Korean films continue Pwning j00

The popular favorite at this year's Venice Film Festival (regrettably located in Venice, Italy, rather than down the street from here in Venice, CA)? Park Chan-wook's Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, his follow-up to last year's magnificent, awesome and spellbing Oldboy. It's probably the best movie I've seen all year.

Frustratingly, because of their often-provocative and/or violent content, many excellent Korean and Japanese films are unavailable to mass American audiences. Oldboy contains a scene where many people are wailed on with a hammer, and another scene where a hammer is used to remove a few teeth, and another scene where a guy eats a live squid.

The imagery is disturbing, but hardly unwatchable. A French film, Irreversible, came out in America in wider release than Oldboy in 2003, which features a 9-minute long, unbroken shot of a rape. It's one of the most disturbing sequences I've ever seen in a movie theater.

I'll admit, some of these films are so extreme, American audiences simply would not be willing to withstand the cruelty long enough to appreciate the filmmaking. Takashi Miike, for example, the maverick Japanese director of Gozu, Visitor Q and Audition, is never going to hit it big stateside. His Ichi the Killer is a rather brilliant movie, based on a hardcore Japanese manga (adult comic book), about a brainwashed serial killer who clashes with a sadomasochistic gang leader, who's searching for the ultimate ass-kicking.

So, okay, those movies are too violent for most Americans. But what of something like 2000's absolutely wonderful Battle Royale, possibly the best action movie of the decade thus far? The film, also based on a manga and directed by legendary Japanese master Kinji Fukasaku, dealt with a fictionalized future world in which, once a year, a class full of middle school students are set against each other on a remote island. For the entertainment and edification of Japanese citizens, the children must fight to the death using weapons randomly provided to them. If they fail, monitoring collars they wear will slice their heads off.

It's an extremely violent film. And all the violence concerns 13-16 year old kids, mainly played by teenage actors. This meant the film was essentially barred from American theaters. (I had to see it first on a bootlegged copy owned by my friend and fellow Asian film fan Aaron, and later on an official NTSC DVD purchased from Amoeba Records).

But it is not a casually violent film. All the killing has meaning to these kids, and the film works as kind of a violent sci-fi satire, like something Paul Verhoeven might make if he were Japanese and less focused on supple breasts.

I suspect it's still more than American audiences could handle. The very idea of a film in which children mete out violent death to one another would cause a sort of hysteria in Middle America. The fact is, kids re-enact grim homicide scenarios on computers and Playstations every day, and seem no worse for wear. Battle Royale doesn't make killing look like fun, anyway. The scenario is a kind of horrific punishment, vengeance aimed at this kids for being too privileged and ungrateful.

Anyway, it's nice that at least film nerds around the world seem to agree that Korean movies are where it's at for the moment. I can't wait to check out Sympathy for Lady Vengeance when it finally hits America. If it finally hits America...