Things I Learned While Remixing A Metallica Record

When Slayer was writing the music for "Reign in Blood", they were fans of Metallica and Megadeth but thought their songs were too repetitive. So the band just began cutting everything that was redundant from their own tunes and the resulting album barely broke 29 minutes in length. It was also fucking incredible, which got me thinking...

Fun as it is to bash Metallica, "...And Justice For All" is probably my favorite metal album ever, if we go by amount of time in my main CD rotation (100% for the last 14 years or so). But even I know it's too long and stuffed with wankery. So I decided to give it the Slayer treatment: Find anything redundant and cut it out. Just snip-snip-gone. How much could I remove? Would I ruin the album in the process?

Pretty much what I did

This isn't the first time I've re-edited an album to my tastes, but certainly the trickest job, given the amount I ended up tinkering. While I won't share my results online (because yarrrrr) here's what I learned from the experience:

1) Audacity is a great product. 

It's free, and strikes just the right balance between accessibility and power for what I needed to do. It's definitely what I'll use from here on out.

2) Shitty production can be a godsend

Everyone knows AJFA as the album with no audible bass, but it was also mixed with no reverb anywhere. While this makes the album sound a bit dry and dead (I'll probably try adding my own reverb to see if I can perk it up a little) it makes editing a lot simpler. Metallica's songwriting is so modular that it's not hard to just snip four bars here and there, and I rarely had to worry about echos carrying over from cut sections. Only one edit was really any trick at all (more on that later).

Metallica's mixing console circa 1989

3) "...And Justice For All" is 90% awesome

Some people just hate the songs on AJFA, but I don't. I started with the assumption that the songs didn't need much tinkering, and that I would just trim the deadweight. This turned out to be pretty much true, and separating the wheat from the chaff helps the album's momentum a great deal. My final cut ended up being 10% shorter overall.

Mostly I cut sections of riffs repeating themselves, and a few of those random extra beats thrown in to show off that the band can play tricky time signatures. The biggest cuts were in the title track (about two minutes, mostly the slow section in the middle) and "Frayed Ends of Sanity" (about one and a half minutes). The only songs I left untouched were Blackened (which is perfect) and One (Because I can't just "make Kirk's solo better", and the song doesn't work without it). By the way...

4) "The Frayed Ends Of Sanity" is a terrible song

The riffs in the middle are amazing, but this is definitely the track I hated editing the most. In fact I saved it for last knowing it would be my nemesis. I managed to remove Kirk Hammet's entire solo, where it sounds like James and Lars just sort of spaced for a solid minute and let Kirk murder a guitar. This was the aforementioned edit of doom. I had to do some serious multi-tracking to get this done, but it was worth it. The song has been thoroughly de-Kirked, and is now clean.

Kirk Hammett: Lowering Metallica's
asshole quotient by 25% since 1983

5) Kirk Hammett is probably a really great dude

This isn't a thing I learned, but I beat up on the man constantly and should probably show a little respect. He's a fine guitarist, just not meant to play speed metal. His bluesier work on Metallica's later albums is awesome. "The Outlaw Torn" alone, man... He practically made the sky cry on that one.

6) Remixing is fun!

As tedious as this exercise ended up being in places, I am super jazzed with my results. I love re-editing albums the way I like. Hell, after I clear my head of Metallica for a little while I might even try fixing Death Magnetic someday. Someday when I really hate myself.

Movie Review: "Thirst"

This is part 6 of my Park Chan-wook retrospective. It's also the last until I get to see Stoker, and since I live in the middle of nowhere I don't know when I'll get the chance.

I kind of feel bad being disappointed by "Thirst", but that's what happens when a director has as good a track record as Park Chan-wook. One of the best vampire films of the 2000s qualifies as a letdown. But I'm not going to beat up on "Thirst" too much. In an overstuffed genre it's got a ton of new ideas. And a film failing because it tries to do too much could certainly commit worse sins.

Park regular Song Kang-ho gets an entire movie all to himself as Sang-hyun, a good-hearted priest deeply affected by the number of followers he has lost to a terrifying new blood disease. That disease, named EV, causes patients to grow boils, cough up blood, and die very quickly. So moved is he by their tragic deaths that he volunteers to enter an experimental trial, and facing near-certain death while hopefully helping to find a cure. During the trial he succumbs to the disease, but springs miraculously back to life, making him the sole survivor of the disease (and a makeshift saint among his followers)

Unfortunately there is a side effects to his recovery, namely vampirism. Sang-hyun gradually discovers his thirst for human blood, and is soon siphoning doses from coma victims (who probably wouldn't miss it, I guess) and keeping blood bags in his fridge. If he goes too long without fresh blood the EV symptoms return, so after a suicide attempt proves his immortality he's got no choice but to become a career bloodsucker.

The first third of the film is the most compelling, grounding the vampire elements in reality, and featuring a protagonist who really doesn't want to hurt anyone, just to stay alive. Making him a priest is effective because now he has to reconcile bloodsucking with his faith and vows. This gets even trickier when he notices that vampirism has also caused him to be hypersensitive to smell, and increasingly unable to resist lustful urges. He confides in a fellow priest who disgusts him by demanding some of Sang-hyun's vampire blood for himself... why should Sang-hyun hog the immortality?

At this point Park marries the vampire plot to a domestic thriller, and I'm not convinced that both were necessary. Sang-hyun begins boarding with a dysfunctional family: Matriarch Lady Ra (Kim Hae-suk), her doltish son Kang-woo (Shin Ha-kyun), and his wife and former adopted sister (eww) Tae-ju (Kim Ok-bin). Tae-ju is trouble on two legs, desperate to escape her domestic hell and particularly good at inciting Sang-hyun's libido. He quickly falls in lust with Tae-ju who swiftly begins manipulating him into trying to kill her husband.

This is enough plot for another movie, and at 2 hrs 15 minutes there has to be a shorter, better version of Thirst that could have been made. All the same, Park does this material well, with some great use of shifting focus to direct attention during tense sequences. Yet as the plot goes on, cranking through one twist after another, I began to miss the flashes of light that perked up Park's other work. Thirst might not be the darkest film Park has made, but it's probably the greyest.

At one point I felt like the movie was likely to end, but nope, a third phase begins wherein Tae-ju contracts vampirism. Unfortunately she becomes too much for Sang-hyun to handle, being quite a fan of the killing and the screaming and not much for subtlety. Seeing Kim Ok-bin's portrayal leap over the top from devious to horror film crazy is unfortunate, and in general gas begins to leave the movie at a steady rate about 2/3 of the way through.

Still, almost every part of the film works on its own. There are just too many parts. And it's worth sticking around for the last 10 minutes, which are so well done they make the whole trip worth it. Unlike Park's earlier films this is straight up genre work, efficiently done and with a minimal amount of subtext. If it weren't so bloated I'd be more charitable towards it, but let's keep perspective in mind. Even lesser Park is damn fine film-making, and "Thirst" certainly bears his mark.

Other films directed by Park Chan-wook:

The Moon... is the Sun's Dream (1992)
Trio (1997)
Joint Security Area (2000)
Sympathy for Mr Vengeance (2002)
Oldboy (2003)
Lady Vengeance (2005)
I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK (2006)
Thirst (2009)
Stoker (2013)

Movie Review: "I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK"

This is part 5 of my Park Chan-wook retrospective.

Park Chan-wook's charmingly titled film "I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK" (2006) was such a departure from his previous work that it took several years to find international distribution. Of course, if the restlessness of "Lady Vengeance" was any indication, a left turn was to be expected, but still... "a romantic comedy from the director of Oldboy" proved to be a hard sell. Even in Park's native Korea, the film mostly bombed. It had a great opening weekend though because the ladies love Rain, an international pop sensation mostly known in America as Stephen Colbert's nemesis. As this film proves, he's also one hell of an actor.

This film has been poorly described as a Korean "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" which is only accurate in the sense that they both take place in mental institutions. "I'm a Cyborg" avoids several common pitfalls of movies about crazy people. The patients aren't saints, or misunderstood, they're fucking crazy. And the staff aren't a blunt instrument of authority or conformity, they sincerely want to help and try their best. But the fact is that the patients are living on a different plane of reality than the staff. You can tell someone the voices aren't really there, but who's more convincing? You, or the voices?

The film is a love story over all else, and it's a damn charming one, though it gets off to a disturbing start: Young-goon (Im Soo-jung) is working on an assembly line when the radio begins dictating instructions to her, leading her to slit her wrist and stick an electrical wire into it. This is taken as a suicide attempt, and leads to her being committed to the asylum. Young-goon really believes that she is a cyborg, and prefers to talk to machines and listen to the radio for instructions rather than deal with humans. Unfortunately she refuses to eat, since her robot body can't process food.

She attracts the attention of Il-soon (Rain), a compulsive thief who steals intangible things like "Thursday", or people's personality attributes. The other inmates play along, almost as though sharing a group hallucination. At one point he steals someone's famous ping pong swing, infuriating the man who can now no longer play worth a damn. Il-soon does this because he fears that if he doesn't continue to steal he will shrink into a dot and disappear. Rain is alternately hilarious (wearing a ridiculous rabbit mask and overtly sneaking in plain sight) and touching in this role. He's charismatic, but damaged, and quite a handful for the staff.

Il-soon notices Young-goon when she asks him to steal her sympathy. She believes that she is a Terminator style combat robot and wishes to take bloody vengeance on the "men in white" for taking her grandmother away from her as a child (her grandmother believed she was a mouse). Yet she can't bring herself to kill anyone. Il-soon obliges, leading to an over the top fantasy sequence where Young-goon massacres all of the doctors and orderlies while the patients jump for joy. Of course it's all in her head, and she collapses from malnutrition.

As the doctors try every trick imaginable to get Young-goon to eat (electroshock therapy only convinces her that her battery is recharged) Il-soon is driven to save her. He has one skill the hospital lacks: he's insane. More specifically he plays along with Young-goon's delusions to solve it from the inside. At one point he tries to convince her that he can install a "Rice-Megaton" converter that will make her able to eat. There's something very touching about this. In order to deeply connect with someone you need to be able to see the world through their eyes. Most people aren't convinced they're robots, but it's a comic exaggeration of something very true.

Along the way, Park gets to indulge every last quirky device he didn't get a chance to wheel out in "Lady Vengeance". Reality is fluid, as you'd expect when every character interprets the world around them differently. In one touching scene Il-soon confides his deepest fears to another patient while shrinking down to the size of a doll in front of her. The oddest moment comes when he convinces Young-goon that her bed can fly, and begins to yodel a mountain tune as her bed flies out the window to meet him in Switzerland.

So that's what we've got. An adorable love story between two clearly insane people. Park's genre fans may not like the result, but I think it's wonderful and proves that he doesn't have to just make grim, violent thrillers. His two films since this one have gone back to that territory, but I think he just had to get this one out of his system. It's a great tonic for the grim realism of many modern movies, and deserves a cult following.

Other films directed by Park Chan-wook:

The Moon... is the Sun's Dream (1992)
Trio (1997)
Joint Security Area (2000)
Sympathy for Mr Vengeance (2002)
Oldboy (2003)
Lady Vengeance (2005)
I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK (2006)
Thirst (2009)
Stoker (2013)

Movie Review: "Lady Vengeance"

This is part 4 of my Park Chan-Wook retrospective

"Lady Vengeance" is the perfect capstone to a series of films that each subvert the conventions of traditional revenge thrillers in different ways: "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance"  removes the divide between hero and villain, sympathizing with every member of the cast. "Oldboy" denies the hero catharsis or even victory. And "Lady Vengeance" depicts a heroine who gets her revenge, but learns that what she really needs is to be forgiven. That proves much more difficult.

The titular Lee Geum-ja ("Lee Yeong-ae") is released from prison after serving 13 years for kidnapping and murdering a young boy named Won-mo. In truth, she was intimidated into assisting the vile teacher Mr. Baek (Choi Min-sik) who threatened to kill her newborn child. In the end, she took the fall for the crime, and in the process became a media sensation. The nation fell in love with her youth and beauty, and watched as she had a very vocal religious conversion behind bars, and cultivated a reputation as "Kind-hearted Ms. Geum-ja" (the Korean title of the film, incidentally).

Of course, this was all an act. Behind this mask of virtue, Geum-ja was plotting an epic revenge scheme, forming alliances with other inmates in order to cash in favors from them upon her release. Now that she's out, she suits up on a black coat and puts on shocking red eyeliner: war paint for her costume as an avenging angel. The revenge scheme goes off without too much trouble, but is only one element of a pretty wide-ranging plot that is not afraid of digressions.

This is the most stylistically restless film Park had made to this point, shifting in tone from grim and violent to practically comedic at the drop of a hat. It feels very theatrical, with devices such as the baroque soundtrack and jumbled chronology serving to distance us from the proceedings. The omniscient narrator's identity remains secret until the end of the film, but she tells us events that she could not possibly have seen firsthand. Like "Mr. Vengeance", we are meant to process this story as a parable, with a lesson in mind.

As I mentioned, the narrative jumps around to all sorts of tangents: each of the prisoners Geum-ja befriends gets their own little vignette, revealing that Geum-ja dirtied her hands quite a bit on the inside. My favorite is the story of a married couple very much in love with each other... and armed robbery. Once freed, Geum-ja tracks down her daughter, now living in Australia and a pouty little bastard about it. And she starts a love affair with a  goofy young man solely because he's the same age Won-mo would be were he still alive.

Geum-ja's rage against Baek is muddled by the fact that she was partially responsible for Won-mo's murder. She visits the home of his parents and begins chopping off her fingers one by one in their living room until they will forgive her. Yet this gesture, dramatic as it is, proves to be pointless. In "Lady Vengeance" Park plays a lot with Christian imagery and themes, casting doubt on the idea that you can just fall on your knees and beg God to cleanse your soul. Geum-ja's ultimate quest is not to kill Baek, but to be forgiven. Forgiven for Won-mo's death, for giving up her daughter and for all of the other wrongs she has committed to get to this point. She despairs when she realizes that that this may be impossible.

The stakes are raised further when she learns that Baek killed several more children after Won-mo, whose deaths would have been avoided had she turned him in. Wracked with guilt she (barely) restrains herself from killing him, and instead assembles a kangaroo court comprised of the dead children's relatives. She offers them a choice: Turn Baek in to face a long jail sentence, or exact a "more personal" revenge. This surreal segment is the grimmest of the film, intellectualizing vengeance to the point where it becomes almost mechanical. How satisfying can it be to get your knock in on an incapacitated man years after the original crime was committed? And still, even if Baek is successfully murdered, it's not going to bring anyone back, is it?

This has been the hardest film for me to wrap my head around up to this point in the retrospective. "Lady Vengeance" is nowhere near as airtight as "Mr Vengeance", but it's not that sort of movie. The narrative is big, emotional, wreckless, and messy. But Park's direction remains tightly controlled, and this is perhaps the most cinematically rich film he's made to date. I have spent hours attempting to unpack it in a short review and I just can't do it justice. What I can tell you is that I love it, and it's a damned shame that it's not generally given the same recognition as its siblings.

Other films directed by Park Chan-wook:


The Moon... is the Sun's Dream (1992)
Trio (1997)
Joint Security Area (2000)
Sympathy for Mr Vengeance (2002)
Oldboy (2003)
Lady Vengeance (2005)
I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK (2006)
Thirst (2009)
Stoker (2013)

Movie Review: "Oldboy"

This is part 3 of my Park Chan-Wook retrospective

"Oldboy" (2003) is the dark heart of Park Chan-wook's "Vengeance Trilogy", which is a hard statement to make following the despair of "Sympathy for Mr Vengeance". But compared to the films on either side of it, "Oldboy" is the most immediate, direct and physical. We spend almost the entire film immersed in the protagonist's battered, tormented psyche, as intoxicated with revenge as he is. For that reason, the gut-wrenching emotional horror of the film's conclusion hits harder, in my opinion, than anything in "Mr Vengeance". Park lures the audience in with the promise of flash, thrills and gore, only to follow that up with an extra course of pain and torment. It isn't my favorite film, but I can attest that it's the sort of movie that can change a man.

While sharing many plot points with the Japanese manga of the same name, Park's film has a very different tone than the more sedate source material, and takes the story in a darker direction. A quick jolt of an intro establishes Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) as a comic book revenge hero, growling his words from beneath a shock of messy hair, dangling a man from a rooftop by his necktie. But we immediately flash back to a very different Dae-su: a drunken boor, causing trouble in a police station. After thoroughly making an ass of himself, he is bailed out by a friend only to suddenly disappear.

Dae-su awakes in a dingy hotel room with no windows, and only a television for company. Food is slid under a slot in the door, and Dae-su begs his guards to tell him why he has been imprisoned, but they remain silent. Periodically he is gassed into unconsciousness only to wake up some time later clean-shaven, showered, and with a haircut. The TV tells him that his wife has been murdered, and that he is the prime suspect. Days, weeks, months, then years pass, without any explanation. Dae-su makes a list of everyone he has ever wronged in an attempt to determine the cause of his imprisonment, but finds no likely candidates. With nothing better to do, he paints the outline of a person on the wall and beats on it with his bare bleeding fists, hoping to someday take revenge on his captors.

15 years later Dae-Su awakes in a grass field with a new suit and cell phone. Why was he released after all this time? Why isn't he dead? And most importantly to Dae-su, who can he destroy for this? After picking a fight with some street punks he quickly learns that 15 years of pretend fighting are easily put into practice. His cellphone rings, his captor announcing that the game has begun: Dae-su has five days to figure out the reason for his imprisonment or this mysterious villain will murder every woman Dae-su will ever love.

"Oldboy" revels in thriller cliches, up to and including the mysteriously trusting woman (sushi chef Mi-do, played by Kang Hye-jeong) who takes pity on our hero and gives him a place to sleep despite his obvious insanity and violent nature. Yet it seems fresh again because everything is amped up to 11. It's in this section of the film that the trap is baited, the audience accepting the parameters of a classic revenge thriller and lapping it up happily. Some of it is gratuitous (one scene of Mi-do tied up half naked leaps to mind), but perhaps this is intentional.

Dae-su's rage is palpable every second he's on screen, visualized most memorably in a now-iconic fight sequence. Dae-su faces off against dozens of armed thugs in a narrow hallway, and as good as the fight choreography is, you don't really see it. Instead you feel the impact of every blow, and watch as these guys spend three entire minutes in real time trying to take down Dae-su and failing. At one point, everybody in the hallway is tired and gasping for breath, Dae-su has taken a knife in the back that he doesn't even notice, and we wait for one of them to recuperate to the point where they can even mount another swing. Finally Dae-su emerges, drenched in blood, victorious.

Only in the third act does Park's game become apparent. The villainous Woo-jin (Yu Ji-tae) is not an unlikable figure, and seems much more emotionally fragile than one would suspect. When the truth is finally revealed the audience is thoroughly sucker punched. No happy endings are found, and the "hero" we have come to love is brought to his knees, psychologically ruined and destroyed. And at this point it becomes hard for me to remain objective about "Oldboy".

This feels like audience punishment, and that's something I have a tricky time with. While I appreciate the baroque plot convolutions and violence for their sheer intensity, and the film's characters remain true to their natures throughout, I still have to ask why we were brought along on this journey? "Oldboy" was the first Park film I saw and it hurt. I spent days trying to justify it and while I could intellectually defend the film as a study of revenge, I could never get over the central cruelty of the narrative. Dae-su has no "fatal flaw" in the tragic sense, except perhaps that he was a jerk before the narrative even began. That's kind of crummy tragedy if you ask me.

"Oldboy" is very much a gut-level film occupied with making the audience feel it. And it's not a pleasant sensation. "Mr. Vengeance" and "Lady Vengeance" tackle the same general topic in more complex ways. Rewatching "Oldboy" I find the plot simultaneously more convoluted and less interesting than those of its neighbors, and the intensity that carries the film dials down quite a bit in the exposition heavy third act. For these reasons, I'm not a huge fan. But I can't deny that it's really damn good.


Other films directed by Park Chan-wook:


The Moon... is the Sun's Dream (1992)
Trio (1997)
Joint Security Area (2000)
Sympathy for Mr Vengeance (2002)
Oldboy (2003)
Lady Vengeance (2005)
I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK (2006)
Thirst (2009)
Stoker (2013)

Movie Review - "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance"

This review is part 2 in my Park Chan-Wook retrospective.

After the runaway success of "JSA: Joint Security Area" in 2000, Park Chan-Wook was given absolute freedom to make the movie of his dreams. Few expected anything as bleak and horrifying as "Sympathy for Mr Vengeance". Audiences stayed away in droves. Even among critics, this has proven to be Park's most divisive work: Many believe it to be his best. Just as many describe it as audience punishing misery-porn. As for me, it's my third favorite film of all time, and I take my rankings very seriously.

The cliche is that Park's films (and this one in particular) are "for those with strong stomachs", and that might lead you to expect a work of unbearable cruelty. Yet for audiences on the same wavelength as the director, it's not cruelty, it's tragedy. In a tragedy, bad things happen for a reason. The audience can actually gain some kind of understanding from the events. Characters are in some sense responsible for their fates, which stem from their own fatal flaws, or at least poor decisions.

Of course, Park stacks the deck against his characters from the beginning. After analysing the Korean war with "JSA", he uses "Mr Vengeance" to tackle a more uncomfortable topic: Korean society. Specifically he argues that Koreans don't care a damn about anybody not in what they consider their own social group or clan. Characters demonize The Other constantly, ignoring the plight of their fellow humans while paradoxically cursing the unfeeling world in which they live. The city of Seoul is seen as vast, inhuman, and uncaring, with static long shots of massive buildings dwarfing the characters we are so invested in. Each of those characters is human and has a heart, but they tend to keep it to themselves.

The narrative initially centers around Ryu (Shin Ha-kyun), a deaf-mute factory worker taking care of his dying sister.  His sister is in need of a kidney transplant, and on a seemingly eternal waiting list. Laid off from his job, desperate to help his sister, Ryu contacts his friendly neighborhood organ thieves (Who helpfully plaster "Need Organs?" flyers on mens room walls in a characteristically dark joke). Sadly, they screw Ryu over and leave him broke, naked and minus a kidney in an abandoned warehouse. Even worse, a donor suddenly appears, which would be great if Ryu weren't suddenly penniless.

Ryu's girlfriend Yeong-mi (Bae Doo-na, recently seen in "Cloud Atlas") is a radical leftist, who half-heartedly hands out flyers for a terrorist group that may or may not actually exist. She claims that the capitalist system is to blame for Ryu's troubles, specifically the executive who laid him off. She proposes they kidnap the executive's kid for ransom. In her mind, this is simple wealth redistribution, nothing will happen to the kid, and in the end the parents will probably love their child more afterwards. Ryu argues that as a recently laid-off employee, he'd be the first person they'd suspect. So they kidnap another executive's kid instead, because they're all fatcats after all.

Anyone who's seen a movie before can tell that this will go spectacularly wrong, and that the kid will die. What isn't expected is the film's shift of protagonist to the child's bereaved father. Dong-jin (Song Kang-ho, established here as a Park regular) is not the fatcat they assumed him to be. In fact he's nearly broke, leads a failling business, and is divorced from his wife. The death of his daughter is the straw that breaks him. Overcome by misery, and driven by a need to extract revenge, he seeks out those responsible for his daughter's death.

The brilliance of this plot is that nobody is innocent. By presenting Korean society as an uncaring agent of chaos, every character can plausibly claim that somebody else is responsible for their misery. Yet every one of them reaches at least one point where they are faced with a choice between pursuing vengeance and just walking away. None choose correctly. Thus begins an ever descending vortex of horror that eventually consumes everyone.

Park's direction is a stylistic breakthrough. This is the first film of his that is clearly the work of an auteur, though his later films would be much less detached and distant. Long takes and long shots abound, without the hyperactive flourishes that would appear in "Oldboy". "Mr Vengeance" does introduce viewers to Park's taste for particularly queasy acts of violence in grand fashion, peaking with one character being stabbed in the neck, falling to the ground and losing control of their bowels. For the most part, the director doesn't show more than is necessary, letting off-camera screaming and horrifying reaction shots do the talking. Though what is seen is plenty, not flinching when displaying the messy after-effects of violence and trauma.

Park's best directorial trick is a fixation on cutting between close ups and long shots to contrast the emotional turmoil of his characters with the cosmic insignificance of what they're going through. The scene where Dong-jin first sees his dead daughter at a crime scene is shot from so far back that you can see the entire investigation happening at once.  Only in a tiny part of the frame, if you're really looking, can you see Dong-jin screaming and weeping in agony. His screams are distant enough to become ambient noise, until Park brutally cuts to a close-up of his tear strewn face, the wailing suddenly overtaking the entire soundtrack before cutting out as the long shot resumes.

It's this focus on the emotional consequences of violence that elevates "Mr Vengeance" above mere brutality. Every death is mourned by somebody, and in the end, we aren't rooting for anyone to win, just for everyone to go home and move on. Yet the plot is so intricate and fascinating that it's a certain kind of pleasure just to watch it unwind. The entire film keeps the audience in a loop of thinking "Good god, that's horrifying! Then what happened?!?"

While "Sympathy for Mr Vengeance" will never play well for multiplex audiences, I believe that it is Park's most accomplished work to date. His style has continued to evolve in future efforts, but like Paul Thomas Anderson's "Magnolia" (similarly the result of young talent given infinite resources), I don't believe Park could ever make a movie like this that was better than this. As depressing as it is, it's compulsively watchable, and the screenplay is a thing of beauty.


Other films directed by Park Chan-wook:


The Moon... is the Sun's Dream (1992)
Trio (1997)
Joint Security Area (2000)
Sympathy for Mr Vengeance (2002)
Oldboy (2003)
Lady Vengeance (2005)
I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK (2006)
Thirst (2009)
Stoker (2013)

Movie Review: "JSA: Joint Security Area"

Today I'm beginning a retrospective of the films of Park Chan-Wook, up to but not including his latest, "Stoker". His first two movies ("The Moon is the Sun's Dream" and "Trio") are impossible to find, likely due to the director's own wishes. As far as most people are concerned, his directorial career begins in 2000 with "JSA: Joint Security Area"

Today many are unaware that the Korean war is still going on. The armistice that "ended" the war was never converted to a foreign peace treaty, and the North claims that even the armistice itself is invalid. The DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) is one of the scariest places on earth. Both sides put their tallest soldiers at the front lines to stare at each other just in case anybody makes a move. Were full war to resume, they would all presumably die. Both North and South have a show village complete with houses (and in the South's case, actual residents) meant to broadcast to the enemy how much greater life is on the other side of the border. Bullhorns blast propaganda over enemy lines. And citizens and visitors are bused in daily by both sides to sightsee in an ethically troubling spectacle

Meanwhile people continue to die on both sides in sporadic conflicts. In the first scene of Park Chan-Wook's "JSA: Joint Security Area" (2000), gunfire erupts in a North Korean guard shack near the border. According to the North, a South Korean soldier crossed the border and went berserk, killing several Northern guards. The accused soldier claims to have been knocked out and kidnapped while taking a leak, killing or wounding his captors while escaping. Both sides threaten violent retaliation. In an attempt to get to the bottom of things, the neutral UN observers send an investigator in the form of Sophie (Lee Young-ae).

While Sophie is ethnically Korean she is culturally Swiss, which makes her an outsider in her "native" country. Her neutral co-workers give her context in English, helpfully serving as an entry point for foreign audiences without seeming like a cheap sop. My one complaint with this device is that the English is spoken with a variety of thick accents (Korean, Swiss, who knows what else) without subtitles... not easy for American ears to parse. Thankfully the Korean mostly takes over after the first 10 minutes.

Unsurprisingly, both sides are lying, though to what extent and why is the film's real mystery. As Sophie untangles the plot, we see flashbacks of what has transpired. Seargeant Lee (Lee Byung-hun), a southern soldier, accidentally steps across the poorly marked border and onto a landmine. Afraid to move, he cries out in desperation to a few passing Northern soldiers, including the world-weary Seargent Oh (Song Kang-ho). Taking pity on Lee, the soldiers save his life and tell him to sneak back home.

This act of kindness eventually leads to a cross-border friendship between four guards. Sneaking across to meet in an unused bunker, their scenes together dramatize the true nature of the division between North and South. None of the soldiers bear each other any particular ill will, and they all wish for eventual peace (though under their side's banner of course). The rants and threats of their respective governments seem to mean little as they shoot the shit with nothing better to do.

The Southern soldiers smuggle contraband across to their friends in the form of bootleg audio cassettes and moon pies (a clear indicator of the American presence in the South). Oh proclaims his love of these glorious desserts, as Lee points out that he could have all the moon pies he wanted if he were to defect. Immediately a chilling silence descends on the room. Oh spits the moon pie out into his hand. "I'm only going to say this once, so listen well. My dream is that one day our republic makes the best damn sweets on this peninsula. Got it?". The subject is never broached again.

At some point this fragile charade is shattered, and I will not spoil how, but it all leads up to the opening shootout. In the present, Lee and Oh both have a vested interest in the truth not being known, as both would certainly be executed for treason. What is shocking is how neither side's leaders particularly want the truth discovered either. Long before Sophie made her entrance, both sides decided what the truth was and postured accordingly. Facts would upset the propaganda.

Unlike Park's future works, the direction of "JSA" is conventional, lacking his typical stylistic excesses. This fits the story, however, as it is a message film attempting to reach as many people as possible. Yet it's all well done with some very evocative shots. The best may be a scene tracking back and forth across a bridge, showing only the soldiers' feet as one tries to convince the other to sneak across the border with him.

Other scenes are tonally tricky, but Park nails them. One shows two platoons from either side lining up in the forest, as their captains light cigarettes and communicate wordlessly. Clearly this is a buried olive branch, disguised under a layer of intimidation. In the film's most intense scene, Lee and Oh are cross examined in the meeting room that straddles the border, and Lee is on the verge of spilling the beans entirely.

This scene is really the key to the entire film, and an excellent showcase for Song Kang-ho, my favorite Korean actor. The character of Seargeant Oh is the most interesting by far, and many of his scenes require him to say one thing and mean another. He's also the most level-headed of the fraternizing soldiers, taking charge when emotions threaten to overrun the fragile peace. In this case he manages to cause a diversion that saves everybody's skins, by upending furniture and screaming out his hatred for his secret friend, loudly praising Kim Jong-Il and condemning the South in a hearbreaking display.

Many Westerners wonder how North Koreans can appear so brainwashed by their dictator. One popular theory is that many know full well the tragedy of their situation, but only show it in secret or behind a mask of adoration. When the nation wept at Kim Jong-Il's funeral, we have to take their word as to what they were really crying about.

"JSA" is required viewing for anyone with even a passing interest in Korea. Neither side is given a free pass: despite the more open aggression of the North's stance, an early scene shows a Southern general's frothing desire to kill communists. The relationship between the soldiers rings true to a nation that was a single cultural entity until it was ripped apart by foreign superpowers waging a proxy war. Some would argue that Park only came into his own as a great director with his next film, but that seems unfair to me. Not all great films have to be flashy, and from the acting up, "JSA" is excellent.


Other films directed by Park Chan-wook:


The Moon... is the Sun's Dream (1992)
Trio (1997)
Joint Security Area (2000)
Sympathy for Mr Vengeance (2002)
Oldboy (2003)
Lady Vengeance (2005)
I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK (2006)
Thirst (2009)
Stoker (2013)

Total Thrash! Warbringer is Awesome

I like music that kicks my ass, and band does it better these days than Warbringer. You know you're in for a good time when a band's album cover shows a tank driving over a mountain of skulls with "WAR WITHOUT END" written in blood.

Thrash metal is easily my favorite genre of music, and I hope to discuss it at length in a later post. In brief, it's music to stir up mosh pits, and it tends to favor modular guitar riffs underneath fast, melodic guitar solos.  Good thrash hits a sweet spot between melody and chaos, and Warbringer scratch the itch like almost nobody else. Start with the chugging riffs of Exodus. Add the intricate, melodic soloing of testament. Bring to a boil, adding a screaming vocalist so powerful that you wonder how he still has a functioning throat. Start a circle pit, add moshing to taste. 

Thrash bands tend to write about only a few general topics, and as you can guess Warbringer likes war an awful lot. On their debut record they stuck to that topic almost exclusively, and they're one hell of a good fit for it. The music is violent as hell (as titles like "Systematic Genocide" and "Wake Up... Destroy" would imply), but the riffs and solos are melodic enough to stick in your brain for long after hearing them.  It's a good thing too, as the lead singer's unceasing screaming leaves little doubt as to the band's intents re: your eardrums.

I was afraid that Warbringer would be tapped out of ideas after that first record, but all three of their albums to date are excellent in slightly different ways.  They even branch out lyrically, while remaining true to the violent, unflinching ethos of the band.  While you won't find the confessionals of Megadeth or the philosophizing of vintage Metallica, songs like "Shattered Like Glass" prove that Warbringer has no end of tricks up their sleeves.

Here's Warbringer's official page http://warbringermusic.com/fr_home.cfm which opens a music player at the bottom of your browser.  Skip ahead to the song "Total War" to get the best possible introduction to this excellent band.  The moment the vocalist bellows out the title is a perfect one, and that's when I fell in love.

Movie Review - "We Need To Talk About Kevin" (2011)

I have a fascination with drama-as-horror films. I frequently seek the rush of being truly made a bit uncomfortable. It's rare that a film upsets me to the point where I can't sleep, and "We Need To Talk About Kevin" (2011, dir. Lynne Ramsay) is the first of that kind in quite a while.  In this case, however, it's not a compliment. Feeling discomfort from a dark dramatic film can be cathartic, a way of dipping my toe in the waters of tragedy and emerging unscathed. "Kevin" goes 90% of the way there, but a crucial 10% is missing: that element that makes the experience something more than a vicarious torture box.  By the end, I felt let down and a bit cheated.

"Kevin" is not a particularly horrific picture, given the standards I play by (I liked "Irreversible" for heck's sake). The film feels drenched in blood, though most of it is metaphorical. From almost the opening shot the color red is splayed across the frame constantly, surrounding Eva (Tilda Swinton) everywhere she goes. It's an obvious but effective way to show that she cannot escape the trauma at the heart of the picture and her life.  The specifics of the trauma are left a mystery until the end, though the outline is pretty easy to guess early on.

"We Need to Talk About Kevin"

What's clear from the very beginning is that Eva is a broken woman and has been for years. Her son Kevin was something she wasn't prepared for (we see her looking a little too distant in pre-natal yoga classes, and practically dead to the world after giving birth).  As a baby  Kevin would do nothing but scream at her, though he appeared to instantly calm down when anyone else held him.  Her awkwardness dealing with him seems to feed his innate sociopathic tendencies, and as we watch him mature his hatred for his mother is as clear as day. He cruelly cuts off everything she says with "nanna-nanna-nanna" mocking. He refuses to use the toilet until the age of six despite understanding the concept completely, solely to torture her with constant diaper changes. And so on. For her part, Eva doesn't handle this well, occasionally being abusive.  But Kevin seems to expect this, and feeds off of it.

By the time he reaches his teenage years Kevin dominates the entire house, cowing his furious mother into submission by ensuring that her husband never sees him at his worst.  John C. Reilly plays the textbook "buddy dad" who is incredibly sweet, but leaves all the tough parenting to his wife, and is eager to maintain his image of Kevin as just your usual growing boy.  In a heartbreaking scene Kevin agrees to let his mother take him out to dinner, only to run through his complete script for how the entire meal's empty conversation will take place, leaving Eva to eat in painful, awkward silence.

Kevin's gift for manipulation is so powerful that it seems provided by Satan himself, and echos of The Omen  or The Good Son are certainly here. Indeed, it's a shame that this film doesn't seem to aim any higher than an artsy take on such "demon child" thrillers. It's made clear that on some level Kevin's climactic act of violence is what he views as the ultimate pain he can inflict on his mother, and I think that this is where the film lost me.

The lifelong conflict between mother and son is very effective, but having it capped off with a mass murder doesn't work. It's cheap because the entire event is staged solely as an act against Eva. Events like this wreck communities. We never get to know anything about the kids in his school, how he relates to them, and even the event itself is handled "tastefully" so that we don't see the violence as it happens.

In a way, that makes it worse. Gus Van Sant's great film "Elephant" (2003) was also about a mass school killing, but was entirely different in tone. The killers in that film felt anonymous, not much different from the others in the school. We saw the violence, but it wasn't sensationalized. We were confronted with the lifeless bodies of people we had come to know over the mellow first two-thirds of the movie. It even ended mid-massacre, so there was no conventional ending, no neat conclusion.

"Elephant"

Kevin, on the other hand, gets his chance to pose. We see him on TV chatting in cynical adolescent fashion about how everyone's listening to him now because of what he did, like some teenage Mickey Knox. But he seems to be running the game from the very beginning. He sure doesn't come across as misunderstood. During the climax he seems triumphant. The film's ultimate twist reeks of cruelty, not because of what happens, but because of how little the film cares about the actual victims.

On the level of sheer technique, "We Need to Talk About Kevin" is excellent.  The unorthodox editing shuffles the chronology of the story rather brilliantly to mix the past and the present in Eva's shattered psyche. Through the length of the film we see how the town has villified her since the tragedy, and how she seems to willingly accept the blame. Tilda Swinton is one of my favorite actresses, and she's perfectly cast here, though she's kind of "doing a Tilda" if that makes sense. Great work, though she's done it before in better movies.

The final scene presents a flimsy attempt to humanize Kevin, or possibly to show that there's been some seed of growth in Kevin during his months in prison. But the climax is straight out of any number of lesser thrillers, and in the film's best moments director Lynne Ramsay shows that she's capable of much more insightful observations. It's a shame that Kevin is so one-dimensional, and that it all ends up the tale of a woman psychologically destroyed by her little hell-spawn  All this talent and quality in service to a worldview so sophomoric.