Shiri
But this is probably going to be one of the nicest blog postings in quite awhile. I am not saying that “Shiri” is a bad movie, it’s just that it won’t be difficult to comment on the film without this nagging thought of not having portrayed it in the way I would like to.
Watching “Shiri” was indeed very relaxing, if it is even possible to watch a thriller with a relaxed mindset. Apart from some rather bloody scenes, this is quite a straight-forward storyline borrowing a lot from Hollywood James Bond-type thrillers and Hong Kong action movies. By the way, I am never going to understand why the violence scenes in Asian movies always have to be so incredibly explicit, I was eating lunch when the first scenes of the movie and those hacked off heads were rather ‘disappetizing’ to look at.
I can easily understand why “Shiri” was so popular, and I have enjoyed it myself a lot as well, especially since the love story of the main characters was actually very sweet. The end was just perfect, it was just tragic and bittersweet without any touch of kitsch. However, I think the film cannot compare with “JSA”, “Welcome to Dongmakgol” or even “The Host”. Those movies were still a few levels higher in terms of meaningfulness, sadness and humour. Plus, I simply could not understand why the two policemen were not able to see how the woman they looked for was the same person as the girlfriend. Dark lipstick is not enough to make you look completely different after all. What the heck. XD
Finally, I think that this is the first movie in quite awhile I am definitely not going to recommend. It is just “not that bad” and enjoyable for me (because I have a weakness for Korean movies), but I am most likely not going to see it again anytime soon.
I found this film to be ‘enjoy once and forget about afterwards’ too, but that’s often the case with this type of film. It does everything it sets out to do: it rivals similar Hollywood films in terms of quality and entertainment value, but nothing more. I can certainly see why it was popular, and I daresay it did the Korean film industry a lot of good too.
The performances were pretty good though. Choi Min-sik is one of my favourite actors anyway – I think of him as Korea’s answer to Gary Oldman!
Choi Min-sik is the best! He definitely is the actor who stood out the most in the whole film (but then again, perhaps I am biased because I didn’t know any of the other actors).
I totally agree that the market of Korean cinema has completely changed with the success of “Shiri”. If “Shiri” was not so popular, we might never have seen films like “Oldboy”, “The Host” or “JSA”. So I suppose I have to be grateful to it, heh.