Actor Ma Dong-seok has carved an eviable niche in South Korean cinema as a kind of all-round hybrid tough guy/sympathetic everyman, thanks mainly to his turn as the working class hero of Train to Busan. He’s also a rising star in the U.S., where he made his mark as a physical trainer to American action actors and goes by the name Don Lee (he holds dual citizenship). The Gangster, et al, has been pegged by fanboys as probably his most enjoyable role, and while it’s supposedly loosely based on a true story, it’s hard not to imagine the movie was written and produced with his peculiar skills set in mind. I don’t know much about the movie’s box office in South Korea, but apparently it impressed Sylvester Stallone enough to buy the Hollywood rights and hire Ma to recreate his character in English.
Ma plays mob boss Jang Dong-su, who runs a successful underground gambling operation in the city of Cheonan. Though he seems a fairly reasonable type as mob bosses go, we meet him as he’s practicing his boxing moves with a bag, which, it turns out, contains a man who obviously got on his wrong side. Jang, who has paid off the local constabulary, is negotiating with a potential rival to lease his tech knowhow to the rival’s business, and when push comes to shove, Jang shows that he knows when to use bloody violence to make a point. Meanwhile, a serial killer (Kim Sung-kyu) is stalking male drivers whom he rear-ends on back streets and then, while trading insurance information, savagely stabs them to death. At first, the police don’t connect certain dots, but the usual loose cannon detective, Jung Tae-seok (Kim Moo-yul), the kind who can’t be bought and thinks he’s ten times smarter than his superiors, has connected them but he can’t convince his colleagues that the string of murders that have occurred in the past several weeks are the work of the same person; that is, until one rainy night when the killer happens to target Jang, who, despite his bigger bulk and better reflexes, barely gets away with his life. When Jung hears about the hospitalized Jang he tries to make a deal — they work together to catch the killer. At first, Jang wants no part of this crazy cop because, 1) he doesn’t want to be any more beholden to the police than he already is, and 2) the news that he was almost killed on the street has badly hurt his reputation in the underworld, where everybody is looking to take over your position. The only way to regain that kind of respect is to get his own revenge.
The ensuing plot finds the three titular stereotypes circling one another in their own orbits until they gravitate so close that the inevitable fission occurs, and director Lee Won-tae knows how to balance bone-crunchingly violent action scenes with smooth thriller exposition. Though there’s nothing particularly original about the movie, Ma carries his ringer bona fides like a champ. Jang’s sympathetic side doesn’t have to be revealed through any kind of soppy back story or scenes of him petting his dog. He bears his humanity with class and, in fact, seems like a decent employer, given his occupation and the amount of hurt he can bring down on people. If the movie lacks anything it’s a counter-leveling female presence (the killer, for once, only targets men of a certain age). This is a resolutely macho movie, though you could say that Ma at least flattens the curve. Let’s hope Stallone knows what to do with him.
In Korean. Now playing Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831).
The Gangster, the Cop, the Devil home page in Japanese.
photo (c) 2019 Kiwi Media Group & B.A. Entertainment
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Bruce Springsteen fans of a certain type often seem perplexed by their affection for his music, which is the opposite of subtle. While the themes hit on complex human connections, the emotions are big, the guitars loud, and the arrangements for the most part reach for hyperbole by default. No one who listens to a Springsteen song adds anything of themselves to it, because there’s already too much of it.
Rhythmic gymnastics is one of only two Olympic sports that are female-specific. Men do not partake, though there are men’s rhythmic gymnastic competitions outside of the Olympics. (Interestingly, it was Japan that developed the sport for males) This identification of the sport with women’s and girls’ bodies and, more significantly, feminine tropes is an important subtext of Polish director Marta Prus’s documentary about the Russian rhythmic gymnast Margarita Mamun. As with most sports docs, the focus is on how to become a champion, and Prus leads us through the grinding training regimen and the psychological strain of competition. Mamun’s goal is a medal in the 2016 Olympics, likely her last ever, and Prus, whether expectedly or not, captures the athlete during a particularly difficult part of her life. Though immensely talented, Mamun seems distracted and put off by the kind of effort she has been conditioned to understand by the keepers of the sport to be necessary in order to attain greatness, because she’s attained that level of greatness in the past. Maintaining it, however, is a different thing, and what we see, and what Prus insists we see, is how Mamun’s lack of focus and physical incapacities have less to do with the usual issues of aging and overwork than with a loss of will.
The story behind the making of this extraordinary documentary is perhaps even more fascinating than the movie itself. Filmmakers Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska reportedly were looking for a subject in the Republic of North Macedonia and heard about an older woman who still followed the traditional methods for honey-making, which does not require the keeping of bees, but rather relies on finding beehives in the wild and extracting just enough honey so as not to upset the lives of insects. In order to make their film, however, not only did Stefanov and Kotevska have to track down the woman, who lives in a remote valley that can’t be reached by normal transportation most of the year, but they had to follow her up steep mountains and into dense fields. They also had to somehow make camp in her village, which has no running water nor electricity save that supplied by battery.
Jim Cummings’ debut feature comes across as a piece of performance art extended beyond its original parameters, and surprisingly it works at that level consistently throughout its 90 minutes. Extrapolated from an award-winning short subject that has been reconstituted as an opening one-take gambit, the movie feels like a tightrope act, which is why you keep expecting it to fail in a big, dramatic way, but it keeps you going, and that’s because Cummings, who directs, writes, and plays the central character, seems to know exactly what he’s doing every second of the movie.
As laser-focused historical movies go, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s take on the rivalry between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse over who would build the first electricity grid in the U.S. has an immediately appealing hook in that electricity is something we take for granted without really understanding how it came into our lives. The obvious pitfall in any presentation of this story is getting past the technical aspects, because, basically, the rivalry was centered on the two men’s respective favored approaches to current: Edison preferred direct current, while Westinghouse thought alternating current was more efficient, and, for sure, a good part of the movie, at least in the beginning, is a struggle to make sense of the differences in these two approaches.
In a year when world movie fans finally woke up to the consistent brilliance of Korean cinema through the vehicle of Parasite, it should probably be noted that in South Korea itself the movie that vied with Parasite in 2019 as the finest of the year, at least among critics, was the indie debut House of Hummingbird by Kim Bora. Purists will say that comparing the two films is a chump’s game, since Parasite is high-concept while Hummingbird is personal. They don’t compete on the same playing field, especially in South Korea where parameters like genre and financial backing have more meaning than they do in other film markets. But to those of us outside of Korea, the two movies have more in common than they do to people inside Korea, and having seen both in South Korea, albeit 12 months apart, I found Hummingbird more affecting and, even now, more memorable.
Romantic melodramas adapted from real-life incidents can often feel doubly phony, since the viewer’s consciosness that these things really happened makes the contrivances feel all the more stagey. Adrift, which is adapted from a memoir by Tami Oldham, has a lot of that loose feeling of stretching the truth for the sake of emotional provocation, but since the basic story is dramatic by definition the viewer allows leeway for their reactions.
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