Reviews

A Taxi Driver is yet another great example how well the industry can create and showcase the turmoil of what was
the 1980s in South Korea. Being brought up by parents from a dictatorship regime, it was almost like I was reliving all of their hardships and experiences through the movie, which just highlights how really half of the world was going through the exactly same thing at the same historical period. The movie nicely bridges the 'Anti-American' sentiment with actual human trust, especially with Song Kang Ho's curious and bubbly character helping out a complete outsider and once again showing to the world how hospitable and family-like Koreans are. As noted, the plot was very dramatic and carrying a powerful message, also doing a great job in translating the strong spirit of the protesters of the time. Truly a great watch if you're curious about Korean history, or just want a great movie night at home.

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Completely forgot that I watched this on a long haul flight, but here I go. And I have to agree with other users that this feels a lot closer to a Hollywood production as compared to South Korea. A movie about connection, what it means to be soulmate and if such a concept exists if one person is unwilling to accept this. More of a hard-hitting watch, the vibe that I was getting from it made me feel ashamed and embarrassed for the lead female character. Many other themes relate to identity, what it's like being a 1st generation Korean-American immigrant, which is close to me as my husband is also Korean-American. I believe viewers can find something relatable to draw from this movie nevertheless. But did this leave me in awe - I can't say so. It felt like an average mature movie to me, something I've seen in Korea before.

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Make sure to stay and watch after the end credits!

This was even better than the first movie! I watched the first movie 6 months ago once I heard about this project and say that Jung Hae In would be in it. I liked the first one but this one was even better! It was done by the same director but it felt very different from what I remember from the first one. The colors were super well done (I think that's cinematography or photography's job but I don't know for sure), and the sound track was great! I will say though, that it felt like it wasn't directed by the same person but maybe there style has changed over the past nine years. The story was a little hard to follow at times but I think that was because I watched in a theater so I couldn't rewind 10 seconds to reread the subtitles. Overall I totally recommend watching this movie if it is showing near you, it is action packed and keeps you at the edge of your seat wanting to know what will happen next.

As for the post credit scene I feel like it could potentially set up for another movie which I wouldn't complain about, but it also feels complete as is. I would love to see move of the Seo Do Cheol character but we will just have to wait and see :)

I also wanted to note that you don't need to see the prequel, but it does add to the watching experience, so I would recommend it.

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Bit dated but enjoyable.

This is one of those movies that going in I didn't really have high expectations per it's subject matter, but it actually surprised me. It's by no means a master piece and would probably not be made today but was still enjoyable and had some laugh out loud moments.

Serious the scene where she throws the dog had me laughing so hard. Lol :D

I think trying to show you should have confidence in yourself is great, but this movie kind of falls flat on it's face when delivering the message as it really only means that if your attractive. The ML waivered back and forth between a jerk and being the hero. I suppose in fairness he did say he was an asshole so I suppose he got what he deserved in the end. At least there wasn't some SML who had to stand by and watch as all the shit went down. Very 2006 too, the hair of that era was just..... a bad idea. The music was really good, I really liked it but i don't see myself turning this on again. One watch was enough.

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It's nice to have Filipino musical movies like this one.

The second movie I took advantage to watch as part of MMFF50, this movie is really worth being my other choice to watch aside from the Jose Rizal 1998 film.
Filipinos boast a lot of singers and musicians, but the fact that the country doesn't produce a lot of musicals is such a travesty. That's why I love that they were able to make this musical (I'm referring to the stage show this was based on) and I love that they were even able to make a movie version of the musical through this movie. I also really enjoyed the casting. I love that they decided to put legit musical and theater actors as headliners for this film instead of the usual big names. Joanna Ampil (who I'm only familiar since I read her name as someone who played Fantine in Les Misérables London, she also performed as Fantine along with her Les Mis costars like Ramin Karimloo back in 2004 for Queen Elizabeth of the UK and France's Jacques Chirac) and Rachel Alejandro are so amazing as the main characters. The only actor who is a big name (among the main characters) is Paulo Avelino, but I think he auditioned to get this role. He's also really capable and I like him as an actor in general (praying he doesn't get stuck in a loveteam with Kim Chiu as they have two recent projects together). The other characters are also well played and well sung. There are some big names and some less well known ones but all did well. I was surprised that character actors such as Nonie Buencamino and Jaime Fabregas (would have been surprised more if I hadn't seen him in Jose Rizal just a day earlier where he sang a bit) can sing as well. So nice to see Menchu Lauchengco-Yulo again here. I only know her as the Liesl in the Sound of Music video performance from the 80s which I found on youtube where she performed with renowned names like Lea Salonga (who did Les Misérables in London like this movie's Joanna Ampil) and Senator Risa Hontiveros.
The story is about two girls who protect their childhood home and their father's legacy against all odds. I love their sisterhood and their deep care for each other. Their father, a cripple who was a renowned painter, had his last painting still in their house and many people want to buy it. Losing support from their selfish siblings and losing money to take care of their father and the house, the girls are tempted to sell the last painting of their father. We later learned that this painting was considered as a curse by both girls (despite being valued by many) as this last painting was painted by their father after the father committed suicide by jumping (which caused his crippled state) after the girls blamed him for something (I forgot the reason why). As a way to apologize to their father as well as to maintain their childhood home their father loves, one of the sisters destroyed her father's last painting despite almost being tempted by Paulo Avelino's character to sell the painting so that she'll fulfill her childhood dream of travelling the world while being with a man who loves her (Avelino's character was willing to marry her provided she sells the painting to an American buyer he talked to since the American promised a commission to him).
It's pitiful that we don't see the painting, but I guess the filmmakers feel the character's description are enough (don't know if the audience saw the painting in the musical version).
I think what we can get from the story is that we see that the two girls value their honor and their love for their father more than money. I just wish that they'll still be able to find love as their sacrifices to maintain their family home is enough.

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This movie could've been an email

I normally avoid watching C-dramas set during the republican era as they tend to be the most heavily lathered in government propaganda. 1911 is case in point.

The film tells the story of the 1911 revolution (or the Xinhai revolution as it's otherwise known). I'm not surprised that this particular event was the subject of such hammed-up propaganda given the revolution is key to the grander political myth-making of the modern Chinese state. That said, you can still do propaganda a lot better than this??

The storyline reads like my high school essays on Bolshevik Russia. It's a boring chronology of events with political commentary slapped across the top. The music and melodrama seems to indicate that you're meant to care about the characters on screen. But you don't.

It's normally a pretty safe choice to start a story in the middle of the action – in this case the failed Second Guangzhou Uprising – but without an emotional hook to the characters, mid action scenes exhaust their oxygen pretty fast. By following a Great Men of History approach, the main characters feel flat and 2D, their entire psyche presented in the form of political speeches or the flashing of guns.

By the end of the film, you're feeling pretty uninspired. There's a lot of monologuing where you start to think the character just likes the sound of their own voice. Jackie Chan is the only one allowed to wear a leather jacket for some reason. And the two normie characters who should've been the soul of the movie are really awkwardly tacked on at the beginning and end.

tbh, it's quicker and more interesting to read the wikipedia page.

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A Neo-Noir Masterpiece of Visual Poetry

Decision to Leave (2022) is a multilayered neo-noir that skillfully blends mystery with a touch of eccentric, almost unsettling romance. What makes this film stand out from Park Chan-wook’s previous works is its accessibility. Unlike some of his more abstract films, the plot here is easier to follow, yet it still maintains the subtle nuances and hidden layers that make you pause and reflect.

While this film may not hit the same notes as Park Chan-wook's previous films, I was captivated from start to finish. Visually, this movie is nothing short of a masterpiece. Every frame feels meticulously crafted, like a piece of visual poetry. Each cut seems deliberate, adding emotional weight and narrative depth. The film has a dreamlike quality, almost as if you're drifting through a fever dream. I lost track of how many times I paused just to soak in the beauty of a particular shot. I think I took over 50 screenshots because the visuals were just that stunning. Not a single frame was wasted.

Ultimately, the film reveals that sometimes the decision to leave is an expression of love, capturing the delicate balance between loss and sacrifice. It’s a quiet kind of heartbreak, but one that lingers just as powerfully.

Content Warning: Violence, Death, Self-harm, Sexual Content

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with in-laws like these, who needs enemies?

This quietly brutal film depicts a violence of memory/remembering - a violence of erasure, of withholding, of rewriting history and truth - enacted against queer people by their family members once those queer people are silenced by factors beyond their control. It unflinchingly shows how family members betray the two lesbian women in their lives after the death of the one who is their biological relative. They do this by ignoring her wishes, by betraying her grieving widow (their in-law), by insulting the widow's dignity, by undermining the widow's belonging in the family, and by betraying any sense of proper relations among kin - all in order to take the wealth left behind by their deceased relative. The film helps us to understand the motivations for each character's choices against a history of class differences and the oppressive backdrop of Hong Kong's material scarcity for basic needs. We are shown how a lack of institutional and societal recognition of queer relationships creates the opportunity for shameful behavior between family: in a deeply unequal society organized around capitalism (alluded to throughout the film, but most explicitly in the mention of how the deceased woman had managed to rise from being a factory worker to a factory owner; and also looming in the background of the housing crisis hanging over everyone in the film), these extended family members see no way to pursue a decent life other than by turning against their queer kin.

The disgracefulness of this so-called "family" is shown in how they apologetically disrespect the two queer women who had previously helped them financially (at least to some limited extent), specifically by kicking the surviving partner out of the apartment she had shared with her deceased partner. They justify this choice as a way to give her nephew his own exclusive place to raise a new baby. Heterofuturity (here as a privileging of the heterosexual continuity of future generations against queer people still alive in the present) manifests in the way that the extended family assumes that the only reasonable way they can benefit from their deceased kin's estate is by asserting their exclusive control over her apartment; they aren't even able to imagine or propose any compromises in which they might share the apartment with their lesbian in-law by living in the apartment together and taking care of each other. In this way, they foreclose any possibility of keeping this queer family member in their lives, much less any possibility of growing closer to her after the loss of this person who had been such an important presence in all of their lives. If (to quote a remark made by the queer couple when they shared a particularly expensive whiskey with their extended family in the film's prologue) "sharing with family isn't wasting", then the extended family lays waste to their kinship relations with their lesbian in-law, by taking the apartment from her and then refusing to share it with her.

Ultimately the film ends with a bitter sense of exasperated acceptance, and perhaps of resignation: with no options available under the legal system for staying in her apartment, the widow has capitulated to the demands of her deceased partner's extended family. She makes this decision after getting written confirmation of the truth of her partner's intentions (which had been to leave everything to her) after even that was questioned by one of her in-laws. The widow's lesbian friends (which is her and her former partner's found family in multiple ways) step in as replacements in order to carry out the familial rites and responsibilities to her deceased partner, responsibilities which had been so coldly abandoned by her deceased partner's biological kin: I am especially talking about the burial-at-sea of flower petals as a symbolic way of fulfilling the deceased's wishes which had been overruled by the extended family. We end with a scene remembering how much meaning the deceased woman had found in her queer family as an adult, after a childhood of hollow and sometimes even violent biological kinship. This scene bookends all the ways the film has shown us the biological/extended family using their traditional values to rationalize their understandable - yet utterly shameful - behavior, underscoring the film's critique of heterosexist ways of doing "family".

This film evoked a complicated mix of emotions in me. Through much of the film I felt anger at the unjust way the family treated their grieving lesbian in-law. And in the ending scene it transformed into a heavy sadness, in my recognition of an aspect of my own difficult experiences with family with the ending scene's reflection on finding meaning in the concept of "family".

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Best Adaption Movie Ever

I first encountered this movie and later I watched the original western one.

Both movies are obviously the same but they have a slight different ending and each movie portrays its own uniqueness.

I love both versions of the movie but the chinese version won my heart. The chinese version is more funnier, the plot, and the castings are everything that made me very emotional.

For me, the main theme of this movie was friendship. It portrays raw true emotions. This movie made me know how beautiful a true friendship is. Despite their little revenge games, they still care about each other in the end.

Angelababy and Nini did a very good job at this movie and I'm so greatly touched. I really recommend this movie to be seen by everyone.

- Review by sukimatchagirl

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Keep Going South

It took me a while to write this because I was angry. This film affected me to the point of wanting to reach through the screen and punch Young. Tae should have been the one with the rock above Young, smashing his skull in. Yes, I was that angry.

Perspective:
It's 2012 and homosexuality is still considered a crime. So it's understandable that Young would be hesitant to continue a relationship with Tae for everyone to know. It's 5 months since Young was discharged and Tae still has some time to complete his service. On his last leave, he visits Young. Young, driving Tae back to compound, tells him coldly, "Don't contact me again." Tae, hurt and grappling with the change between them, decides to drug him and desert. It is revealed through a series of conversations and tussles, that Young had sent a letter telling him that he liked him as a "person". How much more humiliating could he have been? Young was the one who approached Tae. Enticed him and encouraged him to have sex. Young was the one who told him he liked him. Tae believed. He fell deeply in love with him. During the 5 months they were apart, Young is denying his homosexuality, their relationship and has a girlfriend. He says to Tae, "he feels nothing for him, it was the army." Here, he as heartless as they come. The denial, selfishness and cowardice Tae endures, finally rips through him. He has a point to prove. He asks for sex for the last time, in exchange for the letters Young had wrote to him. Sitting on top, Tae rides him and as he senses Young about to ejaculate, he reaches for his small camera and snaps Young's face. He has his proof. He would not have enjoyed it, if he did not feel anything for him. After another hard to watch scene of them fighting in the mud for the camera, Young gives up. After all this, he still chooses to be 'straight'.

This is what causes the anger. Had he taken the time to break things off properly with Tae, rather than discarding him like dirty rubbish, Tae might have had a better chance of handling it. The film ends with Tae
telling Young to get lost. Dancing defiantly and more than a little drunk, with the music glaring, he chooses himself. It's as if he's saying, I know who I am. I will live true to myself. You didn't break me. Young, continues to walk in the opposite direction. Going back to the army would only remind him more of Young and what he thought they shared.

Tae's anguish and emotional ride he took us through was felt. Kim Jae Heung shines. He carries the film. Jeon Shin Hwan had the easier role and I'm still left wanting to see when he would show up to fully deliver. He seems flat against Kim. His true rage only evident when he raises the rock to hit him. Here, Kim steals again, crying in the mud, controlled by the betrayal and pain he feels, he cries out, " Don't treat me like I'm invisible. You had a hard on!"

The short is good and worth a watch. At least once.

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[O canalha que eu amei]

O meu gaydar não errou nessa.

– Kyu Nam, acha que o sul será o paraíso?
Acha que vão deixar você ser livre, sem se importarem com sua origem?
Não existe tal paraíso.
– Pelo menos posso falhar.
Posso fazer o que quero e falhar, tentar novamente e falhar mais um pouco.
Não é ótimo?
Não podemos nem falhar aqui.
Vou até lá para falhar o quanto quiser.
– Acha que não havia nada que eu desejava fazer?
Trata-se apenas de viver.
Lutar é inútil.
– Só irei descobrir se é verdade quando eu me desafiar.
– Vá, e falhe o quanto quiser.

[Para Kyu Nam
Tema uma vida sem sentido, não a própria morte.
Feliz aniversário. de: Irmão pianista.]

Vivi muito tempo me sacrificando. Desperdicei dias a fio sem um pingo de ambição. mas tive esse pensamento de querer algo, mesmo que seja muito pequeno, posso realizar isso sozinho. Acho que queria me ver nesse estado. Esse era meu sonho. Então eu realizei meu sonho? Estou feliz? Sinceramente não sei. A vida ainda é difícil e às vezes choro sem motivo. mas consigo reunir minhas forças nesses momentos. Não posso simplesmente ficar parado. É por isso que estou feliz agora.

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Life imitates art and art imitates life

I wasn't very impressed with this. I somehow expected more drama, intrigue, and obsession from this. I think for me this film falls short of executing what is otherwise a very interesting premise. It's partially due to the ambiguity of the narrative but it's not just that. There's also the fact that the film's intrigue is amped up too high because the actual film fails to deliver its meaning at certain points so it's both ambiguous and vague.

Plot: An idol rapper is (for some reason) doing a super moody theater production with a famous theater actor known for his method acting. This whole thing seems convoluted because theater is too prestigious for idol actors like...seriously! But whatever. After initial disinterest and rebellion, the young idol slowly becomes interested in acting as he watches the seasoned actor. He tries to imitate the method acting technique and soon, things get weird!
Btw, the idol coming from a group called "P2S" is so gauche...Korea, please do better. Seriously...

Plot: So I could not understand the narrative from watching the film. It was so vague, choppy, and scattered for me, that I ended up reading the plot summary on Wikipedia in order to figure out what was happening in the film. I have since read some interesting interpretations of this film which partially succeeded in redeeming some aspects for me but for the most part, I could not understand why characters went from one point to another. Basic details of the plot were so convoluted and unnatural that I also failed at suspending my disbelief and spent a good amount of the film distracted by technicalities that made me feel second-hand embarrassment. Like how are they getting away with making a racy theater production about a gay affair?! It's been seven years and Korea can barely accept a TV show with a gay character in it, in the year of 2024! And why is an idol actor doing theater to begin with?! And why is everyone so chill about the bizarre behavior of these men?
That said, it wasn't all bad. The plot has a cyclical nature and that's so interesting. We're thrust in the middle of a script reading with no context of the drama's plot. We slowly figure out that the drama is the final, bloody moments of an affair gone wrong but we have no idea how the characters got there. Then we see the actors going through a process of living as the drama's characters, becoming them in every way. It's a self-fullfilling prophecy. The actors' attempt to embody the characters sets into motion a series of events that eventually come to precede the events of the drama they are supposed to act in. Real life becomes the cause and history of the drama's events and the drama is the cause and catalyst that brings about the incidents happening in real life. It's actually brilliant! There's also a seriously interesting point made about sincerity and bravery and it's completely entangled with the queer representation in the story which makes this an exclusively queer narrative, impossible to recreate with any other type of dynamic and that's so amazing. I love that!
But I didn't really get all this from just watching the film. I only put these together with the help of other people's analysis and reading the summary! So while I think the idea is great, I think the execution of the plot was sloppy.

Acting: and that brings me to the second point. I don't think the acting was great. It was too much and too little in different scenes and only hit the mark occasionally. I know there's supposed to be ambiguity in the story and we're not supposed to be totally sure if the characters are being honest or pretending but for that to be shown, sincerity and insincerity need to be contrasted against each other. Here though, characters are unreliable and vague all the time! I could never grasp a normal behavior standard for them to measure their abnormal behavior against. So that led to more confusion.

Production: I think the main issue of this film is directing. A better director would have directed the actors better, established the world order better, chosen the best shots, and made sure the editing was immaculate. Then this movie could have been a 10. I really think a better direction would have fixed everything. And that's odd because I believe the director wrote the script too so they should have been the perfect candidate to make this. I wonder why it fell short a bit.

Rewatch: Not really. It wasn't that interesting though it wasn't awful. Once was enough.

Overall: If you're curious, just watch it. But it's not a personal recommendation, for me.

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