The coast guard (2002)

The coast guard is not Kim Ki-Duk's strongest movie. It puts forward a harrowing critique of the South Korean army - against the backdrop of a general atmosphere (augmented by music) of sadness & remorse. In fear of northern spies, troops patrol the border. One night, a zealous young soldier shoots a young boy, a civilian, who has sneaked off to the beach with his lover. Tragedy, madness and violence ensue. The film depicts bully and fear. A very bleak picture is painted of the army's activities, arbitrary excercise of power, hierarchy, moral weakness. If there were less big gestures, less action-style violence & a more focused and subtle/evocative characterization of the characters had been provided, this would have been a much better film.

Romance (1999)

Catherine Breillat is certainly not a tepid director. Fat girl made some very good points on body image & sexuality - in a very blunt, in-your-face way. Watching the film was hard, but it was not in the least exploitative. Although stamped with a bad rumour, I sat down to watch Romance. Yes, it is very explicit, but it wasn't pornography. Sure, this movie could only be made in France: explicit sexual images - plus a monologue about the metaphysical relation between the male and the female. The style of the film is immersed in self-conscious gestures: almost every image seems to be aimed at challenging traditional images of sexuality and aspects of embodiment. What is it about? Masochism and self-annihilation? Well - sure. Take a long, hard look: "The woman is dead." Impossible female desire? Sex & birth? Well, it is certainly not about romance. Is it yet another film the purpose of which is to provoke and to shock? Partly it is, but there's more to it also. There's an undercurrent of extremely dark humor here. Early feminist writers held the medium of film to be an extension of the male gaze, for which women were made objects of desire. This kind of theorizing has partly been rejected as too simple, and there has been much discussion about how to understand practices of watching in a less one-dimensional way (Teresa de Lauretis is one example). Breillat's film joins in with this tradition in that she, too, poses questions about fantasy & gendered gazes. Romance is a complex film. The arrangement of scenes is very strict. But for all its self-consciousness, did I find clarity in those images? This is a difficult question. To be honest, the more I think about it, those ending scenes, depicting the birth of a child and the death of a man, exhibit a brilliant dose of sour irony.

Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti (2005)

An Italian film with material about prison-like camps for asylum-seekers and gangsters shipping illegal immigrants to Italy? That sounds political. But even though Quando sei nato... raised interesting & important questions, it didn't dig deep enough. Instead, it focused on its core story about a boy falls into the water on a boat trip with his father & is fished out by a boat of illegal immigrants. The main problem with this film is that the focus is wrong. I would have craved for more sociology or at least a more interesting cinematic experience. This is not to say that the film lacks qualities. The depiction of a very middle-class relation to money is very alarming: guilt has a price, guilt is something you can pay off with a suitable amount of money.

The Terminal (2004)

I watched The Terminal (almost all of it) to see whether it would depict USA as a fascist state with absurd policies about visitors, asylum-seekers and immigrants. It didn't. It was a film about Tom Hanks doing Forrest Gump with a quasi-Russian accent and an "Indian" cleaner who enjoys watching people slip on a wet floor.

Zeitgeist Addendum (2008)

The first 20 minutes of Zeitgeist: Addendum was a fairly interesting exposition of basic facts of contemporary economics: how money is related to debt. The rest of the film was at worst embarrassing and at best a series of obvious political statements ("we have to save this planet..."). The utopia conjured up by xx:s monotonous voice was a mix of technological engineering - that claims the obsoleteness of politics - and shallow mysticism ("we are all part of eveything"). The anti-religious message of the film was so embarrassing I had to bury my eyes in my hands for a moment. The film ends with a few glossy images ripped off The Matrix and bad ads (a businessman drops his suitcase and joins the Movement).

And then I have said nothing about the utopian possibilities inherent in maglev trains; trains propulsed by magnetism (the technological development of which the Movement people are involved) that will take you from Los Angeles to New York during a lunch break. As a documentary, the film is a total failure. Not only is it carelessly dropping a subject only to delve into the next, but it leans heavily on the dear old technique of treating the viewer as a full-blown idiot; when the word "sheep" is uttered in the film, let's show a sheep. Zeitgeist: Addendum provoked me in one single way: this movie is a mess.

Oleanna

Oleanna is based on a play written by David Mamet. The play premiered in 1992 and the film was released in 1994.

Oleanna might be flawed with shaky & stagey acting and heavy-handed dialogue, but besides that, it's a damn interesting film. An undergrad student sits with her professor in his office. The student asks questions. She claims not to have understood anything, not the course, not the professor's book; she is concerned about the grade she got/will get. The professor tries to explain. He is constantly interrupted by telephone calls. The discussion becomes more & more animated. They enter into a debate about the university as institution. That segment of the film ends with the professor's physical attempt to make the studen listen. In the next scene, we see them again, but now they are accusor/the accused. On behalf of an unnamed "group", she has initiated an investigation of possible sexual harrassment. His tenure position is then threatened.

I'm a little surprised to see that some reviewers understood this as being a film that wages a war against feminism. They would see the Professor as being a representative of Mamet's own views (that Oleanna is weak and "of questionable sexuality") and hold Oleanna to be an embodiment of Mamet's feminist ghosts. But I don't buy that. The Professor is depicted as self-indulgent, pompous and lacking insight into the power he holds. It does not seem to me that Mamet is interested in showing why Oleanna's accusation is outrageous, but rather, he shows the background of power dynamics locked at a standstill.

Mamet focuses on speech, and how speech is productive or non-productive. The two main characters, the Professor and the students, both become intermingled in institutional power. John is the man who gives grades and holds lectures - Carol is the person who files a seemingly off-target charge against John, supported by a "group". This seems not to be so much a film about sexual harrassment and feminism but rather a very cynical film about power struggles in which it is always unclear for whom a person is talking and what issues are at stake. The characters constantly complain that they don't "understand" - but it is always clear what understanding would be here.

Oleanna is also about our reactions; whose words are we to take seriously? What does the role of class, gender and position mean here? A bad interpretation of this is that we are asked to take "sides" and that this will depend on our gender etc:

"The most illuminating value of "Oleanna" is that it demonstrates so clearly how men and women can view the same events through entirely different prisms. With all the best will in the world, despite a real effort, I cannot see the professor as guilty. I see the student as a monstrous creature who masks her own inadequacies with a manufactured ideological attack; she is failing the course not because she is a bad student but because her teacher is a sexist pig."
Says Robert Ebert, critic. And I, with all the best will in the world, can't see how he sees only "a manufactured ideological attack".

Mamet's film is no masterpiece - not in the slightest - but the questions he raises here are important.

Address unknown (2001)

Kim Ki Duk's films are, I think, too interesting to be dismessed because of "gratuitous violence". But honestly, I'm not sure what his films do with me & whether I should watch them at all. You stare into the darkness & something stares back at you (a passage from Nietzsche that can be quoted in almost any context and still make sense). I am tempted to blurt the win-win relativist's "Well, it depends..." If not that, I'd be as tempted to say, "Sure, Address unknown was disturbing, but..." You haven't really said a lot about your reaction to a film by calling it "disturbing". The insertion of a "but" will always make sense.

Address unknown is a political film. Ki Duk grapples with US colonialism; commercial, and military. The film presents a village in which an American military base is settled. The year is 1970 and the Korea war still haunt the villagers' memories. The film dwells on a series of events that will eventually lead to bloody tragedy: a group of target practicing war veterans, an ex-veteran who is now engaged in killing dogs for their meat, a dog-loving girl is promised an eye operation by an American soldier, a boy who likes to watch. And there are several strands I haven't mentioned. From there, everything goes to hell.

The film captures an almost de-humanized world. Most people walk and talk as though they were human, but the film doesn't quite allow them to become anything beyond expressions of a sense of primordial fear and terror. There are almost no cracks in this world. It is totalitarian and the style of the film is very seamless in that way, too - very austere, very quiet, very short scenes intertwined with longer ones. That makes the film dangerously fascinating. A few days after the film, I still have a bad taste in my mouth.

The film explores several themes. One of them, obviously, is war & a militarized post-war dystopia. Another theme is watching & seeing. We are exposed to damaged eyes, restored eyes, secret peeping - as our own witnessing of the events become increasingly unbearable. A third theme is dogs. A fourth theme is the role of American culture (or dicks) in Korea.

Birdy (1984)

I expected Birdy to be the kind of movie I used to watch as a kid on late nights in front of the VCR; nostalgic & low-key movies about coming-of-age and how political & personal innocence went to hell for a boy or a girl in Mississippi at the time of the Vietnam war. It had some resemblance with that, true, but this is actually a film that challenges the notion that there is a state of the world we have to accept if we are to be eligible as full-blown "grown-ups". Al (a young Nicolas Cage) is a boy who takes an interest in the things that young boys are expected to take an interest in; fast cars, adventures, girls. He meets a strange young man who has a passion for birds. They become friends. Close friends. The story is told in flashbacks. Al was injured in the Vietnam war. Birdy, his friend, is locked up in a mental institution. That is where Al finds him, perching in bird-like position, refusing or unable to talk, becoming-bird.

That my thoughts were driven towards Deleuze & his conception of the subversive schizoid, human and animal and anything else at the same time, might actually not be such an over-interpretation as it first may seem. A psycho-analytic reading of Birdy - or a schizoanalytic one - is actually quite tempting in this case. Birdy is not going along with conventional life. He slips out of bourgeois fantasies about heterosexual love and family life. His parents and friends disapprove of the changes he undergoes.  

Birdy is, in some sense, a film that shows compulsory heterosexuality in a light that is far from flattering. Birdy sits in his room, fiddling with his birds. His mom clamps into the room and tells him that a girl wants him to be her partner on the school ball. Defiantly, he says yes. He dances with her without much enthusiasm only to escape from the whole thing, greeting his janitor father who cleans a hallway ("those boys can't hold liquor"). The next frame is the classical, obligatory All-American mist & cars & romantic darkness. Doris and Birdy sit in a car. Doris knows that Birdy is not really interested in her, and she wants to thank him. Throwing off her bra, she suggests he can to her, "whatever he wants". But he doesn't.

The major theme of Birdy is fantasy and how that is related to escape. Birdy is not repressing his (almost erotic) fascination with birds. To the horror of the close ones, he lives his fantasy instead of, as they would have it, snapping out of the fantasy world. The beautiful thing with Birdy is that it allows for a very different image of what it may mean to be at odds with normal, suburban life. At first, I was worried that the bird allegory would lean too heavily on the F-word. And maybe it did, and maybe I should say that is too cheap. But for some reason, I won't. There was too much going on here for there to be a simple, propulsive idea of "freedom". Freedom from what, to what? The answers within the films are not easy

That this is a film that proves to be subversive even to the 21st century audience is suggested by a very strange reaction on film boards. When somebody asks why this film is labeled "gay interest", people responded very aggressively; "Al & Birdy were not gay! They were close friends! Brothers!" One of the things that make Birdy a special film is that it does nothing to live up to the ideas of what male friendship/love is supposed to be like.

Birdy is not a flawless film, but the more I think about it, the more I like it. But there is one feature of this movie that is absolutely unacceptable. The music. P-E-T-E-R G-A-B-R-I-E-L.

Dodes'ka-den (1970)

Dodes'ka-den might not be Kurasawa's most famous film. The story features no samurais and it isn't the blueprint for an American Western movie either. Kurasawa is a good observer of modern Japan. The film is set in the slum. A young man ("the train fool") impersonates a train. A woman cheats on her husband. A poor man tells stories about luxury to his son while making him beg for food from the local restaurants. Two buddies indulge in after-work drinking binges to the nuissance of their wives. Dodes'ka-den was kurasawa's first color movie. And colors are actually one important element of what makes this film stand out. Depicting a landscape consisting of garbage and ash heap using vivid colors & naivistic drawings lends the film a flavor of cruel fairy-tale. This is, largely, a film about escapism & imagination. One might complain that some scenes (the one-dimensional drunken patriarch) are too schematic. But it is a rather likeable film all the same; just look how it takes time to ruminate on repetition, everyday routines & actions (the train impersonation, pouring of drinks, gossip).

The Isle (2000)

When starting to watch a Kim Ki-Duk film, it is very hard to predict what kind of movie one will see. Is it a drama film, a gruesome thriller, or a subversive horror movie? The same goes for The Isle. I suppose this movie is the horror movie Tarkovsky never made. Long shots / long takes / the tranquility of nature. Honestly - I am not sure what to say about The Isle. The contrast(s) achieved through very disturbing images set within a languid pace & a peaceful landscape is quite overwhelming in a sense that is hard to shrug off. The strange thing about it is that there are images of brutal physical cruelty that are filmed with a slightly evasive camera: we see something, but the camera does not linger, it pans away from the central action to focus on a patch of wooden floor or water. When the camera does linger, the effect is harsh, bordering on the unwatchable. Do I have one single conception about what Kim Ki-Duk is trying to tell us with this method? No. It does not seem like a metaphor for anything (becoming-dead-fish? the evil nature of females?), and if it were to be interpreted on that level - I would soon lose interest.
Oddly, even though this film does its best to provoke me into strong reactions - it is not entirely sucessful. That is because I am not sure to what I am supposed to react. I have a strong sense that lots of the violence showed here is placed within the story just because of the visual side of it. And what is Kim Ki-Duks relation to the visual?