cblittle

What an excellent film!

Full of good dialogue that feels real and down to earth it was not surprising to hear Maiwenn say (at the Sydney Film Festival Q&A) she had spent time with the real CPU. The reality of the emotions and the truthfulness of the situations this team faced was evident and really made the difference to this film.

What stops the review getting full marks is the films tendency to let some of the less interesting scenes play for too long. Oddly it's also the love story she included to make the film seem less bleak and Maiwenn's own character that become unnecessary and make the movie overburdened and run a little too long.

The cast is absolutely fantastic and engaging. Their relationships heartfelt and natural; you would think they had been playing this together for years.

This is a movie of the tougher, grimy side of a city. It presents the human behaviours we shudder to believe exist. And yet, handled so superbly, you will not feel wrung out or overwhelmed. It's a terrific movie that will have you talking for a long time.

Oh dear. Where do we begin? Probably by suggesting that if you are going to get your movie translated and sub-titled into English, you get a native English speaker to tidy up the final version. Sadly, the subtitles in the showing I saw often made very little sense grammatically. It was like a bad web site translation where a literal translation is made but the syntax and context are all wrong. The inability to pronounce and understand the letter "L" also creating the wrong words; "fresh" where the word "flesh" was needed. The few women characters in the film can only be described as completely neurotic, screeching banshees. The animation isn't great either but I'm not knowledgeable about this genre and perhaps this is Korean style.

The row of twenty-something Koreans in front of me did say much of the bullying and pressure issues were well represented. They did also spend a lot of time laughing and one of them was on his mobile almost the whole time!

I am cognizant that there must be incredible difficulties for Korean film-makers to overcome and I hope they get the help they need to produce meaningful product that can be recognized as such by their international audience.

The premise for this movie had me very excited when I saw it was part of my Sydney Film Festival subscriber pack. And indeed, it is nicely made, has good atmosphere and is well acted with everyone looking their part. Despite this it falls short of its promise and potential.

Fundamentally, this is a story with too many clichés and an obvious ending that can be picked too early. This diminishes the excellent opening and early scenes. Some of the characters are too exaggerated; especially one overly humble and humanitarian. For me, the medical information, including a particularly speedy diagnosis and some treatments weren't quite on the mark either, but that's more easily forgiven.

If it's a wet cold Sunday and you're looking for something easy to watch, then this will do well enough; but it won't change your life or reveal anything new about life behind the iron curtain.