I am surprised and encouraged by the quality films I've seen out of Korea. Chingoo is a touching first-person story about 4 boyhood friends and the way their lives unfold from carefree boyish cluelessness to the inevitable.
There are flashy, chaotic,violent films like Pulp Fiction which become instant cult classics because they are not chaotic at all, but crafted immaculately. But the characters in Pulp Fiction are just that- unreal, comic-book lowlives who inadvertently display a few human characteristics while going about their destructive, pulp-fiction lives.
Chingoo comes from the other direction, although it too is crafted superbly. No flash. Instead of the cool junkie Vincent portrayed by John Travolta, Joon-suk ably evokes a glimpse of the personal hellworld of addiction...and later wryly comments that he found the will to clean up after he saw he was losing ground in the gangster corporate hierarchy. Very much the CEO material. Yes, he coulda been a corporate contendah .and 500 years earlier he would have been the Korean equivalent of a Samurai daimyo if only..
These are real human characters growing up in a society that is rigidly disciplined, yet dynamic- and their paths take them literally on an escalator of fate to adulthood with just a whimsical struggle of will by Joon-suk, the protagonist, the main toughguy. He evokes the late Lee Strasberg's famous line from The Godfather, "These are the lives we've chosen," in the stolidity with which he accepts the horror of being a gangster. But he's a better man than the Godfather or the Pacino Godfather. He shows loyalty goes both ways.
Thirty minutes after Pulp Fiction, you're hungry- in fact, there's no story to digest at all. It's a fairytale as it intends. Chingoo sticks to your ribs (spoiler pun) by building real characters and taking real themes and hinting at issues that torment great men. Unfortunately, the film is true to the clime, and there are no great women characters. I suppose that's true of the Godfather too. Gangsters just aren't chick-flick material.
Chingoo delivers a supposedly autobiographical story by the director which tells me yet again that life is stranger, realer, better than pulp fiction. Well worth viewing.
There are flashy, chaotic,violent films like Pulp Fiction which become instant cult classics because they are not chaotic at all, but crafted immaculately. But the characters in Pulp Fiction are just that- unreal, comic-book lowlives who inadvertently display a few human characteristics while going about their destructive, pulp-fiction lives.
Chingoo comes from the other direction, although it too is crafted superbly. No flash. Instead of the cool junkie Vincent portrayed by John Travolta, Joon-suk ably evokes a glimpse of the personal hellworld of addiction...and later wryly comments that he found the will to clean up after he saw he was losing ground in the gangster corporate hierarchy. Very much the CEO material. Yes, he coulda been a corporate contendah .and 500 years earlier he would have been the Korean equivalent of a Samurai daimyo if only..
These are real human characters growing up in a society that is rigidly disciplined, yet dynamic- and their paths take them literally on an escalator of fate to adulthood with just a whimsical struggle of will by Joon-suk, the protagonist, the main toughguy. He evokes the late Lee Strasberg's famous line from The Godfather, "These are the lives we've chosen," in the stolidity with which he accepts the horror of being a gangster. But he's a better man than the Godfather or the Pacino Godfather. He shows loyalty goes both ways.
Thirty minutes after Pulp Fiction, you're hungry- in fact, there's no story to digest at all. It's a fairytale as it intends. Chingoo sticks to your ribs (spoiler pun) by building real characters and taking real themes and hinting at issues that torment great men. Unfortunately, the film is true to the clime, and there are no great women characters. I suppose that's true of the Godfather too. Gangsters just aren't chick-flick material.
Chingoo delivers a supposedly autobiographical story by the director which tells me yet again that life is stranger, realer, better than pulp fiction. Well worth viewing.