But enough about me, this is a film blog, a FILM
blog, A film blog. So let’s talk film: as anyone who’s worth their cinematic
salt can tell you (and if you’re not, you’re probably reading the wrong blog),
the most exciting thing that’s going on in film at the moment is that Paul
Thomas Anderson’s The Master is going
to be just as good as There Will be Blood.
For those of us who consider that film our generation’s Citizen Kane, this is very good news indeed. Let’s hope PTA doesn’t
lose it and start doing voiceovers for children’s cartoons anytime soon.
Or maybe that’d be interesting. Who knows?
But in my time away another thing has caught my eye
– something which has been bothering me for a little while. Ladies and
gentlemen, Exhibit A:
No, I
don’t want to talk about the resurgence of 80s action movie “stars” – there’ve
probably been enough jokes made about how Sly Stallone looks old. He’s old. He’s
an old man. Yes. It’s true.
No,
what interests me more – and indeed, worries me more – than the sight of a
bunch of old, right-wing gents ‘doin it one more time’, is the current trend of
the West’s assimilation of Asian cinema. The director of The Last Stand, Kim Ji-Woon, is the director of two of the most
exciting and adventurous films made in the last 20 years – A Tale of Two Sisters and I
Saw the Devil. The latter film might initially lead one to suspect that Kim
would be perfect for Schwarzenegger’s big screen return – it features its own
share of bone crunching action and a body count to match The Terminator. But it is, ultimately, an anti-violence film. It’s
cleverness lies in the fact that the audience is drawn into believing that the
revenge drama is what is driving the film forward. It is only in the film’s
last seconds that it is revealed that all the violence and thrills and spills
(admittedly thrilling as they are) have been the protagonist’s way of
deflecting his own grief; a way of him not actually coming to terms with his
loss. I Saw the Devil, then, is
ultimately meta-cinema of the best kind; it presumes the audience’s knowledge
of a genre and applies generic convention to something approaching real life –
if you really did lose a loved one, would the first thing you’d actually think
to do be to engage a convoluted, yet precise and brutal course of revenge? Of
course it is unfair to judge The Last
Stand before I have seen it, but something tells me Kim’s westernisation
may have lost him some of that subtlety.
A
number of Kim’s contemporaries have also made the move West and are soon to
come out with their own English-language debuts. Whilst neither Bong Joon-Ho or
Park Chan-Wook look to be following Kim quite so far into Western schlock, I
only hope that they maintain some semblance of their roots. Eurgh. This is a
moot post. I’ll go and see a movie and review it. Have you seen This Must be the Place yet?
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