I have now! Watched Memories of Murder last night and really dug it. Definitely my favourite Bong after Parasite (though I also rewatched Snowpiercer recently and liked it a little better than before). It was particularly striking given how tired and formulaic the serial killer genre is in the West, though I wonder how much the divergence was down to being based on true events (I’ve no idea how faithful the story is).
In a similar way to how Parasite makes a good companion piece to Burning, I’d argue that Memories of Murder juxtaposes well with Sympathy for Mr Vengeance. They both share a fundamental lack of faith in the police and policework that you rarely see in Hollywood movies, though it’s much more nihilistically expressed in Park’s film and Bong’s has much more, um, sympathy for at least some (one?) of the detectives as individuals than Park’s. I’d be very interested if anyone has any reading material on the cultural origin of that, kind of like that piece on the Japanese justice system and Ace Attorney.
I saw from the Rotten Tomatoes reviews (and one that popped up in the QT3 search) that a lot of critics highlighted what they called comic elements or dark humour. I have to say I didn’t really get that vibe at all, and I’m usually attuned to dark humour (and it’s clearly present in Bong’s other films). Stuff like the crime scene fuck-ups early on didn’t come across as bleakly funny, just tragic/shameful. That’s not to say there was nothing funny in it at all, but I would never in a million years describe it, as the review referenced on QT3 did, as “an unusual fusion of death and laughter”.
I just saw this movie. What a great movie. Now I want to track down more movies by this writer/director.
The images of the movie were also so immaculate. It made me wonder how many of the scenes were storyboarded beforehand? Or were they filmed based on a rough plan and just turned out so beautifully?
I saw Memories of Murder this morning. Excellent! Thank you for the recommendation. It reminded me a lot of another crime drama based on a real case, the movie Talvar, that’s a really good one too.
By the way, I looked it up, and it seems like they just caught the real killer in 2019, according to wikipedia, and got a confession out of him for all the murders. Of course, after watching the movie, I automatically wonder how reliable such a confession is.
Back for Parasite.
Wow, that’s interesting. Some of the scenes that I thought had to be storyboarded were indeed in that montage, full of CGI.
During the mid aughts I went on an absolute Korean cinema tear.
My Sassy Girl
3 Iron
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…And Spring
Joint Security Area
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
Old Boy
Sympathy for Lady Vengeance
A Tale of Two Sisters
Memories of Murder
Peppermint Candy
Attack the Gas Station
Save the Green Planet
The Good, the Bad, the Weird
The Presidents Last Bang
Secret Sunshine
Castaway on the Moon
Etc…
Then I just stopped, maybe seeing only like…The Handmaiden until Parasite. I think mostly because there were too many other things to now watch.
Also there were a few Korean directed English speaking movies with Hollywood actors like The Last Stand and Stoker I guess I watched but I probably missed a lot.
I haven’t watched this yet. Is it still included with some streaming service? Is it a “hard to watch” film in the sense of people being horrible to each other or what?
Fantastic movie, popped up on Netflix. As usual my wife nope-d out of the action at the end, forcing me to wait until she went to bed to finish, and again as usual the moment I had turned it off just as the bloody part was ending anyway. She did the same to me in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
If I have one complaint, it’s that the one-after-another hiring of the family felt too linear and predictable after the sister… but I don’t have too much of a fix, given the time and plot constraints of the format. A series would have allowed you to pad the character development between these events and made it feel less domino-like.
I was pleased the rich family weren’t made to feel despicable, it added more nuance to the ending, but we did have a feeling that once the events in the middle of the film reached a head, it was the last comeuppance that needed to happen, that they needed to get theirs… but it was dealt with in a pleasingly nuanced fashion. They were the obvious victims of the film, but their resolution still felt deserved.
I really appreciated the dad’s philosophy on planning, and the futility of it, for the lower classes, where setbacks are more debilitating than when you have the padding of wealth.
Have to say though, I’m not buying the kid getting bashed with the rock on the head, hard, twice, the last time with force and gravity. If he survived that, it should have been as a vegetable.
It’s not in most western media reporting but he was being investigated for using marijuana and other drugs by the South Korean police and he left what is being considered a suicide note.
That’s so odd compared to American culture. I didn’t see any reference to which drugs were involved in the investigation, and the article says Lee had passed all the drug tests the police had subjected him to. But even for drugs more serious than weed, it’s mind boggling to me the level of stigma that must be involved to prompt a suicide. From his IMDB page, it looked like his career was humming along nicely.
My understanding is that it was less the drug charges by itself but that combined with the fact that he was caught with escorts giving him the drugs when he has a squeaky clean image in Korea.
Of course, neither of those things would be a career killer in the US necessarily.
