Showing posts with label kong hyo-jin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label kong hyo-jin. Show all posts

Sunday, January 13, 2013

A Bizarre Love Triangle: The Virtues of Being Weird

Lee Mu-yeong's A Bizarre Love Triangle may be an ineffectual dud in some ways but it's also such an oddity, with more-than-a-few WTF moments sprinkled throughout its cockamamie story, that you can't just dismiss it outright as something terrible. Repeatedly, in this screwball comedy about a deadpan standup comic (Choi Kwang-il), a female Tae Kwon Do instructor (Kong Hyo-jin) and the bimbo (Jo Eun-ji) they both inexplicably love, you're likely to do a double-take at your television and hit rewind to confirm that what you saw really did happen. Nonsensical narrative twists and out-of-left-field visual details occur regularly as if to justify the word "bizarre" in the title. Here are nine details of note. I'll let you provide the tenth yourself.

1. The movie is a flashback to the present from a space colony on the moon. (No scifi comes into play outside that.)
2. A blind masseuse pressures her young lover to donate her eyes, over drinks.
3. The femme fatale performs a monologue from Othello while wearing a hooker's pink fright wig. (She doesn't get the part!)
4. A strange Cirque-du-soleil quartet does a Solid Gold number following one comedy act. (Or maybe it's a Vegas version of Cats.)
5. A guy in the background at a talk show attaches a toilet plunger to his head.
6. An electronic, hot pink dildo suddenly appears.
7. A fairly graphic blowjob is enacted after the character you didn't expect to get pregnant has her baby.
8. One sex scene is shown entirely as shadow puppetry.
9. The film concludes with a gay wedding involving two characters you know nothing about.

This doesn't even count the weird leaps of logic, like when the martial arts instructor noisily robs her sleeping blind lover or when the stand-up comic confesses he's a fraud as if that kind of honesty could win over a studio audience. And then there's the dead baby...

Friday, November 21, 2008

M: Not Letter Perfect Symbolism

In Lee Myung-se's mindnumbing melodrama M, maudlin muse and memory-figment Mimi (Lee Yeon-hee) mentions meditatively that she's mad for things starting with M. She loves Mozart, Modigliani, and more to the point Min-woo (Kang Dong-won), a momentarily manic memoirist made miserable by a millstone that's either money-related or a premarital misgiving. Maybe mostly it's the man's miserable case of writer's block. Whatever the mundane matter, Min-woo is majorly mixed up: See how he moons over the mercurial mystery woman; watch as he demeans his milksop/helpmeet/roomie (Kong Hyo-jin), imminent marriage be damned. (As to his book, it's a mawkish mess.) What to make of this murky material... M may mean a mystifying, metaphorical memory of Mimi or a morbid mental case in a midlife crisis! Most likely, M means high-minded masturbation. As moviemaking goes, M is Lee's meandering manifesto for maximalism with all the methods misapplied; the montages are technically masterful yet mildly meaningful. If Lee meant to make an imagist marvel with M, he missed by a mile.