Attack the Gas Station! (1999, Kim Sang-jin)

I’ve lost the desire to visit South Korea.

I’m not sure how to describe Attack the Gas Station! I suppose it’s a crime comedy, except the audience is supposed to laugh at the victims. The film lionizes its criminals–who spend the near two hour running time assaulting children, attempting the occasional rape and generally humiliating everyone they can.

But it’s okay, the filmmakers say, because the squares deserve it. The children–teenagers, I guess–all have part-time jobs, which makes them lame. The woman deserves to be raped because she’s a materialistic bitch. Everyone else is really lame too. But not our heroes. They’ve been mistreated–whether by loan sharks, teachers, coaches or parents–so it’s okay they’re criminals.

Oddly, they spend lots of time beating up other criminals–those are real “bad guys” though, who apparently don’t have social reasons for their disfunction.

Sitting and suffering through Attack the Gas Station, it occurred to me I’ve never seen a film more pro-violence. Any of those popular American films accused of glorifying crime and violence? They have nothing on this one.

Kim’s direction is, at times, sublime. When it goes over the top, it fails. But it’s very well-directed for about the first half. Really good performances from Lee Sung-jae and Park Yeong-gyu. The only bad performance is Kang Seong-jin.

It seems unaware of its general violent misanthropy and more specific misogyny, but I’m not sure if that ignorance is a good thing.

Some (2004, Chang Yoon-hyun)

I love genre-breaking. It doesn’t happen much in film. Something like Blade Runner mixes genre, but little ever really breaks the genre mold anymore. I mean, the American romantic comedy has been around since in 1938 with The Cowboy and the Lady. I’ve seen strict genre films from Korea and I’ve seen loose ones (comedies with severe dramatic turns, for example), but Some sticks out. It’s kind of cute and light-hearted, but never comedic, but still violent and dark. I suppose it’s like an early color Hitchcock, which were still fun, but somebody could, conceivably, die.

More surprising is that Some has a huge gimmick. A huge precognition gimmick. I don’t know how well the film would have worked without the gimmick, because by the time it was fully defined, I was already wrapped up in it. The two leads are great and elicit concern early on–through extreme peril, another Hitchcock method–and I was already committed to the film, so I just let the gimmick pass. I’m not advocating such gimmicks, but the gimmick doesn’t run Some, even though it… kind of does. The film’s focus is on its characters and their immediate danger, not the gimmick, which makes the film an example of a gimmick working (to some degree, the film still only gets a one, I mean, it’s a cute, light-hearted cop movie set in twenty hours).

Not surprisingly, however, Some is from the writer of Il Mare, which failed because it got too wrapped up in gimmick. I guess she’s gotten better. I mean, I support this film even in light of its stupid teenager gangster subplot… but that’s probably just because the acting is so good.