The title and poster almost betrays the openness and capacity of the plot. It begins with the struggling Seoul cab driver (Song Kang-ho, endearing as ever), just trying to feed his daughter and get by. It’s what it looks like, then, an endearing portrait of a family man who has become a sweet taxi driver after losing his wife and his fortune. Then the whole thing twists, as a German (Thomas Kretschmann, complimentary) comes to town looking for a ride…

Capturing interiority and self reflection through his conversational text, Hong Sang-soo rattles off another idealistic open dialogue between audience and creator. It’s profound and smartly developed. The apathy and general dejection from the lead, an artist circling the drain, is pointed and poignant. There’s something to the idea of stripping it all down, having filmmaking with just the most essential parts. It allows humanity to come through and fill in the open spaces of the rigid black and white photography.…

The hook was set. Right away, these floating islands, these lost floating people, this lake of dark poetic imagery, Kim Ki-duc commanded my attention. Hook, line, and sinker.

The measure of poetic cruelty is overwrought. It is a brutalist film with masochistic tendancies. The characters are surreal film constructions. They could not exist in this way. They are outsized to express darker, deeper emotions.

What lies beneath the surface of the lake. Fish hooks. Bodies. All kinds of bad news.…

Hong Sang-soo’s cinema is the high I have always been chasing. Ever since I saw Éric Rohmer‘s Claire’s Knee as a teen and got a taste of the highly intelligent cinema that respected its audience and was confident enough to be still and conversational and let us find its morals, this is what the chase was all about. Claire’s Camera is the film I have always been chasing after.

Hong Sang-soo is a kindred spirit. Our interests and wants for…

A grotesque animated feature, Padak is the most morbid metaphor for a fish out of water story. Perhaps there is something to the revolting aesthetics of Padak, a means of staring into the abyss. It’s harder, though, with its shifting off-putting styles, to put any emotional stake in its attempted emotional manipulations. And perhaps all of them are so surface level and overstated to the point of breaking the metaphor, again and again, that the center of the story no…

It’s a battle of South and North Korean Kaijus in this week’s Ranking the Monsters. It’s Pulgasari vs. The Host, two fascinating productions with a world of difference between their styles and cultural expressions. Won’t you join us for this week’s Ranking the Monsters with guest host Vaughn.

The more Kaiju I see, the more I must advocate for the genre.

My rewatch of The Host reveals that the Kaiju formula is a nice fit for Bong Joon-ho, one of…

Bong confronts class-based fatalism in grim basements, with wealth and division fragmented by the verticality of spaces. His debut feature runs like so many of his others. There are elemental pieces of the filmmaker here. Parts that could later be slotted into more resonant filmmaking. There’s a dark and biting humor (the film certainly bites, whether or not the dogs do), arriving with a sense of the same bleak storytelling that would define his better works. A film for cat…

The idea that directors fall head over heals in love with their muses is hardly rare. There’s a whole cinema of directors who fell for their actors. Where the tensions are felt between the direction and the alluring performance.

Hong Sang-soo takes a more direct path with these things. He’s always ready to process the understood relationship between author and the viewer. His films are open conversations, without being expository and listless. Every conversation means something and matters, or has…

Fantasia Fest — #11

If Josée were to be a flower, it would be annual. It would be hardy all year but then maybe it would fade away. That’s the kind of love Josée is about, sure some seasons, and gone in others. It’s a South Korean romance film about a poor man and the woman, a wheelchair user, he loves. They are together because the shifting seasons have dictated that, for a while, that is the right thing to…

A literal and metaphorical conversation about death. Hong arrives as a close observer, with handheld footage of saturated wintry black and white framing his closeness to the subject. Generally a Rohmerian film is talking about love by a beach, but his Mauds’ also freezes over with analytical black and white. The cinematography here captures the same feeling, of winter and light, and the distance between man and woman, but without the academic interests. The film is a nice, small meditation…