THE FILMS OF JUNE

I ordinarily don't like to include multiple film reviews in one post (makes it harder for going back and finding them later if ever I need to), but I saw two films last night, and with the way Blogger has been acting all week, I don't want to risk being able to post three times in one day.

"Two films! Christ!" you say. Yes, I do see a lot of films. And it is at this point that I shall officially announce that I'm going to see a lot more. My plan for this month is to see at least one movie every day. Not an average. One. Per. Day.

Just because there are only so many films released, I include cable and DVD in this total, and if you think that's easy, try it. Try thirty days of films in which you never skip a single evening ever. I have never done anything close this, not even when I was in film school and watching movies in class.

The bad news is, those of you who don't care for my film reviews are going to have a pretty dreary June, and if June goes well, possible a dreary July and August as well. But then again, you probably stopped reading the blog back in October.

And now, the reviews:

Typhoon
I think I finally figured out why I don't really care for Korean cinema. Every film I see from the country is somehow "essentially Korean," in a way that locks me out from appreciating it fully. Not that being "essentially French" or "essentially Japanese" keeps La Règle du Jeu or Tokyo monogatari from ranking high in my own pantheon of the Great Films. But I understand French and Japanese culture, and I really don't understand Koren culture, and that's my failing as a viewer but it doesn't make me like the films any more.

Which is a lot to say in preparation for reviewing what ends up being a James Bond ripoff.

Taepung [Typhoon] is an action thriller about the tension between North and South Korea. It is extremely difficult to avoid noticing this fact, because the film talks about it constantly. In sum, it's the story of a North Korean pirate (Jang Dang-Kun) who wants to destroy the peninsula because twenty years earlier, he was kept from entering South Korea (he thinks it is the South's fault, but the film is agnostic on this point).

Before we get there, though, the film goes on for an hour as a police procedural, in which Lt. Kang Se-Jong (Lee Jung-Jae) investigates the theft of an American nuclear device. I could describe this in detail, or I could say, "cop movie, 1986," and you'd have the same idea. After a while, he meets the pirate's cancer-ridden sister (Lee Mi-Yeon), who tells him the whole tragic story of why the bad guy went bad, etc. It's all very clichéd, but for about 15 minutes, through the pirate's reunion with his sister, it works on the sheer level of "interesting characters, well-acted."

The the endless third act begins, and I found myself stuck with a movie that gave me exactly what I wanted, and it was dull. "Pirates, nukes and typhoons" seemed like a can't-miss idea on paper, but in reality it's just kind of silly. Long story short, South Korea launches a strike against the pirate ship in the middle of two converging typhoons before the pirate can release nuclear waste into the air.

Kwak Kyung-Taek, the writer director, clearly has not been keeping abreast of the latest developments in action filmmaking. At its best, this feels like a decent Bond movie; at it's worst it feels like Cobra. The action sequences themselves are competently staged, but particularly unimaginatively: in particular, the final fight - in the cargo hold of a ship with explosions all round, the foes on a scaffold high above the fire - feels like I've seen it in every other movie ever.

Some of it's very pretty, I'll give it that. For example, the fight above the explosions has some nice silhouettes and things like that. But "pretty" cinematography is only "good" cinematography if it adds anything to the story or theme, and this doesn't. It's just pretty.

So why credit such a boilerplate film with being characteristic of all Korean cinema? Because throughout, there are fascinating tiny elements that are just so very specific and intentional, and yet make no sense to me. For example, the film opens in an Austrian embassy in 1983, where two children who are shortly to be severely fucked over are given Christmas gifts. Later, a raft of North Koreans is massacred by an American soldier (they're bait for the pirate's nuclear thievery, so it's really confusing what the morality is here); in one shot the soldier is very obviously wearing a crucifix. I know that the status of Christianity in Korea is rather different than in most of the region; but I feel that these signifiers mean a hell of a lot, and I really don't get them at all.

And of course, the entire plot is based on the tension between North and South, in particular how one man's desire to enter the South twists into hate when the South rejects him. Or does it? That's the thing, there's a host of issues about the two countries' relationship that the movie assumes and plays off of, and I can tell that there's a lot going on that isn't registering with me at all. Even the standard climactic bit about the villain and the hero being two sides of the same coin is invested with this Korean-ness.

All this doesn't make it a good film. I want to make that clear. 5/10


The Omen
This is not a shot-for-shot remake of the original, which means it is not the least necessary film of all time. It is a line-for-line remake in many places, which makes me wonder something: the script is credited to David Seltzer, who wrote the 1976 film. But it's not very hard to imagine that it is in fact the same exact script, with a day or two's work for some script-doctoring drudge to add a 2006 flair (not nearly enough: the second act would be half the length if the characters had ever heard of Google). Just about the only real change is the deeply ineffective addition of a scene where the Pope is told that 9/11, the Columbia explosion and the 2004 typhoon are all precursors of Armageddon.

You know the plot, right? Ambassador's son dies in childbirth, creepy priest give ambassador and his wife the Anti-Christ as a replacement. I'm going to try very hard not to complain about the film's incoherent and wildly inaccurate theology (did you know that Martin Luther believed Revelations to be a meritless and un-Christian work? Now you do), because I have the same problems with the original.

(It's worth saying, The Omen of 1976 is an extremely divisive film. There are two camps: those who think it's second only to The Exorcist in its creation of religious dread, and those who think it's an inert cornball of a film that knows as much about religion as a game of Candy Land. I am not in the first camp).

Unfortunately, refusing to discuss anything redundant to the original leaves me with very little to say. It's the same film with a younger cast to serve the market needs of contemporary horror. Actually, the cast - the monumentally overtalented cast - is one of the few things that I can possibly think of to talk about, so let's go item-by-item:

-Gregory Peck (1976) vs. Liev Schreiber (2006) as Ambassador Robert Thorne: both are as wooden and uncharismatic as they have ever, ever been, but Peck is also 60. Advantage: remake.
-Lee Remick vs. Julia Stiles as Kate Thorne: Remick has fewer things to be ashamed of in her career. Advantage: original.
-David Warner vs. David Thewlis as photographer/investigator Keith Jennings: both are fine character actors, Thewlis worked with Mike Leigh. Advantage: remake.
-Bille Whitlaw vs. Mia Farrow as satanic nanny Mrs. Baylock. I'll get to this in a moment. Advantage: remake.
-Patrick Troughton vs. Pete Postlethwaite as insane millennialist Father Brennan: Troughton was the Second Doctor Who, even though I've always loved Postlethwaite. Advantage: original.
-Leo McKern vs. Michael Gambon as German demonologist Bugenhagen. Gambon vs. anyone, Gambon wins. Advantage: remake.

So yeah, boatload of talent, and they are all trapped inside a desparately serious attempt at Art Horror. And just like the original, it turns into a wonderful sniggerfest of actors with pained looks on their faces, like they have pulled something or are constipated.

Except for two cases. Gambon is just here for fun, and he camps it up in high style (or "McKellans," in honor of the actor who's making a cottage industry of it this summer), but he's only onscreen for about one glorious minute. The other case is Mia Farrow, who was clearly cast because of her previous Satanic baby film, which was actually a good movie. Farrow knows, or seems to, that this is not a good movie, and so she glides through with bug-eyed glee, smacking her lips around some truly goofy dialogue and generally leaving no set unchewed. Farrow's performance almost nudges the film into "so bad it's good"territory, but there's a lot of "so bad it's boring" to overcome.

What else? It's terribly edited, in an attempt to make it seem scary by being jarring. The cinematography is so brilliant that I really can't remember what it looked like 16 hours later. The sound design - actually yes, I can talk about that. It's a mess, but an interesting mess: mere seconds after I noticed a really nice surround effect on some creept chanting, I heard a "scary" dog panting that sounded like it was trying to get peanut butter out of its mouth. And everything is way too loud, in an effort to make things actually scary.

So the movie: worth seeing if you liked the original and want to see it on better film stock. I can't stress how obvious it is that it was greenlit for one reason: 6/6/06. The irony is that recent archaeology has shown that 666 was a later, likely erroneous Number of the Beast. Instead, 616 seems to be the original text of Revelations. Which gives me an idea: a group of Satanists move into a house at 666 Beast Street, and call up the Dark One; but in a hilarious snafu, he ends up a few houses down the road, at 616 Beast Street, where his arrival surprises the auto-shop owner who lives there with his wife, a champion quilter. They bond with Satan and inadvertently prevent the End Times in Harold Ramis' outrageous new comedy, Speak of the Devil!

...where was I? 3/10