Park Chan-wook

[mfunk9786]

Artificial Eye is releasing The Handmaiden on blu-ray in both a release with just the theatrical cut and one with both the theatrical cut and an extended (Director's?) cut in August.

Svet is head over heels for it, but it is indeed Region B locked so YMMV

Not exactly sure how 73 minutes of extras are worthy of 5 stars (though the interview with Park sounds nice), but I doubt Pro-B watches them anyway

[tenia]

I doubt Pro-B watches them anyway

Reading how he describes them, he seems to have watched these ones at least.
As for the rating, I suppose the inclusion of the EC might have weighted on it which, combined with the 73 min of extras, would explain the 5/5.

[DarkImbecile]

Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen indicates that Park will be adapting his novel The Sympathizer as a series for A24

[DarkImbecile]

“Life is But a Dream”, a 21-minute short film from Park for Apple’s “Shot on an iPhone” series

[Calvin]

Plain Archive have announced a 4K UHD release of a director's cut of The Little Drummer Girl

The Little Drummer Girl: Director’s Cut - 4K Transfer
We’ve described the video as 4K ‘Native’. According to the LAB tasked with DI, it means: NOT 2K Upscaled.
The Little Drummer Girl was shot in 3.4K(source). While putting the Director’s Cut together, the 3.4K source was slightly upconverted to 4K DI. A mere 1% of the show has been 2K upscaled due to CGI.
The original televised version shown by the BBC and AMC is 2K DI. The IMDB page states 2K DI, which reflects the broadcast version. The Little Drummer Girl: Director’s Cut is available exclusively from Watcha, a Korean streaming service and Plain Archive.

[yoloswegmaster]

For any PCW fans who wants to complete his filmography, a 1080p copy of 'Trio' has surfaced online despite PCW wanting to destroy all copies of it (though I'm not too sure if this is actually true or if its just a rumour).

[A Tempted Christ]

This is fantastic news! Apparently it was playing on a Korean streaming service called WAVVE and someone ripped it from there.



Considering the picture quality and the correct aspect ratio (in contrast with 2014's The Moon Is... The Sun's Dream Blu-ray), I'd say this is sourced from a new restoration. While it is true that he considers JSA his debut (he said people think JSA is his first film and he prefers to keep it that way), I don't think he's ever said that he wants to wipe his first two films out of existence. He may not oversee their restoration and re-release but if they ever ask for his approval, he'd probably give his blessing.

[yoloswegmaster]

This is fantastic news! Apparently it was playing on a Korean streaming service called WAVVE and someone ripped it from there.



Considering the picture quality and the correct aspect ratio (in contrast with 2014's The Moon Is... The Sun's Dream Blu-ray), I'd say this is sourced from a new restoration. While it is true that he considers JSA his debut (he said people think JSA is his first film and he prefers to keep it that way), I don't think he's ever said that he wants to wipe his first two films out of existence. He may not oversee their restoration and re-release but if they ever ask for his approval, he'd probably give his blessing.

Compare that screenshot with this one and you'll see what people had to go through just to watch this:



I only made the claim about him wanting to remove all traces of his first 2 films because a bunch of letterboxd users keep repeating it in their reviews but I'm struggling to find anything that will back that claim. Do you know what the quality of the subtitles for the 1080p version is like? I know the subs for the VHS copy was considered to be poor, so I wonder if it's the same for the new version.

[theflirtydozen]

I only made the claim about him wanting to remove all traces of his first 2 films because a bunch of letterboxd users keep repeating it in their reviews but I'm struggling to find anything that will back that claim. Do you know what the quality of the subtitles for the 1080p version is like? I know the subs for the VHS copy was considered to be poor, so I wonder if it's the same for the new version.

I can answer this. My wife was the one who made the translation for the subtitles. Naturally, she was also one of the first reviews on Letterboxd. She is probably the English-language origin (at least on LB) of this factoid and I'd assume most reviews there got it from her.

I brought it up again to her after seeing your post and she dug up this link (in Korean) where she originally read that. However, she said that website is more like a wikia-type site, so PCW wanting to "destroy every copy of the first two" should be taken with a massive grain of salt. She actually couldn't find any other sources with that sentiment, but in this interview (also in Korean), PCW's statements are more in line with just considering JSA as his "first" film and hoping people continue to think that.

[flyonthewall2983]

Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen indicates that Park will be adapting his novel The Sympathizer as a series for A24

Watching this now it’s very good, just finished the episode directed by Fernando Meirelles. I started the book awhile back, think I’ll finish it up after the finale.

[Mr Sausage]

I'd always thought The Handmaiden was only loosely based on Sarah Waters' Fingersmith. Imagine my surprise to see in fact the movie follows the novel rather closely...to a point (more on that later). What's the same? First, the structure. Both are told the same way, in three parts, with the first part following Sue/Sook-hee up until she's betrayed, the second going back in time to follow Maud/Hideko from childhood up until the same point, filling in the details, and the third part charting the fallout of the story's shifting loyalties. In the novel, the first and third parts are narrated by Sue while the middle is narrated by Maud.

Also the same are many of the characteristic details. The uncle is a bookish accumulator of pornography whose lips and tongue are black from licking his pen; Maud/Hideko is bred to be his secretary and a reciter of pornography to visitors; Gentleman/The Count poses as a drawing instructor, gets the previous maid out of the way, and 'seduces' Maud/Hideko on painting excursions in which Sue/Sook-hee must carry the supplies and eventually is made to come upon a lovers' tableaux. Maud/Hideko's method of seduction is the same, feigning ignorance of sex to persuade Sue/Sook-hee into showing her. A lot of the book's memorable details are imported whole, such as Maud's gloves, the peach, the demarcation line in the book room (a large finger on the floor in the book, a snake statue in the movie), and even the crucial scene where Sue files Maud's tooth with the thimble, a moment Park wonderfully transfers from the drawing room to the bathtub to compensate for not having Waters' sensuous descriptive language. This is a pretty straight-forward adaptation.

Until it's not. It's in the third act where the film diverges completely, and this is fascinating because, despite Park's reputation for ugly and unhappy films about loss and revenge, he turns Susan Waters' deeply sad novel into something much happier and optimistic. The last act of the movie strikes me as the kind of happy ending Maud and Sue might've imagined for themselves while sitting silently in Briar manor. Park's just an old softy. He also simplifies the story in the process, which ought to sound weird given how twisty the movie is. But the novel's playing a much longer game, forwards and back, and makes you feel the heavy weight of personal history.

Other changes: Park piles on interesting and unpleasant details. Maud's uncle is a cruel monomaniac, but he has no dungeon/torture chamber, he doesn't kill anyone, he doesn't keep his old wife around as a maid/tormentor, he has no designs to marry Maud, and he never offers her up sexually let alone inflicts sado-masochistic torments on her in front of others. He is not the villain of the piece. Maud is made to read from her uncle's porn, but these are unremarkable drawing room recitations, nothing like the baroque performances of Park's film. Maud has no aunt, either, and no one hangs themselves. Maud is kept in line by being made to remember the madhouse her mother died in, part of which involves her daily task of trimming the grass and weeds from her mother's grave on the properly. Maud destroys her uncle's books on her own, without telling Sue, where Park has Sook-hee take the initiative there.

The characters are softened as well. Hideko is more likeable than Maud, as Maud has been poisoned by her imprisonment, and is only slowly made to realize she even has proper human feelings when Sue arrives (Waters' novel is, again, very sad). The Count is a more ridiculous and less threatening figure than his counterpart, Gentlemen, whose ugliness poisons everything. As for Sue/Sook-hee, the movie's third act depends on a very different interpretation of her character, turning the novel's unhappiest character into the movie's happiest. The novel has many instances of characters quietly tormenting each other, while Park makes everyone far gentler.

The BBC miniseries is more faithful in terms of setting and story, but oddly enough does not follow the book's structure. It's in three episodes, which you'd think would mean each episode takes one of the book's three sections. But, nope, rather than following first one then another character, the first episode cuts back and forth between Sue and Maud's stories from childhood until they meet. The betrayal, rather than coming at the end of part 1, where it makes the most sense, occurs nearly halfway into episode 2, after which the miniseries switches to Maud's narration and goes back in time for some explanation. This is carried off inelegantly and unintuitively. If Sue is the occasional narrator of the first half, why do we get glimpses of Maud's life in those sections and not in the sections she herself narrates, that she explicitly says will be her explanation of herself and how she came to the choices she made? By messing around with the structure, the miniseries introduces a number of problems. As to style, the miniseries embraces the grime of its social setting. Waters' novel had plenty of that, but told it in an elegant, sensual manner. Park opted for the elegance and the sensuousness when he crated his style, what with the beautiful architecture and careful, expert camera movements to capture movements, exchanged glances, etc. The miniseries goes for straightfoward social realism, with particular attention to the seediness of Sue's London home and the mouldering old rooms of Briar manor. The movie and miniseries are complementary adaptations in that way, each taking one or the other side of Waters' novel. As an adaptation, the miniseries is solid for the most part, ably directed and acted, but lacking the sheer talent that makes The Handmaiden such a standout.

I'll end with an enthusiastic recommendation for Fingersmith, which I spent the last half of my vacation reading non-stop. Not only is it endlessly entertaining and masterfully pulled off, but no one who's seen The Handmaiden has any idea how the novel ends, so there are plenty of surprises in store.

[Never Cursed]

Ahead of his next film, I dutifully watched The Moon is... the Sun's Dream to see whether Park's self-effacing and embarrassed attitude towards his early work is warranted. If I were him, I'd go one step further, make like Klaus Kinski in the aftermath of Billy Wilder's last film and pretend I wasn't involved. The film is an excellent object lesson in what makes an atrocious and self-important first feature, with every possible bad detail and green misstep working in anti-sync with each other to produce some of the creakiest, sub-thesis-level cinema ever projected. I almost feel obliged to recommend it on those grounds. Anyone who's seen enough movies can kind of already tell that there's a huge problem just on a visual level from its numerous technical faults (using the wrong film speed for places with sunlight, badly dubbed performances, an overuse of narration to cover for locations where the crew couldn't shoot sync sound) and stylistic blunders (cutting away from characters as they're about to speak, jumpcuts from failing to fully cover a scene, zooming or panning towards/away from characters when they start/stop speaking, slowing down edited scenes because the music and sound effects last longer than the footage), but it's not as though filmmakers like John Waters, Pedro Almodóvar, or any number of nouvelle vague directors similarly making a movie on a budget of ten dollars and a sandwich haven't found ways to compensate for these limitations.

But the deft, outlandish, or playful spirit that characterizes many of those earliest works and helps them gel together is painfully absent from this film. For someone who went on to make his name on kinetic and emotionally unsparing thrillers, Park's approach to a basic gangster-forbidden love setup is shockingly sentimental, emotional in the most pejorative, unformed, soupy-teenage-feelings sense of the word, with the most obvious narrative devices used to inform the audience of these emotions. I can't do much better than to list some out by rote. The POV character is a photographer (ez filmmaker stand-in, with the added "bonus" of seeing the director's favorite movies represented by posters, clips, and obvious visual quotations) who begins the film by reciting in voiceover "the story of how I got to be so sad is crazy. Let me tell you it now" and ends it by saying "Welp, that's why I'm so sad. Doesn't that suck?" before imitating the last shot of Modern Times and the most famous shot of Persona in quick succession.* His drug-dealer half-brother is played by a then-famous pop star who can't act at all and who spends the "intense" final 25 minutes of the movie imitating George Michael looking PAINED over losing his girl (complete with repetitive sax solo/caterwauling combo). His torch-singer love interest is a competent actor, but she's asked to deliver sweetheart dialogue at once florid and inane ("I feel like a butterfly flying out of its cocoon...and you should be one too...") culminating in the worst possible title drop farewell (literally "you know, they say that the moon is the sun's dream..."). Add to that a b-plot for her to be occupied with that would feel clunky if it were foisted onto Barbara Stanwyck in 1932 and she doesn't exactly become a highlight of the film. The unprocessed feelings and emotions of two screenwriters towards love, art, and obsession are clumsily painted like signs onto these three characters. Again, it's really difficult to overstate how much of a shock it is to watch this after seeing the director's more mature later work. I'm honestly intrigued to see Trio even more now knowing that he thinks it's the worst movie he ever put his name on!

*I would certainly never direct you to someone who just uploaded the whole thing to YouTube, but if you want to look at these shots in isolation, find a copy of the movie and skip to 1:39:13 and 1:40:37 respectively. Go to 1:37:20 for the title drop and 1:28:43 for peak George Michael-dom followed by the striking image of

Spoiler

a man punching his brother, who has just been gut-shot, in the face for no reason

[sabbath]

I'm honestly intrigued to see Trio even more now knowing that he thinks it's the worst movie he ever put his name on!

Where did you hear that? As a South Korean who's been his fan for over two decades, seen all his movies in the theater, attended multiple Q&As with the director, and read a lot of his interviews in Korean, I don't remember him saying that.

It is true that he dismisses his first two features nowadays,(*) but unlike The Moon Is... the Sun's Dream, which he readily admitted was a fiasco and even wrote an essay about the story behind it(**), he wasn't that harsh to Trio in the past. Not that he was proud of it, but he never said he was ashamed of it either.(***)

And while Trio was yet another commercial failure, unlike The Moon..., which literally no one cared about(****), his second feature gained a small cult following. I even met a fan who expressed disappointment that Park, once famous among young cinephiles as "the evangelist of B movies" and proved his taste by making Trio, had become too mainstream afterwards! I must admit that I haven't watched the film myself for over a decade (it wasn't available anywhere for a long time), but I vividly remember enjoying it at the theater, watching it twice in one week, laughing along with the packed audience (it was a small theater) at the film's silly humor. That is way more than what I can say about the truly abysmal experience that was The Moon...



* From an interview on Jan 21, 2017: "Do you occasionally watch or think about your debut film, The Moon Is... the Sun's Dream, starring singer Lee Seung-cheol?" / "I never watch it. It's my dark history. Whenever I have a retrospective anywhere in the world, I [or they] leave out my debut film and my second film, Trio. Many people think that JSA is my debut film, and I hope they continue to think so." In fact, this interview was the first time I heard him openly diss his second feature.

** It was conceived as a sort of microbudget indie star vehicle, which was possible because the star Lee Seung-cheol was a young, handsome, popular singer who was on probation for smoking marijuana (still illegal in South Korea, much more so back then), hence couldn't appear on public TV at that time. When the director finally met his (still super busy) star for the first time just a few days before the shooting, Lee's first words were: "So, what's it about?"

*** In 2001, on a special issue of monthly film magazine KINO titled 201 Directors We Love + @, which came out months after the big success of JSA, Park even picked his favorite scene of his from Trio and explained what he loved about it. By the way, he wasn't one of the 201 directors KINO loved. He was one of @.

**** Apparently, no critic reviewed The Moon... when it opened, so Park, who was a film critic himself at that time, reviewed his own film under a colleague's name. I couldn't find the review, but heard the director's confession about it in a June 2004 Q&A, which was a part of the first-ever retrospective on Park in South Korea after the success of Oldboy.

[Never Cursed]

** It was conceived as a sort of microbudget indie star vehicle, which was possible because the star Lee Seung-cheol was a young, handsome, popular singer who was on probation for smoking marijuana (still illegal in South Korea, much more so back then), hence couldn't appear on public TV at that time. When the director finally met his (still super busy) star for the first time just a few days before the shooting, Lee's first words were: "So, what's it about?"

**** Apparently, no critic reviewed The Moon... when it opened, so Park, who was a film critic himself at that time, reviewed his own film under a colleague's name. I couldn't find the review, but heard the director's confession about it in a June 2004 Q&A, which was a part of the first-ever retrospective on Park in South Korea after the success of Oldboy.

First, these are both hilarious.

Second, I was basing my perception of Park's opinion upon this article (autotranslated into English for me, as I don't speak Korean) where Park said he "regretted (Trio) more than my first film," called it "pathetic," and assumed that under normal circumstances he would not have been allowed to make a movie again after making it. If you are much more clued-into Korean-language sources about Park or his films, though, I wouldn't be surprised if you know more about the film that readily contradicts this!

[Never Cursed]

Park's second film Trio is thankfully a much more stylish (and expensive) action romp than his first, but unfortunately his at-times slavish devotion to his inspirations (and his inability to rise above them into the mode that his later work more comfortably rests in) persists and restrains the film's impact. Where The Moon Is... the Sun's Dream was kind of a cinéma du look thing if those directors had no money, this is more indebted to the indie-action trends and tones that dominated the 90s, in particular the post-Tarantino chestnut of the articulate and philosophical ultra-violent criminal and the inane and self-referential conversations he drags out of people when he isn't killing them. (I also think the Coens circa 1987 might raise an objection to the main female character's motivation and how she goes about fulfilling her dreams). I unfortunately found Kim Min-jong's psychopath exasperatingly uninteresting to watch in his runt-of-the-litter craziness. The three of Park's later movies that I've seen are admirable in their precise and studied employment of violence. For all the extremities on screen in his work, Park very carefully and sparingly reserves harm for when he really needs it and in doing so maintains a deliberate distance from and investigative attitude towards standard cinematic depictions thereof. That is completely absent in this tale of a quirky and murderous piece of garbage gradually growing close to a woman he first sexually harassed and then almost raped by tearing through a gaggle of local cops and shop owners. There are moments where you can kind of see his second thoughts towards what he has already chosen to depict (i.e., making some of the robbery scenes Maria's manipulative presumption as to what will happen in her absence rather than actual truth), but by then it's a little too late! I think it's telling that the only action sequence that really works is the one with Kim and Lee Geung-young running desperately from the cops, in no small part because they're pathetic victims rather than murderers in that case. (Though I did laugh really hard at the scene where they rob the movie theater and ask why the box-office receipts are so bad, leading the manager to reply: "we only show art-house movies half the time!")

Oh, and I doubt either of these movies are coming to English-friendly discs any time soon. Not because of Park's mixed feelings towards them, but rather because I can't imagine any label ponying up the cash to clear the music rights. I assume The Moon Is... the Sun's Dream uses the music-star headliner's songs, which would be bad enough, but Trio takes it a step further and has Tom Waits and Nick Cave/Kylie Minogue needledrops. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, though

[yoloswegmaster]

Pedro Pascal, Matthew McConaughey, Austin Butler and Tang Wei will star in Park Chan-wook's next film ‘THE BRIGANDS OF RATTLECREEK’.

This is the western-thriller that S. Craig Zahler wrote the script for.

[beamish14]

Pedro Pascal, Matthew McConaughey, Austin Butler and Tang Wei will star in Park Chan-wook's next film ‘THE BRIGANDS OF RATTLECREEK’.

This is the western-thriller that S. Craig Zahler wrote the script for.

Easily one of the most famous and well-regarded spec screenplays of the past two decades. I cannot believe this is getting made.