Cinephile
I'm overdosing on movies.
Caught Sunshine on DVD, rewatched No Country For Old Men, and saw The Chaser at Cathay.
Sunshine is another collaboration by Danny Boyle and Alex Garland (previously collaborated on 28 Days Later), which I regretted missing when it was playing in theaters last year.
What a magnificent sci-fi flick. Alex Garland still remains one of my favorite contemporary writers. It's easy for me to identify with him as he also grew up on a steady diet of Nintendo, Street Fighter and Resident Evil.
28 Days Later was no doubt inspired by George Romero's seminal Night of the Living Dead, but I'm dead sure it was also influenced by the original Resident Evil game. Anyway I'm going to digress a bit and say that although both are zombie movies, they represented very different underlying themes. Night of the Living Dead was made in the late 60s and satirized mindless consumerism. 28 Days Later was widely interpreted as being symbolic for the spread of deadly religious fanaticism.
Getting back in topic, The Chaser is a Korean crime movie that became a sleeper hit despite being directed by a first-time director with limited financing.
I gotta say, I'm a big fan of South Korean movies - flicks like Joint Security Area, Oldboy and The Host - awesome stuff. I read somewhere that movies are fairly accurate barometers of the culture and political climate of their country of origin and I think this is true.
Local movies are often introspective and focuses on the tribulations of ordinary folk or characters that traverse on the fringes of society. Think Money No Enough, Be With Me, 15 and Perth. I had also lost count of the number of times people attempted suicide by jumping off a building.
Korean movies, on the other hand, seem to have issues with the authorities. To be more precise - the incompetency of the authorities. This was present with The Host, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance and now, The Chaser.
All three movies depicted characters taking matters into their own hands because the authorities are just too incompetent or bogged down by red tape to render any constructive order and help.
It's also common to see people bludgeoned to death by a hammer.
All in all, I enjoyed The Chaser and felt a real sense of hopelessness and injustice when the victim finally manages to escape - only to run into her tormentor again, who was released due to lack of evidence. This time she doesn't get to live through it.
I'm quite sure this is what the movie wants us to feel.
This scene somehow reminded me of another scene in No Country for Old Men, when sheriff Ed Tom was telling his deputy how it took a naked man wearing only a dog collar running away from a house for people to notice something was wrong.
Sometimes I think that when people read of some of the crazier stuff in the news, like the recent triple murders - we don't really think much of it because it seems so far away. There's a lot of crazy stuff in this world, even for a rational and pragmatic place like Singapore.
Remember the incident where a young man was almost decapitated in a sports store, the murder case at the Soup Spoon restaurant in City Hall, the various cases with dismembered bodies, and even the guy who stole the SAR21 with the likely intention of killing his girlfriend with it.
I think it's in all of us, this potential of going berserk. It's inherently human.
Caught Sunshine on DVD, rewatched No Country For Old Men, and saw The Chaser at Cathay.
Sunshine is another collaboration by Danny Boyle and Alex Garland (previously collaborated on 28 Days Later), which I regretted missing when it was playing in theaters last year.
What a magnificent sci-fi flick. Alex Garland still remains one of my favorite contemporary writers. It's easy for me to identify with him as he also grew up on a steady diet of Nintendo, Street Fighter and Resident Evil.
28 Days Later was no doubt inspired by George Romero's seminal Night of the Living Dead, but I'm dead sure it was also influenced by the original Resident Evil game. Anyway I'm going to digress a bit and say that although both are zombie movies, they represented very different underlying themes. Night of the Living Dead was made in the late 60s and satirized mindless consumerism. 28 Days Later was widely interpreted as being symbolic for the spread of deadly religious fanaticism.
Getting back in topic, The Chaser is a Korean crime movie that became a sleeper hit despite being directed by a first-time director with limited financing.
I gotta say, I'm a big fan of South Korean movies - flicks like Joint Security Area, Oldboy and The Host - awesome stuff. I read somewhere that movies are fairly accurate barometers of the culture and political climate of their country of origin and I think this is true.
Local movies are often introspective and focuses on the tribulations of ordinary folk or characters that traverse on the fringes of society. Think Money No Enough, Be With Me, 15 and Perth. I had also lost count of the number of times people attempted suicide by jumping off a building.
Korean movies, on the other hand, seem to have issues with the authorities. To be more precise - the incompetency of the authorities. This was present with The Host, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance and now, The Chaser.
All three movies depicted characters taking matters into their own hands because the authorities are just too incompetent or bogged down by red tape to render any constructive order and help.
It's also common to see people bludgeoned to death by a hammer.
All in all, I enjoyed The Chaser and felt a real sense of hopelessness and injustice when the victim finally manages to escape - only to run into her tormentor again, who was released due to lack of evidence. This time she doesn't get to live through it.
I'm quite sure this is what the movie wants us to feel.
This scene somehow reminded me of another scene in No Country for Old Men, when sheriff Ed Tom was telling his deputy how it took a naked man wearing only a dog collar running away from a house for people to notice something was wrong.
Sometimes I think that when people read of some of the crazier stuff in the news, like the recent triple murders - we don't really think much of it because it seems so far away. There's a lot of crazy stuff in this world, even for a rational and pragmatic place like Singapore.
Remember the incident where a young man was almost decapitated in a sports store, the murder case at the Soup Spoon restaurant in City Hall, the various cases with dismembered bodies, and even the guy who stole the SAR21 with the likely intention of killing his girlfriend with it.
I think it's in all of us, this potential of going berserk. It's inherently human.