The buzz for this movie is that it is pretty great. Based on the trailers alone, I’m not sure where the claims of originality come from, but I haven’t seen the movie yet. To me, the trailers so far promise a film that is part Cloverfield, part District 9, and part 28 Days/Weeks Later.
Regardless, personally, I am really looking forward to this film. So, since it was added to the list I made today in preparation for this year’s Halloween Moviefest, which just so happened to coincide with a newer trailer a week or so ago, I thought it was high time to include a trailer here on the site.
Folks, you need to watch this movie right now. Tonight, or tomorrow at the latest.
I’m serious.
It’s a gem of popular Korean cinema. The film is insanely fun from start to finish. It’s entirely possible that I could watch this movie on repeat for an entire afternoon without getting bored.
As the name suggests, it’s a humorous homage to the western genre, in similar fashion to how Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg treated zombie movies with Shaun of the Dead andaction movies with Hot Fuzz. Like those films, The Good, The Bad, The Weird is good enough in its own right to be enjoyed by someone who has never seen a western before (like my wife, who loved the hell out of it), but that enjoyment grows deeper the more familiar you are with the genre. So, for Brian and I, after watching 30 westerns in 30 days, the film was riddled with easter eggs just waiting to be spotted by attentive viewers, namely us.
Yet, while the influence of the western genre was plain for all to see, Ji-woon Kim was masterful in making sure that he tilted every scene he used from classic westerns so that he was always telling his own story. He never just copied a scene or moment, he always shifted it just to the left, making a movie that is an homage to some of his favorite movies, as opposed to making a movie which is merely a collage of other people’s work.
Kim’s directing was fantastic, as was the cinematography. As we were watching, we consistently exclaimed in wonder at the high degree of difficulty of so many of the shots. There were many long, audacious tracking shots filled with so many moving parts that they were literally jaw dropping, some of which were extended helicopter shots that must have been a bitch to reset when something went wrong. There are still some shots, especially those with large explosives next to living people, which I have no idea how they did. That’s impressive in this day and age.
The action scenes were the perfect cocktail of thrilling and hilarious. That’s a tough combo to get right without losing one or the other, but this should be used as a case study in how to get it right… or perfect.
Yet, with all that action and technical wizardry, they didn’t skimp on the characters. The writing was strong and the acting was pitch perfect by all involved. All three of the main characters are on the short list of the most enjoyable characters I’ve seen in my young movie-viewing life.
It was a tall order for the primary actors, each was filling a prototypical role that could have easily bogged them down in convention, or else their performance could have gone so far off the deep end that there is no longer a connection to the archetype. Yet, each character incarnated their role with the right amount of continuity to the past, tempered by a heaping portion of their own swagger and attitude to keep things fresh. The performances were so impeccable, it makes me wonder if the aforementioned swagger and attitude was perhaps Ji-woon Kim’s, bleeding through from the other side of the camera.
So seriously, go watch this movie now!
Pretty soon, I’m going to have to write a post all about the actor who played ‘The Weird,’ Kang-ho Song, whose dominance in the world of remarkable Korean cinema is nothing short of amazing. I believe he is this generation’s Toshirô Mifune, and sadly, like Mifune, most folks outside of their native country (Japan for Mifune and Korea for Song) will live and die without learning their name. Bullshit!
Hmm, how do I share my thoughts on this movie without giving anything away?
How’s this:
Masterpiece. Magnum Opus. Piece de resistance. Masterstroke. Tour de force. A brilliant, near-perfect event in cinematic storytelling.
It was the movie I was most excited for this year, and it exceeded every single one of my expectations. I’ll need a few more viewings to know for sure, but it’s possible I just watched my new favorite movie.
What really needs to be said? It’s Joss Whedon. It’s Nathan Fillion. It’s a space western. It’s awesome. Or, to use Firefly speak, it’s one shiny gorram movie. (Also, Glenn Howerton of It’s Always Sunny even makes a very, very brief appearance.)
If you pay attention to the story of how the show was handled, FOX dealt with it all so poorly that it was almost like they were trying to make it fail. Not surprising, it’s FOX.
If you’ve never seen Firefly and Serenity, you should do something about that as soon as you can.
To make a long story short, Shane and High Plains Drifter collided with each other at a high rate of speed, creating a hybrid of the two. This is that hybrid. The result is a mostly enjoyable movie watching experience.
Unfortunately, I can’t say much more than that without ruining it. Part of what I loved was slowly coming to realize what my take was on the film, as it developed.
It was basically one big metaphor, although, like all good metaphor, it was filled with layers of nuance and mystery. If you’ve seen it, I’d love to discuss it, but I’m not going to spoil it for everyone.
Everything that frustrated me about High Noon, The Wild Bunch, and Duck, You Sucker was remedied in this movie, as well as a really refreshing response to the American Western’s portrayal of Native Americans.
It is a sampling from early in Clint Eastwood’s directorial career, and only the second Western he directed (we’ll get to his first later).
I loved it.
The story is basically about a man whose family is brutally murdered by a guerilla terror squad working with the Union army.
He teams up with some bushwhackers to get some revenge, and thus begins the story of Josey Wales. He ends up becoming an avenging angel of sorts, protecting the innocent from harm, but the story is far better than that makes it sound.
The badass outlaw with a heart of gold, as we have seen many times before, but this time, there are different themes at work than there were before.
One of my favorites so far!
Also, young Clint Eastwood looks awesome with a beard.
Duck, You Sucker, also known as, A Fistful of Dynamite, is more Leone. Sadly, it is the first time in my brief relationship with him when he completely let me down.
This movie was nonsensical. Rambling and at times incoherent, it was missing much of what I normally love about Leone.
Also, can anyone explain to me why two guys were watching as the other made out with the same girl? Those flashbacks were just inane, far too long, and mostly pointless since they never really explained how the girl played into the whole thing. I guess we are supposed to guess.
This one left Brian and myself scratching our heads that Leone could make something like this.
I know I’ll lose the movie fan version of street cred for hating The Wild Bunch and loving this, but that’s just the way it is. I really enjoy this one. I own it actually.
The performances are all strong, but more importantly, the filmmakers do a great job paying homage to the great shots and views of the classic Westerns. You can see Leone, you can see Eastwood, you can see Peckinpah’s better moments. It certainly isn’t a perfect movie, but that would be a silly thing to hold against it.
It’s a tight, well-crafted Western for the double zeroes.
This film is another uberclassic. Another one of those ‘greatest movies of all time’ type films. I have a confession to make… I pretty much hate it.
I know, I am in the minority, which is odd, because I have seen it twice, with three different people, and all of us hated it. I get that the editing for the action scenes is a big deal, but the editing for the rest is just absurd. I sat there thinking, “Ok, why is this scene so long? We get it, their horses are falling down the hill, are we going to move on with the story at some point today?”
I also didn’t understand why I was supposed to care about any of these characters. Was it just because they were the main characters? I’m supposed to want them to succeed and survive even though they let innocents die for profit, and use women as human shields, etc? I didn’t want to spend 2.5 hours with these guys.
Also, most irritating of all, the bizarre fits of laughter that ends about half the scenes in this movie. I’m not kidding, at least ten times all the character laugh raucously at something which isn’t really that funny, and they fade out on that to end the scene. In addition to that, the film ends with a montage of laughing scenes from earlier in the movie, in case we missed it early on. For those of you who haven’t watched it, I’m not kidding, that really happened.
I must be missing something that others love. Some reviews I read said it takes a genre which was ‘morally simplistic’ before this, and uses loads of violence to turn that on its head. Whoever feels the genre was morally simplistic before just isn’t watching closely enough, and they are missing the messages of ambiguity and confusion concerning violence , morality and corruption that fill so many of the Westerns I have watched so far.
I guess I’ll just have to be in the minority on this one, I tried to like it, and failed.
