Tag: Kim Tae-ri

Review: Space Sweepers

Space junk is a genuine problem. With humans shooting things and people into space since the 1950s, there’s an estimated 128 million pieces of manufactured space debris larger than 1 millimetre floating about in our orbit. It was the basis for the popular Japanese manga/anime Planetes, and a launching point for Jo Sung-hee’s (Phantom Detective) latest film.

SPACE SWEEPERS (승리호) takes place in 2092. Earth is no longer habitable, and the orbital utopia built by UTS corporation is only available to the elite. Other people try and eek out a living with what little they have, including the crew of the Victory, a space ship that collects junk for money.

When the ragtag group – who includes former space guards and special forces members Tae-ho (Song Joong-ki), Captain Jang (Kim Tae-ri), drug king Tiger Park (Jin Seon-kyu) and a robot named Bubs (Yoo Hae-jin) – encounter a small girl named ‘Dorothy’ (Park Ye-rin), their fortunes change. They have either set themselves up for the profit or fight of their life, especially when UTS head James Sullivan (Richard Armitage) gets involved.

Jo Sung-hee had reportedly been working on the film for 10 years in some form or another, constantly looking for ways to differentiate it from similar genre films. There are the Korean elements, of course, with characters sliding in and out of languages depending on the context. Yet there’s also the effort that Jo and his team have put into world building, crafting something that is unquestionably futuristic but also lived-in.

Adding to this greatly are the stunning special effects and production design. The visual effects company Dexter Studios, who brought Along with the Gods: The Two Worlds and Ashfall to the screen on a similarly larger-than-life canvas, have outdone themselves here. Massive scale docking stations, ships and eventually dogfights fill the screen in true blockbuster fashion. It’s kind of like Moebius designed a Marvel film and infused it with pure Hallyuwood enthusiasm.

Yet to mistake this for a ‘mere’ effects film is to do it a great disservice. This is a animated film that just happens to be live action. Like the finest sci-fi, it’s a character drama in space, and each of these people comes layered with backstory, their own motivations and actual growth by the end of the picture. It really helps that in contrast Richard Armitage is basically an anime villain, joining a long line of bearded gaijin (or waeguk-saram if you prefer).

The cast is excellent as you’d expect. Song Joong-ki rejoins Jo after their previous collaboration on A Werewolf Boy (2012). Kim Tae-ri, who impressed us in The Handmaiden and Little Forest, is at her kick-ass best here. The award-winning Yoo Hae-jin (A Taxi Driver) is unrecognisable as the voice of a CG robot, whose character arc sees them saving up money for a gender reassignment procedure.

In any other year, we may have seen this hit global cinemas in limited release. Thanks to the wonders of streaming, the audience reach has expanded for this crowd-pleaser exponentially. So, if 2020 was the year that Korean cinema got global attention, then SPACE SWEEPERS might signal the breadth of what the nation’s film offerings might be.

2021 | South Korea | DIRECTOR: Jo Sung-hee| WRITERS: Yoon Seung-min, Yoo-kang Seo-ae, Jo Sung-hee | CAST: Song Joong-ki, Kim Tae-ri, Jin Seon-kyu, Yoo Hae-jin, Richard Armitage | DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix (Global)| RUNNING TIME: 136 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 5 February 2021 (AUS)

February 12, 2021
Review: Little Forest

There’s been a number of Korean remakes of Japanese films and dramas over the years, and 2018 alone has seen Be With You and Golden Slumber as box office hits. Yim Soon-rye’s LITTLE FOREST (리틀 포레스트) is actually a remake of two films from Junichi Mori, both of which were based on Daisuke Igarashi’s manga. Yet this compressed tale of self-discovery is actually ridiculously charming.

Frustrated by her life in the city, Hye-won (Kim Tae-ri, best known for The Handmaiden) returns to her childhood home in the country. Reuniting with friends Eun-Sook (Jin Ki-Joo) and Jae-Ha (Ryoo Joon-Yeol), she searches for her own meaning by farming and cooking. So much cooking.

There’s not a lot to LITTLE FOREST, even though it reduces an entire year’s worth of stories down to a comparatively bite-sized version of Igarashi’s tale. The manga creator’s work has often been compared to Hayao Miyazaki, although the unhurried structure that moves between past and present probably has more in common with Isao Takahata’s Only Yesterday that it does with Miyazaki’s magical realism.

The gentle and measured pacing, a sharp left turn for screenwriter Hwang Seong-gu (Anarchist from Colony), is structured around the seasons. (In the Japanese versions, the films are actually called Little Forest: Summer & Autumn and Little Forest: Winter & Spring respectively). The two main sources of drama are a tiny love triangle with Eun-Sook and Jae-Ha, although this is forgotten with the change, and Hye-won’s relationship with her estranged mother (played by Moon So-Ri, Kim Tae-ri’s The Handmaiden co-star). “It’s like I’m always competing with her,” she remarks when cooking.

It’s the cooking that provides the most gorgeous photography though, as Lee Seung-Hoon’s cinematography lovingly capturing all of Hye-won’s food porn moments. The passing of seasons is marked by different hues used for each chapter, as well as time-lapse moments of crops growing. Lee Jun-oh’s quirky synth score adds to the gentle happy vibe.

It might be trite to suggest that LITTLE FOREST is a little film, but it never has any want to strive for anything greater than quite self-reflection. Backed by a charming performances by Kim Tae-ri, it’s wonderful to see a film where the primary outcome is something as powerful as a young woman finding her place in the world.

[stextbox id=”grey” bgcolor=”F2F2F2″ mleft=”5″ mright=”5″ image=”null”]2018 | South Korea | DIRECTOR: Yim Soon-rye | WRITERS: Hwang Seong-gu (Based on the manga by Daisuke Igarashi) | CAST: Kim Tae-ri, Ryu Jun-yeol, Moon So-ri, Jin Ki-joo | DISTRIBUTOR: Megabox Plus M, New York Asian Film Festival (US) | RUNNING TIME: 120 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 7 July 2018 (NYAFF), 9 August 2018 (KOFFIA) [/stextbox]

July 15, 2018
SFF 2016 Review: The Handmaiden

Often over-the-top, but also gorgeously shot and erotic to the point of parody. In other words, it’s the latest masterpiece from Park Chan-wook.

THE HANDMAIDEN has one of the most threatening and inventive uses of an octopus since Oldboy. This is unsurprising given that South Korean director Park Chan-wook is the unique voice behind both, delivering his first feature film since 2013’s Stoker. Adapting Welsh writer Sarah Waters’ novel Fingersmith, previously brought to screen as a BBC series set in its native Victorian England, Park effortlessly shifts the setting to 1930s colonial Korea in a version that is no less inventive, sexy or aware of its own turning cogs.

The first thing that will strike audiences about THE HANDMAIDEN is just how unreal the colours look. Before we know a thing about plotting or characters, Park and cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon establish the hyperreality of the piece, a necessity as they continue to push the narrative into more unbelievable places. Con man Count Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo) recruits street pickpocket Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri) to work at the estate of the mysterious heiress Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee) in an attempt to take her fortune. Yet as Sook-hee and Hideko grow closer, best laid plans take an interesting turn. Divided into three distinct chapters, the film is constantly shifting perspectives, partly to obfuscate the truth, but also to translate something distinct English into a piece that is mostly Park’s.

Excess is the name of the game in Park’s adaptation, true of many of his works, here shifting it from modern violence to sexual encounters. From the first glimpse of the manor house that forms the primary location of the film, a blend of an English Victorian opulence and Japanese elegance, iconography from both cultures pours off the screen. What amounts to a lavish ‘heist’ or ‘sting’ structure doesn’t fall to the rapid-fire editing of the genre, replaced instead with long lingering takes that allow the viewer to soak in the mise-en-scène. When Sook-hee first meets the obsessive book collector (Cho Jin-woong) that keeps Hideko captive, there’s an impressive tracking shot that pushes past a guardian ‘snake’ as the camera envelops the entire space. This slavish attention to the details of the production design would undermine the story, if not for the sense that Park and his crew have placed each thread there deliberately.

All of which might just be a well-dressed delivery capsule for the intensely erotic and equally excessive lesbian sex scenes that commence between Sook-hee and Hideko in the second and third chapters, ones that would take on a pay-per-view porn quality were they not also highly aware of their own farce. What will undoubtedly be referred to universally as the prolonged “scissoring scene” is an extended vision of two writhing female bodies exploring each other, spouting incredulous dialogue that could have be ripped from a paperback piece of purple prose, except it’s so (literally) tongue in cheek that it’s impossible to take it seriously, and nor does Park seem to want us to. Park even returns to the sequence from a different point of view in the third act, an even more heightened version of the original scene, and it’s here we realise how important the traditional roles that Kim Tae-ri and Kim Min-hee have been playing. The innocent and mysteriously repressed archetypes have been hustling the audience, just as much as their intended targets of the sting.

THE HANDMAIDEN straddles the fine line between pointed satire and male fantasy, but also embraces its comic outlandishness at every opportunity. While diverging from Sarah Waters’ setting and plot at various key points, Park’s relocation of the film to something akin to home territory ensures that commentary on class structures and female empowerment remain firmly intact in the translation. So too does Park’s penchant for a ripping vengeance yarn, but the focus remains wholly on the individuals at the heart of the story. At times completely insane, THE HANDMAIDEN is a true cinematic experience.

2016 | South Korea | DIR: Park Chan-wook | WRITERS: Chung Seo-kyung, Park Chan-wook, adapted from the novel Fingersmith by Sarah Waters | CAST: Kim Min-hee, Kim Tae-ri, Ha Jung-woo, Cho Jin-woong, Kim Hae-sook, Moon So-ri | DISTRIBUTOR: DreamWest | RUNNING TIME: 134 minutes | RATING: ★★★★½ (9/10)

June 20, 2016