Round Three Resurrection ReviewPeppermint Candy (Lee Chang-dong Lee, 1999)
Won over Metade Fumaca (verdict by roujin)Won over Picture Bride (verdict by smirnoff)Lost to Hana-bi (verdict by Bondo)I watched the the 2003 Hillary Swank sci-fi vehicle
The Core under horrible circumstances — and I barely remember the movie — but I'm pretty sure that if you're in the perfect frame of mind and just go where the film takes you and suspend your disbelief and don't focus too long on the details,
The Core is a fun time at the movies, however silly its central conceit might be.
Peppermint Candy is sort of like that. It opens with a man's suicide and then each subsequent sequence takes us back further and further into his past, more or less showing us how he got there. It's a smartly structured film, both thematically and schematically, with a strong lead performance Sol Kyung-gu (the screenshot above is meant to convey how unlikable his character is). It's a great text to write about academically, with plenty of layered meanings to be teased out, analytically, without reference to engagement or emotional response. But as a
story and as a character study, it's pretty effing silly, to be honest. At least in the frame of mind in which I watched it. By the end, I was literally laughing at the tragic events to befall our protagonist and groaning at each of the horribly scored train track shots that carried me further back into his past. It's akin to a film like
Mr. Destiny in how simplistic it all is. The conceit of moving backwards in time puts too narrative much weight on those earlier scenes, and the writing isn't nuanced enough to bear it. It'd be an interesting experiment to watch the story unfold from past to present and see how the experience differed. It could end with a freeze frame of the guy screaming, "I'm going back!" to the approaching train, with cheesy music on the soundtrack. Perfect.
Now please go take the time to appreciate smirnoff's use of Ben Stein is his verdict.
Resurrection Standings (the top six films may earn resurrection)Up next:
Ju Dou.
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