my hot take is kim jee-woon is a bad director who has made one good movie (a bittersweet life). the good the bad the ugly… hate it, i saw the devil… one of my least favorite movies i’ve ever seen.
huge fan of park tho! jsa is a the exact kind of masculine romantic melodrama i adore.
I love JSA.
I’ve seen Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring. That movie had some great poetic moments and a beautiful setting though I kind of hate the conceit of the third act. I’ve…heard of some of his other movies and I don’t know if I can follow him down this road.
I consider him the weakest out of the four, for sure. But! I was thinking about the gun dealers in A Bittersweet Life when I made my point about good characterization. I think he can pull of some scenes really well but the plots usually come out disjointed. I actually just watched The Foul King last night and it’s a pretty good example of his strengths and weaknesses. The wrestling scenes are phenomenal but every scene outside of the ring drags the plot to a crawl. My favorite film by him is The Quiet Family which is very different from his later output.
My hot take is that Bong Joon-ho puts at least one incredibly stupid element into each of his movies. Sometimes that stupid element is the entire premise of a film!
Yeah there’s certainly problematic elements in 3-Iron as well but I would still recommend. It’s almost completely dialogue free also if/when you’re ever in the mood for that.
(Edit: There’s no extreme content like that Moebius review describes).
Crocodile is about people who live by (CW - suicide) fishing suicides out of the river and ransoming their bodies back to the families. ‘Uncompromising’ and original seems to be his style.
If The Castle Freak doesn’t rippoff his own dingdong all is lost.
I managed to track down a PAL DVD rip of Tender Loving Care, the goofy “erotic psychological thriller” that the FMV game of the same name was reworked into. It’s so strange not having John Hurt stop everything and start spouting off some nonsense. It’s really hard to sit through this because it’s just a two hour long 1996 Cinemax movie, and there’s a bit more nudity in this than in the FMV game, from what I can recall. Might be more fun to watch in a group if it weren’t for all of the awkward sex scenes and nudity.
The Dead Don’t Die is probably a good movie to put on in the background because it never really goes anywhere. It feels like a bunch of ideas thrown together and they try to get around doing anything interesting or having any sort of a plot by having the characters acknowledge that it’s a movie.
I can’t fucking stand Sturgill Simpson.
Seemed like a movie that would have been fun to make, but I wasn’t glad for watching.
I finally got around to watching One Cut of the Dead all the way through. I started a few months back, but then stopped. The hardest part is getting through the first like, 37 minutes, after that it’s pretty decent. Something this goofy should’ve been dubbed, but I’m apparently the only person who gets anything out of dubs. 
I watched Battleship Potemkin. Which you know was kind of boring and the editing is overwrought. That’s right I’m taking this 95 year old film to task! Take that classic film I think everyone should take 75 minutes and watch.
I watched it like this:
You could also watch it like this:
Film makers and critics calling it their favorite film is definitely jerking off when just about any film of the last 40 years has more consistent player geography.
I am gonna be thinking about it and I am going to see Battleship Potemkin in films for the rest of my life because it is in every film.
No
Yes
NO
“the editing in battleship potemkin is overrated” is an s-rank film hot take, i don’t think it can be topped
Was in a film class that talked about Eisenstein’s methods and theories about editing, montage, and I just read it as Einstein and thought since no one else felt like it was surprising to learn that Einstein had a lot to say about film I just kept my mouth shut and thought Einstein knew some shit.
It’s not overrated. It’s like the first to do it just saying it’s genius (in 1925) doesn’t make you cool. The Odessa Steps is definitely a mood piece and incredibly important but also I could say that people jump position from shot to shot and those steps have to be a mile long and sometimes there is a crowd and then no crowd and the lady carrying her child is like 5 miles from the firing squad and then 5 feet and then 5 miles.
Like any film made in the last 50 years that did that stuff would be called amateur and incompetent. Hearing Roger Corman talk about it’s genius is bullshit because again if someone did that exact same style today they’d receive no praise and be called student film bullshit. But also it is fascinating that student film bullshit, the misteps of amateurs goes back that far.
I also said it is worth taking the time to watch because every film is Battleship Potemkin. I am glad I watched it knowing nothing because otherwise every tiny technical thing would have made me mad because that is who I am as a person.
Like I can’t accept BP is perfect and untouchable. It belittles the next 95 years of films. It is something to learn from and experience and see the merits of.
Have you seen Earth by Dovzhenko? It was made only five years after Potemkin and I think you’d appreciate it for being a more reserved and carefully constructed film. I mean, it’s been a decade since I’ve seen either so I’m working on an old impression, but I remember being really impressed by the emotional strength of Earth.
It’s on Youtube so I’ll give it a try soon.
The Steps sequence destroys me every time I watch it, it’s one of the most effective fictional representations of the injustice of state justice I can think of.
I don’t know if it’s intentional but the editing in the sequence feels disjointed and dreamlike; a collection of striking images interspersed outside of linear time, but arranged emotionally into rising tension. The woman carrying her child is striding; the soldiers are advancing; the people are fleeing; the people are screaming – I don’t know when these take place but they’re all taking place at the same time and I’m feeling them all.
And then the most important moment is isolated and separated from the montage: she stops, she stands, she’s shot. And it all spills out
This is a much better analysis and response than the one Corman gave.
sure but could Eisenstein do this?
