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Well, we�re about two thirds of the way through 2012 and Quetzalcoatl beckons (or whatever they say is supposed to happen, I haven�t looked into it too closely). But 2012 isn�t just the year of the Mayan apocalypse (I know it�s actually not that either, but bear with me here), it�s also the year that several prominent Korean filmmakers all decided at the same time that they just needed to �cross-over� and make English-language movies. This is almost never a good idea.
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| Quetzalcoatl, who foretells the release of woefully misonceived movies. |
The directors in question are Park Chan-wook (�The Vengeance Trilogy,� Thirst), Kim Ji-woon (A Tale of Two Sisters, I Saw the Devil), and Bong Joon-ho (The Host, Mother). And these are all very good movies by very talented directors. This stuff is mainstream fare in South Korea, and it is exponentially superior to anything pumped out by Hollywood in the same period (the past ten to fifteen years or so, when South Korean cinema exploded onto the international scene like blood from a severed carotid artery). Hollywood complains that ticket sales are down and then they confirm that The Hangover 3 is in the works; oh, well, no worries there.
I don�t want to harp on the Hollywood theme too much, but I think by this point it should be pretty safe to say that Hollywood is creatively moribund. If you�re looking for good movies, don�t look to Hollywood. Hell, don�t look to American cinema in general (with a few exceptions, of course�Wes Anderson!�but I mean in a broad sense). And so, given the creative death of Hollywood cinema, it is almost incomprehensible that reputable Korean directors who have enjoyed great success domestically and who have done quite respectably internationally (all the films I cited above have penetrated the philistine borders of the United States, so that even American film snobs have access to them), I say, it is incomprehensible that these directors should want to try their luck in Hollywood, or just in English in general. Hell, if anything, American filmmakers who are actually interested in producing works of art should be emigrating to South Korea, where they know how to do it (and I�m sorry kids, but Ed Helms trying to figure out how he sustained some bodily calamity doesn�t qualify as art; for The Hangover 3, I hope he wakes up in a tub of ice with a missing kidney).
But James, perhaps there�s some sort of historical precedent for foreign filmmakers coming to the United States en masse and producing masterpieces? Well yeah, maybe, in the 1920�s and �30�s, when Hollywood poached off European talent left and right and the rise of the Nazis drove the rest of Europe�s filmmakers to the United States. Yes, then we got Lubitsch and von Sternberg and Murnau and they all came here and made great films. We also got Lang and Renoir and (I don�t know this from personal experience, their American movies don�t appeal to me), but I�m told they made some decent movies here (I mean, seriously, Fritz Lang did fucking Metropolis, I don�t need to see him make some movie about the James gang).
So yes, there was a time when foreign filmmakers came to Hollywood in large numbers and enjoyed great artistic success. But what of more recent filmmakers, and specifically, what about Asian directors? Because what�s happening in Korea now has happened before; a crop of Asian directors has enjoyed great success domestically and then they decide to travel overseas to make shit. The quintessential example would have to be John Woo, whose Hong Kong actioners of the late-80�s and early �90�s redefined the genre and who then decided, �I need to work in America with Hollywood stars!� And so he came to America, and he directed 1997�s Face/Off� and fuck it, I�ll let Wikipedia explain the premise��starring John Travolta and Nicolas Cage. The two both play an FBI agent and a terrorist, sworn enemies who assume the physical appearance of one another.� Now, I know what you�re thinking: �Wow! Travolta and Nic Cage, on the same screen! Could it get any better?� �What if I told you that they play each other?� �Whaaaaaat? So John Travolta plays Nicolas Cage and Nicolas Cage plays John Travolta?� �Yep!� �Woooooow! That�s going to be very, very good.� Sigh� In all seriousness though, when I first had the premise of this movie explained to me, I burst out laughing, because I assumed somebody was having a little fun at my expense, something along the lines of, �Nicolas Cage sure has made a lot of shitty movies. Hell, it�s become a running joke. So wouldn�t it be funny if he made one like this?� Hahahahaha. Oh, shit, he actually did? And John Woo directed this? (Oh, and fuck, it looks like certain American critics�including Peter Travers, who likes everything�actually liked it? Hm, well, I mean, I don�t know, I�ve never seen it, nor do I intend to.
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| So, this exists for some reason. |
Uh, Chen Kaige, director of Farewell, My Concubine, directed something called Killing me Softly, starring Joseph Fiennes and Heather fucking Graham, which enjoys a whopping 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Chen has wisely not attempted to make another English language movie.
Interestingly enough, it seems like Asian directors are more likely to score if they make their foreign movies in French, or at least with French actors. For instance, Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-Hsien�s 2007 film The Flight of the Red Balloon, filmed in French and starring Juliette Binoche, is an excellent movie. I have not yet had the opportunity of seeing Tsai Ming-liang�s 2009 French film Visage, but, despite what appears to be a mixed critical reaction, I�m going to assume it�s good, or at least a worthy misfire, because Tsai at his worst is better than most Hollywood hacks at their best.
Now, Johnnie To�s 2009 thriller Vengeance is an interesting exception to these Asian-directors-making-catastrophically-poor-decisions-by-making-English-language-films rule. Vengeance stars aging French rock star Johnny Hallyday as a hit man who travels to Hong Kong to seek vengeance on the gangsters who murdered his grandson and son-in-law and seriously injured his daughter (played briefly but affectingly by Sylvie Testud). To prosecute this vengeance, Hallyday must recruit the help of local hit-men who know the territory�in this case, To regulars Anthony Wong, Lam Suet, and Lam Ka-Tung.
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| Johnny Hallyday, about to kill some people in Vengeance. |
Now, Hallyday�s character doesn�t speak Cantonese and the hitmen don�t speak French, but they all speak English, and so that�s the lingua franca in play for much of the film (interestingly enough, Lam Suet and Lam Ka-Tung don�t appear to actually speak English, so their English dialogue was dubbed; Anthony Wong, whose father was British, appears to speak it just fine). So To gets to bill the film as his �English-language debut,� while still making use of either his regular Chinese actors or of actors like Hallyday and Testud who don�t speak English as a first language. Also, a good portion of this film is still in Cantonese, as the hitmen and all the other Chinese characters speak it among themselves. So I think the lesson here is yes, you can �cross-over� and make an �English-language movie,� but only if you cheat like hell. If you insist on making a movie in a European language, go for French. There you�re much more likely to succeed.
I should also mention here Hong Sang-soo�s 2012 film In Another Country, which follows the Johnnie To approach to English-language filmmaking by having the Frenchwoman Isabelle Huppert travel to Korea and speak English with the film�s otherwise Korean cast. I haven�t seen this movie yet, but it�s worth noting.
But Hong tends to make low-key (and presumably low-budget) art house movies, whereas our three Korean directors under consideration here (Park, Kim, and Bong), artful though they may be, are known for producing big budget, �mainstream� films. Now, again I must emphasise, what is mainstream by Korean standards is still �out there� by American standards. For instance, there�s been talk for years now of an American remake of Park Chan-wook�s Oldboy, possibly by a big-name director, like Steven Spielberg or Spike Lee. But if you�ve seen Oldboy, then you must know�deep within yourself!�that a faithful American remake of this movie just isn�t going to happen. I won�t go into plot details for people who haven�t seen it�and you really should!�but there�s stuff in this movie that American audiences just wouldn�t stomach (or, to put it another way, there�s stuff in this movie that the philistines with the money who get these movies made assume that American audiences couldn�t stomach, despite twenty years� worth of Quentin Tarantino bloodbaths and the torture-porn Sawfranchise).
So, having explored the background to the matter, what English-language films are Park, Kim, and Bong actually making, and what are the odds of them being any good?
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| Park Chan-wook, lost in a dream of Hollywood stardom. |
The script for The Stoker was written by Wentworth Miller, who played the guy with the shaven head on the TV show Prison Break, which I never saw. It looks like Stoker is his first major screenplay� This does not bode well.
But then again, it is Park Chan-wook. And Park has yet to make a movie that wasn�t good (or at least, all of his movies from JSA: Joint Security Area through Thirst have been good, to varying degrees of �goodness.� He apparently directed two movies before JSAmade him famous, but those movies were not popular in Korea and they have not been made available in the U.S.) And this movie is supposed to be a �horror/psychological thriller� kind of thing, and Park does those very well. So, if we�re rating the probably of success vs. failure of these movies on a percentage scale (and apparently we are), I would give Stoker a 50 percent chance of success and a 50 percent chance of failure. 50 percent for success because it�s Park Chan-wook handling material that he�s usually good at; 50 percent for failure because, goddamn it, he�s making an American movie for some reason, and the actors are a mixed bag (when was the last time Nicole Kidman was in something anybody liked? Was Rabbit Hole any good? Did anyone see it?), and the movie is written by the Prison Break guy (who might be a really talented screenwriter, who knows? Apparently he submitted the script under a pseudonym, so that it could �sink or swim� on its own merits, so maybe it really does have merit? We�ll see.) So, Park�s Stoker has the potential to be good. I wish him luck.
Now to Kim Ji-woon, probably the most �mainstream� and �blockbustery� of the three directors under consideration here. His American movie, Last Stand, is going to be an abysmal failure, barring some unforeseen miracle. You see, Last Stand is Arnold Schwarzenegger�s come-back vehicle. Arnold Schwarzenegger hasn�t starred in a movie since 2003; you know, when he became a state governor and hushed up the child he had with the hired help. Oh, also, Arnold Schwarzenegger is not, nor was he ever, a good actor. He was just really muscular. But now he�s 65, and he was busy being governor for all that time, so he wasn�t able to maintain the physique that brought him fame. So what�s the point of having him in this movie, other than the fact that he�s Arnold Schwarzenegger and people are going to be curious to see him again? Maybe there isn�t any? Or maybe, just maybe, Kim thinks he�s going to pull a Quentin Tarantino, and take some washed-up actor and miraculously resurrect his career? Is that what he thinks he�s going to do? Because that�s a really big risk, especially for your English-language debut that you think you need to make for some reason.
Oh, what�s the plot? Um, Schwarzenegger has been kicked off the LAPD for some reason, and now he�s the sheriff of some border town, and a bunch of drug lords and their hostage are going to attempt to make their escape into Mexico through Schwarzenegger�s town. So he decides to stage his �last stand� there. Oh, and Johnny fucking Knoxville is in this thing for some reason.
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| Well, the poster's "neat," anyway. |
Ok, moving onto Bong Joon-ho, who�s making a movie called Snow Piercer, and this movie is going to upend all my negative expectations, and it�s going to be fucking fantastic. Who cares if it�s in English, this is going to be the shit. This is the plot summary on Wikipedia: �In a world covered by ice and snow, a train full of travelers struggle to coexist.� That�s it. But think of the possibilities! It sounds like the premise of a J. G. Ballard novel, with people in an isolated environment and forced to take whatever they happened to have at hand when the disaster strikes and forge a new society for themselves (the Ballard novel I most have in mind is High-Rise, about a high-rise apartment complex that becomes an isolated world unto itself and in which different strata of society within the apartment building wage bloody and primitive war on each other). Apparently Snow Piercer is based on a French graphic novel series called Le Transperceneige, which attracted Bong�s attention while he was working on The Host, and for which his friend Park Chan-wook secured the film rights for him.
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| The graphic novel upon which Snow Piercer is based. |
So anyway, I give Snow Piercer a 90 percent chance of success. This is going to be fantastic, and I will not be dissuaded from eagerly anticipating its release (and God, how depressing if it failed? After I entertained such high hopes for it! But it won�t fail, I�m sure of it!).
I talked about 2012 being the year of the Mayan apocalypse, but now I realize that these three movies, although they went into production in 2012, won�t be released until 2013. So I guess the world can�t end until at least then. Quetzalcoatl will just have to hold off for a bit. In the meantime, Godspeed to you, my foolhardy Korean directors! May your dubious enterprises be far more successful than I have any reason to hope!
