Mother

Mother (2009) dir. Bong Joon-Ho
Starring: Hye-ja Kim, Bin Won, Ku Jin

****

By Alan Bacchus

One of Asian cinema’s current giants, Bong Joon-Ho is primarily known for his cross-over creature feature The Host. But in his follow-up picture, Mother, he executes a deeper, more emotionally driven character story, a powerful masterpiece about the impenetrable bond of mother and son.

Hye-ja is a single mother to mentally challenged Yoon Do-joon, a young man who follows around his tougher miscreant buddy, Jin-Tae. After a night out on the town Do-joon follows a young village girl home before turning in for the night. But when she turns up dead the next day as a victim of a brutal murder, Do-joon gets the blame.

Witnessing the callous indifference to her son’s pleaded innocence, the mother begins an epic journey to clear her son’s name. Fuelled by her unerring need to protect her naïve son, she comes face to face with a cacophony of hard-ass cops, slimy/drunken lawyers and varied petty criminals in the name of justice.

Joon-ho’s magnificent script never rests, as it constantly changes pace and sends us on a number of sudden and shocking twists. While The Host elevated Joon-ho to international genre auteur of the highest order, Mother lines up more with his murder mystery Memories of Murder, an equally beguiling and intense pot boiler. His razor sharp criminal procedural plotting creates an intense and sometimes frantic pace. And we’re putty in his hands as he moves us elegantly through sequences of absurd humour and heartbreaking moments of emotional release.

Hye-ja’s performance might just be the last word in female revenge heroes. Forget about Lisbeth Salander or Thelma & Louise, hell hath no fury like this woman scorned (sorry, I couldn’t resist that line). Hye-ja’s supremely interesting face contains a range of remarkable emotions, from supreme sadness and pity to laser-sighted intensity. Joon-ho subverts our expectations through a number of turns, giving us a couple of red herrings to tease us before unveiling a climax that turns Hye-ja’s character inside-out.

Unlike the generic and salaciously titled Memories of Murder, Mother is the only appropriate title for this film. By the end it ceases to be about who did what to whom and more about the clouded version of justice a mother conceives for her son.

Barking Dogs Never Bite

Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000) dir. Bong Joon-Ho
Starring: Sung-jae Lee, Doona Bae

***1/2

By Alan Bacchus

There's an old adage in Hollywood: "never kill the dog." Do whatever you can to any of the heroes ― splatter their brains over the wall, rip out teeth, arms, fingers ― but never, ever kill the dog in a movie. Writer/director Joon-Ho not only kills dogs, he strangles them, tosses them off roofs, skewers them like pigs on a spigot and carves them up to be boiled like stew. In Barking Dogs Never Bite, this conceptually unfriendly idea makes for a jet-black comedy of the peculiar Korean variety. And now that Bong Joon-Ho (Memories of Murder, The Host, Mother) has become a celebrated, Cannes-worthy auteur, his first feature finally sees the light of day in North America on DVD.

Yun-ju (Lee Sung-jae) is an unemployed, frustrated college instructor. He lives in a drab high-rise complex with his overbearing girlfriend. When a yapping dog annoys him past the breaking point, he relieves his stress by stealing it, with the intention of killing it. His conscience won't allow that, but before he can rescue the doggy, a sadistic janitor has already skinned and boiled it for stew. Meanwhile, Hyeon-nam (Doona Bae), a government worker in the area who dreams of becoming a YouTube celebrity, witnesses one of Yun-ju's acts of cruelty and endeavours to be become the local hero she's always dreamt of and take down the mysterious dog kidnapper.

There's no doubt there's an iconoclastic director behind the camera. The audacious subject matter begs critics and audiences not to notice the picture, either to revile it or go along with the subversive ride. On a technical level, Jong-Ho's direction is pitch perfect steady cam work that roams the high-rise building with ease, slo-motion photography that highlights key comic beats in the action and dramatic camera angles that capture the sanitized uniformity and engulfing feeling of condo-living.

Beneath the surface, Joon-ho creates warm, genuine characters who we desperately want to succeed. Even Yun-ju, despite throwing dogs off the roof to relieve his angst, never comes off as cruel, but full of misplaced anger against a corrupt society that has wronged him. And cute heroine Hyeon-nam and her overweight convenience store clerk BFF are wonderfully drawn underachievers looking for a way to break out of their shamed existences.

It's important to note that these heinous acts of animal cruelty are never shown on screen and there's even a clear disclaimer at the beginning telling us no animals were harmed during the making of the picture. So, for those who can at least stomach the notion of killing dogs for comedy, Joon-ho fans will certainly take delight in his delicious screen debut.

MEMORIES OF MURDER

Memories of Murder (2003) dir. Joon-ho Bong
Starring: Kang-ho Song, Sang-kyung Kim

***

“Memories of Murder” is Joon-ho Bong’s second film, after “Barking Dogs Never Bite”, and before 2006’s “The Host”. Joon-ho Bong, who so far, loves to play around in genre tackles a serial killer film with success. It’s a procedural film, influenced by “Seven” and “Silence of the Lambs”, with an added peculiar Korean twist to it. More on that later.

The film, based on real events, takes place in 1986 in the province of Gyunggi in South Korea. The film opens in a wheat field. Detective Park Doo-Man is investigating a double homicide. Two young girls found a kilometre apart have been brutally murdered, both bound and gagged with their own undergarments, and then strangled. This isn’t Seoul and so the techniques of the police are shoddy at best. Park and his partner Cho Young-koo find a footprint in the mud, but before he can take a photo a tractor drives through the crime scene destroying the evidence.

Cho and Park are fuck ups too. They are allowed to run free without ethical guidance and frequently use planted evidence and torture to catch their killers. A mentally challenged man is the first subject, who innocently followed one of the victims the night of her murder. Instead of a traditional interrogation Park takes one of his shoes and creates a new imprint in the mud near the scene, and Cho actually beats a confession out of the man. During this time, the Seoul police send over one of their crack investigators, Seo Tae-Yoon, to help out. He is aghast at the poor state of policing. Seo dismisses the mentally-challenged man’s confession and lets him go. Seo takes over the investigation and discovers the covering of tracks and evidence suggests a more sinister and cunning killer.

The procedural elements take over and the three men become obsessed with the case. Cho becomes a target by the media for police brutality and so everyone must work under 100% scrutiny of the public and the media. Several trails of evidence lead to more suspects, but all evidence is still completely circumstantial. They are still missing their smoking gun.

WARNING SPOILERS AHEAD.

Seo, Cho and Park are led to the most promising subject, ironically with the help of the mentally-challenged man. The trio deduces that a specifically-requested pop song which the killer listens to on the radio is the spark which causes the killings. When the detectives hear the song on the radio, they cleverly trace the request letter to the home of their key suspect. I won’t say what happens at the end, but it’s a tense and suspenseful finale.

“Memories of Murder” has much in common with David Fincher’s “Zodiac”. The case comes to dominate the lives of the investigators, so much so that it drives Park to eventually quit his job over it. The timeline of the film moves beyond 1986 and finishes in 2003. But the film doesn’t wrap itself up neatly either. Like “Zodiac,” doubt over who the killer is remains.

Though “Memories” follows the path of the serial killer genre, Joon-ho also makes the film his own by incorporating moment of humour, which unfortunately, for me, took away from the intensity of the film. I don’t know if it’s just a Korean thing, but the investigators seem to have a penchant for drop kicking their suspects. On three occasions Cho and Park stun their foes by drop kicking them. I don’t get it. Maybe it’s a cultural thing, but the film would have worked better without the comic 'keystone cops-type' slapstick.

If anyone tells you “Memories of Murder” is better than “Zodiac”, don’t believe the hyperbole. “Zodiac” still outshines “Memories” in terms of tense and suspense and showing the integration of the murders into their personal lives. “Memories” largely stays away from the domestic ramifications of the manhunt, and unnecessarily suffers from the amateurish slapstick antics. But maybe it’s just the cultural differences that prevent me from loving the film 100%. In any case, it’s a worthy entry into the genre and better than any of the James Patterson novels or movies. Enjoy.

Buy it here: Memories of Murder

THE HOST

The Host (2007) dir. Joon-ho Bong
Starring: Kang-ho Song, Hae-il Park, Du-na Bae

***

“The Host” is the biggest film ever to come out of Korea, a fun monster movie and a mixture of “Alien”, “Godzilla”, and all the Roland Emmerich-disaster films rolled up into one, with an unquestionably peculiar Korean spin to it.

The opening is clever: years before today, an American scientist at the U.S. Army base in Seoul instructs his Korean subordinate to drain a bottle of dusty, expired formaldehyde into the drain. The Korean man objects saying it will end up in the Han River harming the tepid waters. The scientist wonderfully typifies the environmentally unfriendly “Ugly American.” The Korean follows orders and proceeds to drain the bottle into the sink, but when the camera pans right we see there are hundreds of bottles to dispose of. This slap-in-your-face expository set up is a great send up of the B-monster-film genre.

Cut to present day, on the banks of the beautiful Han River, we meet the Park family operating a kiosk selling food and snacks to tourists. In the middle of the serene day, everyone’s attention is curiously drawn to an odd shape hanging underneath a bridge in the distance. When the shape falls into the water the quick glimpse reveals it’s a large creature of some sort. Several moments later it swims to shore and appears with great shock charging towards a group of tourists on the bank of the river. One of the rules of the monster genre is to hide the creature from full view of the audience until at least the second act, and in the case of Jaws, Alien and some others, the third act. But in "The Host" we dramatically see the alien in its full glory in this first scene. This is the first of many great shocks and surprises in this genre-send up film.

Hyeon-Siu Park, the daughter of the kiosk operator is sucked into the jowls of the beast and taken away. The remainder of the film portrays the family’s search to find the beast and rescue the girl. In addition to the scares Joon-ho crafts some great comic scenes, including a hilarious grieving scene for the victims of this first attack. Joon-ho sets up the family’s dysfunctionality when they start fighting with each other, while mourning at the foot of their child’s memorial.

The family provides the majority of the laughs, Gang-du is the father of Hyeon-Siu, but a real dimwit who takes the blame for letting his daughter go, his brother, Nam-il, is an unemployed university graduate and is self-conscious for his underachievements, and the sister, Nam-ju, is a famous archer, who feels shame for winning a ‘bronze’ in the latest world championships. The dynamic of these three fuels the film in between the monster moments.

But it’s the monster moments that make the film. The beast is truly scary and unique as well. It’s like a giant mutated piranha/lizard with dash of Alien and Predator thrown in. The special effects by New Zealand’s famed Weta Workshop (“Lord of the Rings” and “King Kong”) is top-notch and completely believable.

The send up of the SARS scare provides added poignancy and humour not to mention the not-so-subtle jabs at the anti-Kyoto, military-heavy American influence in the Korean culture. The result is a funny, scary and highly entertaining piece of pulp cinema. Enjoy.