Showing posts with label Chan-wook Park. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chan-wook Park. Show all posts

Monday, February 15, 2010

I'M A CYBORG, BUT THAT'S OK (2006)

[Update 01/05/2022: Need to redo this review completely. Fix the screenshots also.]

A young woman who secretly thinks that she's a cyborg is committed to a psychiatric hospital after she slits her wrist, inserts some wires and plugs the wires into a wall outlet. Once inside she meets a whole slew of bizarre people and...well, that's pretty much the entire movie.

IACBTOK is a good movie and it had some charming moments - my favorite being the rice eating scene - but it's way, way too long. It would have an magical short film, but there's nowhere near enough story to justify this being a full-length movie. Good movie with interesting visuals, but I expected more from Chan-wook Park.

Sorry for the short review, but there's really nothing more to say, besides: what's up with that ending?! What even happened?

Thursday, February 11, 2010

LADY VENGEANCE (2005)

As far as the Vengeance Trilogy goes...OLDBOY is the best, followed by SYMPATHY FOR MR VENGEANCE and this one third.  The story was too slow and the vengeance was weak as fuck. Visually though the film was great to look at!

The story jumps around back and forth and all over the joint, so I'll just give you the simple version and say a woman served 13 years in prison for the murder of a child she didn't kill. Now she's out and she wants revenge. She gets it, but it slooooowly. At least in SFMV you had a bunch of stabbing and that great baseball bat the the skull scene, in OLDBOY you had the tooth-pulling and the legendary hammer scene, but in SFLV there's really nothing that stands out. It's a good movie, but I found it overly boring and nowhere near as exciting as I had expected from Chan-wook Park.

Good film and definitely worth watch, but I found it to be a minor drag. Honestly the highlight of the entire movie was seeing the brief cameo by Kang-ho Song and that other dude, the guy who farted on his mother in THIRST. Check out Park's other stuff first.

Part 1 - Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002)
Part 2 - Oldboy (2003)

Friday, January 22, 2010

SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGENANCE (2002)

Ehh, kinda boring. There's a few exciting moments, but I could easily trim off 20 minutes of filler. So you got this deaf mute dude who has a sick sister. She's on the waiting list for a kidney, but she's sick as fuck, so being a little simple, he goes to an organ dealer. They take his money he's saved up for his sister's surgery, steal his kidney and leave him naked in an abandoned building. That's pretty shitty, but the real bad luck happens next when he gets a frantic message from the hospital saying they have a donor kidney and all they need is the money for the surgery within few days. He flips out and with his Communist girlfriend they kidnap a wealthy dude's daughter. At first, things are going according to plan, but soon everything goes to shit and here's where the vengeance comes in.

Overall it's kinda entertaining, but I felt zero connection to any of the main characters so I really didn't give a f what happened to any of them.  Also why would they even sew him up?  Why not just harvest all of his organs? The most interesting thing for me was the look of the movie. Chan-wook Park is definitely talented and lucky for us he seems to get better with each film he makes.

Not a bad movie by any means. I just think it should have been shorter with better character development. Good performances by everybody. Worth watching once.

Part 2 - Oldboy (2003)
Part 3 - Lady Vengeance (2005)