A Bittersweet Life (2005) (Korean)
After Tale of Two Sisters, Ji-woon Kim’s new movie has been eagerly anticipated. In his previous film, the marks of originality, intellectual challenge and superb visual style hailed the possibility of a brave new voice in Korean cinema.
A Bittersweet Life commences with similarly awesome photography and ambiance. The wind in the leaves of a tree - Is it the leaves or the wind that moves? asks the disciple of the master. Neither, he replies, it is your mind and heart that moves. Cut to La Dolce Vita, the swish bar restaurant which we are to discover is also the gangland stronghold of Sun-Woo. A single tree in the centre of the restaurant’s sky lounge. The colours red and black, glossy and visually forceful in the lounge - they not only play heavily in the film but make any small deviations stand out. Lushness or delicacy is easily conveyed later in the film by colour, a respite to the bloodshed that will almost swamp us. A tinkling piano (Chopin is used as part of the score) adds a delicate counterpoint to what we know will surely be an overload of violence and mayhem.
Sun-Woo has served his boss, President Kang, faithfully for seven years and is now manager of Dolce Vita as well as Kang’s right hand man. Background profits, and gang competition, focuses on innocuous little sidelines like the supply of guns or dancing girls, and which countries these should come from. Kang has a secret lover from the ‘normal’ world, a cellist who is much younger than he, and whom he suspects of infidelity. Kang entrusts Sun-Woo to sort it out and show no mercy. The warfare that follows goes beyond honour, beyond profit, beyond vengeance, . . . beyond any rational point in fact.
Sun-Woo is the ultimate cool bad guy. Indentured to a world of violence and expert in the use of martial arts, knives and guns, he is almost a humanised Bruce Lee who’s woken up on a Tarantino set. It sounds almost too good to be true and it is. The story lines are formulaic and derivative, consisting largely of how to engineer more ingenious punch-ups, torture or revenge posturing. Light humour afforded in the contrast between suave topdogs and bumbling henchmen has been done so many times, and many of the entertaining debacles could have been borrowed from Kill Bill. But entertaining it is, on an undemanding level. Sadly it is not the work of the Master that we might have expected from Two Sisters. “The dream I had can’t come true,” laments the protagonist, and ironically the dreams Ji-woon Kim’s fans may justifiably had don’t quite come true in A Bittersweet Life, but this otherwise elegant shoot-em-up is still reasonable ‘boys night out’ night fare.
Director: Ji Woon Kim
Genre: drama, action, crime
Cast: Jeong-min Hwang, Yu-mi Jeong
Runtime: 120 minutes
Language: Korean
Subtitle: Eng. subs
IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0456912/
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Jiang Hu (2004) (Chinese)
When Triad leader Hung’s wife gives birth to a baby boy, Hung considers leaving the world of the gangsters. Despite the fact that he is not sure of his decision, word gets out fast and now, a brutal war begins in the world of “jiang-hu”. Two hoodlums, Wing and Turbo, set to make a name for themselves, are ordered to kill Hung. Meanwhile, an internal conflict begins between Hung and his #1 man, Left-Hand. Despite this conflict, the two have nothing but respect for each other. However, they know deep down, that there are people waiting to get rid of Hung.
Directed:Ching-Po Wong
Genre:Drama / Crime / Action
Cast:Andy Lau, Jacky Cheung
Runtime:102 mins
Also Known As:Left Hand
Country:Hong-Kong
Language:Cantonese
Subtitles:English Hardcoded
IMDB link:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0415080/
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Natural City (2003) (Korean)
In the future, technology has gotten so advanced that cyborgs have been created with their own individual specializations and consciousness. They can feel, love, and hate�but they�re also susceptible to expiration. Refusing to die off and be recycled, a band of combat cyborgs launch an attack against Neucom genetics in an attempt to prolong their lives and destroy all who get in the way. In the middle of it all are �R� and �Noma�, two soldiers trained to battle against this type of renegade cyborg. But all is not what it seems, as there�s something R is hiding, and some kind of conspiracy brewing behind the curtains.
Year: 2003
Director: Min Byeong-Cheon
Genre: Sci-Fi/Drama
Cast: Yu Ji-Tae, Yun Chan, Seo Rin
Country : South Korea
Running Time: 1H53
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Breaking News (2004) (Chinese)
After a sting operation goes bad, gunfire erupts on the streets of Hong Kong as police chase a group of suspects across town. Unfortunately, the melee is caught on camera by the media and when the criminals humiliate a police officer live on national television and escape, the public outrage towards the police department is mutinous.
The leader of the sting operation, Inspector Cheung (Nick Cheung, Election), furious from losing the criminals, disobeys orders from his commanding officer and stays hot on the heels of the bandits. Chased into a residential apartment block, the villains take a family hostage and bunker down to plan their next move. Cheung tries to roust the criminals out from within, but is unable to single-handedly defuse the situation. Meanwhile, the police swarm around the building and set up a command center outside, led by ambitious and media-savvy Commissioner Rebecca Fong (Kelly Chen, Infernal Affairs), who seems more concerned about the swarm of video cameras and photographers than the criminals inside the building.
Embarrassed by their earlier defeat, the police begin fighting a public relations war, anxious to repair their tattered image in the public eye. In order to portray the department in a favorable, decisive light, they begin feeding “punched-up” video clips to the media, carefully edited to show the police coming out on top in the conflict with the criminals, as they keep the press updated on every move they make. Unfortunately for the police, the bad guys need only to turn on their television and are immediately brought up to speed on every detail about the police activity, keeping one step ahead of the police at all times…
Directed: Johnnie To
Genre: Action / Crime / Drama
Runtime: 91 mins
Also Known As: Daai si gin
Country: Hong Kong
Language: Chinese
Subtitles: English Hardsubbed
IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0414931/
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WELCOME TO DONGMAKGOL (2005) (Korean)
An American pilot crashlands in a remote mountain region, and is rescued by the friendly locals of the village of Dongmakgol. Days later, two South Korean soldiers come across the same village, after fleeing from their regiment. After a bloody battle, three North Korean soldiers flee the advancing South Korean forces across the mountains, stumbling into the very same place.
The villagers, insulated from the outside world by their remote setting, are wonderfully unable to grasp the significance of a war of Korean against Korean, and through their innocence the soldiers themselves gradually become reconciled to each other. But just when they seem to have found peace, the war once more intrudes on the villages quiet existance - threatening to finish it off for good…
Directed: Park Kwang-hyun
Genre: Comedy/Drama
Cast: Shin Ha-kyun, Jeong Jae-yeong, Kang Hye-jeong
Runtime: 133 mins
Country: South Korea
Language: Korean
Subtitles: English .srt
IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0475783/
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Welcome to Dongmakgol.[ENG]subs.
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Sinking of Japan (2006) (Japanese)
REVIEW FROM IMDB
Nihon Chinbotsu is another example of Japanese creativity and ingenuity. The original story written in the early seventies is truly incredible in terms of thrill and how thought-provoking it was. Very basically, the story is about the Japanese archipelago “sinking” into the ocean due to plate tectonics. I’m not an expert on this branch of science, so I can’t say how realistic the science behind the disaster is, but it sounded very believable as a layman.
There are many elements which make this disaster movie stand out compared to other disaster flicks like Day After Tomorrow, Independence Day, Twister, etc. No matter what devastation there is in the aforementioned movies, the land itself remains to fix. The people can rise out of the rubble, is usually the end of the film. However, Japan sinking means that the Japanese can’t do anything to rebuild their homeland. Japanese will have to live somewhere else forever. Which raises many philosophical questions. What happens to a people without a homeland? Are the Japanese going to be worth anything to the other nations when they’ve lost their factories, cities, cultural artifacts? More specifically, do the Japanese today have any value? Will the Japanese have to simply assimilate into other nations and disappear as a unique civilization?
This film is a remake of the 1970s classic which is itself the film adaptation of the novel. There are many changes, one being the obvious CGI which is on par with Hollywood standards (which some may find a prerequisite for a good disaster film). But there are some crucial story edits that some may find for better or worse. I personally found the differences neither better or worse, just another alternate ending. This remake however is a bit faster pace and focuses more on the destruction and relies heavily on the action to keep people excited, which was probably not the intention of Komatsu Sakyo, the author. The questions raised continue to exist in this remake but are not the main focus of the film.
In conclusion, this remake is exciting as an action packed disaster flick with great CGI destroying familiar sites (if you’re Japanese) as well as a thought-provoking film. What’s great about it is that if you want to just watch it as an action flick, you can, if you want to think about the questions raised, you can as well, but you won’t be forced to. It’s a good balance. I would recommend it.
Directed: Shinji Higuchi
Genre: Adventure / Drama / Sci-Fi / Thriller
Cast: Tsuyoshi Kusanagi, Kou Shibasaki
Runtime: 135 minutes
Country: Japan
Also Known As: Nihon Chinbotsu
Language: Japanese
Subtitles: English
IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0473064/
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