Archive for August 16th, 2011

Remember in 1979 when the head of South Korea’s intelligence agency just up and shot the President dead one night?

Me neither. In fact, no one told me that ever happened. It seems like the kind of thing you’d hear about a country. But according to South Korean filmmaker Sang-soo Im, it’s a taboo subject. Which is why he made a movie called “Folks Back in Those Days”. That’s how the title is translated from it’s Korean title. But the US release is called The President’s Last Bang, which is where you’ll find it on Netflix.

Which you should do. It plays like a cross between a thriller and a black comedy, about a million miles away from a somber historical story like, say, Joint Security Area or Memories of Murder or The Host. For instance, it opens with a shot of a bunch of hot Korean chicks taking their tops off and it closes with a shot of the movie’s most enigmatic character just eating dinner. Everything in between moves among a set of different characters and different locations as the evening of the assassination unfolds through various stages of uncertainty, confusion, and resolve.

I hate to overuse this description — I can’t help but bring it up every time I talk about In the Loop — but there’s something so very Dr. Strangelove about The President’s Last Bang. It has an appreciation for the absurd without having to wink or point. It just lets the absurd be absurd. Because once you try to make the absurd actually absurd, once you start nudging, you end up with Oliver Stone’s W. Hey, look, Josh Brolin’s President Bush is stuffing his face with foot and Thandie Newton’s Condoleeza Rice is talking like Urkle and Richard Dreyfus’ Dick Cheney is exactly like Richard Dreyfus’ villain in Red, and it all pales in comparison to watching the real life Bush demonstrate his drive for the press in Farenheit 911, which isn’t unlike President Muffley asking the Soviet premier to turn his music down. Leave the absurd alone. Let it be. It’s already absurd, so making it eat a sandwich doesn’t add anything. Sang-soo Im knows this and it makes his movie great.

The style is very Western, with a careful sense of pacing and tension and even an eye for action sequences. But the setting is very Korean, and very Cold War. You won’t hear communism and Japan mentioned this way in any American movie. Like Denmark and Spain, South Korea is one of those countries with its own distinctive eye for moviemaking. Yeah, yeah, Taiwan, Japan, France, England, whatever. My theory is that Denmark, Spain, and South Korea have been on the periphery of enormity for so long that it has done something to them, something that bubbles up in their movies. They’re countries that have spent centuries watching terrible spectacles roll around them, occasionally lapping at their feet, like a bystander on a rock outcropping when a tsunami drowns everyone on the beach. The bystander is the guy to tell the story.

But never mind my penny-ante analysis of the national psyche of countries I’ve mostly never been to. If you want to see a latter day game of thrones, allow me to recommend The President’s Last Bang as political theatre of the absurd at its best.

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The saga of [Rec] continues. When Sony bought the rights to this superlative found-footage Spanish zombie movie, they decided to cheaply remake it instead of banking on stupid Americans being willing to read subtitles. The result was Quarantine, featuring Dexter’s sister and a marked lack of appreciation for what made the original work. Protip: the cast. So that happened.

Then the creators of [Rec] made a sequel. [Rec] 2 effectively ignored what made the first movie good (did I mention the cast?) and even decided to jump genres, as if it hoped to get a head start on the resurgence of demonic possession movies that, for all we know, are hot on the heels of the occasional exorcism movie like The Rite and Last Exorcism. Stand by for that, I suppose.

Now there’s a sequel to Quarantine, the remake of [Rec], that wisely ignores [Rec] 2 and does its own thing. And in the process, it very nearly becomes the best thing you’ll see all week. Despite its middling cast and made-for-TV directorial style, Quarantine 2 has a good script and a solid sense for how to do horror in a post-9/11 air travel setting. This is classic Irwin Allen, but modern day, and with zombies instead of air traffic control mishaps. And for a while, it’s ratcheting up the tension, introducing its characters, hitting all the right beats, and generally getting it done. Way to go, Quarantine 2, written and directed by John Pogue, the writer of Ghost Ship! You may very well be the best thing to come out of a [Rec] movie since the original [Rec].

But then, like so many horror movies, it starts to come apart. It starts to explain things. It cracks. It starts to go over well tread territory. It crumbles. It forces a poorly conceived nightvision gimmick for no other reason than because it was in the original [Rec] and in the process it’s wishing so hard it was 28 Weeks Later, as the plucky determined stewardess and her frightened teenage charge grope their way through and into oblivion. But you simply can’t get there with this cast. And what’s with the late-game needle-into-eyeball squick factor? Really? 90 minutes of rampaging, virulent, blood-soaked zombies isn’t enough, so we’re going to take a break by sticking a needle in an eyeball? Oh, Quarantine 2. You could have been a contender.

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…my two-word review: yee-haw! I’d write it in all caps, but I don’t want to be more obnoxiously ebullient than I already am.

Read another 998 or so words here.

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