Last night, Sweetie and I watched Oldboy, a Korean adaptation of a manga that owed at least a small debt to The Count of Monte Cristo. I was tired, and at one point requested a backup because I lost track of the subtitles, having distracted myself wondering whether this movie was demonstrating "other cultures are incomprehensible" or "this was just made by some Korean Quentin Tarantino." Mostly, the latter--with perhaps a dash of the former. The first is interesting because I couldn't even tell whether what seemed crazy to me--the addition of not just one but two separate incest plot lines--was developed by the creatives or the money people. The second won for sure after reading this morning that Oldboy won an award at Cannes the year that Tarantino was chairing the committee handing out the prize.
Today, Sweetie was looking at other Korean movie descriptions, and had one I am compelled to post.
The film takes place in a mental institution. Young-goon, a young woman
who believes herself to be a cyborg, refuses to eat and instead
administers electric shocks to herself. Il-sun, a young male patient
hospitalized for anti-social behaviour and schizophrenia, who believes
he can take other peoples souls, befriends Young-goon. After Young-goon
is given shock treatment, she believes that she has been recharged and
fantasizes about killing the hospital staff who had previously taken
her mentally-ill grandmother away. In reality, her physical condition
begins to deteriorate rapidly. By convincing her that he had installed
a food-to-electrical-energy converting unit (a rice-megatron) in her
back, Il-sun gets Young-goon to eat.
The title is I'm A Cyborg, But That's OK.
I prefer being bewildered at plot lines that do not involve puppies in outerspace, which seems more a case of bad focus-group-based decisions, which is sort of like being puzzled by another culture, only sadder.
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/japan_pledges_to_halt_production?utm_source=a-section
Posted by: mildred township | 2009.02.19 at 09:54 AM