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.
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.
…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.
One of the nicest things I can say about most of the frippery that passes for content on Xbox Live is that it’s miles and away better than Playstation Home. But sometimes I’m paging idly among those little panels on Xbox Live and I’ll duck into one, only to immediately wonder what I think I’m doing. For instance, I couldn’t help but duck into a panel promising the “Top 10 Racing Games”. On the list, among seven perfectly cromulent racing games available for download, I found Dark Void, Tranformers: the Game, and Tron: Evolution.
Still, calling Tron: Evolution a racing game is better than anything I’ve ever seen on Playstation Home. Is that thing still going?
We can all agree that videogaming needs more Westerns, right? And, in particular, a strategy game, because Red Dead Redemption will only get us so far. Enter through the saloon doors Six Gun Saga.
Six Gun Saga just went from its beta to its release version, so it’s time for an official review. Read it here.
If you only have a PC, that means you haven’t played Bastion yet. I’m a little jealous because that means you can play Bastion for the first time. It’s an experience you’ll treasure and it’s available to PC gamers this week. When you’re done, listen to this interview with writer Greg Kasavin and then buy the fantastic soundtrack here.
If you have an Xbox 360, you’re also in for a treat this week! Toy Soldiers: Cold War on Xbox Live Arcade is an energetic tower defense game every bit as good as the original Toy Soldiers. And then some! I’ll have a review posted tomorrow. Suffice to say, I’m a little bit in love. Unless you’re allergic to tower defense games, you’re going to want to fork over the requisite Microsoft space bucks. The only reason Bastion and Toy Soldiers: Cold War don’t merit an elevated wallet threat is because they’re relatively inexpensive.
If you’re bound and determined to play From Dust, that’s also out for the PC this week. I’m guessing the PC will be the platform of choice, given the graphics and interface problems I had with the 360 version. However, you have to be willing to play an Ubisoft release on a PC, which is a bit like contributing to a Tim Pawlenty Presidential campaign.
On the unknown front, El Shaddai is out this week. It’s…uh…I don’t know. I got nothing. I saw posters for at E3 and thought they were for Assassin’s Creed. I guess it’s some sort of anime thing about the Old Testament.
Finally, Age of Empires Online goes live this week. I feel strongly about it and I’ll have a full review posted tomorrow.
After a week off, we’re back with a few surprise recommendations which may or may not include Rise of the Planet of the Apes, The Change Up, Final Destination 5, and/or The Help. Then we get down to the unfortunate business of all having seen 30 Minutes or Less. If you just want to hear our 3×3 of the finest moments of slow motion, fast forward to the 1:01:30 mark.
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One of the things they teach you in actor school is never appear on stage with animals or children. Apparently that dude in the background, who’s cosplaying some Chinese railroad worker superhero with no sense of color coordination, didn’t take that class.
Click here for more awesome Amaterasu cosplay pics. Fortunately, there is no Chibiterasu cosplay, as that would likely melt the internet with its cuteness.
Thanks, Charles!
Tom Chick has tales from QuakeCon, where the men are nerds and the horses are uneasy. Jason McMaster, who hasn’t seen Zoo, thinks it’s all very funny. Also, The Sims, Brink, Fallout: New Vegas, League of Legends, and Hard Reset. Yeah, that’s right. Hard Reset!
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I am so curious about the name of this week’s community level, Meerkats Adventure 1. Why? Why are you called Meerkats Adventure? What does that mean? You don’t look like a meerkat. My sackboy isn’t disguised as a meerkat. At one point I ride a mouse…is that supposed to be a meerkat?
Maybe I’m overly obsessed with the word meerkat. Yep, I’m gonna go with that. Because the level itself is just okay. Standard collect-the-community-bubbles kind of level. I’m just so curious about the name. Maybe it’ll be explained in part two.
Next week, the subterranean world of Weekly Little Big Planet returns. For now…
Click here for a previous Weekly Little Big Planet
Great, now I’m one of those jerkwad reviewers who flings a harshly negative review at a Dynasty Warriors game.
It was a bit of a chore to play through the early single-player bits of Rage, the upcoming next-gen shooter from Id.
The pistol sucks. The ATV sucks. The mandatory driving sucks. The rote missions through corridors suck. The checkpoints suck. Matching up the right bits of junk to build stuff sucks. But don’t give up! Rage seems like a classic example of “crawl before you can run” design.
Click here for other stuff you (probably) didn’t know about Rage.
You know you’ve been playing too much Alpha Centauri when you watch the news and think, “Well, I know what I’d do”:
So I got to play Skyrim. Actually play it. Jump in and run around and do whatever I want and stuff. I can’t verify anything about dragons, but I can assure you “here there be giants”.
Read all about it here.
Return in Red is, by nearly any metric, a bad movie. Bad. Director Tyler Tharpe is inordinately pleased with the simple act of moving the camera on a dolly without any regard for why or whether he should do it, much less how to cut around it. The lighting is alternately soupy, harsh, or tacky. It has no meaningful production values, shot mostly in people’s houses in Indiana. A barn set up with a couple of power tools stands in for a factory. The best thing you can say about the actors is that they’re occasionally relaxed. There is scarcely a frame of Retun in Red that doesn’t announce itself as an amateur production.
That said, I really liked Return in Red. It’s a textbook example of tension, suspense, and fear without resorting to the usual tropes. It has a canny sense for quiet menace. The opening narration is right out of the 70s, consisting of a simple quote about a program to study the effects of sound waves as a weapon. From here, we’re introduced to a small rural community, stalked by a strange white van with what looks like a satellite dish sticking out the side. Return in Red belongs in the tradition of The Crazies, or a far better version of The Crazies called Impulse, or an Alan Rudolph movie called Endangered Species, in which Dan Ulrich, JoBeth Willams, and Paul Dooley investigate UFO cattle mutilations.
And even though it’s bad, the amateurish quality gives it that raw grimy feel of 70s horror movies, especially when it starts to roll out the special effects. Like George Romero, Wes Craven, and Tobe Hooper before him, Tharpe is states and states away from from Hollywood, hundreds of miles from any movie studio, surrounded by and therefore working with actual people. As such, he has to come up with his own tricks. His desperate no-budget affection shows in every bleak and poorly lit frame he shoots. He’s like Mark Borchardt, but with a sense for subtlty.
I’m tempted to say Return in Red should have been a half hour shorter, maybe because I actually fell asleep a couple of times while watching it. Which isn’t the movie’s fault. My hours were messed up because of a time zone shift. In fact, my falling asleep complemented the occasionally hazy narrative. But ultimately, I don’t think you could trim anything from this slow and sometimes wet burn. The time it takes to breathe and meander makes the weird finale more effective. It gives the fate of the characters more weight, especially since they don’t seem like characters so much as people persuaded by Tharpe to wander into the frame from time to time.
But again, let me remind you that Return in Red is bad. I know that. I warned you right off the bat. But sometimes there’s more to a movie than being good or bad. Return in Red, available on Netflix’s instant watch, is one such movie.
