Lady Vengeance

This is the final piece in Korean director Chan-wook Park's revenge trilogy (see entries on Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance).  I think I liked Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance best, then this, and then Oldboy, in case you are wondering.

The movie follows Lee Geum-ja after her release from prison for kidnapping and killing a 5-year-old boy.  It briefly repeats Sympathy's assertion that most kidnappings are basically harmless, with the child being returned completely fine once the ransom is paid.  You can imagine how that turns out in both movies...

Is that true in Korea?  Do kids get kidnapped all the time and then returned, perfectly unharmed, upon payment of the ransom?  Does it happen anywhere?  My understanding is that kidnapping is a messy business and doesn't really work out for anyone involved.  These movies indicate that I'm right, but who knows.

Anyway, Geum-ja spends the movie on a couple of missions, ultimately seeking vengeance against a man connected to her crime.  All while wearing red (!) eye shadow.  Which she can actually pull off, almost.  I say that knowing that nobody in the world can actually pull it off, but seriously, you get almost used to it.

I'll say this for Chan-wook Park: if I ever decide to seek revenge, which I haven't ruled out, but certainly hope I never do, I'll watch his movies repeatedly.  The message I take away from all of them is that it in the end, it's not as satisfying as you need it to be.  And if you watch Sympathy, my God.  Revenge upon revenge upon revenge until, what?  Nobody's left to avenge / be revenged on.

Availability: DVD and Streaming
Released: 2005
Added to my queue: 2/11/2008
Reason added to my queue: I apparently got on a kick where I wanted to see every single Asian horror movie.  And if you think is the last one I'm reviewing, you're dead wrong, there are several more in the queue.

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance

This movie shows a mass shooting at a bank, and then shows the victims' lives in the leadup to the shooting, along with real news footage from around the world at the time (1991).

I found the premise and the characters interesting.  It's in German, which might be why I felt sort of disconnected to it.  But it was decent.

Availability: DVD only
Released: 1994
Added to my queue: 5/13/2008
Reason added to my queue: Not sure.  I also added Funny Games that day, so maybe I was on a German kick?  Who knows.

One Missed Call II

Okay, I can't believe I even watched this movie, considering how terrible the first one (and the American one) was (were).  

But dude, if you have to watch a movie about a cell phone call portending death, this is definitely the one to watch.

It's not nearly as vapid as the first one - the characters are engaging, you actually don't want them to die - and you hope they get to the bottom of the mystery.

No promises on that front.

The premise is the same - creepy ringtone you didn't download, then three days later you die.

Availability: DVD

Released: 2005

Added to my queue: 2/11/2008 

Reason added to my queue: I seem to have added tens of movies that day, nearly all of them Asian horror.  Who knew I'd be paying 5+ years later?

Three...Extremes II

I really liked the first one, so I figured the second would be good.  And it was decent.

It's three vignettes, each directed by a different Asian director:

• In "Memories", a woman keeps trying to get home.  Based on experience with other movies, you will ultimately begin to wonder whether she's actually alive or a ghost.
• In "The Wheel", a Thai village is haunted by creepy ceremonial puppets.
• In "Going Home", which I found to be the most interesting and worth watching, a man is held captive while his neighbor prepares for the resurrection of his dead wife.

 Far and away the most disturbing of the vignettes is in Part I, though.  The first one on the the first disc is seriously disturbing.

Watch it, don't watch it.

Availability: DVD only
Released: 2002
Added to my queue: 2/11/2008
Reason: This is when I added all the Asian horror movies to my queue, so I assume I was on some kind of tear.

The Power of Kangwon Province

I apologize in advance for this review, I'm pretty sure it's going to suck.

This is the blurb about this movie on Netflix:

"After a painful breakup with her married professor, Jisook joins two of her girlfriends for a holiday. But in an eerie twist of fate, her former lover plans a getaway for the same destination, where tragedy brings them together once again."

I watched the movie.  I gave it the vast majority of my attention.  Now, it was in Korean, so that is one area where I may have missed something.  I did see Jisook go on holiday.  I even saw her go back to visit a dude she met on holiday.  Then, I saw her former lover go to the same place she had gone.  But I missed any eerie  twists of fate and if I saw a tragedy, it didn't move me much.

So I mean.  Skip it.  Or watch it and let me know what I missed.

A History of Violence

When this movie came to theaters, I remember thinking it was going to be, literally, a history of violence.  Like a documentary.  And even after I realized that wasn't the case, I didn't want to see it.

It's pretty good, though.  Viggo Mortenson and Maria Bello play a married couple in a small Indiana town.  He owns a little diner, which gets held up by criminals, and his quick reactions save the day...and unleash a host of other problems when Ed Harris comes to town claiming Mortenson is actually a thug from a Philly crime family.

I mean, if nothing else is on, this isn't bad.  It wouldn't be my go-to, though.

Availability: DVD only
Released: 2005
Added to my queue: 2/12/2008
Reason added to my queue: unknown

Funny Games (German)

I saw the American version of this movie in the theater, randomly, with my friend Wendy in NYC.  It was so violent and senseless, we were kind of dumbfounded.

The German version is, based on my recollection, almost exactly the same.  Shot for shot remake.  Even the house feels the same....

The premise is a family arrives at their lake house for a vacation, and as they're settling in, two strangers come over to innocently borrow some eggs for the neighbors' breakfast.  And then it gets messy.

If you like senselessly violent torture thrillers, one of these two movies is for you.  The German one is cool because it's the original, but the American one is in English and (stop me if I'm wrong here because it's been like 6 years since I saw the American one) they're basically the same movie.

Availability of German: DVD and Streaming
Released: 1997
Added to my queue: 5/13/2008
Reason added to my queue: I'm assuming because I had seen the American version.

Klepto

This indie drama follows Emily (Meredith Bishop), a kleptomaniac who gets caught by a store security officer (Jsu Garcia).  At first it seems like the security guy has her best interests at heart, but his own problems make things even more complicated.  Also interesting is Emily's relationship with her shopaholic mother (Leigh Taylor-Young).

It's decent.

Availability: DVD and Streaming
Released: 2003
Added to my queue: 12/6/2007
Reason added to my queue: unknown

Paper Clips

This documentary centers on Whitwell Middle School, in Whitwell, Tennessee (or, the way they pronounce it, TENNessee).  This tiny town is almost entirely white, with only several thousand residents.  One year, the principal, Mrs. Cooper, decided that the 8th grade should have a consciousness-raising project to promote diversity understanding and tolerance.  One of the teachers, David Smith, attended an educational conference, and returned with the decision that this project should be about the Holocaust.  All the teachers read up on the Holocaust, and started teaching the kids about it.  Upon hearing that 6 million Jews were murdered in the concentration camps, one student admitted that he really didn't have a good grasp of 6 million - he had never seen 6 million of anything.  So they decided to collect 6 million somethings...and started researching what would be the most meaningful thing to collect.  They discovered that paper clips were invented during WWII, by Norwegians who used them in solidarity against the Nazis, wearing the clips on their collars as a testament to the atrocities that were being committed daily in German-controlled areas.

I won't spoil it for you, but this film is so touching, I literally had goosebumps for the entire first half, and most of the rest of the movie.  I so much want to go to Whitwell and see their work for myself!

Highly recommend.

Availability: DVD and Streaming
Released: 2004
Added to my queue: 1/10/2011
Reason Added to my queue: Netflix recommended, based on my enjoyment of: March of the Penguins, Schindler's List, and Dear Zachary.

Note: Dear Zachary is so sad and so disturbing, I can't even.  Amazing, though.

Mad Men

If you aren't already watching Mad Men, I'm not going to attempt to talk you into it.  It is SO good, its characters are SO real, everything I say will sound cliche.

This is up to you.  Don't make the wrong decision.

Availability: DVD and Streaming; new episodes begin April 7 at 9pm EDT, on AMC.
Released: 2007

Thumbsucker

I honestly can't figure out whether I thought this was a good movie.  While watching it, I was kind of like, "eh," but then at the end, I was like, "that was a good movie".  So I guess I liked it?

It centers around 17-year-old outcast Justin Cobb (Lou Taylor Pucci), who still sucks his thumb.  It embarrasses his parents, Audrey (Tilda Swinton) and Mike (Vincent D'Onofrio), and his orthodontist (Keanu Reeves) (!!) offers to hypnotize him to make him stop.  And the story just kind of goes from there.  Justin is a member of the debate team, whose adviser is played by Vince Vaughn - making this one of the rare one-two Vince punches with both D'Onofrio AND Vaughn.  Justin's romantic entanglements with Rebecca (Kelli Warner) add cringes to an otherwise already cringe-inducing film.

I mean if Keanu Reeves is your orthodontist, something is already wrong.

The story is saddish but engaging.  I think I did like it.

On a side note, I sucked my middle and ring finger on my left hand until I was 28 years old.  This was an interesting movie for me because it was a boy, and his parents were pressuring him to stop, and his teeth had  been affected.  I don't really know why I did it, except that my parents were kind of distracted when I was around the ages that a kid would usually stop sucking fingers, and I just happened to never stop.  So the whole time I was in elementary school, middle school, a dance cult, high school, COLLEGE - I had boyfriends AND was in a sorority and nobody ever made fun of me to my face.  That may not be true, but I think everyone basically was fine with it.  I made it to adulthood, again with the boyfriends, friends, etc. - and then when I was 28, Santa gave me a handheld video game that I started playing when I was watching TV or falling asleep - the times I had previously sucked my fingers - and I just sort of stopped.  Like, accidentally.  With no fanfare.  I remember once, my sister-in-law kind of made a jab at me about it, and I was like, "I don't do that anymore."  And she didn't believe that I would have stopped with no mention of it - but seriously, it just went away.  No orthodontic problems, either.

Availability: DVD only
Released: 2005
Added to my queue: 1/1/2008
Reason added to my queue: Unknown

Network

This movie wasn't on my radar in any way.  I had of course heard its catchphrase, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!" - but had never really thought about its origins.

It was powerful!

The premise is a network struggling with coming in last in the ratings in 1975 - which would have been a fairly big deal back then, before cable, right?  The film is "satirical" which I generally assume means an exaggeration of reality for the sake of comedy, usually dark comedy.  I don't think I really thought the movie was funny, although the continuing game of musical chairs in terms of who's head of UBS (the fictional network in question) was kind of amusing...it doesn't take much for one person to get replaced by another.  Anyway, the primary storyline in the film is the on-air breakdown of a news anchor, which has interesting results, again driven by ratings.  Everyone in the movie is great, particularly Faye Dunaway, who plays a blindly ambitious director of programming; William Holden, who plays the network division president who unknowingly provokes the anchor's (Peter Finch) breakdown by letting him go because of poor ratings.  Robert Duvall, who plays Dunaway's boss, is also great, as is Ned Beatty - in the most passionate role I've ever seen him play...and I feel like I've seen him in a lot of stuff.

Anyway, I'm not going to add spoilers, because the film should stand on its own - but it was really good.

Availability: DVD only
Released: 1976
Added to my queue: 4/11/2010
Reason added to my queue: Netflix recommended based on my enjoyment of: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Lost in Translation, and Taxi Driver.

That 70's Show, Season 3

If you haven't seen That 70's Show, you should give it a shot.  It's really cute.  It's in the old canned-laughter sitcom format, and takes place, well, in the 70's.

Season 3 spans 1977-78, and opens with Hyde (Danny Masterson) just having been arrested for holding Jackie's (Mila Kunis) stash.  Red ( Kurtwood Smith) considers throwing him out, until he hears the truth.  Also found in this season (sorry for the spoilers, I'm basically posting this for myself to read when I start Season 4 in 5 or so years)...

• Eric (Topher Grace): is still with Donna (Laura Prepon), but he turns kind of clingy (including reading her diary) when she finds herself wanting to spread her wings with a new job down at the radio station (fun cameo from Howard Hesseman in that episode).  He also pulls her pants down in a pickup basketball game, exposing her granny panties.  They also go to a hotel for a romantic weekend, but his parents end up in the next room.  Gets Donna a promise ring in the last episode, and breaks up with her when she gives it back.  Ay, que loco!
• Hyde: after almost getting thrown out of the Forman's basement for holding Jackie's stash, he ends up moving out voluntarily when his father (fun cameo from Airplane's own Ted Striker, Robert Hays) shows up on the scene.  Throws a big party at his dad's, which his dad breaks up after Eric goes home drunk and the Formans encourage Mr. Hyde to take a heavier hand with his son.  Also goes on a date with Jackie.
• Donna: gets to go on-air with her new job; also lands tickets for everyone at a Ted Nugent concert and then gets to go backstage, where The Nuge gives her an interview.  Eric is irritated with her for leaving him alone to go back stage, but she is unapologetic.  When Eric tries to solidify their relationship with a promise ring in the season finale, she ultimately gives it back after realizing she isn't sure what she sees in her future.
• Kelso (Ashton Kutcher): starts the season dating Eric's sister Laurie (Lisa Robin Kelly), but she cheats on him, so he realizes how bad Jackie was hurt when he cheated on her, and spends the rest of the season trying to get back together with Jackie.  It works.  Gives her a promise ring in the last episode, which she accepts.
• Jackie: Starts the season obsessed with Hyde since he took the fall for her with the pot.  When he finally goes on a date with her, they kiss and realize they have no feelings for each other, so that ends. She gets a callback for a modeling agency, but Donna exposes it as a fraud.  Ultimately gets back together with Kelso, which is a sweet process.
• Fez (Wilmer Valderrama): gets a girlfriend, Caroline (Allison Munn), but she's batshit crazy so they break up.  Spends the rest of the season lonely.
• Red: spends the season trying to maintain control over the family.
• Kitty: gives up her nursing career and spends the rest of the season trying to figure out what she wants.
• The Pinciottis: Bob loses his job; Midge admits she's unhappy.

Ready for Season 5!

Availability: DVD and Streaming
Released: 2000
Reason I added to queue: who knows