Category Archives: Video

Saturday Matinee: Beasts Clawing at Straws

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Director: Kim Young-Hoon
Cast: Jeon Do-Yeon, Jung Woo-Sung, Bae Sung-Woo, Youn Yuh-Jung, Jeong Man-Sik, Shin Hyun-Bin, Jung Ga-Ram, Jin Kyung, Park Ji-Hwan, Kim Joon-Han 
Running Time: 108 min.

By Paul Bramhall

Source: City of Fire

Adapted from a Japanese novel by Keisuke Sone, Beasts Clawing at Straws marks the directorial debut of Kim Yong-hoon, who also penned the script after being impressed by the novels intertwining story. Onscreen it’s easy to see why it made for a compelling big screen outing, as an impressively cast ensemble come together for an almost Shakespearean comedy of errors that focuses on 10 characters, all of whom are looking to get their hands on a Luis Vuitton bag stuffed with cash.

Taking place in the North Western harbour city of Pyeongtaek, giving the surrounds of Beasts Clawing at Straws a welcomely different aesthetic from the usual Seoul set thrillers, we initially meet a down on his luck bathhouse worker played by Bae Sung-woo (Metamorphosis, The Great Battle). Life’s been giving Sung-woo a tough time after going bankrupt, which isn’t made any easier by living with his mother, played by Youn Yuh-jung (Minari, Keys to the Heart). Suffering from the onset of dementia, she feels sure his wife (Jin Kyung – The Witness, Veteran) is trying to kill her, and matters are confounded further by their daughter having to take a break from studying to work so she can afford the tuition fees. Sung-woo and his family are fundamentally good people, the only ones in the entire cast, however when he finds the bag in question stuffed in one of the bathhouse lockers, the contents understandably prove hard to resist.

Meanwhile a frazzled immigration officer played by Jung Woo-sung (Steel Rain, Asura: City of Madness) is also in debt and being pressured to repay a vicious loan shark, played by Jung Man-sik (The Swordsman, Rampant). His limbs are on the line, and to make matters worse his girlfriend has disappeared, although in reality she’s running a hostess bar across town. Played by Jeon Do-yeon (The Shameless, Memories of the Sword), she’s always on the make and seems to be two steps ahead in whatever shifty deals are afoot. Working in the hostess bar is a newcomer played by Shin Hyun-bin (Seven Years of Night, Confidential Assignment), a character forced into the world of hostessing after she fell victim to a financial scam, but equally to get away from her abusive husband. When a Chinese customer (Jung Ga-ram – The Odd Family: Zombie On Sale, Believer) falls for her, he offers to assist with getting rid of her violent spouse.

All of these disparate scenarios gradually end up connecting with each other in different ways across the 108 minute runtime, and for a first time director Yong-hoon does an amicable job of balancing them all in a way that lets us get to know each character just enough to be invested in them. While the synopsis may indicate that Sung-woo is as close as we get to a main character as the everyman who ends up out of his depth, onscreen we get to spend just as much time with Woo-sung as the immigration officer and Do-yeon as the hostess bar madame. It’s the first time for the pair to share the screen together, and as 2 of the most recognisable faces in Korean cinema for more than 20 years, it’s a fitting vehicle to show off their talents. Woo-sung here is in the same hyper tense state that we saw him in Asura: City of Madness (although he doesn’t end up half as bloodied), and it’s undeniably fun to see him return to this kind of role.

As with almost any production she appears in though, it’s Do-yeon that steals the show whenever she’s onscreen. One of the world’s best actresses, after recent appearances in disaster flicks like Ashfall and Emergency Declaration which offered solid but unremarkable roles, it’s a real pleasure to see her here in a role fitting to her talents. Perhaps even more ruthless than the loan sharks who turn out to be as much on her tail as they do Woo-sung’s, it’s Do-yeon’s character who lingers most in the memory as the end credits roll.

It’s also another of Do-yeon’s movies that I was reminded of the most when watching Beasts Clawing at Straws, with the whole concept of various unsavoury characters in pursuit of a stash of dubiously acquired cash recalling Ryoo Seung-wan’s 2002 crime caper No Blood No Tears. Yong-hoon employs a similar caper style feel to his debut, and despite the fact that characters repeatedly get killed off left right and centre (in various gruesome ways), the violence never feels like its breaking from the black comedy tone which is established from the outset. At its core it’s a tale of dog-eat-dog, with each dog never knowing if there’s a bigger dog just around the corner, and it’s a scenario which allows for a brisk pace and some unexpected surprises.

The tension is ratcheted up further by the arrival of a cop from Seoul looking into a dismembered body that’s washed ashore. Played by the always welcome Yoon Je-moon clocking in a special appearance, ironically the last time he clocked in a special appearance was also playing a cop alongside Jung Woo-sung in 2017’s Asura: City of Madness. Je-moon’s character, who seems just as keen on hanging out in the local hostess bars and downing a few beers, has a habit of turning up at the most inconvenient of times, pushing half the cast who are already on edge just that little bit closer to it. Indeed it’s the concoction of the characters that populate the narrative that makes Beasts Clawing at Straws so much fun, with everyone suffering from some kind of bad luck, debt, or simply a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time (or right, depending on which way you look at it).

The biggest surprise that Yong-hoon has up his sleeve is that it’s only revealed mid-way through that we’re in fact watching a non-linear tale play out, and have been watching a number of timelines that are playing out concurrently rather than chronologically. It’s executed in an unassuming way, and shows off first time director Yong-hoon’s strong grasp of storytelling, almost certainly making him a talent to watch out for in the future. Matched with the scripts unbiased approach to who gets killed off next, while there’s been countless movies that prove going after a bag stuffed with cash of unknown origin always turns out to be a bad idea, Beats Clawing at Straws does enough with the concept to keep it feeling fresh.

With that being said there are moments when Yong-hoon’s inexperience shows through. In particular the plot thread involving Shin Hyun-bin’s rookie escort pairing with Jung Ga-ram as the customer that falls for her, and the subsequent sub-plot that sees Ga-ram offering to kill off her husband, feels undercooked. The scenario plays out, however in the end it doesn’t feel particularly important to the overall plot, coming across more like an inconsequential aside that should have either been dropped or spent more time connecting to the bigger picture. Similarly for Youn Yuh-jung as the meddling and paranoid mother, who’s character ultimately just feels kind of there, but fails to serve any real purpose.

These are minor flaws though in what’s an undeniably fun movie, and it’s easy to imagine the tagline for its western release going something alone the lines of “No Country for Old Men meets Pulp Fiction!” There’s arguably traces of both the Coen Brothers and Quentin Tarantino’s filmmaking DNA throughout both the tone and structure of Beasts Clawing at Straws, but Yong-hoon’s success is that it never feels like it’s being derivative of either. The distinctive locales of hostess bars, late night saunas, and scrappy apartments forever bathed in the neon of the surrounding nightlife mean there’s no question we’re in Korean territory. With a healthy mix of black comedy, typically brutal violence, and colourful characters, the lesson on offer is one we should already know, but as a reminder to leave bags stuffed full of cash exactly where they are, Beasts Clawing at Straws is an entertaining one.

Watch Beasts Clawing at Straws on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/15296509

Saturday Matinee: A Man Called Ove

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By Odie Henderson

Source: RogerEbert.com

“A Man Called Ove” tells the familiar story of the curmudgeonly old man whose grumpy life is brightened by forces beyond his control. These forces take the guise of a much younger person who provides a sense of purpose for the old hero. A film like this rises or falls not only with its central performance, but also with its ability to engage the viewer’s emotions in a credible, honest fashion. Movies like this tend to get dismissed as “manipulative” because audience sympathy for the protagonist is at least partially elicited by flashbacks to a litany of tragic or unfair past events. But all movies are manipulative by default; the effectiveness of that manipulation is the more valid measurement to inspect. On that scale, “A Man Called Ove” is a morbidly funny and moving success.

Adapting Frederick Backman’s Swedish best seller, writer/director Hannes Holm doesn’t veer too far from the storytelling structure we’ve come to expect. Instead, he tweaks expectations with the way he presents the material, and his grip on the film’s tricky, tragicomic tone is masterful. For example, several flashbacks are cleverly presented as the “life flashing before one’s eyes” moments triggered by the suicide attempts of Ove (Rolf Lassgård). Ove is a widower whose daily visits to his recently deceased wife’s gravesite end with his verbal promise to join her in the afterlife. His failures of self-annihilation are due more to bad timing than botched attempts—he is constantly interrupted by neighbors or some distracting event going on in his housing complex. Priding himself on his reliability, Ove feels compelled to stop killing himself to address each interruption.

Keep in mind that the black humor in this situation doesn’t arise from any mockery of Ove’s pain over missing his spouse. That is presented as real, understandable pain. Instead, the humor comes from Ove’s stubbornness as a creature of habit. Perpetually enforcing neighborhood rules nobody cares about nor adheres to, Ove can’t resist the opportunity to scold those who violate them. Yet, for all his crabbiness, there’s a level of selflessness inherent in Ove’s character, a trait he finds infuriating yet he begrudgingly accepts. His wife, Sonja, played as a young woman in the flashbacks by Ida Engvoll, sees this in the younger version of Ove (Filip Berg), and the much older Ove acknowledges it after much bitching and griping. It’s almost as if Sonja is sending him interruptions from beyond the grave just so he can have an excuse to complain to her like he’s done every day since her passing. This compulsive adherence to routine will keep Ove distracted.

Also distracting Ove is the new, young family who moves next door to him. They start off on the wrong foot by crushing his mailbox while ignoring his sign about not driving in the area, and the noise from their young kids is a major annoyance to the childless Ove. Though the husband is originally from the area, his pregnant wife Parvaneh (Bahar Pars) is of Iranian descent and new to the country. It is she who constantly irritates Ove while simultaneously endearing herself and her family to him. Many of his suicide attempts are interrupted by her, and their eventual father-daughter style bond is often predicated on Ove’s opinion that his help is required because he thinks her husband is an idiot.

“You survived struggle in Iran, moving here and learning a new language, and being married to that idiot,” Ove tells her after taking up the task of her driving instructor, “driving a car should be no problem!” Of course, she can’t drive it wherever Ove has those “no driving” signs everybody else ignores.

Admittedly, “A Man Called Ove” throws everything but the kitchen sink at poor Ove. There’s a shocking death early on that haunts him (and us), and he is the recipient of several slights by higher ups at work and in the government. The marriage between the shy Ove and the jovial Sonja is full of love but fraught with personal tragedies. There’s an almost Job-like mercilessness to some of the fates that befall him, yet the film never dwells on them. Instead, they’re presented rather stoically and serve as a means for us to understand why Ove is who he is. This is a movie that softens its hero by giving him a cat, which sounds syrupy until you see how jacked up and scraggly this cat is. “He likes to shit in private,” says Ove to Parvaneh. “Please give him that courtesy.”

One gets the sense that the novel (and the award-winning film version) is so beloved because Ove represents a Scandinavian everyman who saunters on no matter what life throws at him. His admirable resilience toughens like leather, and his love of Saab and hatred of Volvo plays like a beautiful in-joke aimed straight at the hearts of his compatriots. That rivalry even costs him a friendship, though that same friend’s subplot also presents Ove angrily battling the unfeeling agents of bureaucracy that caused him such agony as a young man. Holm pulls everything together in a well-crafted, satisfying package that is nicely balanced between comedy and pathos.

As Ove, Lassgård gives one of the year’s best performances. He’s well supported by the other actors (and the aforementioned cat), but this is a rich, complex performance that is both funny and moving. It would have been easy to just let Ove coast by on his amusing grouchiness, but Lassgård lets us see so deeply under that protective exterior. We feel as if we’ve walked a mile in Ove’s shoes and absorbed his catharsis as our own.

Watch A Man Called Ove on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/5563258

Saturday Matinee: The Suspect

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An utterly ridiculous and over-the-top action movie from director Won Shin-yeon (Seven Days, A Bloody Aria), but at least it knows what it is…

By Andrew Heskins

Source: Eastern Kicks

The suspect in question is Dong-cheol (Gong Yoo, Silenced, Finding Mr. Destiny, Coffee Prince), a North Korean defector accused of murdering Chairman Park, a businessman with connections with Pyongyang for whom he worked as a chauffeur. He didn’t do it, of course; framed by high-ranking NIS bureaucrat Kim Seok-Ho (Cho Seong-Ha, Pluto, Helpless, The Yellow Sea, Spider Forest), who is in fact playing both sides for his own personal gain. In his dying breath, Park gives Dong-cheol a pair of glasses with instructions to ‘bury them’. But Dong-cheol had his own agenda for defecting to the South: to seek revenge on the murder of his family.

Holding a personal grudge against Dong-cheol, Colonel Min Se-hoon (Park Hee-soon, Behind the Camera, Hansel and Gretel, Seven Days, Three: ‘Memories’) is called back from training cadets to chase him down, as the authorities use surveillance across Seoul in what could easily be a nod to Tony Scott’s a Enemy Of a The State. There with old friend Captain Jo (Jo Jae-Yun, Miracle in Cell No.7, The Man From Nowhere, Romance Joe), they begin to cotton on to there being more going than a manhunt for a defector gone wild. Meanwhile, Dong-cheol discovers his daughter could still be alive. Turning to his only ally, reporter Choi Gyung-Hee (You Da-In, The Client, Re-encounter) – allegedly working on a documentary about former defectors, but actually working on something more significant, hidden away in a Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance DVD case – they begin to unravel the truth.

As is typical in such roles, Gong Yoo makes for a rather anodyne hero. Part Won Bin in The Man From Nowhere, part Yoon Kye-sang in Poongsan (who was originally cast in the role before he backed out), with maybe a smidgen of Ha Jung-woo in The Berlin File, there’s little character to get behind. Instead, it falls on Park Hee-soon to bring some flavour to the film. Established as a hard arse in his first scene in an utterly outrageous (and actually completely unnecessary) sequence where he is shown jumping out of a plane to save a cadet who’s parachute has malfunctioned. The on screen ribbing between Park and his more ambitious friend Jo Jae-Yun crackles believably.

But it’s the character of Kim Seok-Ho who gets the films best lines, with actor Cho Seong-Ha relishing every moment. ‘Go kill Dong-cheol. Have a duel like you proper commies do!’ he smirks in one scene. Later declaring, ‘Money trumps everything in this country.’ He’s proved wrong, naturally.

It all leads to an ending not unlike Ryoo Seung-wan‘s The Berlin File, with some fantastical salvation thrown in for the famine in North Korea (it’s better you don’t ask). There’s little question that this film tries to follow Ryoo’s model, but thankfully takes itself less seriously. Far less seriously, also circumnavigating the stabbing satire of the Kim Ki-duk scripted Poongsan, or any motivation beyond the desire to make a cracking action film. And largely it succeeds.

The action is well handled by director Won Shin-yeon (Seven Days, The Wig, A Bloody Aria), with chases through malls, shootouts, and close shot hand-to-hand combat. It might not be as inventive as, say, Ryoo might direct, but it’s well choreographed nonetheless, with lead Gong having specially learned Russian martial art Systema for the role. It’s in the car scenes that The Suspect displays the bigger budget of a Showbox production, with a crash tally that might do The Blues Brothers‘ John Landis proud. As well as head on impacts, there’s a lot of high speed driving in reverse down busy roads or even narrow, steep stairways. (Though I have to say from my visit to Korea, random reversing is hardly uncommon!)

Taken at face value, The Suspect is a surprisingly enjoyable once it gets in gear. (The first half hour seems sluggish, and the film is easily some 20 minutes too long.) A daft action film with sparkling dialogue in Lim Sang-Yoon’s (A Company Man) script; it knows exactly what it is. Perhaps you shouldn’t end up rooting for the bad guy quite as much, but it’s hardly the first action that is true of…

Watch The Suspect for free on Pluto TV here: https://pluto.tv/en/on-demand/movies/the-suspect-2014-1-1?utm_medium=textsearch&utm_source=google

Saturday Matinee: Pi

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By Roger Ebert

Source: RogerEbert.com

The film “Pi” is a study in madness and its partner, genius. A tortured, driven man believes (1) that mathematics is the language of the universe, (2) nature can be expressed in numbers, and (3) there are patterns everywhere in nature. If he can find the patterns, if he can find the key to the chaos, then he can predict anything–the stock market, for example. If the man is right, the mystery of existence is unlocked. If he is wrong, the inside of his brain begins to resemble a jammed stock ticker.

The movie, written and directed by Darren Aronofsky, is a study in mental obsession. His hero, named Maximillian Cohen, lives barricaded behind a triple-locked door, in a room filled with high-powered, customized computer equipment. He wants nothing to do with anybody. He writes programs, tests them, looks for the pattern, gets a 216-digit bug, stomps on his chips in a rage, and then begins to wonder about that bug. Exactly 216 digits. There is a theory among some Jewish scholars, he learns, that the name of God has 216 letters.

The movie is shot in rough, high-contrast black and white. Max, played by Sean Gullette, is balding, restless, paranoid and brilliant. He has debilitating headaches and nosebleeds. Symptoms of high blood pressure–or of the mental torment he’s putting himself through. He’s suspicious of everyone. The friendly Indian woman next door puts food by his door. He avoids her. He trusts only his old teacher, Sol (Mark Margolis). They play Go, a game deeper than chess, and Sol tells him to stop with the key to the universe business, already. He warns that he’s spinning away from science and toward numerology.

Not everybody thinks so. His phone rings with the entreaties of Marcy (Pamela Hart), who works for a high-powered Wall Street analysis firm. They want to hire him as a consultant. They think he’s onto something. He has predicted some prices correctly. At the deli, he runs into a Hasidic Jew named Lenny (Ben Shenkman), who seems casual and friendly but has a hidden mission: His group believes the Torah may be a code sent from God and may contain God’s name.

Of course if one finds the mathematical key to everything, that would include God, stock prices, the weather, history, the future, baseball scores and the response to all moves in Go. That assumes there is a key. When you’re looking for something that doesn’t exist, it makes you crazier the closer you get to it.

The seductive thing about Aronofsky’s film is that it is halfway plausible in terms of modern physics and math. What was numerology a century ago now has now been simplified into a very, very vast problem. Chaos theory looks for patterns where common sense says there are none. A computer might be able to give you the answer to anything, if (1) it is powerful enough, and (2) it has all the data. Of course, you might need a computer the size of the universe and containing everything in it, but we’re talking theory here.

“Pi” is a thriller. I am not very thrilled these days by whether the bad guys will get shot or the chase scene will end one way instead of another. You have to make a movie like that pretty skillfully before I care. But I am thrilled when a man risks his mind in the pursuit of a dangerous obsession. Max is out on a limb. There are hungry people circling him. He may be on to something. They want it, too. For both the stock market people and the Hasidic cabal, Max’s formula represents all they believe in and everything they care about.

And then there is a level at which Max may simply be insane, or physically ill. There are people who work out complicated theories involving long, impenetrable columns of numbers. Newspapers get envelopes filled with their proofs every day. And other people who sit in their rooms, wrapping themselves in the webs of chess or numbers theory, addicted to their fixes. And game players, gamblers, horseplayers–people bewitched by the mirage of a system.

The beautiful thing about mathematics is that you can’t prove it except by its own terms. There’s no way to put some math in a test tube and see if it turns purple or heats up. It sits there smugly in its own perfect cocoon, letting people like Max find anything he wants in it–or to think that he has.