Movies Don't Create Psychos, Movies Make Psychos More Creative

An image from I Saw the Devil, to which I couldn't help but think of you know what!

I had heard a lot of buzz about Jee-woon Kim's I Saw the Devil [Akmareul boatda] so I thought I would give it a spin in the DVD player (it went direct-to-DVD here in Australia) despite my general ambivalence towards ultra violent East Asian cinema that isn't Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. Despite an opening that is fantastically staged and scary, a great lead performance by Byung-hun Lee and some truly expert fight choreography, I found the movie to be nothing all too special. It's not as painfully ugly as Oldboy - yes, a contentious opinion to hold - although there's potentially an interesting discussion to be had about Choi Min-sik starring as the wronged man in Oldboy and now, in Devil, the man doing the wrongs and the way a past injustice can turn a man into a "devil". In fact, Choi's sadistic serial killer could have easily been the same character that he played in Oldboy if, you know, he still had a tongue.

Still, all of that would be reaching as I found I Saw the Devil to be like so many others. Nothing particularly new being said here as far as I could tell, but maybe those who like Oldboy can spot the social commentary.

My knowledge of this genre of film is admitted quite limited and I never did complete Chan-wook Park's revenge trilogy with Sympathy for Mr Vengeance; perhaps I figured it was a gender thing and just preferred the nihilism when there's a woman at the front? And before you start going all Freudian on me, I would say that that has more to do with my actressexual leanings than anything else. Anyway, I Saw the Devil? C. The Poster (to the right)? Still an A, even though I liked it more when I thought I Saw the Devil was a horror movie :/

These Women's Work

Over at Trespass Mag it is "Women's Week" where we celebrate women (naturally). I was asked to write a piece on some of the best performances from the decade, and since I had recently just wrapped my Design of a Decade countdown it came quite easily. Within the piece I discuss 11 (I didn't know who to cut out) of my favourite performances of the decade including Nicole Kidman in Birth (if I keep hammering it into people's heads that she's great in it then maybe they will actually see it), Tilda Swinton in Julia ("so depraved and ridiculous, it verges on the insane",) Laura Dern in INLAND EMPIRE ("a performance so completely out there that she’s practically orbiting Neptune",) and others. So go on and have a read.

And because I used one of her song titles in the post title and she's just as awesome as all the ladies mentioned within, here is Kate Bush's "This Woman's Work". It's from the John Hughes-directed film She's Having a Baby and despite it being quite sad, the video is a hoot. Maxwell can fuck off with his R&B version that everyone somehow thinks is the original. Blerg.