Jevo
Registered User
- Oct 3, 2010
- 3,491
- 373
Knock yourself out. Make sure to report back if you come up with anything interesting.
Great pick.My next pick is The Vanishing
Sluzier (1988)
Great pick.
Just a note of caution: Everybody make sure that they get the 1988 Dutch original, not the awful, terrible, rotten, inexcusable, ******ed, imbecilic, craven, vile, disastrous, putrid, incompetent, grossly disrespectful 1993 remake, also entitled The Vanishing and also directed by George Sluizer, unquestionably the worst remake of a fine movie ever made on this or any other planet.
so remember: 1988
I'm just getting to know this guy. If Nameless1, who is very familiar with Hong, reads our reviews, hopefully he/she will chime in. Here's my two cents. I think a lot of Hong's films have this autobiographical edge. His next film, Claire's Camera, about a school teacher who visits Cannes for the first time (playful performance by Isabelle Huppert) also has a philandering director who has a one-night stand with Kim Min-hee in it. The film is lighter and much more fictiony. So I surmise Hong does this type a thing frequently but there is a sliding scale from very autobiographical to slightly autobiographical,On the Beach at Night Alone
Hong (2017)
“What I want is to live in a way that suits me.”
So this brings me to my struggle. Not a bad struggle, but an interesting one given the real-life roots of the film. The film alone without the outside noise is a pretty compelling little character piece. Knowing the backstory though can’t help but color my thoughts a little. I suppose these are unanswerable (maybe even irrelevant) questions but I couldn’t help but wonder how much of this is actual depiction and how much is interpretative or invented. My gut says it’s more the latter than the former. I’m still pondering the confrontation at the end as it feels like she’s sorta cast off and martyred while the director gets a tearful catharsis. It’s a testament to Kim’s performance that thinking about this kinda makes me mad. The real life backstory changed my feelings about that scene because it suddenly felt like the real life man was letting his fictional counterpart off the hook while the woman was left to bear the brunt of it all.
This may be a dumb question, but is this movie chronological? I wasn’t thinking about in the course of watching, but thinking about it now, it almost feels like that first segment was the actual end of the story. And if so, then what does that say?
Questions though I may have, I have to admit it’s an effective watch.
Most popular decade: 60s. I think 70s and 00s are in the top 3 as well, but I think 60s has the edge.
Most popular year: Impossible to guess. 2000?
Most popular filmmaker: Can I have use a handful of guesses? Because that's how many names I'm going back and forth between here. I'm gonna go with Bunuel, but I can't actually recall how many times he's been picked. I'm pretty sure Godard and Truffaut are on four each, and I can't see who outside of Bunuel might have more. Maybe Hitchcock or Kurosawa?
2nd most popular country: France. I'm 99% sure of this.