In Another Country signals something of a shift in the approach of Hong Sang-soo’s films, one in which the director’s generally economically modest production methods begin to become more consistently transnational. The film centers on a woman played by French actress Isabelle Huppert, who speaks English throughout. Its narrative is less knotty than some of Hong’s others, briefly setting-up a frame story — there are three different screenplays, all written by Won-joo (Jung Yu-mi)…
Hong Sang-soo’s monochromatic, soju-soaked, metaphysical odyssey, The Day He Arrives, explores the question of whether or not one can ever really escape the past, but as considered through the filter of Hong’s signature narrative tropes. Over the course of a three-day visit to Seoul, Seong-jun (Hong regular Yoo Jun-sang), a retired filmmaker who now teaches at a provincial university, goes to the same bars with the same group of acquaintances and friends…
“Things repeat themselves with differences I can’t understand,” proclaims Oki (Jung Yu-mi), the director of the fourth, and final, film-within-the-film that comprises Hong Sang-soo’s 2012 feature Oki’s Movie. She has attempted to compare and contrast two relationships that she had — one with a professor (Mun Seong-kun), one with a fellow student (Lee Seon-gyun) — by casting actors who look similar to the men that she knew, and then following them on separate dates…
#32: Beyond the Masked Tortilla: Musicians Making Movies Download episode here. Episode Description: “This is where we came in…” Like guilty men returning to the scene of a crime, Simon and Steve decide to revisit an idea they’ve had before — in fact, the idea behind the very first Bad Idea, the cinematic career of Frank Zappa.…
#6: People Like Us Download episode here. Listen to episode here. Episode Description: As the latest version of The Mummy lurches its way into theaters, we take a look at director Alex Kurtzman’s directorial debut, 2012’s family dramedy People Like Us, a film that forces us to ask the question, “Is incest okay when the participants are Chris Pine and Elizabeth Banks?” The argument gets heated.…
Despite its 2012 release, Bad Film captures a Sion Sono before he reached international acclaim; before his particular brand of otaku-influenced action films; and before his unabashed revelry in exhibitionism and voyeurism. It was filmed back in the mid-’90s, way before Sono’s breakout Suicide Club, and not finished until after his critical success Love Exposure, in 2011. This allowed a wizened Sono to collect fragments (roughly 150 hours) of his earlier activist years and turn them into either a diary of a particular…
Only in a filmography as stylistically restless and formally anarchic as Sion Sono’s would a somber family drama like The Land of Hope be considered a radical departure. Made in the aftermath of the Tohoku earthquake and ensuing Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster of 2011, Sono’s film is its own odd hybrid of Ozu-esque generational drama, speculative sci-fi, and searingly direct protest art. Set in a post-Fukushima Japan, in a fictional rural province called Nagashima (Sono’s invented portmanteau of Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and Fukushima, all…