mountains of madness

I took it easy this weekend. I traded bars for movies, and that was a pleasant change of pace from the last couple weeks of debauchery. Y'know, I still had booze and stuff, and I went to the bar for a drink, but that's the be expected. Otherwise, it was really low key.

I started the movie marathon off with Iron Palm, a comedic Korean melodrama pretty par for the course with other comedic Korean melodramas, which seems to make up 80 percent of all movies that come out of South Korea. Iron Palm was good because it made me laugh sometimes and it starred Yunjin Kim from Lost, who, as luck would have it, was just as dreamy off the island as she is on.

It's about this guy who has this hot and heavy and seemingly mostly physical relationship with a woman, who quite suddenly moves to Los Angeles. Five years later, dude's still torn up about it, so he learns English and, when he finally passes the TOEFL exam, gets a visa to come to the States to find her. In so doing, he leaves everything Korean about him behind, even his name, and speaks only broken English throughout the film. He finds her (Ms. Kim, of course, and a good thing he does too 'cause she fine) and hilarity and bittersweet moments ensue. It's pure cheddar, but I was kinda in the mood for that. I like a good love story, and in the absence of a good one, I'll settle for a mediocre one. Yunjin was pretty good in it too. She was raised in my hometown hood (Staten Island, bitches) so she's fluent in the English, but her facial expressions say a lot more, I think. And y'know, she fine.

I followed up this harmless piece of starcrossed fluff with Marebito, which was directed by Takashi Shimizu, the guy who directed Ju-On and its American counterpart, The Grudge.

It wasn't a horror movie in the traditional sense. Instead, I think it was more about the feeling of horror. This cameraman guy is obsessed with fear, but hasn't felt fear himself. Instead, he films people who are afraid of stuff and pines over what they're feeling. So, I guess in Japan there are these urban legends about beings that live deep in underground passages beneath the cities, and this film kinda banked on that. Being unfamiliar with these urban legends, I guess there was a bit of a cultural barrier to cross, but there usually is with Japanese films.

So cameraman guy goes down into the depths and talks to a crazy homeless dude, then has a conversation with some other dude he filmed committing suicide, then happens on to "The Mountains of Madness" where he finds a cute lil' naked woman suspiciously chained to the rocks. He brings her home, because it's only right to bring home a cute lil' naked woman you find chained to the rocks at the Mountains of Madness, and he ends up treating her like a pet. Of course, cute lil' naked women chained to rocks at the Mountain of Madness require blood for sustenance--they'll take animal blood but human blood is prefered. From this situation, absolutely no hilarity ensues, but though it might sound ridiculous, the film was really well-made and worked the whole symbolism angle to a T. It wasn't perfect, but definitely one I'd like to watch again to see if I could pick up on more clues. But it was pretty damn disturbing. The story is that Shimizu made the film in the eight days he had between finishing up Ju-On 2 and starting work on The Grudge. It seemed really personal, like a director hashing out personal demons. Pretty trippy.

I capped off a Sunday of football (and another Giants win) with The Glass House, which I bought from the Wal-Mart clearance bin. It was pretty good--entertaining and vaguely thrilling. I wish it wasn't 3:22 am, or else I'd find something else to watch.