Program Notes You'll Never Read at Severance Hall

From this weekend's concert of the Eureka Symphony, a subscription series concert entitled "A Guy You Love, A Guy You Don't Love & A Guy You Never Heard Of":

My program notes for this concert -- found on page 18 in the playbill -- describe Alexander Taneyev, whose second symphony we were intending to play. I wrote, "Alexander Sergeievich Taneyev is not to be confused with Sergei Ivanovich Taneyev, a distant cousin." In fact, they were confused. Our music supplier was asked for A. Taneyev's second symphony, but sent that of S. Taneyev. So now you need to know a bit about Sergei Taneyev.

The notes, by Dick LaForge, go on to describe how S. Taneyev's second symphony was both unfinished and unpublished in his lifetime, and how Sergei himself was considered "hopelessly conservative" by his more accomplished colleagues. It is somewhat surprising that the supplier had this music at his fingertips.

And yet, it was something of a happy surprise. Despite the members of the symphony, and its music director, being utterly unfamiliar with the work, it actually played to the strengths of the ensemble, showcasing the richness of the strings and lyrical beauty of the reeds without overexposing the brasses. The composition itself was fairly dull, but not inordinately so; certainly no duller than your average orchestral work by Tchaikovsky, Taneyev's teacher (and, presumably, the "guy you love," as the program also contained works by Tchaikovsky and Bartok). Although I can't begin to guess whether it worked out better than the intended performance of A. Taneyev's second symphony, I'd say the only disappointment was that they didn't change the title to "A Guy You Love, A Guy You Don't Love & A Guy WE Never Heard Of."

New Best Friends?

At left is Boots, a very sweet cat who has been on this property almost his whole life. He moved here as a young'un with a couple who rented my house some number of years ago. They later moved to Eureka, into an apartment where cats were not welcome (such places should be razed, if you ask me), so Boots stayed behind as a mostly-outdoor pet for my landlord. Then around the first of this year, they moved down to the Bay Area and couldn't take their assemblage of cats, all of whom are now under my care. The others all have their own "homes" (three in the barn, a fourth in a little doghouse on the back porch of the main house), but poor Boots was shut out of his usual accommodation on the laundry porch of the main house, and became homeless. Since I was feeding him (on my back porch), he started more or less living around my house. He and Reggie (pictured at rear) have never gotten along very well, but Boots was just so pathetic and such a lover that I couldn't keep him out any longer. So I started to let him inside when he wanted in, deciding to just hope for the best.

Pictured above is "the best." So far, it looks like Reggie has decided that he can share his comforts with his less fortunate (and considerably elder) brother. Please welcome Boots into our little family.

When You're a Cat...

...life is just a bed of clover.

Best of 2000s

Here's my Top 50 Films of the 2000s, as submitted as part of an omnibus project on another website. You may note the absence of any 2009 films; you may also note that my tastes don't run to the commercial. Consequently, I have to wait for a film to reach DVD before I see it, and that rules out a lot of newer releases. Please add a comment telling us a) how many of these films you have seen, and b) how crazy, obstinate, and/or wrong-headed you think I am.

1. Treeless Mountain 2008 Kim So-yong
2. Still Walking 2008 Kore-eda Hirokazu
3. This Charming Girl 2004 Lee Yoon-ki
4. Yi Yi 2000 Edward Yang
5. Take Care of my Cat 2001 Jeong Jae-eun
6. Café Lumière 2003 Hou Hsiao-hsien
7. In the Mood for Love 2000 Wong Kar-wai
8. Eureka 2000 Aoyama Shinji
9. Vertical Ray of the Sun, the 2000 Tran Anh Hung
10. Vibrator 2003 Hiroki Ryuichi
11. Return, the 2003 Andrei Zvyagintsev
12. Oasis 2002 Lee Chang-dong
13. On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate 2002 Hong Sang-soo
14. Long Weekend in Pest & Buda, a 2003 Makk Karoly
15. One Fine Spring Day 2001 Hur Jin-ho
16. Man Who Wasn't There, the 2001 Coen Bros.
17. What Time is it There? 2001 Tsai Ming-liang
18. My Dear Enemy 2008 Lee Yoon-ki
19. Kabei (Our Mother) 2008 Yamada Yoji
20. Nobody Knows 2004 Kore-eda Hirokazu
21. Good Lawyer's Wife, a 2003 Im Sang-soo
22. Chunhyang 2000 Im Kwon-taek
23. Railroad, the 2007 Park Heung-shik*
24. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring 2003 Kim Ki-duk
25. Singles 2003 Kwon Chil-in (not to be confused with the Cameron Crowe 1992 film of the same name)
26. Lilya 4-Ever 2002 Lukas Moodysson
27. Still Life 2006 Jia Zhang ke
28. Maria Full of Grace 2004 Joshua Marston
29. Between Love and Hate 2006 Kim Hae-gon
30. Twilight Samurai, the 2002 Yamada Yoji
31. Into Great Silence 2005 Philip Gröning
32. Royal Tenenbaums, the 2001 Wes Anderson
33. Woman is the Future of Man 2004 Hong Sang-soo
34. Spirited Away 2001 Miyazaki Hayao
35. This is England 2006 Shane Meadows
36. Saving My Hubby 2002 Hyun Nam-seob (aka Be Strong, Geum-soon!, but not to be confused with the Korean TV series of this same name)
37. Clean 2004 Olivier Assayas
38. Saddest Music in the World, the 2004 Guy Maddin
39. Barking Dogs Never Bite 2000 Bong Joon-ho
40. Memories of Murder 2003 Bong Joon-ho
41. Time Out 2001 Laurent Cantet
42. Monday Morning 2002 Otar Iosseliani
43. Woman on the Beach 2006 Hong Sang-soo
44. Last Life in the Universe 2003 Pen-ek Ratanaruang
45. Circle, the 2000 Jafar Panahi
46. Ad-Lib Night 2006 Lee Yoon-ki
47. Secret Sunshine 2007 Lee Chang-dong
48. Tokyo Trash Baby 2000 Hiroki Ryuichi
49. Incredibles, the 2004 Brad Bird
50. Enfant, L' 2005 Dardenne Bros.

*Note to #23: There are two active Korean directors with this name, but imdb conflates them into one. This one is the director of The Railroad and The Twins. The other, more famous one directed (among others) My Sweet Seoul, My Mother the Mermaid, I Wish I Had a Wife Too, and Bravo My Life (aka Mommie Dearest). If you care.

No Comment

I must say, getting no comments at all on the preceding seven DVD reviews is not what I was hoping for. Especially since I've posted links to them in three different places, trying to attract people who I thought might have an interest in the subject.

If you have any comments or feedback, positive or negative, please don't be shy.

My Rosy Life

The final installment of the Korean Movie Classic Collection is 1994's My Rosy Life (or La Vie en Rose, 장미빛 인생), directed by Kim Hong-joon. It is set in Garabong, a suburb of Seoul, amid the student riots and general chaos of 1987 as the government prepared to host the 1988 Olympic Games. The story centers on a comic book shop which the proprietress (Choi Myeong-gil) uses as an illicit no-questions-asked shelter at night. Her shop is populated by a wide variety of down-and-outs, petty thieves, and others with no place to go who, for a small fee, can stretch out on the chairs, enjoy a bowl of noodles, and watch a late-night porno on the closed-circuit. In particular, three men are attracted to the shop and its "Madam:" Dong-pal (Choi Jae-sung), a small-time hood on the run from two or three different gangs; Yu-jin (Lee Ji-hyeong), a baby-faced writer whose latest work has made him an unwitting enemy of the state; and Ki-young (Cha Kwang-su), who harbors a secret that will upend all of their lives.

I really wanted to like this film. These are fairly well-thought-out characters thrown together at a very interesting place and time in modern Korean history. Unfortunately, there are just too many problems for the film to overcome.

The main problem is that the film revolves around the least interesting, most generic character, Dong-pal. Dong-pal is just a hood, like any other hood from any other Korean gangster film set in any time or place. Time spent with this character and his romance of the Madam (I'm not spoiling anything; that's Dong-pal and the Madam on the cover, shown above) is basically time wasted, when one considers the potentially much more interesting stories shunted aside to make room for him. In particular, the moment that Yu-jin reveals his secret, for all practical purposes his story ends, in favor of a "Yu-jin Becomes a Man" story which is utterly without interest.

A second problem, even more damning in my eyes, is that the first act of this central romance is Dong-pal's brutal rape of the Madam. I confess that I have very little tolerance for these "love-my-abuser" stories. At first, the Madam takes no action, the point being to demonstrate to us that she's a tough cookie; and anyway, she really can't turn him in to the police as she herself is running an illegal business. Besides, this is 1987 Seoul; you don't turn to the police for help, especially from their side of the tracks. Okay; fine. But Dong-pal immediately falls in love and (for lack of a better word) begins to stalk her, and this of course wears down her resistance over time. Spare me.

There are other issues, such as several laughably out-of-place martial arts fights (with sound effects straight out of the old Batman TV series; I kept expecting to see "OOF!" or "KA-WHAM!" spiral up from someone's kicked stomach), and the combined effect of them is to sink what had been a very promising premise.

Once again, we have an anamorphic 1.85:1 presentation that is crisp and clean, and a good 2.0 soundtrack in the original Korean. Subtitles are fine; much improved over the middle five titles from this boxset. Extras here include both a director's commentary track (unsubbed) and a 15-minute curiosity entitled "My Korean Cinema, Episode 8: Garabong, again." This 2006 item is nothing more than brief scenes from the film, in chronological order, presented wordlessly with a simple music track. Each brief scene is prefaced by a title card, on which the only things I could decipher were dates--evidently shooting dates, as each are from 1994. They're not outtakes or alternate scenes; each is from the film itself. I don't know how much sense it would make if one were to watch it without having seen the film; but maybe those title cards explain it all. There's also the usual trailer/poster/photo gallery.

The Avatamska Sutra

Not being a Buddhist, I am going to find it quite difficult to describe the next film in the series, variously titled The Avatamska Sutra, Passage to Buddha, or its Anglicized Korean title, Hwaomkyung (화엄경). I imagine that a better grounding in Buddhist philosophy than I possess would enrich the viewer's experience, but even lacking that it's still an intriguing and beautiful film.

As it happens, I am currently reading a book in which the Dalai Lama explains some basic Buddhist concepts, and one of them seems quite pertinent to this film. "There can be two visions of the same thing," says His Holiness to the author Thomas Laird, "one of people who have a pure insight developed through spiritual practice and one that is purely conventional." He goes on to explain that both viewpoints can be true at the same time, even if the "uncommon viewpoint" is not verifiable by western standards.(*) All throughout this film are examples of things (mostly people) which are both as they seem and not as they seem.

On the surface, the story is about Sun Jae (Oh Tae-kyung), an 11-year old boy who, upon the death of his father, sets out to find his mother. Along the way he encounters a number of colorful characters, each of whom give him guidance in his quest. However, while Sun Jae is a young boy, at another level he is not. He seeks his mother, but who--or what--is his mother? The people, and even the cows, that he encounters are also, in the uncommon view, sattvas, placed in his path to assist him in his quest.

At the "common viewpoint" level, Sun Jae's travels illustrate director Jang Sun-woo's concern about the deteriorating state of postmodern Korean society. Sun Jae moves from construction sites to shanty towns to quarries to fishing piers, and nearly everyone he meets is poor or even entirely without possessions and living in at least some degree of squalor. Even the weather is uncomforting: wind and rain pelt him throughout the movie. Bustling modern Korea can often be seen on the horizon, but he knows, and we know, that Sun Jae will not find his "mother" there.

If this sounds like a gray, depressing, and difficult movie, it is not. (I told you it would be hard to describe!) It is beautifully photographed by You Yeong-gil, one of Korea's foremost cinematographers with a 70+ film career spanning from the late 1960s to Hur Jin-ho's Christmas in August, You's last feature before his untimely death. Even if the story (or stories) leave you befuddled, the film is worth viewing just for the images. The performances are strong throughout, most especially by young Oh Tae-kyung, who is onscreen virtually throughout the film and must cross some physically (and emotionally) difficult territory. There are a few of scenes that some viewers might find disturbing, one involving the slaughter of animals, the others involving the sexual awakening of the young boy-who-is-not-a-young-boy, so be forewarned. (This subject is covered with a little more depth in Adam Hartzell's review at koreanfilm.org, if you wish to know more.)

As with most of the other DVDs in this box, the picture is enhanced for widescreen TV from its 1.85:1 OAR, and looks lovely. The sound is a bit hissy, but that's not always out of place in a film where so many storms rage. The optional English subtitles, however, leave a lot to be desired. They're really no worse than the others in this series (Yeong-ja excepted), but in this film, the dialogue is much more crucial, and you're already expected to understand each line at two distinct levels, the "common" and "uncommon." Thus, when one encounters a subtitle like the one shown at right (click the screengrab to enlarge it), it can really throw you off your stride.

Even with the distracting subtitles, and the dense and multi-layered storyline, 90% of which I'm probably not getting, I still can recommend this DVD as one that will provide an interesting viewing experience.

(*)Thomas Laird, The Story of Tibet: Conversations with the Dalai Lama (Grove Press, New York, 2006, p. 5). Please excuse any formatting errors in this footnote; I lost my Strunk & White about 30 years ago!

The Road to the Race Track

Cinema is a cerebral art form. Great cinema is not passive; it requires the active participation of the viewer to succeed. No matter how beautiful, or clever, or breathtaking a movie is, if it doesn't engage your mind, it may be great entertainment, but it can not be called a success on an artistic level. While The Road to the Race Track (경마장 가는길, 1991) has a number of flaws that keep me from being able to declare it a great work, one of them is not that it fails to stimulate the grey matter, and it can be recommended on that basis.

The plot, to the extent that this film has one, can be summarized quite easily. Having spent the last five years studying in France, "R" (Moon Sung-keun) returns to his native Korea, and is met at the airport by "J" (Kang Su-yeon) who seems somewhat less than excited to see him. R and J were lovers in France, having lived together for three and a half years until J's own return to Korea a year earlier. R clearly wants to dive back into what clearly was an intensely sexual relationship, but J is resistant. Confused and angered by her reaction, R dutifully treks to Daegu to visit his family, which we are surprised to learn includes a wife (Kim Bo-yeon) and two small children, but evinces little interest in remaining there. R quickly returns to Seoul and to J, and spends the remainder of the film attempting to rekindle their relationship. His methods, which range from smarmy to brutal, are at all times emotionally abusive, raising the question of why J keeps coming back for more. One reason is that R, who both parties agree ghost-wrote J's doctoral dissertation, has published a piece of literary criticism in Korea under her own name that was actually R's work. When he finds this out, R wastes no time in devising ways to use this fact as blackmail. R's wife refuses to grant R his divorce, a fact which J uses as an excuse to maintain a distance; R's marital status was not an issue when they were in France, but "this is Korea." J goes so far as to agree to marry another man who she has been seeing since her own return to Korea, but whether this is a serious relationship or just a threat to hold over R's head is an open question, the answer to which seems to change from moment to moment.

That this warring couple seems to be moving in circles, both emotionally and temporally, is not unintentional. Writer Ha Il-ji and director Jang Seon-woo attempted to express what they saw as a crisis of values in postmodern Korean society, and the circularity (or lack of progress) is a result of that moral breakdown. (For more analysis along these lines, see the KOFA page on this film, part of the "100 Korean Films" series.) It can be hard to know how much circularity is enough, however, and as a result I think this film could have survived about 20 minutes of judicious cuts. One scene in particular, involving R's attempts to remove a sash around J's waist, is both much too long and clumsily arranged.

This film perhaps could be seen as a Hong Sang-soo film with a much darker tone, and it comes as no surprise to learn that Hong was influenced by it. (KOFA) A more tangible connection to Hong's films is in the casting of Moon, who will be familiar to many viewers from his performance in Hong's Virgin Stripped Bare by her Bachelors. Here he brings to life a character that is at once charming, reprehensible, and sympathetic, no mean feat. Across the table from Moon is Kang Su-yeon, one of the greatest actresses of her era and among the very first Korean performers to achieve international recognition; she won Best Actress awards for her roles in Im Kwon-taek's films The Surrogate Womb (Venice, 1987) and Come, Come, Come Upward (Moscow 1989).

The film is presented in a 16x9 enhanced 1.85:1 (really 1:78) format, with a stereo soundtrack in the original Korean, and both are fine. Subtitles are at about the same level as the previous few discs in this series; an example is provided at left. When he says "look me down," he means "look down on me." Similar problems with idiomatic expressions crop up with relative frequency (her response is "When the hack did I look you down?"), but they are easily overcome. Extra features are restricted to a trailer, poster, photo gallery, and a (Korean) filmography for the director and two leads. The disc is produced by Spectrum DVD, whereas the others in this series are all Taewon, but this doesn't seem to matter to the generally high quality of the presentations.

Portrait of Youth

"Find the substance of your nihility."
This bit of wisdom is given to the hero of Portrait of Youth (젊은 날의 초상; aka Portrait of the Days of Youth) as he nears the completion of his quest for...for...for whatever the hell it is he's been questing for the previous two hours. It also might as well have been the order of the day for director Kwak Ji-kyun (Plum Blossom) and writer Jang Hyeon-su (who later directed Everybody Has Secrets) in this, the 1990 installment of the Korean Movie Classic Collection 1975-1994.

Jung Bo-seog (Virgin Stripped Bare by her Bachelors) plays Young-hoon, a young man whose character is so sketchily laid out that I could describe him equally well as an aimless drifter, a lovelorn poet, or a radical in search of a cause. He's taciturn and introspective, speaking only rarely, which is a real handicap to the understanding of the film, given that he's the narrator. He drifts first to his brother's house, where he collects a little money from his mother's estate and is informed that he's "the hope of the family," then to a coal mine for no apparent reason, and thence to a college, where he takes up with two revolutionaries and courts a pretty but completely bourgeois co-ed. The relationship ends badly, and both of his radical friends die tragically. Driven by his demons, Young-hoon drifts away from the (now-closed) college into the countryside. He's haunted, but as it turns out not by any of the foregoing events, but rather by his having witnessed, as a boy, some illicit sex between his teacher and a local girl he had a crush on. He next has a chance encounter with this paramour at her father's funeral, but she escapes before Young-hoon has a chance to speak with her. He spends the next six hours of screen time (feels that way, anyway) trying to locate locating her. Along the way he encounters the Hooker With a Heart of Gold as well as an itinerant knife sharpener who seems to have wandered out of another century (and who provides the great advice quoted above), and together the three of them...well, they wander around for a while. Finally tracking down his puppy love, Young-hoon tearfully admits to her "I really don't know what's what." Brother, you said a mouthful!

The picture (1.85:1 anamorphic) and sound (Dolby 2.0) are fine; the cinematography by frequent Im Kwon-tael collaborator Jung Il-sung matches the mood of the film with lots of long shots in gray skies or darkness, rain or snow. The disc is graced with the usual not-so-special features: trailer, poster, and photo gallery. With each film in this series, moving forward chronologically, it seems that the subtitling gets a little worse. There were more obvious mistakes here, but as before it's not something that will harm your understanding of the film. Of course, I have exactly zero understanding of this film; the subtitled dialogue may as well have been from another movie for all the good it did me. (After 45 minutes had elapsed, I was so lost that I actually skipped backwards chapter by chapter, hoping that the disc might have skipped one somehow. It hadn't.) It's not that uncommon for a film to be so wrapped up in symbolism and metaphor that its deeper meaning entirely escapes me; for all I know, Young-hoon represents Man's Inhumanity to Man, while the hooker Miss Yoon is The Plight of the Korean People. Somebody obviously appreciates it; KOFA thought it should be part of this series of "classics," and it did win a Best Film award at a festival (the 1991 "Grand Bell Awards"). So although this film may not exactly run to my tastes, your mileage may vary.

[WARNING--POTENTIAL SPOILER]
Maybe this will help clear things up: towards the end of the film, Jung-hoon leans up against a tree and (as the narrator) says "It's time to end the play. Existence doesn't exist without continuation. A glass of wine should be emptied. Despair is the real start of existence."

I dunno; maybe it's just that my nihility is too substanceless.

The Eel Sea

After two days of steady, hard rain, the usually insignificant Eel River looks like an inland sea. Note the standing water even in the pasture on this side of the river's edge. And we have rain forecast every day for the rest of the week, courtesy of El Niño. Time to start building that ark!

Gagman

Gagman (개그맨), Lee Myeong-se's directorial debut of 1988 (or 1989, depends on who you ask; I'm trusting KOFA on this one), is the next feature in the Korean Movie Classics Collection. As noted above, this is a second collaboration of Lee, co-writer (and, here, co-star) Bae Chang-ho, and actors Ahn Sung-ki and Hwang Shin-hye, following but entirely unrelated to the 1987 melodrama Our Joyful Young Days. It's difficult to find just one little box in which to classify this action-comedy-gangster-Hollywood tribute-fantasy film. At least for 1988 in South Korea, it was one of a kind, and a terrific film (that, evidently, nobody saw.)

Ahn plays Lee Jong-sae, a nightclub comic/emcee who has based his act on Chaplin's Little Tramp to such a degree that his own personality has become subsumed into it. Despite taking on the outward appearance, and some of the mannerisms, of the Tramp, he does not aspire to the stardom of his idol. Instead, he sees himself as a director, a true genius of the cinema in an age that has forgotten what genius looks like. (This, despite the fact that his film career consists of having sent one script to one studio, without response.) While performing his silent Chaplin-homage routine on stage, his internal monologue is lamenting that "this great world of ours [has] come to value wads of cash over true feeling and romance" becoming a "barren, lifeless, and emotionless wasteland. What can a genius like myself do for times like these?" he asks himself while twirling an imaginary cane and mugging for his not-very-attentive audience. Lee, the film's narrator, occupies a world that is a mixture of reality and fantasy, and as he can no longer clearly discern the dividing line, neither can we.

His barber, Moon Do-seok (Bae), quickly falls into Lee's mixed-up world when Lee suggests that Moon should star in his next picture. Moon, who wants nothing more than to be a movie star ("I started watching movies from the time I was conceived," he says), immediately sells his shop, has eyelid surgery, and places himself completely at Lee's disposal. Moon's main talent, apart from shaving Lee's forehead, appears to be bathroom-going. It can be inferred that, shall we say, he does not possess a complete supply of hot towels.

Unable to make any headway at the studio (where he is viewed as a trespasser), Lee takes refuge in a cinema one afternoon to enjoy a screening of Coppola's The Cotton Club, when the beautiful Oh Sun-young (Hwang) literally drops into his lap. She is on the run from her gangster boyfriends, and cajoles Lee into letting her come home with him. Once there, she takes up residence among the many movie posters and pieces of Chaplin memorabilia, agrees that she should star in his picture, and generally starts minxing her way around like, well, like a fantasy.

One evening when Lee is rehearsing his routine in the closed nightclub, he is interrupted by a deserting soldier who gives him his weapons and ammunition before disappearing (literally, exiting, stage right.) Back at the apartment, Sun-young discovers the firearms and suggests that he should use them to rob a bank, thereby acquiring the capital to finance his film which will make her a star. At this point, the film swings from a broad comedy to a gangster picture, albeit a comedic one, seeing as they are a terrifically inept gang. We follow their criminal career to its end, which I won't spoil for you here.

Overall, the film is great fun from start to finish, and the final scene contains a twist that makes you reconsider everything that went on before it in a new light. The performances are first rate. Ahn is consigned to playing a character who is playing a character, never an easy task, but after a while you stop seeing Chaplin and start seeing Lee, and that is tough to do. Hwang is excellent as the young gangster's moll who is also the brains of the outfit. Bae, in one of just three on-screen appearances of his career, is riotous in his role as the village idiot.

Lee Myeong-se has gone on to direct a total of eight features, one every few years or so, including 1999's critically acclaimed Nowhere to Hide (again with Ahn). Gagman is presented in an anamorphically enhanced 1.85:1 ratio, with a Dolby Digital stereo track, and both are excellent. Less good are the subtitles, which are complete and well-timed but exhibit a fair number of typos. Not Panorama-bad, mind you--there was an Anglophone involved somewhere in the process--but they are a little distracting. Unlike the first two DVDs in the box, here there is no commentary track, as the extra features are limited to a trailer, poster, and small photo gallery.

Our Joyful Young Days

The second film in the series is entitled Our Sweet Days or Our Joyful Young Days (기쁜 우리 젊은 날, Gippeun wuri jeolmeun-nal), a 1987 film directed and co-written by Bae Chang-ho (배창호). Maybe there was something novel about this script in 1987 (I doubt it), but it's certainly been made a thousand or more times since then. It goes like this: Pathetic Loser falls in love with Dream Girl, and starts Stalking her. DG, who really should get a Restraining Order, instead is Gently Standoffish. PL persists. DG Goes Away, and PL is crushed. DG returns, and PL runs into her Quite by Accident. It turns out that DG Has Issues of Her Own. And so forth. Believe me, if you've ever seen a Korean melodrama, you know exactly where this is going, and even if you haven't, when it reaches what seems like a relatively happy ending point and there's still a half-hour to go, well, consider yourself warned.

The Pathetic Loser is played by the always reliable Ahn Sung-ki, veteran of more films than I can count, including some of Im Kwon-taek's better films (Festival, The Taebaek Mountains), huge hits like Lee Jang-ho's Eoudong, and classics like The Housemaid (made when he was 8) and Chilsu and Mansu. Ahn is still active today, taking elder statesman roles in such films as Im's Chihwaseon and Kang Woo-suk's Hanbando. Here, Ahn is asked to be the emotionally stunted, unsure and klutzy Young-min, and he doesn't do much with this thankless role. It might have been nice to see some emotional growth over the two hour running time; nowadays that would be expected from this genre, as it makes the emotional payoff in the final scene either richer or more sappy, depending on your tastes. Ahn, who is now and was then a better actor than he shows here, instead just mugs and cries his way to the inevitable conclusion. Opposite Ahn is the positively luminous Hwang Cine (or Hwang Shin-hye, 황신혜) in her film debut. Hwang was, for a time, Park Chul-soo's muse, appearing in five of his films in the 1990s, and while still active today, is perhaps better known for having a line of lingerie named for her. Here, she is mostly required to look both beautiful and unapproachable, and she has no trouble whatsoever with these requirements. Her role should actually have been the more interesting of the two (as I said above, she Has Issues), but her character is one-dimensional, existing just so Young-min has something to react to. Had this film been written from Hye-rin's POV, it would have doubtless been a better, or at least more interesting, film. Ah, well.

It's not a terrible film, and is certainly well made with some very good compositions here and there. If I had seen this in 1987, before I grew bone-weary of this genre, I'm sure I would have liked it a lot better than I do today. I wouldn't buy the box solely for this film, but it wouldn't keep me from buying it, either. And anyway, there's really nothing wrong with looking at Hwang Cine, "the most perfect face in Korea," for two hours, now is there?*

All the major players here (Bae, Ahn, Hwang, and co-screenwriter Lee Myung-se) will reunite the following year for Gagman, Lee's directorial debut and the next film in this series. I'm somewhat less than breathless in anticipation.

The film is presented in its original 1.85:1 ratio, sort of; it's enhanced for 16x9, making the display ratio actually 1.78:1, but I won't quibble. The print, apart from a few speckles, looks very good. Audio (Dolby Digital stereo) has a hiss, but it is also quite good. Subtitles are also good; perhaps not quite as good as those in Yeong-ja's Heydays; "in" and "on" get mixed up occasionally, and there's a laugh-out-loud moment when the name Lee Strasberg shows up as 'Lee Streetsbourg', but these are minor issues. Again there is an unsubbed director's commentary track, as well as a trailer, poster, and photo gallery.

*Most of this background information on Hwang is taken from Darcy Paquet's brief profile of her at the indispensible koreanfilm.org, which is also the source of the photo of Hwang used above. Now excuse me while I go buy a Hwang Cine thong...

Yeong-ja's Heydays

One of my original intentions when starting this blog was to dabble in film reviews. I've started to review the contents of a box set of "Korean Movie Classics" for another site, and decided that I should cross-post them here as a way of fulfilling that original goal.

The first title is from 1975 and is variously titled Young ja: On the Loose (that's what the keepcase says) or Yeong-ja's Heydays (the name I commonly find on the internet); the Korean title is "영자의 전성시대" (Yeongja-ui jeonseongsidae). It was written and directed by KIM Ho-seon (김호선); according to KMDb, it was his second feature as a director in a career that ran to 15 films over 22 years; I admit I've never heard of him or any of his films. However, according to Darcy Paquet, this was the fourth biggest box-office hit of the 1970s in Korea. I'm not surprised, as it is quite salacious considering what South Korea ca. 1975 was like. (Kim was also responsible for the biggest hit of the 1970s, 1977's Winter Woman [겨울여자]).

We first meet Yeong-ja as she is being dragged in in yet another roundup of prostitutes from one of the seedier neighborhoods of Seoul. In the police station, by chance she encounters Chang-su, her would-be boyfriend of three years ago, who is just back from serving in Vietnam. We quickly embark on a lengthy flashback, tracing Yeong-ja's long strange trip from fresh-faced maid to sweatshop seamstress to bar hostess and finally to bus conductress, where tragedy strikes as it so often does in Korean melodrama. Left with no other choice, pretty but maimed Yeong-ja succumbs to the vortex of prostitution that has been tugging at her sleeve ever since she got fired from her housemaid job (for being wanton; i.e. the no-good son of the manor raped her.) The rest of the film chronicles first Chang-su's and then Yeong-ja's attempts to make a better life for themselves. It's a pretty standard story, although it does produce a somewhat non-standard ending; but for me, the story is not the appeal of the film.

The appeal is chiefly in the performance of Yeom Bok-sun (염복순), who is superb as Yeong-ja. She is asked to play any number of emotional registers, ranging from naif to slut to suicide to determined woman, and most of the time she has to feign a handicap to boot. Despite the intense scenery-chewing going on all around her all the time, she manages to keep all of the manifestations of Yeong-ja's changing personality under control and delivers a nuanced performance. In those two opening scenes, for example, she first appears as a foul-mouthed hooker in the hoosegow, and then (in the flashback) as an angel-faced fawn suddenly out of the woods and in the Big City, and it wasn't until it the second scene was over that I realized that it was the same actress playing both parts. I can't find much online about Yeom, except that it seems that her short career had come to an end by 1979 after making about 10 films in five years.

The film is presented in the OAR of 2.35:1, enhanced for widescreen. The print was in reasonably good condition; some damage shows up, most especially in outdoor shots near the end of the film, when the print is so speckled that you momentarily wonder if Yeong-ja is going to have to endure a plague of crows on top of everything else she's been through. Similarly the mono track will disappoint the audiophiles, as there's an ever-present hiss and some cracks and pops, and seems to sit a little too far forward, but none of this bothered me; in fact, I might not have noticed them were I not planning to write this review. Full disclosure: I don't give two hoots about this sort of stuff.

There is a director's commentary track, which is unsubtitled; all the more reason to learn Korean. Apart from that, there's no other extras.

One film in, and I'm already glad I got this set.

More on this film from KOFA (warning: spoilers).

I Got REALLY Lucky

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/01/12/thoughts-and-prayers-haiti

A Tapestry of Natural Phenomena

A geology professor up at the university estimates that there is a 78% probability of a 5.0 aftershock within seven days of the main quake (which was Saturday at 4:30pm), and a 5-10% chance of an even larger (than 6.5) temblor in that period. The fact that there were seven quake events of at least 6.2 magnitude in a 10-month period of 1991-92 (see post below) does not fill me with comfort.

We did have some damage here after all. One of the massive water tanks, which holds the water pumped up from the well down by the river, shifted sometime during or after the quake. The now-tilting tank put some pressure on a PVC pipe, which pulled at this joint and that, causing one of the joints to snap. I first noticed problems with the water yesterday, when it was milky and seemed almost carbonated, but didn't think anything of it. This morning, however, the pressure in my shower was noticeably less, and it was spitting and coughing, indicating the presence of air in the pipes. I talked to my landlord about it, and we went to investigate in the pump house, where we saw the break. It's being repaired now, but I've been without water all day.

Water is soon not going to be in short supply, as the sky has gotten apocalyptically dark. There's a big thunderstorm on the radar just offshore (it's probably raining on the quake's epicenter right now), biding its time before coming ashore and beginning the three days of predicted rain.

So after feeling the earth move under my feet, soon we'll have the sky tumbling down (a-tumbling down.) I just hope I don't lose control, down to my very soul, and get hot and cold, all over, all over, all over, all over.

The Hits Just Keep On Coming

We had another 4.1 aftershock at about 10:30 last night. I was reading in bed at that time and didn't notice a thing. I have, however, begun to notice, or perhaps imagine, subtle shaking from time to time. It might be little aftershock, or it might just be my blood pressure; who can say?

I hope the worst is over for this event, but a disquieting history lesson was dropped on my doorstep this morning (see left; click to enlarge.) I don't know about you, but by the end of April 1992, I'd have moved the hell outta here.

(The table is published in today's edition of the Times-Standard.)

I Got Lucky

My friends L&D live in Eureka, and I have not been able to reach them by telephone. So today I decided to drive up there to make sure everything was all right. When I got there, it was immediately obvious that they were gone for the weekend (mail in the mailbox, car gone, etc.), so I decided I should check on the cats and make sure there wasn't anything (like a gas leak) that needed immediate attention. Using the spare key, I let myself in and looked around.

First and foremost, I located all three cats, and they were safe and healthy, their normal selves. They had food and clean water and were fine. There were no gas leaks, the power was on, and there seemed to be no immediate danger to anyone.

While there was no significant damage, most every room in the house was a jumble of fallen and broken items. In the dining room (above right; click on the picture to enlarge it), a curio shelf had collapsed, taking numerous china pieces to their doom. The kitchen was a mess of broken glass, and the bathroom had toiletries all over the place. But the TV was upright, and so were all the stereo components, and even the Christmas tree!

I went upstairs, where they have two rooms that are mostly just used for storage. One of them was a mess, but it's always a mess, and we won't go into that. :) The other, however, looked like a very selective miniature tornado had visited it (left.) A big filing cabinet had fallen over and spilled its contents, and a number of books had fallen off bookshelves. However, most of the books were still in their proper places, evidently undisturbed.

All throughout the house, almost every cabinet door, closet door, or room door that could be open was open. To my mind, this seems to defy the randomness of the event. I can see why the shaking would swing closed doors open, but why would at least some of them not then swing shut again?

Anyway, I took some pictures and otherwise left the mess alone. They may want to document the state of the place for insurance purposes, and/or just see what the aftermath of a 6.5 looks like. Furthermore, it wouldn't be up to me to decide what is garbage and what should be kept for possible repair. I decided that the best course of action was to leave a message about the condition, offer my cleanup help when they want it, and otherwise leave things as they were.

Nineteen Hours Later

"Earthquake? What earthquake?"

Earthquake Preparedness

After today's magnitude 6.5 temblor, the epicenter of which was maybe 30 miles from my house, I have earthquake preparedness on my mind. I'm feeling pretty good, since this was a fairly major event and my only damage was a broken vinegar bottle. But despite the fact that lots of people appear to feel that this was the biggest quake in memory (I suppose those who don't feel that way don't get quoted by the media), there's likely bigger ones on the way in this, the most seismically active area of the continental USA. So I can't help thinking of this as a great test of my readiness for the Big One.

My initial reaction was that a very, very big truck which had escaped my notice was rumbling past the house. It was more the noise, a very loud, low rumble, than the shaking that I noticed, at least for a second or so. Then the nearly full vinegar bottle fell from its perch to the kitchen counter, broke into many pieces, and then hit the floor. It was the only item to fall from my open kitchen shelves (pictured at right), but it was enough to wake me up to what was really going on. I immediately know I had to find my glasses, which as per usual I was not wearing. Fortunately, they were next to me in the spot they always are when I sit at the computer, and I was level-headed enough to know that. Next, oddly enough, I thought of my disaster stash of water and food, and got up to go fetch it. That idea was dismissed as idiotic almost immediately, but as the stash is in the pantry, I found myself standing in the doorway, which I judged to be a good idea. Thinking a bit more, I decided a better place to be would be outside, as this is a very rural area and there's nothing that could fall on me out there. I think by this time the shaking had stopped, but nevertheless I went outside, grabbing my car keys (which hang on a hook by the door) on the way.

I stayed outside for a few minutes, during which Reggie (the cat), in a full-blown panic, hurled himself at one of the windows, trying to get out. I decided not to let him out, reasoning that in his agitated state he may run away and get lost. In hindsight, I'm still not sure what I should have done. Had the house collapsed with him inside, I would of course feel terrible, but I wonder what the chances of that happening would be. I certainly could not have collected him; if he got out he was going to run somewhere, fast. What would have happened then I can't say. As it was, unable to escape, Reggie ran under the bed and stayed there for about two hours. Reggie's usually "large and in charge" around here, but today he was revealed as a true "scairdy cat."

After a couple of minutes, my neighbor came out of his house and waved at me. I waved back, and walked down to talk to him. It was at this time that I realized that, not only did I not know what was going on more than 100 yards from my home, I had no good way of finding out, since I didn't think I had a working radio and in any case had no idea of the local radio frequencies. It turns out that my satellite radio has AM and FM dials, and it does pick up some stations, so I now have to make a list of the local frequencies so I know where to tune to get information when I need it.

This is an area that, I believe, is well-prepared for the Big One. This summer, the local university in conjunction with a few alphabet-soup governmental agencies published the brochure pictured above left, and it went into wide circulation. I got a copy with my local newspaper, then a second with the alternative weekly paper, and I suppose it was made available--or even force-fed--in a number of different ways as well. Plus, just a week or two ago someone in one of these papers published an op-ed about waiting for the Big One. So this is not really news to any of us, even a newbie like me.

But I'm not satisfied with my preparations, some of which I now need to re-think. There's the radio, and the cat, but also there's my emergency stash. I presently have it in my pantry, on the top shelf. Nothing happened to it today, but of course today's event was not wicked enough for me to need it. (The electricity went out but came right back on; my coffeemaker didn't even forget the time. I never lost either water or gas, both of which are local--that is, gas is in a tank outside, and water comes in pipes from a tank up the hill.) If we had a Big One, over 7.0 say, I think it's a reasonably good chance that I won't be able to get to the stash through the wreckage of the pantry. I'm not sure, however, where a better place would be, except perhaps for my car, which is likely to make it through any temblor unscathed. I'm not so sure I want to tote all that stuff around all the time, but I'll have to consider it.

I do like how easily accessible my car keys were, and that I thought of grabbing them. Around here, I could probably just leave them in the ignition, but this is next best. I didn't grab anything else, but I don't really have any "important papers"--most of my financial life exists on-line, and I have no homeowner's/renter's insurance (not offered this far from a fire station.) I might want to find a more convenient spot for my wallet, but otherwise I'm not concerned about papers.

So all in all, I think I'd give myself a 'B' for this preparedness test. And now I'm better prepared when the Big One rumbles through.

I can't say that for poor Reggie, though. I think he was eating when the quake struck, and it totally freaked him out. Now he's a little afraid to go back into that small room (the laundry room.) I hope and expect that he'll forget all about it by tomorrow.

Esq.

"Look. I practice the law. I'm not only willing but anxious to sue anyone, anytime, for anything." The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, written and directed by Preston Sturges (1944).