Synopsis/ Plot:
High school teacher Seiji Hasumi (Hideaki Ito) is the most popular teacher at his school with an attractive smile. Yet, Seiji Hasumi is a psychopath. To solve some of his school’s problems, like bullying, and to protect himself, Seiji begins to kill his students one by one. Continue reading
Interview follows a film crew while they sort through interviews to make a movie, which may or may not be a documentary, about destined love. In the process, the director within this film, Eun-suk (Lee Jung-jae) seems to be destined to fall in love with one of the interviewees, Young-hee (Shim Eun-ha). We learn through a purposely disjointed narrative that this may not have been when Eun-suk met Young-hee for the first time. Added to this temporal disorientation is further doubt in the events unfolding since Young-hee is as unreliable in her interview as Eun-suk is silent about his past. Continue reading
Plot Synopsis [AMG]
After wrapping-up his critically-acclaimed “Vengeance Trilogy” with the award-winning 2005 thriller Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, South Korean filmmaker Chan-wook Park shifts gears for this gently comic romantic drama concerning a delusional young mental patient who believes herself to be a cyborg. Convinced that she is not entirely human but in fact part android, Young-goon (Lim Su-jeong)’s health begins to deteriorate as she gives up eating food and instead decides to “charge her batteries” by administering electric shocks to herself via a small transistor radio. As her mental state continues to deteriorate, the troubled young woman takes to donning her grandmother’s dentures and carrying on extended conversations with various machines around the mental health facility. Of course Young-goon isn’t the only person suffering from a mental malady in this hospital, and it’s not long before Il-soon (Rain), a young man with a penchant for wearing masks and a reputation for being anti-social, is admitted as well. A good-looking young man who sets about convincing his fellow patients that he has the power to absorb their personality traits, Il-soon gradually begins to develop a tender romance with the troubled Young-goon. Later, when hospital officials determine that the only way to save Young-goon is to administer electro-shock therapy, the treatment has the unusual side-effect of convincing the would-be android that she has been fully recharged and possesses the ability to fire bullets from her fingers. In reality, Young-goon’s physical deterioration has become truly alarming. With little time to lose before the love of his life slides beyond the point of no return, Il-soon enlists the aid of his concerned fellow patients in getting Young-goon back on the path to good health. Continue reading
Plot
Pei Gang (played by Ou Wei) was earlier sentenced by the magistrate to death for committing 3 cruel murders,even though he claimed that the killings were acts of self defense. We learnt that Pei Gang was in fact a spoiled brat and a bully. He also had a doting grandmother who promised that she’ll get him out of any trouble, including death row. Pei will not be executed until next Autumn, which gave him about one year’s time. When all efforts to get him out seem to fail, what will his next course of action be? The central theme of the story is not so much about his escape, but rather the transformation of this man from evil to good, from running away and blaming others into accepting responsibility for his actions and eventually, accepting his fate… Continue reading
Award-winning actress Jeon Do Yeon stars as poor divorcee Eun Yi, who gladly signs on to work as a nanny and housemaid for a wealthy, upper-crust family. In her naive eyes, the rich and handsome Hoon (Lee Jung Jae, Typhoon), his pregnant wife Hae Ra (Seo Woo, Paju), and adorable daughter (Ahn Seo Hyun) make the picture-perfect family. But that myth is soon shattered when the domineering Hoon finds his way to her bed. Their torrid affair upsets the balance of the household, unleashing a cruel power struggle as Hae Ra, her mother (Park Ji Young), and the head housekeeper (Yoon Yeo Jung) all answer with their own calculated measures. Continue reading
The film is based on “Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Action takes place in modern Kazakhstan. The film’s protagonist is The Student whose major at the university is philosophy. He rents a basement room from an old woman living in the suburbs and suffers from a permanent lack of money and loneliness. The Student is stressed by the surrounding atmosphere of poverty and the ideology of total survival competition, the division of people into rich and poor, strong and weak… Influenced by all these, The Student decides to rob the nearest convenience store where he buys some bread time to time… Continue reading
Synopsis:
Youth of the Beast marked a turning point in director Seijun Suzuki’s career. No longer content to just crank out production-line gangster films, here Suzuki starts to assert his own voice. The plot is fairly typical for the genre: chipmunk-cheeked Jo Shishido stars as ex-cop Jo Mizuno, who muscles his way into the shadowy world of the yakuza. He gets hired by the clan that killed his former partner while double-dealing with the clan’s rival. Yet the plot contains some particularly Suzuki-like details. Why is Jo’s partner more interested in guns than in women? Why does Hide, the notorious gay gangster, always slash the face of anyone who mentions his mother? What does this all have to do with the Takeshita School of Knitting? Suzuki’s audacious style heightens the absurdity and artifice of both the genre and the medium with pop-art colors, loopy camera placements, and bizarre, dream-like images: A feather-clad dancer silently struts behind sound-proofed two-way mirrors, a pink dust storm serendipitously occurs while a pimp whips a junkie prostitute. The film is a dizzying visual feast whose tone Seijun Suzuki would amplify to the most absurd heights in his later films, Tokyo Drifter (1966) and Branded to Kill (1967). — Jonathan Crow Continue reading
