Change Your Image
dalgiers
Reviews
Nabbeun namja (2001)
two-way mirror into a bad guy
*****SPOILERS AHEAD! And an interpretation.
Very affecting. The leads, especially the male lead, are intense. As a movie this could have been truly profound but it doesn't quite convince. The fault of direction, maybe, or editing, I don't know, but it just misses coherence... not to say it doesn't make sense (though there are many, many depressingly lost comments on the message board about the photos/beach sequence), but... that as if the director fizzled out on the effort to think it all through. I'm all for ambiguity, when it's well done and intentional, but there were moments when I couldn't help thinking the material was just too much and got away from the director. Thoughts like that might routinely strike a film buff or critic, but they shouldn't to a casual movie-watcher like me and it's that kind of your-slip-is-showing that makes this fall short of brilliant.
Where this movie is in my opinion very successful, however, is in revealing the really sympathetic depth to this "bad guy." He's not good but he has a kind of honor and he isn't incapable of responsibility or deep feeling or tenderness. Fixing the clothes hook. Wiping off tears and vomit. Handing a cigarette to his distraught lackey. Even his disabilities, both emotional and as later is revealed his voice, make us sympathetic to this guy who we come to realize as being himself (socially) oppressed and so frustrated that his beating up a stranger (instead of the baseball pitches) becomes almost pitiable rather than repulsive he literally can't express himself in any other way. He's trapped, too, in his class, in his being typed as a thug and social undesirable, and his own internalized self-hate evident in his final blow-up/shrieking at his underling who falls in love with her, as well, about "love for a scumbag." Again, pitiable, because, as he slowly realizes, he's in fact talking about himself.
And when the camera's eye makes us fix our eyes on his for so long, on his obsessive but soulful gaze on her from behind his two-way mirror, it's really hard not to identify with him and... to like him, a little. Like the female lead comes to. Like her, in getting to know this bad guy, we suffer a sort of cinematic Stockholm Syndrome. SS isn't the entire answer but there's definitely an element of having gone over to him as awful as it is, we are made to not want him in jail, either. Just look at him as he smokes and stares at her from behind the prison glass (continues the visual trope/metaphor for barriers) and as she fights against realizing that she does have some affection for this person who forced her into prostitution we're having the same dilemma, and he's seeing it all and at the same time seducing us in that cool, silent bad-ass loser kind of way which is totally macho and of course machismo assumes misogyny.
So, while on the one hand, we are chastised for social stereotyping for writing him off as a thug on the other, in seeing him as more than a "bad guy," we are dangerously close to accepting that basic misogyny. Humanization can be scary.
But what makes that humanization readier (apart from the great acting) is less the director at work so much as the misogyny already in place in the world. And that's scary. But on a film-level, it's just my opinion but it doesn't feel like this is something the director *meant* to capitalize on. Take the romantic incidental music (not the sexy-elegaic downbeat track, but the clichéd TV drama music) - it's a subtle/sideways thing, but it reveals a lot - for one thing, that the director on some level wants this to be a simple love story. That music is not ironic. It's not a "commentary" or whatever. I think he really believes in it. Which shows up his own unconscious misogyny. And when we sort of want them to end up together, ours shows. All of which disturbs but doesn't detract from the movie as such - rather, the problem is that these moments of unconscious misogyny happen to devolve into sentimentality. It's played straight, almost naive: As the two-way mirror is fractured, he sees her sans barrier and she at last sees him. Their faces strategically fill the cut-outs of the photos (taped on the mirror no less) and as the last fragments are pieced they are revealed to be who they have been becoming. Together. Where it could have been ambitious and ambiguous and elegant, it gets a little muddled in its own conceit. This could have been brilliant if grittier, braver, and clearer-eyed.
But still *very* good.
Constantine (2005)
more interesting is the vehemence of some of the reviews
I'd seen this on DVD the other night and came here curious about its reviews. What's interesting to me is how vehement the hate is. Why? There are plenty of bad movies. This is one of them. But I don't see that this is really that much worse than the usual slop. But I suppose, not being familiar with the comic and so not feeling betrayed, I can't make myself rise to indignant righteousness over a supernatural-themed mindless shoot-em-up spectacle. And it's hard to get really incensed about the acting (de)merits of Mr. Cool Breeze. Yes, he looks far too sleek here to make believable any real pain or even that disheveled gumshoe cliché of world-weary see-you-in-hell antipathy. But the man is not a character actor. We all know this. Or should. So, doesn't it make all of this disgust over his expressionlessness just a little... gratuitous? As if one expected him to emote??! Actually, I enjoyed his deadpan style in this movie. It made me laugh several times. I don't know if it was his (or the director's) intention, but sometimes the studied deadpan delivery of standard noir gestures and lines made them almost ironic. He does not do either the heartfelt drama or the highbrow very well, but I think he's perfect for these slightly self-conscious and heavy-handed caricature-roles. Incidentally so does Tilda Swinton also seem well-suited to such roles. I thought she looked stunning. The only miscast, ironically, is Rachel Weisz whose lovely performance was altogether too human, touchable, real, and vulnerable for this sort of thing.
Elizabeth I (2005)
too much interest in Bess, not enough in Queen
I have to admit that despite my being in general a fan of Mirren, my arm had to be twisted into watching yet another Bess biopic. Iconic, captivating, etc. but MERCY. Still, this one is pretty good. The Cate Blanchett inaccuracy-fest was actually more daring, if totally heavy-handed, in vision - the transformation of young woman to icon. But neither that Elizabeth nor this one escapes the tiresome prurient interest of biopics in their subjects. But Mirren invariably exudes so much sharp wit that she makes it believable that this was a person with tremendous political acumen (but for god's sake, barely any mention of SPAIN??) apart from personal love turmoil.
That said, this Elizabeth pic is distinctive in having one of the better-motivated portraits of Essex, so much so that Essex seems to eclipse Leicester in Elizabeth's life (historically questionable, but put to dramatic good use here). Apart from script and Mirren, probably the credit for that goes to the really commendable performance by Dancy especially as the young Essex (though he sort of loses me toward his pre-decap days). Toby Jones also gives a great performance as the younger Cecil, though the portrait is far more sympathetic (milking the modern sensibility/sensitivity to handicap) than the historical Robert Cecil deserves. And needless to say, MIRREN's Elizabeth - spunk with irony and threats. The only weak performance to my mind, surprisingly, was Irons' - completely fulsome, not well-suited to play Dudley the suitor, should have been more the Dudley the ambitious.