Movie review
Mar. 30th, 2008 12:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tarigwaemirHaste Street on the Feast of St. Joseph of Arimathea
Just finished watching Memories of Murder (살인의 추억). Oh my gosh. No wonder Manohla Dargis put it on her Oscar list (though it was never nominated). The acting, the cinematography, the soundtrack...all amazing.
The story is about detectives trying to find a serial killer responsible for murdering women in a rural village. As you might expect, there's the hometown detective who considers himself a good judge of faces and has rather lax standards about extracting confessions from the suspects. Then there's the Seoul detective who believes in documents and finding the culprit by scrupulous investigation. They never find the culprit. Murder after murder, each one more horrendous than the last. In the process, the educated, rational detective finds himself slowly losing his sense of detachment and his ethical standards. They find a final suspect--a handsome but mildly creepy-looking young man--whom they believe to be the real culprit, but the DNA test comes out negative. The man who once said, "Documents are always right," throws away the paper and says, "No, this must be wrong."
The director is particularly brilliant about conveying the horror of the crime scene without actually showing us gruesome images--in the process, we are of course all the more horrified. During the autopsy of one victim--we are never really shown the corpse in explicit detail--we see the examiner extract piece after piece of peach fruit from the body, with the final piece being the stone. There's also a scene where we see the last victim being carried, her body contorted as her hands and feet are bound together: the killer is no more than a dark anonymous blur, as he sets her down and bends over her. Cut to black. The next scene is the discovery of the body in the rain; we see people rushing past to vomit and sob, as the detective approaches to realize that it's the very girl to whom he gave a band-aid a few weeks earlier. He loses it, of course, and tries to take justice into his own hands and is barely stopped by the other detective.
The very final scene: the hometown detective, now an appliance salesman, goes back to the original scene of the first discovered murder. A little girl passes by to ask what he's looking at and says that someone had just been there last week, looking in the same place, who had said, "I came back because I had done something here a long time ago." What did he look like? "Just an ordinary face." Close-up of the former detective's face, expression indescribable.
Brilliant film. Go watch it!
Yours &c.
Just finished watching Memories of Murder (살인의 추억). Oh my gosh. No wonder Manohla Dargis put it on her Oscar list (though it was never nominated). The acting, the cinematography, the soundtrack...all amazing.
The story is about detectives trying to find a serial killer responsible for murdering women in a rural village. As you might expect, there's the hometown detective who considers himself a good judge of faces and has rather lax standards about extracting confessions from the suspects. Then there's the Seoul detective who believes in documents and finding the culprit by scrupulous investigation. They never find the culprit. Murder after murder, each one more horrendous than the last. In the process, the educated, rational detective finds himself slowly losing his sense of detachment and his ethical standards. They find a final suspect--a handsome but mildly creepy-looking young man--whom they believe to be the real culprit, but the DNA test comes out negative. The man who once said, "Documents are always right," throws away the paper and says, "No, this must be wrong."
The director is particularly brilliant about conveying the horror of the crime scene without actually showing us gruesome images--in the process, we are of course all the more horrified. During the autopsy of one victim--we are never really shown the corpse in explicit detail--we see the examiner extract piece after piece of peach fruit from the body, with the final piece being the stone. There's also a scene where we see the last victim being carried, her body contorted as her hands and feet are bound together: the killer is no more than a dark anonymous blur, as he sets her down and bends over her. Cut to black. The next scene is the discovery of the body in the rain; we see people rushing past to vomit and sob, as the detective approaches to realize that it's the very girl to whom he gave a band-aid a few weeks earlier. He loses it, of course, and tries to take justice into his own hands and is barely stopped by the other detective.
The very final scene: the hometown detective, now an appliance salesman, goes back to the original scene of the first discovered murder. A little girl passes by to ask what he's looking at and says that someone had just been there last week, looking in the same place, who had said, "I came back because I had done something here a long time ago." What did he look like? "Just an ordinary face." Close-up of the former detective's face, expression indescribable.
Brilliant film. Go watch it!
Yours &c.
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-30 11:28 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-30 04:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-30 05:51 pm (UTC)ps, I agree with your comment on issen's post, but felt a little uncomfortable replying to you there, 'cause WHAT IF SHE SEES. I mean, not that I don't think it's great the fandom is getting new talent, but HnG is so close to my heart, I feel slightly injured by the idea of anyone writing fic for it without ever finishing the series. Like, oh my god, how could you do this to me... XD
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-30 07:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-30 07:55 pm (UTC)Nothing against her at all, since I don't even know her, but HOW COULD YOU NOT WANT TO FINISH..... XD
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-02 02:58 pm (UTC)...Oh, wait. Are English subtitles available?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-03 02:47 am (UTC)