The Classic (Cock Jae-Yong)
I think there's something severely wrong with my psychology. I feel that I've entered a hypomanic episode, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Hypomanic episodes tend to come along with strong creative energy and a generally good mood.

Yet, it's also going to be spring soon. Spring it the time for falling in love. Hell, it's not even spring yet, and I'm already in the mood for love. Just the anticipation makes me want to grab the nearest cute girl with dark hair and high cheekbones and shower her with attention. I'm also about to gradate, so it's probably not a good idea since I'll be splitting from this university pretty soon.

So what's the effect all this has on me? I'm becoming attracted to melodramatic things. Lately, I've been listening to a lot of Teresa Teng songs, especially the stunningly gorgeous "The Moon Represents My Heart," which probably doesn't mean shit to you if you aren't Chinese. Although I'm not Chinese but it does mean shit to me lately. The point is, at any other time in my life I'd probably just consider the song cheesy.

I'm a sucker for a good romantic story in any mood, but generally I stick to the artsier stuff. This is probably why I shower Wong Kar-Wai with more acclaim than most people do, minus that Blueberry Nights crap, because that was a steaming pile of disappointment. But when I really get in that mood, I have this bad tendency to keep running back to the cruel, manipulative arms of some film director named Kwak Jae-Yong, a 500-year-old wishy-washy pervert whose sole purpose in life is to torture his audience.

I'm not quite sure what the best metaphor for a Kwak film is. On one hand, they're like the one cheerleader you knew in high school that you actually got along with. If you're a hipster douchebag like me, you should know that cheerleaders are totally not your type at all, yet you find yourself strangely liking this girl. Eventually, you fall for her, and for a while you enjoy that sensation of being young and in love. Eventually, you realize that, despite the fact that she's different from the other cheerleaders, she's just exactly like them. And then, bam! She's pregnant by the quarterback of the football team. You should've known it was going to happen, but you fell for the silly little girl anyway.

No, maybe Kwak's films are more like drugs. At first, you get high. Then, the drug wears off and you feel worse than you did before, but you keep coming back for more.

Okay, enough with the cliche comparisons. Kwak Jae-Yong's films are essentially shaggy dog stories. Bait-and-switch films. Since I'm pretty sure that none of you actually want to watch The Classic, I'll tell you the entire plot, twists and all:

You know it's a Kwak Jae-Yong film because it starts with god-fucking-awful "Canon in D." So there's a girl. And there's her best friend. And there's the guy that her best friend has a crush on, whom she also secretly has feelings for. Girl has requisite cuteness and ability to cry on demand for the "classic" Korean melodrama. Then there's the story of her mom (Joo-Hee) and dad and their hypotenuse (named Joon-Ha and Tae-Soo, but not necessarily in that order), which she relates to us by reading letters exchanged between the three of them.

Before I get into diatribe mode full blast, I will say that there's something very appealing about Kwak's films. There's a certain lightness and nostalgia in his tone, and his sense of blocking and framing is much different than one would expect from a mainstream, audience-friendly film.

So anyway, there's these two stories spanning across these two generations. I won't get into the present day story because it's really not that interesting. Come to think of it, the past story isn't really that much more interesting, either, but I found myself kind of enjoying watching it play out, even though I thought I knew how it was going to end. I mean, Joo-Hee has to end up with Joon-Ha, because Joon-Ha is the present day girl's father, right? And even Tae-Soo wants them to be together, even though he is in love with Joo-Hee and their parents set the two of them up.

AND THEN THERE'S THE MANDATORY KOREAN WAR SCENE!!!

I should've known it was coming but I really thought the film was taking place more recently. I'm not quite sure how the timeline of this film is supposed to work out. So anyway, Joon-Ha has to fight in the Korean War. And there's a battle scene. And a guy gets shot. And then the North Koreans come running and the South has to retreat. But wait! Joon-Ha doesn't have the necklace that Joo-Hee gave him earlier. The guy who got shot has it. So idiot protagonist Joon-Ha runs back to the dead guy to get the necklace, juking and jiving through the commies. And he gets the necklace without getting harmed. He's on his way back to the helicopters, and another guy gets injured. So idiot protagonist Joon-Ha picks up the guy, and somehow they make it back to the retreating place.

And then they get hit with a grenade.

But wait! Joon-Ha actually survived the war, and it cuts to years later, with Joon-Ha and Joo-Hee meeting again for the first time. And all is going to be okay, right?

"Hello Joo-Hee. You're Beautiful. How's Tae-Soo? What? You guys didn't get married? Well, guess what, dear Joo-Hee, whom I've loved for years: I got married a few years ago."

Fuck you, Kwak.

Then Joon-Ha turned around. Joo-Hee says:

"Why are you trying to hide the fact that you're blind?" Joon-Ha falls over a bunch of tables and waiters and shit.

Fuck you, Kwak. Asshole.

THEN, It turns out that Joo-Hee married Tae-Soo and had the little girl who's narrating the story. THEN, it turns out that Joon-Ha didn't get married until after Joo-Hee and Tae-Soo did. THEN, it turns out that Joon-Ha DIED and LEFT A SON BEHIND.



Cut to present day story, and you'll never guess who the guy that the main character is in love with is.



I guess I have to admit, that last part actually might have made the ending less of a work of manipulative cow manure (an item which also has an apt role throughout the film), but it's a totally fucking cop out of an end.

So the question remains: why do I keep watching films by Kwak Jae-Yong when I know very well that no matter how appealing they might be in the beginning, the last 30 minutes are going to piss me off? Couldn't I be better spending my time just re-watching Wong Kar-Wai's films or Before Sunrise/Sunset?

I don't know, but what worries me is that somewhere along the line I might have actually financially supported Kwak Jae-Yong, contributing to his mostly undeserved international success. He knows this, too, and just to rub it in my face, he took a picture of himself with Haruka Ayase:


"Thank you for your financial support! She's cute, isn't she?"

One of the most disturbing psychological thrillers ever, what's remarkable about Repulsion is that it was originally meant to be a B-horror film with cheap scares. It was produced by a company that had previously only worked in exploitation films and had hired Polanski to bring a bit of class and respectability to their company. However, they had no idea HOW much class Roman would bring to the production as it went over budget and over time almost immediately, though in the end the producers told Polanski they'd ordered a Mini Cooper and he'd delivered a Rolls Royce. Repulsion is a film about a young woman named Carol, played superbly by Catherine Deneuve, who lives with her sister in a small UK apartment and works a day job at a beauty salon. But Carol seems to have a penchant for daydreaming. When her sister goes on a trip with her boyfriend, Carol is left all alone in the apartment and her fantasies turn into schizophrenia as she envisions the walls cracking, a serial rapist attacker, and even views the few real people left in her life (such as her potential boyfriend) as dangerous threats.

Much like Knife in the Water, Polanski shows a stunning adeptness at sustaining tension through mood and tone that's never overstated. His use of sound is especially masterful; such as a clock in Carol's room that incessantly ticks. But moreover it's his restraint of when not to use sound. The first rape that Carol envisions is played in silence with the exception of that ticking clock and in combination with the angles and the editing creates a truly disturbing experience. But beyond sound the film greatly benefits from having cinematographer Gilbert Taylor who before Repulsion had worked on Dr. Strangelove. Taylor has a tremendous eye for black and white compositions especially when it comes to dense and sensual shadows. Along with the use of sound it's really Taylor's cinematography that imbues the apartment with a claustrophobic, haunting, otherworldly quality to it. But we can't attribute it all to Taylor's eye, as Polanski's choices of lenses, movement, and long takes attribute a great deal to the film. Especially striking are the scenes later on in which the apartment itself stretches out. Polanski said he had ordered the production designer to build sets that would be modifiable so as to achieve the effect. The elongating of the rooms and corridors, combined with the wide lenses which exaggerate the depth to an even greater degree provides for a startling psychological effect through the physical representation of space.

If I can find negative criticism for the film it's solely in the remnants of some cheap scare tactics and a bit of cold, distance that Polanski maintains between the audience and Carol. Even though so many of the film's chilling thrills are effective they seem somewhat disconnected from a more holistic perspective. As if they were just tacked on because Polanski knew they WOULD be effective. I think it hurts the film more because we never really get much of an insight into Carol as a character. This isn't the fault of Deneuve either who plays her with a wonderful, physical subtlety. In fact, Deneuve spoke broken English and even though her vocal acting isn't top-notch it's her physical presence that sells it. But for some reason we never really feel intimate with her; as if we're joining in on her psychological breakdown from a close perspective. It ends up making the film a bit too much of the typical horror film it was meant to be rather than really playing up the innovative psychological thriller that Polanski intended.

But even with these reservations, Repulsion is still an excellent film; one in which I have almost all positive things to say about. Chilling, thrilling, and constantly visually engaging, Repulsion is one of those films that proves if you give a great director a chance he can turn a b-grade production into grade-a material.

In perhaps the best scene in Bill Condon's 1998 film "Gods and Monsters", a film about the last days of director James Whale, we get a montage of various people watching Bride of Frankenstein. Whale's rather innocent and traditional maid finds the film too horrific, gruesome and violent. Whale's assistant, played by Brendon Fraser, watches it as a sad film; one in which the monster just wanted a friend. Fraser's ex-girlfriend in a bar reads the film as a comedy, going as far as to say "can you believe they used to think this was scary?". It's a remarkable scene because it shows the durability of such horror classics, but more-so because it shows the ambiguity of works of genius even in an age where people can't connect to them as being fresh and new. I've probably seen Frankenstein myself 100 times, but never sitting down and consciously watching it from beginning to end. By all sense it should be trite, tired, and pure camp by now. And yet, somehow, it isn't.

It seems to me that the best monsters have something in common with the best superheroes, or even the best religions and mythologies in that they seem to tap into basic human archetypes that are so universal, so simple, yet presented so powerfully that we'd swear we'd never encountered them before. Whale's Frankenstein films are two such creations. It launched Boris Karloff as a horror icon and created the indelible image of the monster himself. But Frankenstein is one of those films in that the rich subtext seems to belie the outward simplicity of the film. Perhaps now the themes of man playing god, reviling his own creation, and then trying to destroy it seem trite now, but I still find a great deal of poignancy and empathy in Whale and Karloff's portrayal. Perhaps it's that childlike innocence beneath the exterior grotesqueness that sells it; something akin to Spielberg's ET. And no matter how many other characters are on screen it is always the monster's show; he's the one we empathize with, he's the one we feel sorrow for, laugh with, and ultimately grieve for when he's ruthlessly killed by his own creators.

Even though Frankenstein could hardly be called a faithful adaptation of the novel, it did seem to be a fairly close adaptation of the stage play based on the novel. Whoever is responsible, it seems clear that Whale decided to put much more of his own personality into Frankenstein's sequel, Bride of Frankenstein, more so than he did in the original. While both contain Whale's directorial taste for German expressionistic and gothic art design, Whale's sense of playful and satirical humor is much more overt in Bride. Bride is, overall, a much more dynamic and multi-faceted film than its original; even while the original is more intimate and frightening. For its early humor, it's astounding that Bride also has the most poignant moment in either film when the monster meets the blind man. After suffering the torture, anger, and fear of everyone he's met, the monster finally encounters someone that treats him like a gentle human only because he can't see. This is echoed wonderfully earlier by the monster even slapping at his own reflection in the water. But I was stunned to find even myself shedding a tear when the old blind man sets by the monster's side on the bed and the monster himself cries as he mutters the word "friend".

More than just horror classics, Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein seem more like mythological classics. They seem to be works that have existed forever in one form or another. They are timeless films that are profound in their depiction of humanity and their relationship with life, death, and so-called monsters. But because of Whale they're also given a light, humor and camp, but also a visual and dramatic ingenuity and potency. These are films that can be read so many ways because they are so incredibly rich. And like the characters in Gods and Monsters, whether you're frightened, humored, or saddened I'd propose that they're all equally "right" reactions. They reveal the timeless richness these films possess.

I've heard Larry Wachowski became Lana via sex-change. Is that true?

I've heard Larry Wachowski became Lana via sex-change. Is that true?

San Fransisco Chronicle says yes.

ran1 wrote:

I've heard Larry Wachowski became Lana via sex-change. Is that true?

San Fransisco Chronicle says yes.

See, I heard that reported before Speed Racer was released. But also heard that debunked.

Hm. imdb.com list Andy and Lana Wachowski as the directors. But if memory serves me, the credits in the film listed them as Andy and Larry.