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Watching Kim
Jee-woon's The
Good, The Bad and the Weird
at the Elgin, all I could think was, “I wish I were seeing this
with the Midnight Madness audience.” It's interesting to see how
the daydwellers live, the Elgin is beatiful and being short I love
nearly any theater with stadium seating. I'm not ashamed to admit
it's a big part of why I miss Midnight Madness at the Uptown. But still, I missed the enthusiasm.
I
guess I should also admit I'm exaggerating just a little how much I thought about
the daytime crowd since from the opening shot, I didn't think about
anything but the movie.
I like
Kim's films (A
Tale of Two Sisters, The
Foul King and The
Quiet Family, remade as The
Happiness of the Katakuris
by Takashi Miike)
and he makes a damn fine Western. The opening tracking shot
following Song
Kang-ho's (The
Host and yay!) back as he
walks up a train selling rice cakes and candy rivals the opening
tracking shot in JCVD.
Not in the complexity of action, but maybe in the beauty and in a
different low tech complexity. I think that Kim Jee-woon's “steady
cam” wasn't just a “human-cam” as he mentioned in the Q&A.
It seemed like it might've been hanging from a board a la Sam
Raimi's Evil Dead films. Kim Jee-woon mentioned Sam Raimi's
Spider-man
as an influence, so I can't help wondering. But regardless, the
shot's amazing.
The Good, The Bad and the Weird
is funny and there are anachronistic elements intended to translate
through time, but it's not detached from the characters or the
situation. There's no fear of engagement. Kim Jee-woon told us
afterwards that he always thought that Manchuria in the 1930s was
incredibly postmodern. Miike uses similar postmodern elements in his
Western, Sukiyaki
Western Django, and they
seem to move his film out of time. But I never doubted that The
Good, The Bad and the Weird was
in a particular time and place. Even the Sergio
Leone references aren't intended for abstract appreciation and it
didn't really matter that many in the audience might not catch little
things like Park Chang-yi's (Lee
Byung-hun) suit or hat-shooting.
Look at that suit!
You can line parts of The
Good, The Bad and the Weird up
against Sergio Leone's Man
With No Name trilogy, but it doesn't matter all that much. Kim
Jee-woon isn't playing collect them all. There's a lot more to this
film than that.
I did
really like the musical references, though. Westerns are about
landscape, it's true, but they're also about sound, or maybe about
silence and when to break it.
Look at him go!
Also, Jung
Woo-sung rides better than any actor I've seen. Maybe even better than
Mifune Toshiro in
The Hidden
Fortress.
Toshiro says, "Hmph!"
He also successfully wears a cowboy hat in Manchukuo.
Dead Lau Ching-Wan also successfully wears a cowboy hat. After
The Good, The Bad and the Weird,
Sukiyaki Western Django,
Tears of the
Black Tiger and even Johnnie
To's Exiled,
the world is clamoring for more Asian Westerns. Or at least I am.
They seem like the best ones around right now. Well, except maybe
weird Westerns, like J.T.
Petty's The
Burrowers.
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