SpoutBlog on spout.com

Under discussion:

Ben-Hur  (1959)

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly  (1967)

Mad Max  (1979)

The Host  (2007)

The Good, the Bad and the Weird  (2008)

Ever since the great Italian director Sergio Leone rode into town, it’s been clear that the Western is not solely the domain of American filmmakers. Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns boosted Clint Eastwood’s career and forever changed the genre. A new film from Korea, what many are calling a Kimchi Western, may change the genre once again. Kim Ji-Woon’s The Good, the Bad, and the Weird is in many ways an homage to Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, but is also an excellent example of the energy and originality emerging in Korean cinema.

The Good, the Bad, and the Weird, set in Manchuria in the 1930’s, follows the story of three bandits, all in pursuit of map that leads to an untold amount of treasure. Woo-sung Jung (the Good), Byung-hun Lee (the Bad), and Kang-ho Song (the Weird) all give excellent performances. Cool and outrageous enough for an action comedy, but not overdone. Kang-ho Song, who you may recognize from the hit Korean monster movie The Host, is particularly good at playing his own brand of lovable dork.

The plot is not particularly dense, but it doesn’t need to be. The action is relentless through the entire two hour run time, and it’s delightful. Each fight scene is a perfect blend of comedy, thrilling choreography, and excellent scoring. The centerpiece of the final act is an epic desert chase scene involving horses, motorcycles, Mongol bandits, and the Japanese Army. In a Q&A following a screening at Telluride, director Kim Ji-Woon said he told the crew working on that scene to watch Ben-Hur and Mad Max for inspiration. It payed off.

I got a chance to talk to Kim Ji-Woon about the film and where he sees himself going from here:

Spout: Why a western? What drew you to that genre?

Kim Ji-Woon: I think I was impressed as a youth when I watched the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone. And somewhere in the back of my mind I thought if I ever direct, I must do a Western. So I thought long and hard about how to create an Asian Western, and like all Westerns, you need this big canvas. I thought that the historical canvas of what was happening in the 1930s amongst the Chinese, Japanese, and the Koreans, I thought that would be a great backdrop [for] a Korean Western.

Spout: It’s interesting, because of course, Sergio Leone was an Italian director who breathed new life into this very American genre. And now you’re revitalizing the genre in your own way. Of course Leone did not set his Westerns in Italy, he set it in the American West, can you explain that choice a little bit?

Kim: I wanted to make a movie with Korean actors, so I thought if I tried to make a Western in America with Korean actors, it would no longer be a Western, it would turn into science fiction [laughs].

Spout: I was curious about those characters. Could you just talk a bit about casting a developing each of them? As I watched the film, they’re all so likable in their own way, the bad guy is such a great villain, they’re all so engaging…

Kim: Initially, like all films, the characters start out with a single trait. But in a good film, as the movie develops, each character takes on many traits. So the good person takes on traits of the bad and the weird, and so on. As the situation is created and changes, you get to see all the aspects of that character. So although they all have characteristics that shift throughout the movie, I think the title is most appropriate to the last scene of the movie.

Spout: I was curious about the fight choreography, it was brilliant, for one thing, and also it seemed like there was an element of slapstick comedy in certain scenes, especially with Tae-Goo’s character (the Weird).

Kim: I wasn’t out to make just an action-packed movie, I wanted to make a movie that was balanced with action and humor. And because of the actor who played the Weird, and his capabilities, he brought so much to the film in his own portrayal of that character. Putting three of the top male leading actors [in Korea] is a stunt in itself. So there was a lot of fun and new things that came out of that situation. There were all kinds of discussions, like the actor who played the bad guy, after seeing the actor who played the good guy twirl his rifle, he said, ‘I want a rifle! I must have a rifle!’ And Mr. Song, the actor who played the Weird, said, ‘God, those guys look so great! I want to look great for a moment, too!’ The actor who played the good guy said, ‘I know I’m really cool and all, but can’t I have a comedic moment once in a while?’

Spout: In this Q&A just now, the name Quentin Tarantino came up. That is a comparison that will probably be drawn, especially with the bending of the genre, also East meets West. Is Quentin Tarantino an influence, or is he just somebody who has a similar sensibility in blending genres?

Kim: I think because we’re contemporaries, and because we have similar influences in the type of movies we watch, what people are probably noticing are things that we’ve taken away from our similar history and seeing it projected in our work. We could say we’re kind of headed towards each other, he’s starting in the West moving East, and I’m starting in the East moving West. Maybe when we meet in the middle there will be something really interesting that will happen.

Spout: Have you ever thought of trying to direct in Hollywood, with a Hollywood studio or American cast?

Kim: Ever since the movie A Tale of Two Sisters I’ve been receiving a lot of scripts from Hollywood, and certainly if I read a script that speaks to me, and if I feel inspired to direct, it’s always a possibility. One of the things that has been a concern for me is that I hear in America the director’s cut is not something that’s naturally given to the director. So it’s a big concern for someone like me who has had directors cut.

Spout: Do you think in the Korean film industry you get more creative control, as a rule?

Kim: I think Korea is a great place for directors, you’re a big part of the creative process. Not only the editing, but all the different elements of making the film. Korean directors are also writers and producers, and they’re involved in the marketing and distribution. They’re really auteurs. A director’s work is never finished in Korea, it’s endless.

Under discussion:

I've Loved You So Long...  (2008)

Revanche  (2008)

I’ve Loved You So Long came into Telluride with a lot of buzz about this being Kristen Scott Thomas‘ soon-to-be Oscar winning performance. Like Forrest Whittaker in The Last King of Scotland two years ago, it was the performance not to miss. So, I didn’t. And if Kristen Scott Thomas wins an Oscar it’s because there are very few actresses who can hold an audience for two hours alternating between chain smoking with a million-mile-stare and delivering long, expository monologues about her backstory. I mean that as a compliment to Ms. Thomas and a criticism to director, Philippe Claudel.

Juliette (Kristen Scott Thomas) sits in an airport in France smoking. Her face is a map of heartache. In fact, it looks more dead than alive, which is probably the most impressive moment of the movie. (Why do directors insist that great actors talk so much?) Her sister, Léa (Elsa Zylberstein) arrives late. The ride to her sister’s country home is icy. They haven’t seen each other in a long time and they want to discuss anything but why. That’s how I’ve Loved You So Long begins.

Quickly, we learn Juliette has been in prison fifteen years for murder. But obviously she’s not considered dangerous because her sister brought her home to live with her husband, two adopted daughters and mute father-in-law. Juliette and Léa reluctantly embark on trying to be sisters again. Meanwhile, Juliette looks for a job, smokes, visits her parole officer (Frédéric Pierrot, the most compelling character with the least screen time) and slowly defrosts around her sister’s family and friends. When somebody tries to talk to her, she snaps at them, but when she chooses to talk to somebody, there’s a huge backlog of stories about herself she needs to share. Its kind of a rhythm: Smoking, snapping, talking. Smoking, snapping, talking.

It doesn’t take too much time for the audience to discern the nature of the murder she served time for, but for some reason the director orchestrates a big reveal at the climax of the movie, which is anything but. Juliette’s a classic tragedian whose slowly stepping toward a grand catharsis, a moment that begs us to be stunned by what we’ve known all along.

At Berlin, I’ve Loved You So Long won the Ecumenical Prize for best picture promoting unity or something. I guess it won because we feel compassion for a prisoner walking the streets after serving time for a crime of compassion. But isn’t that kind of a non-criminal? It’d be like making a movie about learning to forgive Harriet Tubman for all the lies she told. I think if the award validates anything, it’s that people love to have great actors repeat their beliefs back to them.

Now Revanche on the other hand. Phew-ee. That movie had a slimeball ex-con who was so magnetic I wanted to hire him as a nanny. Figure out how the director promoted that kind of unity because I can’t.

Under discussion:

Che  (2008)

Paris Hilton and her team have successfully pressured the Toronto International Film Festival into canceling all but one screening of Adria Petty’s Paris, Not France, a documentary about the celebrity heiress which “attempts to explore the Paris phenomenon and how it defines this moment in culture” and is also “modeled after the 1960s “it”-girl film Darling.” Though the film’s TIFF info page still lists three public screenings, TIFF documentary programmer Thom Powers confirmed to me that Paris will screen only once at the festival. “From my standpoint, of course, I wish we could do additional screenings,” Powers told me in an email. “But this is certainly a better option than not showing the film at all.”

Of course, the big question is why, and that’s something that no one seems willing to give up an answer for. As I’ve noted before, if it turns out that Hilton’s own life resembles the narrative of Darling, that might qualify as embarassing to a different kind of starlet (Orgies! Abortion! Glorified prostitution! Ennui!), but not Paris. As Steven Zeitchik joked when he first blogged about this, “the mind dances at what kind of footage can be seen so newly shameful to Paris Hilton, the enfant teribles whose entire reputation is based on shamelesness.” Zeitchik didn’t name his own sources, who apparently didn’t offer details as to what, exactly, rubbed the celebutante the wrong way. Publicist Mark Pogachefsky’s statement on behalf of the filmmakers is extremely vague: “For a variety of reasons - which we are unable to discuss - the film will only be screened once.  We are optimistic that the film will ultimately be released commercially, but we are not able to comment further.”

But I’ve got to wonder if there’s more to this than meets the eye. On the surface, you’ve got a rich, fame-hungry girl who allows a filmmaker to document her for publicity purposes as she tries to legitimize her outsized fame by recording an album. A couple of years later, that album is universally considered a joke, and those publicity materials have been expanded into a stand-alone film about Hilton’s relationship to her own celebrity. Paris has obviously lost control, and she’s obviously siccing Daddy’s lawyers on Petty et al in an effort to take that control back.

But I don’t think we should at all assume that Paris is concerned about whatever the film reveals. Zeitchik predicted that the film would “likely be seen once [at TIFF] and nowhere else afterward…[since] costs from the legal wrangling simply wouldn’t be worth the financial upside for a buyer…like Soderbergh’s Che at Cannes, you may never get a chance to see it this way again.”

Again, this might be a reasonable assumption if we were dealing with the usual celebrity, but Paris has made a career out of managing the release of imagery that she supposedly didn’t want us to see. From the sex tape which she first sued over and then transformed into both a cash cow and a career platform, to the prison stay that turned into a week-long, weepy melodrama and dominated the news cycle all the way up to Paris’ march out of the county jail and into her mother’s waiting getaway vehicle, all of Hilton’s career high points have involved the transformation of humiliation into triumph. It’s not that her reputation is “based on shamelessness”––it’s that she continually turns events that should be shameful into products for public consumption. I don’t think we’re dealing with anything different here, and I don’t think we shold be surprised.

It would be one thing if the Hilton camp has insisted that the film be removed from the festival completely––I don’t know the laws, but this is something I assume they would have the right to do, considering that Petty’s footage came from her contract to produce publicity materials for a DVD and is now going towards personal use––but they didn’t. Instead, they’ve made tickets to Paris‘ single TIFF screening a hot commodity. Though technically this single screening at the Ryerson (one of TIFF’s largest venues with about 1200 seats) is open to the public, behind the scenes press and industry folks will jockey for tickets, sucking attention away from the Fest’s competing red carpet events, all but guaranteeing Hilton dominance of the following day’s TIFF coverage. To compare Paris, an unseen celebrity documentary by a first-time filmmaker to Che’s premiere at Cannes–-which, when added in with the film’s seemingly eternal North American distribution limbo, could be seen as a one-film referendum on the state of contemporary auteur cinema––only plays into the Paris plot. Hilton and her people have managed to turn a run-of-the-mill film festival premiere into an must-attend event coulded in mystery. Still think she’s stupid?