening of Possession, which was completely incredible and now cemented as one of my favorite movies, and which also features a porno octopus.

July 2021: Watching this again. I get the sense from twitter that as a reaction to the joyless superhero movie landscape, an interest in pervy horny movies is back in style, just doing my part.

The “Count” is hired to forge rare books so millionaire porn collector Kouzuki doesn’t have to part with the ones he sells. Now I recognize The Lady Kim Min-hee from the Hong Sang-soo films – the other woman is Kim Tae-ri, who has since starred in a historical drama miniseries and a sci-fi movie, both on netflix.

The Count with Tae-ri:

The Count with Min-hee:

The Count being tortured to death by pornographer uncle Kouzuki:

by ·Comments Off on Stoker (2013, Chan-wook Park)

Kind of your standard family-secret homicidal-maniac twist-ending thriller, but Park makes it great. Every scene is amazing looking, not just well-shot but with attention-drawing effects like seamlessly transitioning Nicole Kidman’s hair into a field of grass.

Mia W. is our vaguely Rogue-looking heroine whose dad died the day she turned 18 – killed by his maniac brother, it turns out, who killed their youngest brother as a boy, then kills Mia’s would-be-rapist school acquaintance (Alden Ehrenreich, Bennie in Tetro), then almost kills her mom until finally Mia pulls out the hunting rifle that the movie has taken care to mention and blows him away. Then she drives off, killing a sheriff on the way out of town, having inherited her uncle’s taste for murder.

Other victims include family maid Mrs. McG (hidden in the freezer) and Auntie Jen (Jacki Weaver of Picnic at Hanging Rock) – great discovery scene as Mia calls auntie’s cell and hears it ringing underground. The shooting (by Park’s usual guy Chung-hoon Chung) and editing (by Nicolas de Toth, son of the House of Wax director) are thrilling. Matthew Goode (Firth’s dead boyfriend in A Single Man, kinda has a George Clooney voice) is crazy uncle Charlie, Mia Wasikowska is currently starring in Only Lovers Left Alive, and this is the first Nicole Kidman movie I’ve seen since Birth. Shoot, Harmony Korine was in this and I didn’t notice him.

by ·Comments Off on Thirst (2009, Chan-wook Park)

Not a vampire thriller with comic parts, but an all-out comedy. I used to think Park was someone to take seriously with his vengeance trilogy, but after this and I’m a Cyborg But That’s Okay, I’m not sure he was ever serious. Maybe it has always been dark humor, and he never had anything to say about revenge – there’s nothing I can remember, anyway, and surely nothing to match K. Kurosawa’s Eyes of the Spider. Complaints aside, this was entertaining as hell and the sparse crowd was laughing and yelling in horror and delight.

Great to see the star of The Host again on the big screen, and just as good (if not better) was his 20-year-old costar Ok-vin Kim. Anyway, a priest volunteers to be injected with a painfully fatal disease in the name of science, but during a blood transfusion on his deathbed, accidentally gets turned into a vampire. Still a priest, he’s trying to be the most humane vampire he can be, killing nobody and drinking blood from coma patients through their feed tubes. But then he falls for wild young Tae-joo and leaves the priesthood to have an affair with her behind the back of her husband (Ha-kyun Shin, father of the dead girl in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance). She’s messed up and amoral from the start, and our man begins to fall – killing his blind friend and the girl’s husband so they can be together. But then she becomes a vampire and starts killing everyone in sight, so he drives them out to the middle of nowhere and waits for the sun to come up…

No messing around with stakes through the heart, garlic or other vampire business – we never even see the original vampires who infected these two. Their super strength adds to the comic-book atmosphere, jumping across rooftops, denting lampposts, tearing apart a car with his bare hands.

This died at the theater with hardly anyone hearing about it. Weird that foreign action/horror movies don’t seem to stand a chance in theaters here, while talky family dramas do fine. I’d think The Good, The Bad & The Weird, Sukiyaki Western Django and this could pull a bigger crowd than Summer Hours and Revanche, but I guess that’s why I’m not paid to book theaters.

Steve McQueen’s Hunger was playing last week, and I meant to catch it so I could watch Hunger and Thirst back-to-back, but sadly reality prevailed over gimmickry and I missed it.

by ·Comments Off on I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK (2006, Chan-wook Park)

“Sympathy is the worst of the seven deadly sins.”

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Title credits built into the opening scene shout: “I Know Where I’m Going!,” but the cartoonish situations, lively editing and bright colorful cinematography reply: “Amelie!” Maybe Park was afraid of being typecast as a grim downer of a filmmaker, a Korean David Fincher, and so like other grim young typecast filmmakers before him (Danny Boyle, Robert Rodriguez) he set out to make something light and lively to prove that he can – but maybe not as light as conceivably possible since it’s set in a mental institution.

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Our girl Young-goon is a bit of a sociopath and likes to talk to machines. Cute boy Il-soon is a thief, but steals intangible things: a ping pong serve, someone’s appetite, Thursday. Other colorful patients include a fat girl obsessed with her skin, a super-polite guy who walks backwards and spends all day apologizing, a girl who only looks at her hand mirror.

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Park includes a violent kill-all-authority-figures fantasy into his light mental-illness comedy when the girl (who is, of course, a cyborg) fantasizes her hands becoming guns, blowing away all the nurses. She very nearly starves herself to death (cyborgs do not eat human food) but she’ll be okay in the end, thanks to the cute boy who truly understands her.

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In true Amelie style this has got wonderful visuals so those who aren’t enchanted by the story and characters can delight in the cinematography (and accordian music, hmmm) – Park’s got all his bases covered. His filmmaking genre versatility proven, the typecast of dark sadistic violent films safely behind him, it sounds like Park has just turned in a dark sadistic violent vampire movie at Cannes 2009, heh.

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Recommended listening: Become a Robot by They Might Be Giants