Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho, 2013)

[Michael Kerpan]

feihong -- your "description" of BONG Joon-ho sounds like an almost perfect fit for KIM Ji-woon -- but really seems to be a pretty "curdled" view of Bong's work and methods.

[feihong]

Well I do see the two filmmakers as more closely related to one another than they are to many of the other filmmakers in the new Korean cinema. But how am i curdling Bong's work and methods? I assume you mean that I'm ignoring or not seeing some considerable subtlety in Bong's work which, if I understood it, would cause me to re-evaluate Snowpiercer?

[Michael Kerpan]

feihong -- I can't judge your opinion of Snowpiercer (which I _might_ get to see in the course of the next week), but was commenting on your remarks on his more general practices (if your critique was not more general, then I misunderstood).

(Calling him Spielbergesque is fighting words to me) ;~}

[repeat]

But how am i curdling Bong's work and methods? I assume you mean that I'm ignoring or not seeing some considerable subtlety in Bong's work which, if I understood it, would cause me to re-evaluate Snowpiercer?

In fact I would like to suggest the opposite: I think you might have been reading too much into his work, hence your disappointment with the new film because it doesn't live up to the expectations you've built up. It's almost as if the Cahiers had suddenly backlashed against the latest Hawks picture for not being able to find the things which he famously denied having ever meant to put in!

Bong has been consistent and unambiguous enough about his motives for choosing Transperceneige (see for example Cahiers #696 or this Film Comment interview): he was interested in the narrow tubular shape of the train and what sorts of action could be staged within that environment, even going as far as to state that "the film is about experiencing this unique setting of the train and enjoying the thrilling action, the cinematic tension".

But apart from questions of taste, I think there is a hell of an interesting conversation about tone to be had here (also pertinent to what's going on in the Pawlikowski thread) - I'll try to explain more thoroughly what I meant by Bong's tonal manipulation on the previous page when I have 30 minutes off, but just a couple of quick points:

I said "tonal shifts and jolts", you said "sliding tonal structure", which, while an apt description of what happens in for example Pola X, is an entirely unappropriate wording for what's going on in Memories of Murder, The Host or Snowpiercer. I agree that what Bong is doing with the awkward comic moments etc. could be thought of as coming out of Hollywood (especially Hawks), though I'm not familiar enough with Spielberg's oeuvre to comment on that particular similarity. From Peckinpah I only have two atypical films (Pat Garrett and Cable Hogue) in recent memory, but I'd describe his films as tonally very even (as you pointed out), devoid of actual shifts or modulation - it's just that his overall tone is a strange melange, which I guess is a way of striving for a similar effect.

From the same Film Comment interview:

Whether it’s a genre or a certain emotion, the effort of maintaining the same tone is foreign and weird to me. I don’t get it. The mixture of all these different things is more like life. I think keeping the same tone throughout is the wrong approach.

[HistoryProf]

Huzzah! Weinstein caved and the U.S. gets the director's cut. It will now be a limited/platform release instead of a wide one, but I can't imagine that this was ever going to be a multiplex blockbuster in this country.

Can anyone clarify the dissonance between this piece saying they caved to the 2 1/2 hour cut that Bong submitted and the US release being 126 minutes? That makes it sound like it is indeed the Weinstein cut?

A wide release was in the contract, until the director turned in a cut of just beyond two and one-half hours. The truce is basically that the director keeps the length of his action film but instead of a wide release, it will be a platform release with a roll out. I am told the picture is not being dumped.

[Michael Kerpan]

I think Bong has been preternaturally effective in adapting the source material (which I find fundamentally unsatisfactory). One still must overlook all elements of plausibility, but Bong has created a story and characters that are far more interesting than one could reasonably expect. Not precisely my kind of film, but very good for what it is. Glad to see KO Ah-sung have such a big part.

[repeat]

If there's anything I love about New Korean Cinema and Bong's work in particular it's his deft command of tone and his ability to switch on a dime between seemingly incompatible moments/feelings

Totally agree with this - Bong is definitely one of the contemporary masters of tonal modulation, and Snowpiercer for me was a return to Host form in that respect

I substantially disagree with the claim that Bong Joon-ho is a master of some sort of sliding tonal structure within his films. Tonal variation in a drama is a basic way to contrast scenes, and many filmmakers reflect that skill in more subtle and illuminating ways than Bong does (...) Peckinpah was a real master of tonal contrast in many of his films, and that that tonal contrast came from the sympathy of the performances, from Peckinpah's eye for composition...and only considerably less so from the cutting and pacing of his pictures. The fact that the tonal color of scenes in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid are consistent no matter which cut of the film you watch suggest that this is something you create when you film, much more than something you do afterwards. To my eyes, Bong handles tone the way Steven Spielberg handles it--they both possess a sophisticated sense of pace and rhythm within a scene, but they each display an attitude towards tonal construction that is quintessentially Hollywood in its origin, so that tone becomes for them a question of cutting and rhythm, rather than an attitude expressed through imagery and choreography.

What I understand by tone is the synergetic result of every single element that goes into a film at any given moment, including, but not limited to, performance, dialogue, storyline, framing, camera movement, music/sound, lighting, editing, etc. etc. - there's absolutely no way to reduce it to merely an effect of just editing, pacing or imagery by themselves. Consequently, a moment of comic relief (for example a joke or an awkward character) or a tragic or gruesome event (say, a violent death) does not constitute a shift or even a rupture in tone per se. But a director interested in tonal manipulation can use those kinds of events to bring about a change in the entire tone of the film, and that's what I think Bong excels at.

Manipulation and control are the key words here: with a bad director, the attempt to avoid boredom by introducing diverse elements often results in involuntary fluctuation of tone. Many (re)viewers seem to consider an even tone as an axiomatic virtue, and interpret all tonal fluctuations as faults in a film: in other words, they can not tell intentional tonal manipulation from lousy tone control - hence the totally misunderstood and misused term "tone deaf" that has become commonplace in facetious film reviews. With a film like The Host or Snowpiercer, at least if you're open-minded or sympathetic to what the director is doing, you never get that sense of losing control: on the contrary, you feel how he revels in the possibilities of introducing these wildly different emotions and knows exactly how to realize them.

As to Peckinpah, I've only seen about half a dozen of his films, but my impression is that his tone as basically ironic (similar to, say, Tarantino). And while he throws together seemingly disparate things, he rarely breaks away from that tone to a dead serious one, which would be required for genuine tonal contrast. I think there's an attempt in Pat Garrett to move towards serious tragedy towards the end (from the "Knocking on Heaven's Door" scene onwards I guess), but I don't feel it really works: the story gets sad but the overall tone stays the same. (Mind you I've only seen the 2005 edit, but like you pointed out the tone is so consistent that the different edits probably don't differ very much in that respect). Whereas with Bong, a tragic or comic event is a trigger for an immediate shift in film tone: the entire film assumes a different feel (or "switches genres" as some prefer to describe it), without striking the viewer as awkward or throwing them out of the story. If you were to cut The Host up in little isolated pieces and showed them to a bunch different crowds, you would get a set of completely different audience expectations, one thinking it's a slapstick action comedy, the other one thinking it's a seriously hair-raising horror movie, one for family drama etc. Bong excels at the game exactly because he takes all these different elements seriously and constructs his scenes with care and attention to tone, and on top of that manages to move seamlessly from one to another. I wish I'd seen more Spielberg to be able to compare, but if you can provide examples of a similar approach in his films I'd be anxious to investigate further!

[matrixschmatrix]

I enjoyed this quite a lot, for any number of reasons- the most basic of which, beyond that it's a movie in which 2+ hours feels fairly quick, and there's no particular piece of it that feels like anything other than good cinema, is that it's a political allegory where each turn in the events depicted manages to deepen, rather than betray or muddy, the ideology coming across. In that respect, it easily outclasses good willed but muddled attempts like Elysium, and and far surpasses the core-Hollywood equivalent (movies like The Dark Knight or Captain America 2, which seem always to avoid making any definitive statement of outlook so as to avoid alienating a potential market segment- and thus just double back on themselves constantly or undercut everything shown by making it a case of a few bad eggs or whatever.) Good politics alone don't make a movie fun, of course, but it's very satisfying to get a movie that works and has a self-coherent outlook.

The actual worldbuilding is significantly less coherent- there's a lot of stuff in the science of the science fiction that seems silly at best- but it's also broadly irrelevant, as the global warming and infinite motion train engine angles of the movie are basically just an excuse to get to the setting it wants. I do think Bong displays a specific type of tonal mastery that came up strongly in The Host, but is also familiar from Gilliam films- deadly serious scenes with an element that should totally break the mood via a laugh, but instead just set you up to feel that much worse. Gilliam described it in some detail in the Brazil commentary, saying that one of his goals was to make you choke on a laugh in most of the nastier scenes, and it feels like something Bong very much picked up (the climactic Chris Evans monologue previously referenced walks a razor's edge between unbelievable horror and the risible, and it's hard to believe that the near-silliness of it wasn't intended.)

In a few ways, it feels very much a piece with other science fiction/action movies- elements of The Matrix

Spoiler

and particularly the much-despised Matrix sequels, in the film-ending revelation that the entire rebellion was a setup designed in collaboration by the oracular older person we meet near the beginning and the big bad Jehovah figure we've been moving towards

Hunger Games

Spoiler

in the forms of decadence practiced by the rich, and the general sense that the rich have become so distanced from the poor that they are willing to make bloodsport of children without any twinge of conscience

and a touch of Star Wars

Spoiler

although the central importance of the son overcoming the mistakes of the father is undercut both because Evans is no relation here, and because he's fundamentally not even the real hero of the piece

but it's nonetheless coherent, both visually and textually, as long as one isn't too concerned with the logic of the machines and how they work- and honestly, I'm happy to ignore such questions in a film where the logic of people seems cuttingly incisive.

It may be a movie I admire more than I like in some ways- there's a certain dourness about a lot of it particularly when Tilda Swinton isn't on screen, which makes sense for the kind of movie it is but nonetheless keeps me a bit at arm's length- but it's easily my second favorite film starring Tilda Swinton and John Hurt I've seen this year.

[solaris72]

Huzzah! Weinstein caved and the U.S. gets the director's cut. It will now be a limited/platform release instead of a wide one, but I can't imagine that this was ever going to be a multiplex blockbuster in this country.

Can anyone clarify the dissonance between this piece saying they caved to the 2 1/2 hour cut that Bong submitted and the US release being 126 minutes? That makes it sound like it is indeed the Weinstein cut?

A wide release was in the contract, until the director turned in a cut of just beyond two and one-half hours. The truce is basically that the director keeps the length of his action film but instead of a wide release, it will be a platform release with a roll out. I am told the picture is not being dumped.

My best guess is that Deadline misreported the original length- that it should've read just beyond two hours instead of just beyond two and one-half hours. Twitch reported it that way, and they've been reporting on Snowpiercer since long before the film went into production so I'd bet on their accuracy in the matter.

[mfunk9786]

The worldwide release length is 126 minutes, Solaris is right.

[HistoryProf]

Good to know. Saw this tonight and am glad to see i'm not the only one that couldn't escape thinking this was Super Gilliam in many ways. It's like Bong set out to make a Terry Gilliam film in a bizarre dystopian future utilizing absurd leaps in logic to get to the train 17 years post snowpocalypse. I quite enjoyed it.....I think. It is indeed extremely cynical, and I also thought the shot

Spoiler

of the Polar Bear at the end was by far its most redeeming moment. I was deathly afraid that a few humans would appear on the high ridge to show that humanity had indeed not died out and these survivors had come to save the day.

As for Chris Evans' abrupt switch at the end upon the unsavory discovery he makes, I took that to be a direct tie in to his revelation just prior to entering the engine room. The thing he hated most about himself was basically set before him one last time, and he was going to make an effort to redeem himself by doing what he did.

Ultimately the entire story is so completely unbelievable you have to just go for the ride and appreciate the truly cynical absurdity of it all. It doesn't matter than nuclear power would provide heat islands or subterranean havens would surely exist and allow people to survive. That's all beside the point. I'm not entirely sure what exactly Bong is trying to say with this spectacle, but my sense is that it isn't terribly nice. And in the end the set pieces add up to a very entertaining couple of hours.

[jbeall]

The actual worldbuilding is significantly less coherent- there's a lot of stuff in the science of the science fiction that seems silly at best- but it's also broadly irrelevant, as the global warming and infinite motion train engine angles of the movie are basically just an excuse to get to the setting it wants. I do think Bong displays a specific type of tonal mastery that came up strongly in The Host, but is also familiar from Gilliam films- deadly serious scenes with an element that should totally break the mood via a laugh, but instead just set you up to feel that much worse. Gilliam described it in some detail in the Brazil commentary, saying that one of his goals was to make you choke on a laugh in most of the nastier scenes, and it feels like something Bong very much picked up (the climactic Chris Evans monologue previously referenced walks a razor's edge between unbelievable horror and the risible, and it's hard to believe that the near-silliness of it wasn't intended.)

In a few ways, it feels very much a piece with other science fiction/action movies- elements of [...] and a touch of Star Wars

Spoiler

although the central importance of the son overcoming the mistakes of the father is undercut both because Evans is no relation here, and because he's fundamentally not even the real hero of the piece

but it's nonetheless coherent, both visually and textually, as long as one isn't too concerned with the logic of the machines and how they work- and honestly, I'm happy to ignore such questions in a film where the logic of people seems cuttingly incisive.

Especially Star Wars, given

Spoiler

that Curtis sacrifices his arm to save a child, just as Gilliam had before him, so there's the Vader/Luke disfigurment parallel.

FWIW, not all of the AMC cinemas near me had this, so I had to drive ~15 miles to see it.

Anywhoo, I really liked it, especially the worldbuilding you reference here. One question, though:

Spoiler

Who the hell maintains the track? I know the train only passes over the track once a year, but in those climatic conditions, I would think the track might need some repairs after eighteen years!

[matrixschmatrix]

Spoiler

Given that one of the setpieces is the train smashing ice that had fallen on to the track, one imagines that nobody does- but with locked down weather, not much temperature variation, and supposedly no life moving around, maybe that wouldn't be so much of an issue.

[jbeall]

Sure, and while I'm not a climatologist, it seemed as if

Spoiler

it was so freakin' cold until this last year, according to "Nam," that there probably wouldn't be much in the way of precipition, leading one to wonder how those ice slides managed to get on the tracks in that one and only area of the circuit. But surely bridges as large as the Yekaterina would require maintenance in even the best of conditions.

These are relatively minor complaints; the plot holes in Prometheus or Star Trek: Into Darkness are far more glaring.

Further pondering a couple of unanswered questions:

Spoiler

what happens to the children working on the gears once they've grown too big for that particular labor? Do they get promoted to the rave car? There was a striking contrast between the haute-bourgeois folks in some cars--e.g. the orchard car--and the ravers in the last cars before the engine, and given that the residents of the caboose are the ones makin' babies, according to Wilford, I wonder if their wasted nihilism, maintained in close proximity to the actual engine, is by design. Just wondering.

[mfunk9786]

This film has vastly improved in my estimation upon a second viewing. I plan to write more later, but even the stuff that doesn't work the first time around becomes merely endearingly bizarre the second time around, which improves the overall experience significantly. One quick observation: I don't know if enough has been made about how great Chris Evans is in this film. Really a revelatory performance.

[wllm995]

My second viewing was much more enjoyable since I ordered in a Region 3 Thai DVD of it with optional English subs which showed all of the dialog - including all of the Korean.

With the addition of that dialog; much more of the movie made sense; particularly the motivations of Song Kang-ho's character.

And I agree that Chris Evans's work in this film was excellent.

[mfunk9786]

Theatrically, is the Korean dialogue subtitled? I can't imagine it being all that necessary until Evans' long conversation with the electrician late in the film, but still - I'm curious.

[Michael Kerpan]

Theatrically, is the Korean dialogue subtitled? I can't imagine it being all that necessary until Evans' long conversation with the electrician late in the film, but still - I'm curious.

I believe everything that is not otherwise translated (by the auto-translator or the daughter) is subtitled.

[wllm995]

Unfortunately that was not the case when I saw the movie in the theater.

[criterion10]

That's bizarre -- I saw this in theaters too and Michael Kerpan is right (at least, according to my memory).

[wllm995]

Nope; the many monologues and conversations with his daughter by Song's character (those not translated by the electronic hand held device) were not translated at all - which was why seeing the DVD with it all translated was such a revelation.

Must have been an early print - or maybe just my local theater.

[Michael Kerpan]

In some cases, the daughter's translation was a lot briefer than the back and forth between her father and herself leading to her translation. But I definitely can't recall any Korean conversation directly between father and daughter that did not have subtitles.

[wllm995]

In some cases, the daughter's translation was a lot briefer than the back and forth between her father and herself leading to her translation. But I definitely can't recall any Korean conversation directly between father and daughter that did not have subtitles.

Yes, that and all of his talking to Chris Evans's character that was not translated by the hand held device (which was quite a lot; actually).

[Michael Kerpan]

Yes, that and all of his talking to Chris Evans's character that was not translated by the hand held device (which was quite a lot; actually).

Right before the end?

That is definitely subbed in current prints. If it wasn't in the one you saw, someone screwed up.

Which Asian Blu did you get (and does it subtitle the English dialog?)

Michael

[wllm995]

Yes, that and all of his talking to Chris Evans's character that was not translated by the hand held device (which was quite a lot; actually).

Right before the end?

That is definitely subbed in current prints. If it wasn't in the one you saw, someone screwed up.

Which Asian Blu did you get (and does it subtitle the English dialog?)

Michael

I'm sure somebody screwed up - as it makes a tremendous difference!

Region 3 Thai DVD (with English sub-titles for ALL of the dialog... ):