[Movie 2004] Three..Extremes / Three, Monster 쓰리, 몬스터

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Credit to lee ji woo at *Everything Lee Byung Hun*

Three... Extremes

A film review by Nicholas Schager - Copyright © 2005 filmcritic.com Search 5,750+ reviews!

As anthologies invariably tend to be disappointingly lopsided ventures, it’s a welcome surprise to find that unevenness is the strongest facet of Three… Extremes, a diverse and successfully chilling horror triptych that brings together the short works of acclaimed directors Fruit Chan (Durian Durian), Park Chanwook (Oldboy), and Takashi Miike (Audition). Unrelated save for a shared fascination with female ghoulishness, the three segments form something of a rough primer for Asian horror newbies, with Chan delivering a dose of macabre black wit, Chanwook providing his usual brand of self-consciously bloody moralizing, and Miike contributing otherworldly, irrational J-horror spookiness. And though none come close to approximating the bone-deep scares elicited by Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2001 Pulse (which receives a long-overdue stateside release in early November), the trio of stories – alternately caustic, gruesome, and bafflingly opaque – prove a welcome relief from the CG-infatuated, subtext-barren supernatural thrillers currently being dumped on moviegoers by Hollywood this Halloween season.

Progressing from its strongest to its weakest chapters, Three... Extremes (a sequel to 2002’s Three) starts with the Hong Kong-native Chan’s sumptuous Dumplings, a satiric tale of female vanity-gone-awry that began as a feature-length film (also titled Dumplings) but was cut down by the director to a compact 40-odd minutes for this cinematic compilation. Having not seen it in its original form, I’m unqualified to discuss the pluses and minuses of this editing-room abbreviation, yet Chan’s entry is nonetheless an amusingly grisly piece of social commentary in which former TV star-turned-neglected trophy wife Mrs. Li (Miriam Yeung) finds the fountain of youth (and the remedy to her negative self-image) via witchy chef Aunt Mei’s (Bai Ling) unique brand of dumplings. Revealing the special ingredient that makes Mei’s culinary treats so physically and emotionally rejuvenating would be in bad taste, but suffice to say that Chan – riffing on Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal with the help of Wong Kar-Wai regular Christopher Doyle’s disquietingly ethereal cinematography – deliciously lays bare modern society’s unhealthy preoccupation with physical female beauty via one crunchy bite and a terrifying, serpentine lick of the lips.

Park Chanwook also strives for gallows humor in Cut, the story of a movie director (Lee Byung-hun) whose seemingly perfect life is slashed to ribbons after he and his pianist wife (Gang Hye Jung) are taken hostage by an extra (Lim Won-Hee) on a movie set that looks just like the director’s ornately decorated home. Forcing his captive to either kill a young child with his bare hands or watch his musician wife’s fingers be severed and shredded in a blender, the fiend reveals an upper class-lower class axe to grind, though the Korean Chanwook’s vignette functions less as a treatise on classism than as another one of his portraits of man’s inherent viciousness. Such pedantry is, as usual, simply Chanwook’s justification for staging elaborate nastiness, but whereas his work usually reeks of hipster superficiality, here Chanwook’s self-reflexive gestures – which result in a scabrous critique of his own reputation as a purveyor of ghastly, gratuitous gore – feel sharply honed and less overbearingly exaggerated. Plus, Chanwook’s David Fincher-esque CG zooms and pull-backs, coupled with his stunningly sick imagery, strike a powerful visceral chord.

The same can be said of Takashi Miike’s Box, which finds the prolific Japanese provocateur working in an ominous mode more akin to One Missed Call (cross-bred with HBO’s Carnivàle) than Audition. Miike’s submission charts the traumatic events which befall a novelist (Kyoko Hasegawa) who is visited by the pale-faced apparition of her long-dead kid sister…or, perhaps, simply sees this spirit in harrowing nightmares involving incest, full-body plastic bags, and being buried alive in the downy snow. Utilizing an oppressive silence and fragmented narrative to create a sense of sinister unease, Box feels untethered to reality even as its basic plot outline – about the ticked-off dead returning to exact revenge against those who wronged them – reveals itself to be straightforward to the point of ridiculousness. Yet because the director diligently strives for disjointed structural chaos bereft of reassuring logicality or coherence, it becomes near-impossible to determine whether the ongoing action is a dream or reality – an unsettling disorientation that fittingly caps off a trilogy in which madness and mayhem are de rigueur facets of everyday life.

RATING (out of 5)

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Director: Fruit Chan, Park Chanwook, Takashi Miike

Producer: Peter Chan, Fumio Inoue, Naoki Sato, Shun Shimizu, Ahn Soo-Hyun

Screenwriter: Lilian Lee, Park Chanwook, Haruko Fukushima

Stars: Kyoko Hasegawa, Atsuro Watabe, Mai Susuki, Yuu Susuki, Bai Ling, Pauline Lau, Tony Ka-Fai Leung, Meme, Lee Byung-hun, Miriam Yeung, Lim Won-Hee, Gang Hye Jung, Lee Jun Goo

MPAA Rating: R

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Year of Release: 2004

Released on Video: Not Yet Available

source: Film Critic

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October 28, 2005

Movie Review

Three short films, one intense anthology

By Jeff Shannon, Special to The Seattle Times j.sh@verizon.net seattletimes.com

In case there was any doubt about the willingness of Asian filmmakers to stretch the boundaries of cinematic horror, "Three ... Extremes" lives up to its title with sights, sounds and stories that are definitely not for the squeamish. Prudes are advised to stay away. Appetites will be spoiled, along with good taste and decorum. They don't call it "Asian Extreme" for nothing, folks.

On the other hand, Hong Kong's Fruit Chan, Korea's Park Chan-wook and Japan's ultra-prolific Takashi Miike are directors to be reckoned with, attracting widespread acclaim for their distinctive styles and fearless embrace of daring material. Dismiss them at your peril, for they will not be denied. A sequel of sorts to the 2002 horror anthology "Three," this unrelated trio of shorts begins with the best of the bunch. "Dumplings" is a shortened version of Chan's 91-minute feature from 2004, condensed but still remarkably effective.

"Three ... Extremes," with Bai Ling, Miriam Yeung, Lee Byung-hun, Lim Won-hee, Kyoko Hasegawa. Directed by Fruit Chan, Park Chan-wook and Takashi Miike, from screenplays by Lilian Lee, Park Chan-wook and Haruko Fukushima. 125 minutes. In Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean with English subtitles. Rated R for strong disturbing violent content, some involving abortion and torture, and for sexuality and language. Varsity, through Thursday.

The fiery and fascinating Bai Ling stars as Aunt Mei, whose pricey dumplings have a mysterious, rejuvenating ingredient that lures women including a retired actress (Miriam Yeung) to her kitchen. Body image, obsession with youth and a wicked twist on "Vera Drake" make "Dumplings" a potent social commentary, blessed by Christopher Doyle's cinematography while delivering shock value guaranteed to disturb just about anyone.

"Cut," directed by Chan-wook, is a queasy exercise in bloody sadism, similar to "Saw," in which a disgruntled movie extra (Lim Won-hee) seeks revenge against a hot young film director (Lee Byung-hun) by forcing him to make an impossible decision: strangle an innocent girl or watch, helplessly, as his pianist wife gets her fingers chopped off. Like Chan-wook's cult-favorite "Oldboy," this booby-trap thriller is slickly directed, overindulgent and pointlessly unpleasant. Only horror buffs will appreciate its grisly intensity.

"Box" is one of Miike's most interesting films, incorporating several of the director's visual trademarks with the added benefit of psychological depth and dreamlike imagery. It deals with a guilt-ridden novelist (Kyoko Hasegawa) who receives a mysterious invitation to return to the snowy place where her twin sister died in a childhood accident. "Box" is the least conventional of these three films, and Miike's willingness to experiment (including passages of chilling silence) yields considerable impact.

Unlike many horror anthologies, "Three ... Extremes" does not employ a connecting device, unless you count the image of a long, slurping tongue in both "Dumplings" and "Cut." Otherwise, it's just three gifted filmmakers with vision to spare, daring you to go to their extremes.

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October 28, 2005

Stylish scares from the East

By Lisa Kennedy, Denver Post Film Critic denverpost.com

*** | "Three ... Extremes"

R strong disturbing violent content, some involving abortion and torture, and for sexuality and language|2 hours, 5 minutes| HORROR ANTHOLOGY | Directed by Fruit Chan ("Dumplings"), Park Chan-Wook ("Cut") and Takashi Miike ("Box"); written by Lilian Lee ("Dumplings"), Park ("Cut") and Haruko Fukushima ("Box"); starring Miriam Yeung, Bai Ling, Tony Leung, Lee Byung Hun, Lim Won-Hee, Kyoko Hasegawa

"Three ... Extremes" makes a persuasive argument for what's wrong with so many horror films today.

Movies like "The Fog" claim feature-length status when they're at best a bedtime ghost story. Films like "Saw II" hinge their box-office ambitions on cruelties that pretend to be complex but are merely venal.

Edgar Allan Poe understood that something short but sweetened with symbolism could rack your dreams, lay waste to REM sleep. Why don't more filmmakers?

The horror anthology "Three Extremes" forgoes the undeservedly long for the tightly crafted. Like one of those personality tests, which of these "Extreme" tales you favor likely says something about what kind of horror works your nerves.

That admitted, Park ChanWook's "Cut" makes for the most anxious viewing.

The South Korean director behind the critically lauded vengeance trilogy "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance," "Old Boy and "Sympathy for Lady Vengeance" mixes social commentary and a bizarrely impersonal vendetta to queasy effect.

After a fine day on the set of a very bizarre vampire movie, director Ryu Ji-Ho (Lee Byung Hun) heads to his home, which uncannily resembles the set.

An intruder awaits. And Ryu awakens bound by a giant elastic band. His wife sits just out of his reach, tied up like a marionette to their grand piano. What transpires between intruder (Lim Won-Hee), a one-time extra on a Ryu film, and the handsome filmmaker is a wicked dance of contempt, over identification and class resentment.

"You live well in this world and you'll live well in heaven," the intruder says, poised to sever the wife's finger.

In Hong Kong filmmaker Fruit Chan's "Dumpling," an actress of a certain age visits a purveyor of youth remedies. Bai Ling plays Aunt Mei. Poured into her capri pants and looking like a teen, she considers herself her best advertisement. Whatever Mei wraps in that translucent dough, Qing (Miriam Yeung), whose husband is having an affair with a younger woman, is buying.

Christopher Doyle, one of the finest cinematographers working today, makes Chan's first foray into horror visually delectable. He shoots Mei's secret ingredient from beneath a transparent table. The image is over-the-top perhaps. But then, written by Lilian Lee, "Dumpling" delivers a brutal critique of the cultural craving for youth. In a world in which lamb placenta can be marketed as a remedy, is some form of cannibalism that out of the question?

Thanks to movies like "The Grudge" and the "Ring" cycle, audiences know if there's an implacable ghost in it, it's probably Japanese.

Takashi Miike's "Box" finds well-regarded novelist Kyoko (Kyoko Hasegawa) haunted by a childhood memory. In her dreams, she sees a man in a wintry field burying an ornate box. As he shovels earth, she sees herself wrapped in plastic.

Is her dream one of a demise foretold? Or merely a profound expression of guilt working its way to the surface? With restraint, sorrow, and disturbing eros, Miike tells us all ... or does he?

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October 28, 2005

Three...Extremes

Review: A satisfying trio of twisted tales

by Todd Gilchrist filmforce.ign.com

Three years after Hollywood's commercially successful remake of Ringu introduced Western civilization to the notion of Asian horror, I still have yet to figure out what the fuss (or perhaps fright) is all about. Subsequent remakes, like The Grudge, were mostly boring endeavors laced with intermittent 'what the...?' moments, while the precious few actual Asian films to secure distribution, among them The Eye and the unwatchable Gozu, proved - in this critic's estimation, anyway - tedious exercises in atmosphere that built to moments that asked not merely 'what the...?' but 'what the hell was I thinking wasting my time on this?'

Needless to say, I entered Three... Extremes, an Asian horror anthology, no less, with a bit of trepidation.

Thankfully, I was fully satisfied by the trio of twisted tales, at least in regards to my previous experiences with such films: They were just as filled with weird and wild moments as their predecessors, and yet having familiarized myself with the vagaries of the underlying formulas (a creepy scenario + gross-out imagery + incest = atmosphere galore) I never once asked 'what the...?'

Truth be told, the main attraction for me was the second story, Cut. The forty minute short was conceived by director Park Chan-Wook, whose previous film Oldboy I loved, and whom I suspect was slighted grievously by someone in a past life (if not this one), as he excels in revenge tales. Here, a film director named Ryu (Byung-hun Lee) finds himself and his wife at the mercy of an extra who is quite literally insane with jealousy at his success both personally and professionally; before long - and much like in Oldboy - Ryu must make a choice that might compromise not only his life, but his entire system of beliefs. Suffice it to say that the man who once chronicled a ten-to-one showdown in one unbroken, bloody take pulls no punches capturing Ryu's decision in devastating detail.

The other two stories, however, are no less unflinching: in Fruit Chan's Dumplings, an aging actress (Miriam Yeung) forges a Faustian pact with a ebullient cook (Bai Ling) whose dumplings are said to rejuvenate women from the ravages of time; in Takashi Miike's Box, meanwhile, a young novelist named Kyoko (Kyoko Hasegawa) suffers nightmares of a childhood horror where she accidentally kills her twin sister while vying for their father's affections.

These facile descriptions, obviously, scarcely account for the abundance of 'what the...?' moments which ensue in each of the three stories, but those questions I leave for you to ask (and if you figure out, answer). But the purpose of Asian horror, I am learning, is not to build to anything in particular; nothing so perfunctory as a cheap punchline or even highfalutin 'moral' will sufficiently summarize the horrors that the audience endures. Rather, it's the end in and of itself, the creation of an atmosphere of suspense where no payoff will - or perhaps even could - satisfy its winding road towards the bizarre and gruesome. And quite frankly, that is indeed a very good thing.

Some horror movies, like House of Wax, are cheap shock-fests gussied up with the pedigree of a previous classic but worked over to evoke the singular effect of arousal - in whatever way possible - in the minds, hearts and loins of audiences. Other horror movies, like Saw or even The Blair Witch Project, are endurance tests that offer such unrelenting brutality (or worse yet, humanity) that only a cathartic payoff of Grand Guignol proportions will satisfy.

What is enjoyable - if that's the right word - about Asian horror is that the pretense of casual (or even concentrated) manipulation is dropped, and the filmmakers dedicate their efforts to conjuring deep-seated emotional conundrums from which the audience doesn't quickly recover. How much would one compromise his or her 'goodness', including murdering a child, to save oneself or one's loved ones? How vain and desperate are we to retain youthfulness and beauty that we enter into amoral pacts - with surgeons, shamans, witch doctors or faith healers - in order to preserve ourselves? And if we are responsible for great pain in others, are we then deserving of a lifetime of pain and unhappiness ourselves?

All of these are questions that go unanswered in Dumplings, Cut and Box , but go literally unasked in the score of Western horror movies that we regularly plunk down our hard-earned dimes to see. And in all cases, that's what makes these movies work: escapist entertainment satisfies some, but usually only for a short time, while searing psychological provocation sticks with you long after you've left the theater.

Mind you, I'm not recommending a complete overhaul of horror movies, or even suggesting that Asian horror is now the pinnacle of what the genre can achieve, now that slashers, ghosts, and goblins have been thoroughly explored. But next time you think about seeing an Asian horror movie, consider that the graphic and gruesome power of such efforts as Three... Extremes lies in accessing both the emotional and the existential, the prurient and the profound. That of course doesn't mean you won't ultimately find yourself asking 'what the...?' in the darkness once the movie has started, but at least with a bit of understanding, you'll be asking a better question before it starts: namely, why not?

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October 30, 2005

De-finger the Piano Player

Source: nytimes.com

THE omnibus film "Three ... Extremes," which opened in New York on Friday, consists of three horror stories from three different centers of Asian filmmaking. "Box," from Japan's Takashi Miike, is a dreamlike study of a woman who relives the death of her twin sister as a child; "Dumplings," directed by Fruit Chan of Hong Kong, is a cautionary tale about a wealthy woman who believes she has found the secret of eternal youth in the special dumplings prepared by a tenement witch.

But it is "Cut," the final sequence, that lingers in the mind. A successful, handsome, well-liked director (Lee Byung-hun, one of Asia's reigning superstars) returns to his apartment after a hard day's work, and finds a situation straight out of one of his movies: a bitterly resentful bit player (Lim Won-hee), has bound the director's wife to a grand piano with a web of razor-sharp wires. The indignant bit player threatens to pull a wire, and thereby sever one of the woman's fingers every few minutes until the director agrees to strangle the innocent teenage girl kidnapped for the occasion and left tied-up on the couch.

Now, that's extreme. "Cut," which accounts for 48 of "Three ...Extreme's" 125 minutes, was written and directed by Park Chanwook, 42, a rumpled, thoughtful South Korean filmmaker whose name and work has become synonymous with what has been labeled the Asian Extreme movement. As he demonstrated in his 2003 film "Oldboy," Mr. Park has a vivid imagination that he is not afraid to apply to disturbing material, such as a man devouring a live octopus or the removal of teeth by means of a hammer claw. When his feature "Lady Vengeance" was shown recently at the New York Film Festival, A. O. Scott of The Times wrote, "The question, as always with Mr. Park, is whether he is making high-toned exploitation movies or using the genre to explore serious emotional and ethical issues."

"Basically, I'm throwing out the question 'When is such violence justified?' " Mr. Park said through an interpreter during his recent festival visit. "To get that question to touch the audience physically and directly - that's what my goal is. In the experience of watching my film, I don't want the viewer to stop at the mental or the intellectual. I want them to feel my work physically. And because that is one of my goals, the title 'exploitative' will probably follow me around for a while."

It's a title that at least a few Western distributors of Asian films and DVD's are happy to exploit in turn. Picking up on the reputations of Mr. Park and some of his colleagues - including, most notoriously, Mr. Miike, whose work displays little of the formal inventiveness and moral seriousness of Mr. Park's - one distributor, Tartan Video, has registered Asia Extreme as a trademark and issued a dozen films under that rubric, including "Oldboy" and Mr. Park's earlier "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance." "Three ... Extremes" is being distributed by a specialist in hardcore horror fare, Lions Gate Films, a company that includes "Audition" (1999), one of Mr. Miike's most popular/reviled efforts, among its offerings.

For Mr. Park, the notion that Asia is breeding a new generation of cinematic sadists is simply a marketing ploy. "If you look at the other two Korean films in the New York Film Festival, they're not extreme in the least," said Mr. Park, referring to Im Sangsoo's "President's Last Bang" and Hong Sang-soo's "Tale of Cinema." Indeed, the vast majority of Korean films are romantic comedies and sentimental dramas. At the recently concluded Pusan International Film Festival in South Korea, Kim Jee-woon's "Bittersweet Life" (which also stars the widely worshipped Mr. Lee) was one of the few films concerned with violence.

Still, there's some fire behind this smoke: joining Mr. Park and Mr. Miike on the Asian extreme shelf at the video store are Japanese filmmakers like Shinji Aoyama ("EM - Embalming"), Takeshi Shimizu ("Ju-On," which he remade in English as "The Grudge"), Shinya Tsukamoto ("Tetsuo, the Ironman") and (though on a far more accomplished, poetic level) Kiyoshi Kurosawa ("Bright Future"). (Mr. Tsukamoto stars in Mr. Shimizu's new horror film, "Marebito," which is set to open Dec. 9.) There are also the Pang brothers from Thailand ("The Eye") and many of the so-called Category III (or adults-only) films from Hong Kong, featuring drooling sex killers and hopping vampires. As widely different as these films may be, they all seek a response, as Mr. Park said, beyond "the mental or the intellectual." They are anti-rational, deliberately transgressive works that flaunt their "forbidden" imagery as a way of setting themselves apart from mainstream cinema.

It's interesting that the Asian extreme movement is largely a phenomenon of the Internet and DVD's. "Oldboy," the most successful theatrical release of the bunch, seems to have topped out at a gross of around $700,000 in the United States, not a bad figure for a foreign-language film these days, but much less than one would expect given all the publicity it received.

These films are consumed in the home and discussed on the Internet, on the dozens of sites like filmthreat.com and midnighteye.com that have sprung up to serve the genre. These Asian films are often associated with Western counterparts: the so-called Eurotrash work of filmmakers like Jess Franco of Spain ("Vampyros Lesbos," 1971) and Lucio Fulci of Italy ("The Beyond," 1981), or the American exploitation films of the 60's and 70's, by directors like Doris Wishman ("Nude on the Moon," 1962) or Herschell Gordon Lewis ("Two Thousand Maniacs!," 1964).

At a certain point, this is a subject that belongs more to sociology than to aesthetics. It probably matters little to the young North American consumers of "Three ... Extremes" that Mr. Park means his embittered extra to be in part a symbol of the North Koreans who have been left out of South Korea's economic boom. For fans, the important thing is that the severed finger imagery is indeed revolting - and that it provokes revulsion among parents, teachers and the wider range of authority figures that we now call the mainstream media.

That which is rejected by the dominant group is embraced by a subculture, and a cult is formed. Thirty years ago, young cinephiles could provoke outrage by supporting, say, the disreputable genre films of Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock over the stolid, respectable Oscar-winning work of directors like Fred Zinnemann and George Stevens; today, it's Hawks and Hitchcock who make up the classical canon, and revolutionaries have to go a bit farther to find their outsider heroes - all the way to Asia or Italy, or back in time to the heyday of the 42nd Street grind houses. But the underlying impulse remains the same, and it is, I believe, a healthy one: If you want to shake things up, sometimes you have to go to extremes.

[Guest the.elephant]

i really want to see this... anyone know if the DVD is out for US??

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Park Chan-wook

Screenwriter/Director/Editor : Born August 23, 1963 - Korea

From All Movie Guide: A versatile stylist with an aesthetic that straddles the line between the idiosyncratic and the mainstream, Park Chan-wook is best known for his 2000 film Joint Security Area, a powerful story about a murder along the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea that became the biggest box-office hit in the history of Korean cinema. (It was later supplanted by the action film Shiri, which also dealt with North-South relations.) Park's interest in film began in college at Sogang University, where he started the "film gang" club and published a number of critical studies on contemporary cinema. After graduating from the Department of Philosophy, he began working in the film industry as an assistant director to Gwak Jae-young on A Sketch of a Rainy Day (1988).

In 1992, he directed his first feature, The Moon Is...the Sun's Dream, a gangster drama, and shifted gears into comedy with 1997's Trio, a romp about three pals on the run from the law. Neither of these films gained much recognition, but his next film, Joint Security Area, struck a nerve with Korean audiences, partly because it was released at a time when relations between the North and South Korean governments were beginning to thaw, but also because it's a well-made, extremely moving film. Rather than following his success with something similar, Park once again changed direction with his next movie, the kidnapping drama Sympathy for Mister Vengeance (2002).

With its heavy doses of excruciating violence and a set of characters bent on destroying one another, it's a much more disturbing film than his previous efforts. While it is very different from Joint Security Area, it does make a similar point about how easily "normal" people can be driven to perform horrific acts. Even though he is now one of Korea's most commercially successful directors, he still finds time to collaborate with other filmmakers, co-writing and co-editing Park Chan-ok's 2002 debut feature, Jealousy Is My Middle Name. ~ Tom Vick, All Movie Guide

2005 Sympathy for Lady Vengeance Director / Screenwriter

2005 The Nine Lives of Korean Cinema Actor

2004 Oldboy Director / Screenwriter

<b>2004 Three... Extremes Director / Screenwriter </b>

2002 Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance Director / Screenwriter

2002 Jiltuneun Naeui Him Editor / Screenwriter

2000 Joint Security Area Director

Source: http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/filmography.html?p_id=293448

December 13,2005 Star Director's Book Recalls His Days as a Failure

Source: englishnews@http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200512/200512130003.html

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Oslo Korean Film Festival 2006 (Press Release)

Norway Film Institute (NFI) is organizing an independent Korean film festival in Oslo January 27~February 19, 2006. Expedited together with MK International, a film marketing & sales company based in Seoul, Korea, the scheduled Korean film festival is the very first of its kind to take place in the entire Scandinavian region, and is expected to provide the Norwegian filmgoers with rare opportunities to experience 18 carefully selected Korean films of various genres.

Such recent films as Magicians, directed by Song Il-gon, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance by Park Chan-wook and The President's Last Bang by Yim Sang-soo will greet Norwegian audience throughout the film festival. Shiri by Kang Je-kyu and JSA( Joint Security Area) by Park Chan-wook, both successful box office hits in Korea, are also among those films to be screened in Oslo.

Two new generation directors have also been invited to the festival: Song Il-gon and Yim Phil-sung, each directed Magicians and Antarctic Journal, the two films selected as opening premiers.

In fact, one of the fastest growing industries in South Korea today is the film industry. The Korean film industry last year alone generated a total of US$711 million in revenue. While its exports to Asia and Europe increased by 250% and 70% respectively, it still maintained a market share of 55% in its Korean domestic market, attracting about 150 million viewers to Korean cinemas throughout the year of 2005!

Based on dynamic history and social, political issues of ideology from the divided Korean peninsula, South Korea's new generation directors and producers with creativity and boldness today are making numerous quality films of diverse genres that are touching millions of hearts at home and abroad. TAEGUKGI by Kang Je-kyu and SILMIDO by Kang Woo-seok, for example, hit Korean box offices like a typhoon in 2004, by each winning nearly 12 million hearts, an unprecedented number of audiences for a single movie!

In addition, with Director Park Chan-wook's Old Boy winning the Grand Prix of the Jury in Cannes in 2004, and Director Yim Kwon-taek’s winning the Golden Honor-Bear at Berlin in 2005, the Korean film industry is surely booming with ever-increasing awareness, recognition and sales in both domestic and international markets.

Consequently, the Korean film industry is also attracting some bold investments by large Korean and foreign corporations, thus strengthening its infrastructure with sufficient financial resources for the Korean local film productions. The average Korean film production cost today is around US$4.5 million, whereas the figure remained at mere US$1.2 million just five years ago, which is still substantially low compared to that of Hollywood or Japanese films.

This is where the fine investment opportunity kicks in as well, points out Mary Katherine Olsen, CEO of MK International.

"Quality Korean films today, with rich contents and strong market share they take up in Asia, are offering both Korean and foreign investors an exciting investment opportunity with substantial profits," says Olsen.

According to the annual reports from Korean Film Council, Seoul, TAEKUKGI, for instance, earned more than US$100 million in profits so far since its theatrical and DVD releases in 2004.

Three Extremes (2004)

- Directer : Park, Chan Wook

- Time : 126 min

- Genre : Horror

- 01.Feb 21:00

- 08.Feb 20:30

A whole list of Korean movies' screening schedule:

http://www.mkinternational.co.kr/kff/progr...ogram_list.html

Source: http://www.mkinternational.co.kr/kff/news/...tml?cpg=1&seq=4

Credit to twitchfilm.net for the highlight

http://www.twitchfilm.net/archives/004863.html

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Lee Byung Hun & Kang Hye Jung

Credit: Cine21

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Lee Byung Hun & Park Chan Wook at the set of Three, Monster (2004)

Source: www.leebyunghun.com

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January 11, 2005

Three... Extremes (Hong Kong - Korea - Japan)
By DAVID ROONEY [Reviewed at Venice Film Festival (Midnight), Sept. 6, 2004. Running time: 126 MIN] variety.com


'Three...Extremes' is a triptych including works by Takashi Miike, Chan-Wook Park and Fruit Chan
A Lions Gate Entertainment release (U.S.) of an Applause Pictures, CJ Entertainment, Kadokawa Pictures presentation of an Applause Pictures, B.O.M. Film Prod., Kadokawa Pictures production. (International sales: Fortissimo Films, Amsterdam.)

DUMPLINGS
With: Bai Ling, Miriam Yeung, Tony Ka-Fai Leung, Pauline Lau, Meme, Miki Yeung, Wong Su-Fun.

CUT
With: Lee Byung-Hun, Lim Won-Hee, Gang Hye-Jung, Lee Jun Goo, Lee Mi Mi.

BOX
With: Kyoko Hasegawa, Atsuro Watabe, Mai Suzuki, Yuu Suzuki, Mitsuru Akaboshi.

Plenty of vile little secrets and ghastly urges are explored in the stylishly made Asian-fusion horror triptych, "Three ... Extremes." Enlisting three higher profile directors than "Three," the 2002 omnibus that spawned this followup, the bracingly twisted new pic unites Japanese cult figure Takashi Miike, Korean Cannes prize winner Park Chan-Wook and Hong Kong's Fruit Chan, who delivers the most extreme offering . Acquired out of the Venice fest by Lions Gate, this smartly packaged series should tickle both genre enthusiasts and fans of cutting-edge East Asian cinema, with its biggest payoff on DVD.

Lions Gate earlier this year picked up "Three," the first in a planned pan-Asian trilogy being packaged by Applause Pictures. "Three" teamed Korean director Kim Jee-Woon, Thailand's Nonzee Nimibutr and Peter Ho-Sun Chan from Hong Kong.

In addition to the more widely known triple-act of directors on board for the second installment, "Extreme" is boosted by the ravishing images and caressing camera of ace cinematographer Christopher Doyle on Chan's wicked wonton tale, "Dumplings."

An aging former actress whose husband's attention is straying , Qing (Miriam Yeung) seeks rejuvenation via the potent dumplings prepared by Mei (Bai Ling), a former abortionist who commands more remuneration helping women erase their wrinkles. With her errant husband (Tony Ka-Fai Leung) back in line, Qing even appears willing to overlook some unforeseen side effects.

Likely to outrage puritanical sensibilities while appealing to others with its brazen nastiness and savage skewering of the obsession with youth, the story takes the liposuction fat recycling of "Fight Club" several horrific steps further. It also provides a morbid spin on China's One Child Family policy.

More appealing here than in her English-language roles, Bai has fun with the slovenly but sensual witchdoctor, while Yeung transitions nicely from her initial poise through shocked revulsion to grim purposefulness.

Radically different from his Cannes Grand Jury Prize honoree "Old Boy," Park's "Cut" deliciously explores the horror genre from within. Segueing neatly from Chan's episode via a witty audio link, the story concerns successful film director Ryu (Lee Byung-Hun), who wraps a day's shooting on his latest vampire pic and returns home to find an intruder.

Knocked out and transported back to the set, Ryu wakes up to find his pianist wife (Gang Hye-Jung) bound to her instrument by a maze of wires, her fingers glued to the keys. Their captor (Lim Won-Hee) is a resentful extra from Ryu's films, whose monstrous demands push the husband and wife to increasingly barbaric behavior.

Mixing macabre humor with crisp visuals and bold use of color, Park's bloodbath is markedly different in tone from Miike's "Box." That entry departs from the Japanese director's usually edgy, frenetic terrain to tell a more psychologically creepy story that unfolds with disquieting stillness and a cool, wintry look.

Drifting freely between dark imagination, ghostly visitations, memories and confused actuality, ethereally beautiful novelist Kyoko (Kyoko Hasegawa) dwells on her traumatic childhood. Part of a magic act, 10-year-old Kyoko (Mai Suzuki) was constantly overshadowed by her twin sister Shoko (Yuu Suzuki), who earned greater praise from their surrogate father Hikita (Atsuro Watabe). When Kyoko's actions inadvertently caused a tragic accident, Hikita vanished, seemingly to resurface in the present.

The final seg is more dreamy and lyrical and, although it has less narrative clarity than the others, is arresting in a different way. As always in thematically bound portmanteau projects, a certain unevenness of tone and style is inevitable. But, like an exotic, stir-fried take on hoary "Tales From the Crypt" fare, the three chapters here fit enjoyably together, sharing polished, distinctive visuals and effective scores. 

DUMPLINGS
Produced by Peter Ho-Sun Chan. Executive producer, Eric Tsang. Directed by Fruit Chan. Screenplay, Lilian Lee, based on her novella. Camera (color), Christopher Doyle; editors, Tin Sam-Fat, Chan Ki-Hop; music, Chan Kwong-Wing; production designer, Yee Chung-Man; art director, Pater Wong; costume designer, Dora Ng; sound (Dolby Digital), Kinson Tsang; special visual effects, Su Chun-Hung; associate producer, Patricia Cheng.

CUT
Produced by Ahn Soo-Hyun. Executive producers, Oh Jung-Wan, Lee Eu-Gene, Park Dong-Ho, Choi Pyung-Ho. Directed, written by Park Chan-Wook. Camera (color), Chung Chung-Hoon; editors, Kim Sang-Bum, Kim Jae-Bum; music, Peach; production designer, Yoo Seong-Hee; costume designer, Cho Sang-Kyung; sound (Dolby Digital), Kim Suk-Won.

BOX
Produced by Naoki Sato, Shun Shimizu, Fumio Inoue. Executive producer, Kazou Kuroi. Directed by Takashi Miike. Screenplay, Haruko Fukushima from a story by Bun Saiko. Camera (color), Koichi Kawakami; editor, Tasushi Shimamura; music, Kouiji Endo; production designer, Takashi Sasaki; costume designer, Tomoko Yasuno; sound (Dolby Digital), Jin Nakamura.

Also known as: THREE 2: Extremes; THREE II: Extremes

Source: Poker Industries

Director: Fruit Chan, Park Chan-Wook, Takashi Miike
Producer: Peter Ho
Cast: Miriam Yeung, Bai Ling, Tony Leung Ka-Fai, Masatoshi Nagase, Kyoko Hasegawa, Atsuro Watabe, Lee Byeong-Heon, Gang Hye-Jeong, Lim Won-Hee
Running time: 120 minutes 

Genre: Anthology 
Sub-genre: Horror, Japanese Cinema, Korean Cinema 
Keywords: Adaptation, Addiction, Aging, Cannibalism, Child/Children, Compilation, Cooking/Food, Dismemberment, Filmmaking, Gore, Graphic Violence, Greed, Horror, Hostage, Insomnia, Japan/Japanese, Jealousy, Korea, Murder, Nightmare, Obsession, Pregnant/Pregnancy, Revenge, Sequel, Series, Suspense, Thriller, Torture, True Story, Twins, Violence 

Synopsis: After the exceptional success of the first Volume, the THREE Anthology delivers a sequel with three of Asia's heavyweights that takes the concept a bit further in entertainment value [and much further in terms of graphic onscreen content].

Korea's Park Chan-Wook [Oldboy] turns in by far the most gripping of the three, with Hong Kong's Fruit Chan close behind with one of the better offerings from HK in recent memory [that were not Crime capers]; and Takashi Miike [Japan] is...well...Miike. Not exactly the violent Miike of old, but he hasn't lost his knack for the big finish.

BOX [Takashi Miike - Japan]:
Kyoko is a writer, whose editor has a crush on her, and makes no effort to hide it. She shares his feelings, but is worried about opening up to him. Her editor looks exactly like she remembers her surrogate father, who was the key element in a terrible accident that happened when she was ten.

DUMPLINGS [Fruit Chan - Hong Kong]:
The dish that is practically a staple in Chinese cooking takes a sinister turn in the hands of Mei. Her secretive dumpling, which has a bizarre pinkish glow that permeates through the hand-made wrapping, is not meant for ordinary folks. And those that dare to try her dish must be prepared to pay a price beyond imagination.

CUT [Park Chan-Wook - Korea]:
A failed actor takes the ultimate revenge against a director who turned him away. The actor kidnaps the director, his wife and child, and puts them all on a stage that recreates the director's home. The actor gives the director a choice: watch as he cuts his wife's fingers off, or strangle the child to death.

Distributor: CJ Entertainment [Korea] 2004
Rating: Unrated

Copied from auctions.yahoo.jo, captures courtesy hanayon0833

 

[rubie]

February 6, 2006

From the Nightmares of 3 Horror Masters

When I woke up this morning I had a strong craving for something. Was it Frosted Flakes? Nope. A hot chick? Not today. A glass of JD? Just had one! Then it hit me, I was yearning for a bowl of potent Asian horror. So I went through my i can't reade and found the anthology Three Extremes. What better way to start the day then with a varied dose of Asian loving (3 tales directed by a Chinese, a Korean and a Japanese)! A sequel to the less successful "Three" (2002), Three Extremes dealt more with human horror (the scariest kind to me) as opposed to the supernatural type and thankfully, all three accounts came through in their own special ways.

-The first spoonful of vinegar jammed down my throat was the semi stylish DUMPLINGS by Fruit Chan (Made in Hong Kong) which had to do with an aging actress (well interpreted by Miriam Yeung) guzzling down on special dumplings at some oddball cooks (Played by ta zany Ling Bai) place. Why? All in the name of retaining her babe-liscious appearance, what else? This segment was oddly occasionally sexy, made a light (yet thought provoking) statement on how far some people would go to retain their good looks and glimpsed its nastiness my way as my feeble mind gapped the rest for maximum whoopass.

The sucker punch was that, once the magic ingredient within the dumplings was revealed, the horror of the piece was let loose like a wild bull in search of a matador to ram. Result: mucho queasiness from yours truly. What an ugly idea! I loved it (all about the chewing sounds brrr)! Granted the flick got a tad predictable at the halfway point as to where it was heading and it could've gone much further with its themes (the possibilities were there) but as the cruel final frame filled my screen, I could say that I was a happy a-hole. Where can I get some of those dumplings?

-SECOND HELPING! The engagingly and kinetically directed CUT by stylist extraordinaire Chan-wook Park (of Oldboy fame) was then stuffed down my yapper. Talk about some harsh stuff! The story? An ace film director, his wife and some kid are taken hostage by a bitter 'extra'(background performer) who was all about wielding an axe and cutting fingers. I dug this segment a lot where not only did the story find and play up the dark humor within the warped situation, but it also often interrupted my giggles with some hefty servings of viciousness and f*cked up scenarios. One element that grabbed me by the collar as well, was that the pieces villain (played to a tilt by Won-hie Lim) reminded of a couple of people I know.

You know the type, they blame their messed up childhood for who they are today, project their own failure onto others and feel that the world owes them everything. I wanted to reach into the screen and punch that guy out while saying 'Who gives a i can't read what happened to you, once an adult, your life is in YOUR HANDS! BE A MAN! Tag to that truly engaging performances and a fearless demeanor in terms of being 'out of line' and you got a keeper. My only peeve was the "blah" final frame. I felt cheated and I didn't buy the execution. Other than that, all was peachy!

-Last but not least the artsy BOX by Takashi Miike (Ichi the Killer) was force fed to me. BOX tells the anecdote.of�I'm not sure to be honest! All I know is that some 'use to be side-show attraction' dame killed her sister when she was a kid, jealous that their pedophile Father was paying more attention to her sibling than her. The flick played out like an experimental reel more axed towards a disorderly and emotionally charged dream like narrative than a linear one. But that was all good!

Miike went hog-wild visually with striking imagery and symbolism galore. Furthermore the flick was such a treat audio wise! I�m talking an odd score and a poignant use of silence to accentuate some of the heavier events. And if that wasn�t enough implied nastiness, a talented lead actress in Kyoko Hasegawa ,some creepiness and a handful of touching moments were also on display to make the ride a more impact heavy one. My only complaint about it was the left field final frame which went to confuse me more as to what I was watching and unfortunately for me lessened the strength of the whole.

And that was my freaking morning! Three Extremes was a tight anthology that put out three different types of tales when it came to tone, execution, themes and style. It started my day on the right stab that�s for sure! Will it do the same for you? Fix yourself up an Extreme Omelet and find out!

http://www.joblo.com/arrow/reviews.php?id=1033

[rubie]

3 Extremes DVD info

As an unrelated sequel to Three, this collaborative asian effort is comprised of three breathtaking horror shorts- Dumplings from Hong Kong, Cut from Korea, and Box from Japan.

The First Extreme: Box Directed by Takashi Miike and starring Hasegawa Kyoko. The story revolves around Kyoko who lost her younger twin sister when they were ten in an accident at the circus. She suffers from recurring nightmares prompted by the guilt she carries for the feelings of jealousy and competition she had with her now deceased sister. Although this short is missing Miike's trademark bloodshed, it more than makes up for it with creepy and disturbing feelings.

The Second Extreme: Dumplings Directed by Fruit Chan, Screenplay by Lillian Lee, and Cinematography by Christopher Doyle. Miriam Yeung plays an aging ex-starlet who is desperate to regain the love of her cheating husband, played by Tony Leung Kar-Fei. She finds a woman who makes these miraculously rejuvenating dumplings from a mystery ingredient that is sure to make the viewer's stomach turn. Beautifully shot and with a graphically disgusting plot this short has a different ending than the feature length film it was cut from.

gruesome capture > http://66.240.136.85/catalog/images/three2_3.jpg

The Third Extreme: Cut Directed by Park Chan-wuk (Old Boy) and starring Lee Byung-Hun. An endurance test for the mind, Cut is a graphic surrealistic conundrum. Byung-Hun is a famous director who is kidnapped one day and forced into a completely helpless situation where his wife's fingers are being removed and put in a blender one by one and he is being asked to do the unthinkable to save her. The film is filled with double entendre and hidden meaning pushed to the limits of the horrific by stunning set design and a haunting soundscape.

The DVD package features a second disc of bonus materials: It includes an outline of the story, a making-of featurette, trailers, and information on cast and crew.

Source:

http://www.cine-east.com/catalog/product_i...roducts_id=1008

[rubie]

THREE … EXTREMES (2005)

OUR GRADE: A

CRITICS' GRADE: B

http://movies.go.com/movies/review?name=th...es_2005#critics

FANS' GRADE: B

http://movies.go.com/readerreviews/movie?n...or&studio=Lions Gate Films

OUR REVIEW

by Dave White

Who's in It: Bai Ling, Tony Leung Ka Fai

The Basics: Three short horror films by three acclaimed Asian directors — Fruit Chan (Public Toilet), Takashi Miike (Ichi the Killer) and Park Chan-wook (Oldboy).

What's the Deal? In Fruit Chan's Dumplings — a gruesome fable about the ultimate spa facial — impossible beauty standards, the toxic side-effects of fame, the institution of marriage and the very dangerous social place occupied by female babies in China are all eviscerated.

What's the Deal? Part II: Park Chan-wook's Cut is a booby-trapped Twilight Zone episode about a kind, decent film director forced to see the evil he carries inside when a madman puts him in a no-win life-or-death situation.

What's the Deal? Part III: Takashi Miike's Box is a change of pace from his usual gross-out antics. A young novelist has recurring dreams of being buried in a box. Flashbacks tell the story of how she was somewhat responsible for the death of her twin sister.

Why So Vague, Dave? Because there are spoilers in almost every scene.

A Draw: You go for Miike because he never fails to kick you in the stomach and shock your system, and Park's freakishly entertaining thesis about revenge is an ongoing one, but it's Chan's gut-churning fantasy, made all the more lurid and oddly beautiful by Christopher Doyle's incredible cinematography, that'll pin you to your seat. Maybe give you dry heaves, too.

No Hollywood Adaptations, Guaranteed! Sarah Michelle Gellar, it's safe to say, won't be starring in the American Dumplings remake. Its Swift-ian premise pretty much guarantees that there won't even be one made.

------------------------------------------------------

CRITICS' REVIEWS

POSITIVE REVIEWS FOR THREE … EXTREMES

TV Guide 3 stars/4 "… all three tales are short, sharp shockers …"

Variety N/A "… stylishly made Asian-fusion horror triptych …"

MIXED REVIEWS FOR THREE … EXTREMES

Entertainment Weekly C- "… too stylized and preassembled to be truly unnerving …"

The Hollywood Reporter N/A "… falls somewhere between psychodrama and horror."

LA Weekly N/A "The result isn't extreme, but it's certainly unsettling in its placidity."

Source: http://movies.go.com/movies/review?name=three-extremes_2005

[rubie]

May 18, 2005

Asian film omnibus goes to so-so extremes

By MARK SCHILLING japantimes.co.jp

Rating: * * * 1/2 (out of 5)

Director: Takashi Miike, Fruit Chan, Park Chang Wook

Running time: 118 minutes

Language: Japanese

Currently showing

The English title of this film, Three . . . Extremes," is one that promises more than it can possibly deliver, especially as one of this omnibus film's three directors is Takashi Miike. After all, what affronts to good taste or simple sanity has Miike not committed in more than 50 films?

Lee Byung Hun and Kang Hye Jeong in "Cut"

For the uninitiated, it's enough to say this bad boy of Japanese cinema has found ways to slice body parts and spray bodily fluids that would have taxed the imagination -- and stomach -- of the Marquis de Sade. All good fun, mind you.

By comparison, this collaboration with Hong Kong director Fruit Chan ("Durian Durian") and South Korea's Park Chang Wook ("Old Boy") -- a follow-up to the similarly structured 2002 film "Three" -- is a model of restraint, though its shocks have enough voltage to stop more than one handful of popcorn midway to mouth. Unlike many of Miike's other entertainments, though, it shouldn't drive anyone from the theater in retching disgust -- save perhaps those unwise souls who dine on Chinese dumplings before the show.

Miike's segment, "Box," is uncharacteristically subdued, if insidiously creepy in a Taisho Era (1912-26), Edogawa Rampo sort of way. His heroine is Kyoko (Kyoko Hasegawa), a sultry writer who works in a gloomy den filled with memories and haunted by a young female ghost. When her editor (Atsuro Watabe) visits, she emerges from her shell to attempt something resembling a seduction, only to plunge back into her past.

Miriam Yeung in "Dumplings"

As a girl, she and her twin sister were part of a bizarre magic act, involving two identical boxes. The magician (Watabe, in a dual role) was a sinister father figure who, with capricious cruelty, preferred the sister to Kyoko, driving the jealous girl to a childish act of revenge, with horrific consequences. Then, one day, Kyoko receives a formal invitation to revisit the scene of her crime and she accepts, trudging off in the dead of winter to meet her fate.

Rather than subvert this story with odd, rude shocks -- as is typically his wont -- Miike somberly lays on the old-timey, otherworldly atmospherics in a mannered style that resembles little else in his oeuvre (though the first act of "Audition" comes close). The producers, I thought, might have done better to hire that past master of Taisho Era strangeness -- Teruo Ishii.

"Dumplings" is the title -- and subject -- of Chan's segment, a shortened version of a 90-minute theatrical version already staged in Hong Kong (and unseen by me). Like the other segments, it is less a crass exploitation than an arty excursion into the macabre. It differs from the others, however, in being comic as well as horrific -- and in addressing a real-life problem in a real-life setting. Its solution, though (we fervently hope), is anything but realistic.

Atsuro Watanabe and Kyoko Hasegawa in "Box"

Canto-pop star Miriam Yeung plays Mrs. Lee, a former TV celebrity who has married a successful businessman (a silver-haired Tony Leung) and retired. But hubby has turned to philandering, and Mrs. Lee is frantically searching for a way to restore her fading beauty and win him back. To all but the most critical eye, there is hardly much to be alarmed about -- a bit of sagging here, a bit of tightening there -- but she seeks nothing less than that dewy glow. She finds it, improbably, in Mei (Bai Ling), a rough-mannered working-class woman who make dumplings that she claims are the fountain of youth and she offers her own youthful looks as proof. (She is unforthcoming about her real age, though she breaks nostalgically into songs of the long-gone Maoist era.)

Mrs. Lee soon discovers that the miracle dumplings are made of ingredients banned by not only the health authorities, but every moral code known to civilized humankind. She continues to crunch grimly away, however, as Christopher Doyle's camera photographs her bubbling meals with an ironic beauty, as though shooting a cooking show from hell. Meanwhile, Mei remains chipperly oblivious as she prepares yet another batch -- and a new ingredient wails and weeps.

This story may sound blatantly misogynist, but Chan and Doyle are hardly sadistic in their treatment of their two heroines, bathing both in the same caressing, flattering light, while placing the action at several removes from gross and sordid reality.

The last segment, Park's "Cut," starts as the most extreme and thus Miike-esque. The shocks are so elaborately and sadistically over the top that they verge on the comic. No one dreams up anything remotely like them in real life, unless they are Japanese manga artists or variety show producers.

The hero is a commercially and critically successful film director (Lee Byung Hun) who lives an idyllic life with his beautiful pianist wife (Kang Hye Jeong) in a pad straight out of a painfully chic design magazine. Into this perfect setup steps a psychotic extra (Lim Won Hie) from the director's films, who considers himself a neglected talent and is furious that the filmmaker has never recognized his existence.

Invading the director's home with a child hostage, the extra acts out a fiendishly ingenious script, using rope, Superglue and a bungee chord as props. Finally he presents the director with a horrific choice that, one way or another, will change his life forever.

Park's working out of this familiar "madman in the house" situation is clever enough, but my attention began to flag as I realized that the plot springs were purely mechanical -- and that the only real surprise would be in how the extra met his inevitable end.

The Miike of old, I thought, would have finished with, say, a duel in outer space, with both antagonists transformed into giant penises (see the "Dead or Alive" series for examples). By that standard, Park is boringly sane. But who wouldn't be? Even, today, Miike himself.

[rubie]

May 12, 2005

VC Filmfest 2005 - The Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival

Three...Extremes

Warren Curry einsiders.com

125 minutes, Japan/Hong Kong/South Korea, Directed by Fruit Chan, Park Chan-wook, Takashi Miike, Cast: Bai Ling, Miriam Yeung, Tony Leung Ka-Fai, Lee Byung-Hun, Kyoko Hasegawa

Three of Asia's finest cinematic agitators combine talents to make the depraved (and that's not an insult) horror film "Three Extremes," a compilation of three short movies, all running about 40 minutes in length. South Korea's Park Chan-wook, who's 2004 Cannes Grand Jury Prize winner, "Oldboy," is currently in theatrical release, makes a strong impression with "Cut," a twisted tale about a movie director (Lee Byung-Hun) and his wife who are held hostage in their home by a deranged man who was an extra on one of the director's movies. Bizarre humor, graphic (but not overly so ala "Perth") violence, and the director's wizardry behind the camera coalesce into a stunning whole. Takashi Miike's "Box," an ethereal ghost story about an adult woman (Kyoko Hasegawa) still not fully recovered from the childhood loss of her twin sister is relatively subdued given the director's reputation for hyper-violent work. But it is Fruit Chan's "Dumplings," adapted from his feature of the same name that is also making the festival rounds, which will be the most difficult to digest. The story about an aging actress (Miriam Yeung), who believes that the dumplings made by a doctor (Bai Ling) -- which contain a disgusting secret ingredient -- will restore her fading beauty, totally crosses the limits of good taste but that certainly doesn't mean the film fails. It's repulsive, but also strangely absorbing.

Asian horror films have developed quite a unique reputation worldwide the past few years, and "Three Extremes" will further add to it. Lions Gate has acquired the film for U.S. distribution, and my free advice to them is to re-sequence the order of these films. "Box" is too slow to take up the rear and should be placed first, with "Cut" remaining in second position and "Dumplings" closing the show. And a friendly suggestion to viewers: if Lions Gate doesn't switch the order, don't bother buying popcorn at the theater -- after watching "Dumplings" you won't be able to eat anything the rest of the day.

[rubie]

October 31, 2005

THREE... EXTREMES (2005)

*** (out of four)

Source: filmfreakcentral.net

My favourite working cinematographer is Harris Savides. His collaborations with Gus Van Sant and his contribution to Jonathan Glazer's Birth demonstrate to me an agility with aspect ratio and rhythm that's particularly pleasing to my own ways of seeing. A close second, though, is Christopher Doyle, the great Australian cinematographer who teams almost exclusively with Asian directors (most notably on the bulk of Wong Kar Wai's visually arresting filmography, Zhang Yimou's Hero, and Pen-Ek Ratanaruang's Last Life in the Universe)--his stuff indicative of a kind of lyrical, ritualistic devouring that matches the best of the Asian sensibility in pace and narrative. Doyle joins an elite crowd (Greg Toland, James Wong Howe, Raoul Coutard, Sven Nykvist, Vilmos Zsigmond, Conrad Hall, and a select few others) of cinematographers worthy of the auteur label: a certain mood, a certain style, haunts every frame on which he works with a distinct, unmistakable bouquet. He's an interesting choice, then, as the only constant of an anthology film, Three... Extremes, a sequel in structure to an Asian portmanteau from a couple years back, featuring, again, three different frontline Asian directors, each enlisted to provide a horror-based short film.

Start with Doyle behind the camera for Fruit Chan's lauded feature-length Dumplings, trimmed down to anthology size for inclusion in a piece that feels, pleasantly, like three phases in a conversation with one evolving consciousness. Something that initially appears to be another Category 3 tale of the things that make their way into Chinese food, Dumplings quickly resolves into a strong statement on cultural diffusion, traditional remedies, and the toll of institutionalized misogyny. Its details are extraordinarily intimate and discomfiting (it's the most invasive picture about the female anatomy since Dead Ringers), while Bai Ling serves as a counterpoint just by her presence, introducing an unhealthy dose of uncomfortable sexuality--a whiff of the sexpot in the figure of an ageless old woman (she speaks in Mandarin, the rest speak in Cantonese--the stateliness of the "State" language a subtle indicator of her character's "real" age) who peddles youth through the filling of her special dumplings. A rich woman (Miriam Yeung) visits her for a drink from a certain fountain and an aging ex-television star loses her philandering husband--and from that potting in conventional soil, Chan nurses a stern warning about the toll of governmental sanctions on childbirth on every level of society. If only by transference, notice our own ceaseless ideological debate concerning the abortion issue on the block as well. With a brilliantly obscene soundtrack and an indelible image of Bai Ling singing a bawdy folk song as one of her customers happily slurps and crunches away at her grim repast, Dumplings is heady stuff--and uniquely squirm-inducing to boot. The full cut of Dumplings, complete with a different ending and a far more leisurely pace, adds over fifty minutes to the running time but thus far lacks North American distribution.

South Korean phenom Park Chan-wook chimes in next with Cut, possibly the most balanced short of the three and originally (and logically) positioned at the end. The intrigue begins when hotshot director Ryu (Lee Byung-hun) wakes during a home invasion to find himself bungeed to a wall and his concert pianist wife (Kang Hye-jung) pinioned to her grand piano, her fingers super-glued to the keys in preparation for a whack from their schlubby torturer's (Lim Won-hee) axe. The problem, as it's presented to Ryu, is that Ryu's got it all and still seems to be a nice guy, thus deflating the assailant's theories about nice guys finishing last. And so Ryu is to strangle a little girl the man's abducted at random--or every five minutes, he'll chop off one of the wife's fingers. Park's gift is his genuine inquisitiveness: he wonders if it's possible to actually locate a moral tether in the exacting of vengeance, and he hopes, along the way, to marry Greek tragedy with post-modern self-reflexivity. Its last third a model of displacement and the art of misdirection (compare to the bumbling richard simmons-circus of last year's Saw), Cut addresses issues of honour and betrayal, sacrifice and duty, and, most importantly, the facades we erect to keep us at arm's length with the lies of our lives.

Takashi Miike rounds out Three... Extremes with Box, a piece that reminds a lot of Masato Harado's Inugami in its stately execution. Doyle's palette is subdued here to black, white, and one shade of grey, and in truth our post-millennial familiarity with the vagaries of J-horror preclude many chills in the spectral little girl half-obscured by a doorway at the end of a hall, but this incest-darkened tale of a circus family and the tragedy that one act of jealousy touches off does enthral until the obscene, incomprehensible last shot. Had Three... Extremes begun with the Miike and ended with the Park, there would have been a kind of cohesion in its movement from formalist-to-modernist-to-post-modernist--but as it is in this shuffle, the picture ends on its weakest note (it's almost as though Miike is passing the title of the Pacific Rim's King Sicko on to Chan and Park), softening the kill blow right when the existential quagmire should be stickiest.

[rubie]

November 17, 2005

THREE... EXTREMES

Source: by Ryan Vu popmatters.com

Director: Fruit Chan, Park Chanwook, Takashi Miike

Cast: Bai Ling, Miriam Yeung Chin Wah, Tony Leung Ka Fai, Byung-hun Lee, Atsuro Watabe

(Lion's Gate, 2004) Rated: R

Release date: 28 October 2005 (limited)

The Asian horror vogue has already worn off, thanks to a procession of American remakes and a lack of variety in the genre itself. Three... Extremes, however, confounds expectations. Not only does each of the three horror vignettes contain more surprises than most full-length features, but unlike most filmic anthologies, it has no weak links.

Fruit Chan's Dumplings focuses on the act of eating. Over-the-hill actress Qing Li (Miriam Yeung) visits the Shenzhen equivalent of a witch doctor, the mysterious Aunt Mei (Bai Ling), to get an anti-aging supplement in the form of magical dumplings. The revelation of the all-too-rich special ingredient leads to some very unsettling psychological changes in Qing Li, which are slowly reflected on her body. The most satisfying of the three pieces, Dumplings is also the least ambitious. Cut down from a feature-length film, it makes for a darkly seductive look at a woman's efforts to hang on to her beauty, her appetites going from merely pathetic to the stuff of horror. Remarkably, the lightness of Chan's direction (coupled with Christopher Doyle's always elegant cinematography) makes the change seem almost natural.

Cut, the middle chapter, is written and directed by Park Chanwook, the Korean filmmaker behind the cult hits Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. The story concerns a well-known film director (Byung-hun Lee) and his pianist wife (Hye-jeong Kang), as they endure agonizing physical and psychological abuse at the hands of a disgruntled extra (Won-hie Lim). Park's trademark slick, almost distractingly inventive camerawork (delirious tracking shots trading off with jittery handheld close-ups) gives the proceedings a madcap intensity, and the short format serves his directorial ADD well, even as he splices together a number of genres (low comedy, musicals, splatter).

It's no surprise that Park takes the body horror theme to its most obvious "extreme": torture. Angry that the director is a "good man," the extra threatens to chop off one of the wife's fingers every five minutes, until the director kills a young girl tied up in a corner of the room. Toying with the director's moral sensibility, the extra destroys his dignity and steals his power. The extra even stages the abuse on a film set mock-up of the director's home, where he can adjust music and lighting to dramatic effect. Cut at times plays like a smarter, more chaotic version of Saw. It includes many twists before the denouement, though by then the initially tight narrative has spiraled into near incoherence. The point, however, is unmistakable: we are all directed.

The third and most perplexing entry is Takashi Miike's Box. While his chief claim to fame has been the depths of depravity to which his films sometimes sink (Ichi the Killer being a prime example), Miike is also a consummate craftsman. This short turns out to be the least overtly "extreme" chapter, but it is also the creepiest. It mixes familiar J-horror techniques (long takes, eerie noises, silence) with surreal imagery that recalls the work of David Lynch.

The story unfolds in fits and starts, like a dream constantly interrupted, every detail part of an elaborate allegory. Novelist Kyoko (Kyoko Hasegawa) is troubled by nightmares that may or may not relate to her past. A massive tree, snow-covered plain, and lone circus tent haunt her. Inside the tent, a young Kyoko and her sister Shoko perform contortionist acrobatic stunts under the direction of their stepfather (Atsuro Watabe). Like tiny dolls, they can collapse to fit into small boxes. But Kyoko, jealous of their stepfather's (vaguely incestuous) attention to her sister, plots the girl's demise. In her waking life, her editor is also played by Watabe (though their personalities couldn't be more different), blurring its distinction from her dreams. The film conveys a disturbing sexual subtext, capped off by a jaw-dropping final shot that reveals just how closely Kyoko and her sister are related.

While none of the three pieces in Three... Extremes is directly connected to the others, they do create a thematic coherence. In each, psychological traumas are expressed on bodies. In exploring the fragile boundary between mental and our physical states, the film gives its grisly forays into the "extreme" greater resonance than the sensational title might suggest. It's a wonderfully unpleasant reminder of the deep, dark places that intelligent horror can go, places where even the most splatter-happy mainstream "thrillers" fear to tread.

[rubie]

THREE ... EXTREMES

Rating:

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Hong Kong/South Korea/Japan. 2004.

Dumplings:

Director - Fruit Chan, Screenplay - Lilian Lee, Producer - Peter Chan, Photography - Christopher Doyle, Music - Chan Kwong Wing @clickmusic, Production Design - Yee Chung Man. Production Company - Applause Pictures.

Cast:

Miriam Yeung (Mrs Li), Bai Ling (Aunt Mei), Tony Leung Ka-fai (Mr Li)

Cut:

Director/Screenplay - Park Chan-wook, Producer - Ahn Soon-yun, Photography - Jeong Jeong-hun, Makeup Effects - CELL, Production Design - Seong-hie Yu. Production Company - Son Film.

Cast:

Lee Byung-hun (The Director), Lim Wong-hie (The Extra), Kang Hye-jeong (Wife)

Box:

Director - Takashi Miike, Screenplay - Haruko Fukishima, Story - Ben Saikou, Producers - Fumio Inoue, Naoki Sato & Shin Shimizu, Photography - Koichi Kawakimi, Music - Peach, Makeup Effects - Yuichi Matsumo, Production Design - Takashi Sazaki. Production Company - Kadokawa.

Cast:

Kyoko Hasegawa (Kyoko), Atsuro Watabe (Stepfather/Editor)

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Plot: Dumplings: The aging actress Mrs Li goes to Aunt Mei whose dumplings are reputed to have the ability to help one regain their youthfulness. But after she starts the treatment, Mrs Li discovers that the principal ingredient in the dumplings is aborted human foetuses. Cut: A successful South Korean film director has his home invaded by a man who appeared as an extra in several of his films. The extra is determined to expose the sins in the director's life and ties his wife, a successful concert pianist, up to her piano and promises to chop off one of her fingers every five minutes if the director does not make the choice to strangle a child he also holds prisoner. Box: A Japanese novelist Kyoko is haunted by a dream and the appearances of a girl. These obsessively draw her back to her childhood when she and her twin sister Shoko were a performing contortionist act. Kyoko was jealous of how Shoko was her stepfather's favourite. She locked Shoko in their performing box for one night, but then the tent was accidentally set on fire and Shoko burned alive. The dreams draw Kyoko back to the tent where something starts stirring inside the box.

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Three ... Extremes is a horror anthology. It is actually a sequel to an earlier anthology Three (2002), which did not quite enjoy the same exposure as this follow-up. Three ... Extremes, like Three, has been put together to capitalize on the current interest in Asian horror with the successes of Ring (1998), Ju-on: The Grudge (2003) et al. In the case of Three ... Extremes, the producers have chosen three directors each from a different one of the top three Asian filmmaking countries - Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea. The directors in question are Takashi Miike, the cult Japanese director of gruelling and ultra-violent films like Audition (1999), Ichi the Killer (2001) and Visitor Q (2001); South Korea's Park Chan-wook who made the previous year's Cannes award winning Oldboy (2003), a similarly gruelling and ultra-sadistic horror that pushes a number of taboo boundaries; and Hong Kong's Fruit Chan, who has yet to make a horror film but is known for strong, socially conscious portraits of disenfranchised people on the edges of Hong Kong society and his critique of rule by mainland China.

The first episode, Dumplings, was later expanded by director Fruit Chan into a feature-length film, Dumplings (2004). Due to film festival scheduling, I unfortunately ended up seeing the feature film version of Dumplings less than a week before Three ... Extremes, where in fact they were originally released the other way around. The two are essentially the same film. The shorter version of the film here covers all the basic points in the longer film but what becomes apparent in watching both films close together is that Fruit Chan has not shot two different versions, but shot both films once. The longer version, Dumplings, features all the same shots that appear in the shorter version, but just tells each scene with more additional pieces to each scene, while the shorter version has edited each scene and shot down to a bare minimum. The shorter version does lose many of the aspects that work much better in the longer version - we don't get to see the full hilarity of Bai Ling's sublime performance, while Fruit Chan's chiaroscuro directorial style is much the less. On the plus side, the shorter version works much more effectively as a horror story. The nonchalant humour comes much more concisely and makes much sharper contrast to the grim revelations about the dumplings containing human foetuses and the depiction of the abortions, whereas the longer version tends to draw these things out to somewhat lesser effect.

The most notable change between the shorter and longer versions of Dumplings is in the ending. The feature film version has Miriam Yeung persuading her husband's lover to surrender her baby and the film goes out on her preparing to devour it, while this has a much nastier and completely different ending where Miriam Yeung finds that she is pregnant herself and the episode goes out on her conducting a wire coat hanger abortion in the bathtub. It's not quite certain why Fruit Chan displaced the thrust of this scene onto the character of the husband's lover, but certainly the way the scene comes here has a much grimmer and nastier kick than it did in the feature film version.

Park Chan-wook's episode Cut is another strong segment. Cut shows Park revisiting much of what he offered up in Oldboy - a character abducted out of the blue and tortured in sadistic ways. Both Cut and Oldboy see the torture as a transformative psychological process where the central character is forced to peel away their life and confront harsh truths about the past, and in both films there come a number of jolting revelations. Park Chan-wook, like Takashi Miike, revels in sadistic and psychological extremes. There are some quite nasty scenes in Cut \ with the wife having her fingers severed one at a time and of course the grim position the protagonist is put in where he is asked to choose to strangle the child or see his wife lose all her fingers. Lim Wong-hie, the actor playing the extra, plays to the gallery and is clearly having the time of his life (and proves an excellent dancer into the bargain). The opening of the segment also offers up a rather funny spoof of the Asian vampire movie.

Takashi Miike's segment, Box, is surprisingly the weakest of the three. Miike seems to have played against type and not gone the route that both Fruit Chan and Park Chan-wook have in pushing for queasy horror (a territory that could really be regarded as Miike's homeground) but rather created a more abstract arty subject. Box starts out seeming like a traditional Japanese ghost story. But this soon moves into a blurred series of childhood reminisces and dream sequences, where we get the impression that the protagonist is being haunted by the vengeful ghost of the twin sister she killed during childhood. Takashi Miike creates all sorts of weird synchronicity between the sister locked in the box, the adult heroine trudging through the snow and then seemingly being folded up like a voodoo doll by her stepfather. Ultimately Box does seem like a very experimental short where Takashi Miike is more interested in visual abstraction than he fully is in narrative. However an unusual twist ending brings the whole episode together quite effectively.

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Copyright Richard Scheib 2005

Source: http://www.moria.co.nz/horror/3extremes.htm

[rubie]

Updated Feb.15,2006 15:12 KST

Front - Feb. 15, 2005

Outside the Berlinale Palast cinema at the 56th Berlinale International Film Festival in Berlin on Wednesday, Cannes Grand Prize-winning director Park Chan-wook holds a banner that reads "Korean Films Are in Danger" in protest of recent government steps to cut the screen quota reserved for Korean movies./Yonhap

Source: Digital Chosun Ilbo

http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/new...0602150001.html