A Bittersweet Life (Korean film)

One of my favorite Korean directors is Kim Ji-Woon. I have liked every movie he has made. One of them, "A Tale Of Two Sisters" has been remade as "The Uninvited" in the US. And my copy of "The Foul King" came with a rubber wrestling mask. His latest film, "The Good, The Bad, The Weird" played at the International Film Festival last year, and may get a release this year (fingers crossed). But my favorite film of his is the gangster film "A Bittersweet Life". It is the story of a mob enforcer who feels sympathy with someone for the first time, unfortunately it was with the mistress of his boss. Things go wrong and there is lots of bloodshed. Here is the trailer for the movie.


If this looks good, then search on youtube for the whole movie as someone has posted it with subtitles. It has been 4 years since it came out in Korea so I doubt that it will get a US release, which is a shame.

Devil At Your Heels

One of the movies I will buy if it ever comes out on dvd is "Devil At Your Heels". It is a documentary about a Canadian stuntman, Ken Carter, and his five year quest to jump a car over the Canadian/ US boarder, a distance of a mile. At times it seems Spinal Tap-esque, you refuse to believe that it is a real documentary. It is available on vhs at collectable prices on ebay and amazon. It is as good as "Grizzly Man" or "Hands On A Hardbody". Here is a 10 minute clip on youtube.

The IT Crowd

One of my favorite British comedies of the last 10 years is starting to play on the IFC channel. The set up is that two socially awkward computer geeks have to deal with a new boss who knows nothing about computers. I highly recommend it. It also seems that most of the episodes are up on youtube in 10 minute intervals. Unfortunately most of the clips have embedding disabled. So go to youtube and search for IT Crowd Moss Roy and it will bring up the episodes. I recommend buying the US dvd that comes out next month.

T-shirt inspired by the hammer fight in Oldboy

My favorite film of 2003 was the Korean revenge drama Oldboy, one of the best scenes in the movie was the hammer fight in the hallway where the the lead actor, Choi Min-Sik fights a small army of gangsters in a small hallway armed with a only with a hammer. Originally the director had planned to use x-ray shots to show the hammer breaking bones. It was going to be a homage to Sonny Chiba's Street Fighter. But when he found out that Quentin Tarantino was working with Chiba in Kill Bill, he thought that Tarantino would use the same effect. So on the day of the shoot he improvised the fight into one take, one shot. There has been an America remake in the works for the past couple of years and the idea of an American film filled with product placement has inspired this t-shirt store to print up this shirt. You can buy it for $18 at dutchsouthern.com/shirt.php?id=11
The link has a clip of the fight and so I did not include one here.
Instead here is the clip from the Indian remake, Zinda. They tried recreating the shot but you can see the main actor, Sunjay Dutt miss gangster with his hammer, and the gangsters reacting as if they were hit.

Hard Boiled Upate 1-29-09

The store will close at 4pm on Sunday due to my desire to watch the ads during the Superbowl. I think that the Steelers will take the lead early and keep it. Some betting site is offering 10-1 odds that Bruce Springsteen will pull Courtney Cox out of the audience, recreating their music video magic moment from 25 years ago.

Several big releases came in last week and we still have them in. Also I've bought a bunch of good used LPs this week.

Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion CD Vinyl will be available again in a couple of weeks.

Andrew Bird - Noble Beast CD

Thievery Corporation - Radio Retaliation CD With Femi Kuti, Seu Jorge, Anoushka Shankar and many other special guests.

New issue of Mojo

New issue of Uncut



Thanks
Mark

More Animal Collective

Last week I closed the store an hour early to go to The Metro to see Animal Collective. They were pretty good. So here is their latest music video for "My Girls"

Imaginary Criterion covers for Hong Kong movies

I saw this link on kungfufridays.blogspot.com/ (scroll 1/3 of the way down to the Jan 5. 09 post) for images created by fans of Hong Kong movies. Fake Criterion covers, so much better than the crappy covers these movies get in American releases. You can check out more at this link
Fake Criterion covers

Mark