Nobody Knows Anything

One cinema visit, marked with a *.

INLAND EMPIRE (2006)

So, does it still work on DVD? As long as you watch it in the dark. And crank up the sound system. Interestingly, once you claim to have figured it out, the film gets right up and baffles you all over again. Interpretation isn’t what this film’s about at all really, it’s like an ongoing negotiation between you and the experience you’re having. I found myself less interested in the rabbits and more interested in spotting how and when various characters recur. And, really, there is no experience more strange than watching David Lynch host a cooking programme: now there’s a niche market BBC2 are missing out on.

The Simpsons Movie (2007) *

The mantra about The Simpsons, endlessly repeated by disaffected thirtysomethings with a voice on the web, is that it ain’t what it used to be. That The Simpsons has now become too silly and unbelievable, that it has betrayed itself, as if an animated TV show where nearly everybody has yellow skin was somehow a paragon of realism. To me, the only thing that matters is this: is The Simpsons still funny? Answer: yes. So you can take your disaffection and shove it where the sun don’t shine. And yet, after all’s said and done, is there really any need for a Simpsons movie? Doesn’t the whole enterprise strike you as somewhat unnecessary? Well, it is awfully funny and it does have a song called Spider-Pig. What more do you want?

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002)

I’m a big fan of Tartan’s Asia Extreme label, and in particular of a number of films that have been produced in South Korea over the last ten years. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that South Korean cinemas are stocked full of dark, twisted thrillers, brutalist takes on the cop genre and unimaginable horror pictures. They make ratty comedies just like the French do, it’s just that it’s the dark stuff that has found a worldwide audience. Take this film, the first in Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy, it didn’t do well at the Korean box office at all, and only found an audience on export. Possibly due to budgetary constraints, there are a lot of static camera shots and an overly oppressive soundtrack, but Park makes it all work for his own chilly purposes.

Oldboy (2003)

As a sign of how psychotic Cho Seung-hoi was (he was the instigator of the Virginia Tech massacre earlier this year, you may recall), here is People’s Exhibit #1, the evil DVD of the evil film that “inspired” this evil twat to kill 32 people and then himself. Except of course it did nothing of the kind. Only if you were a psychotic, could you claim this film as an inspiration, because if you actually watched the film and continued to function as a normal human being, what you would take away from it is the idea that vengeance isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and lives will be ruined and minds will be broken and body parts will be compromised. If you’re psychotic, you don’t care about any of that stuff anyway, so you’ll pose for pictures holding a hammer and guns and then set about your filthy work. Oldboy did not make anyone kill anybody else. All Oldboy provided Cho Seung-hoi with was justification beforehand; the damage had already been done to him and the signs were sitting there waiting to be read - it is the failure of the people who were treating him, and the failure of the university authorities to deal with what was happening that led to all those deaths. And of course the failure of Cho Seung-hoi himself. Another loser looking for something to help him make it through the night. And he found Oldboy, a film he quite clearly never began to understand.

Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005)

The vengeance trilogy of Park Chan-wook has one concern at its heart. There is a doubling of the vengeances in all of the films. Those who seek vengeance fail to realise that a vengeance is being sought on them as well. So, given that the third film is, as they say, one for the ladies, does this mean any softening of the focus or any pulling back from the extremities of the earlier two films? Oh no. Park sets up an intervention into the current debate on what to do with murderous paedophiles and comes to his own ambiguously disturbing take on what society calls justice and what the parents of a murdered child would call justice, and leaves his audience to swim in the immoral soup that results. And then there’s that title. It’s a great title. And boo hiss to Tartan for attempting to sell the movie in the UK as Lady Vengeance, as if that was what the film was about. Thankfully, Park was way ahead of them, and has titled all of his films in both English and Korean. So sympathy it is.