Sympathy for Lady Vengeance & Save the Green Planet!

Sympathy for Lady Vengeance is the last in Chan-wook Park's vengeance trilogy, although it is also known as Lady Vengeance here. I watched the Sundance Channel's version, which had the sympathy part added on to link it to Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance explicitly. The problem with that film was that it wasn't good. Oldboy at least had a lot of panache behind it, even if all the characters were just there upon which to be shat. This one, while still fairly mean to people (I really didn't need to see that woman with all of her teeth knocked out, nor that shot of rolls of fat during the oral sex scene), at least has the skill along with characters I didn't hate. Which puts it above both the earlier films, but not as good as JSA, whose female lead plays the lead here pretty well, gaining my sympathy with very little effort. My issue with the film is that I tend to agree with the first three paragraphs of the New York Times review, written by Nathan Lee, my least favorite reviewer in the Times (and, from people who know him, a snot), but I have to say that the killing of the dog didn't bother me at all. Then again, I am known to be exceedingly happy to have the dog die in films. Not that I condone killing animals or people in real life, but I still get pissed about the dog living in Independence Day. This film has a frequently annoying narration, not to mention that the subtitles were running at least a second ahead of the sound. Which is ok if you're watching something in English, but when you have to think about who just said something and whether it makes sense for the character you think just said it, it makes my brain hurt. I think it started out ok, but certainly by the end, the subtitles were running fast. So boo unto Sundance for that.

Save the Green Planet! is one of the strangest films I've seen in a long time. It pretty much defies description, although it's mainly about a clearly insane person who believes aliens from Andromeda are planning to take over Earth during a lunar eclipse, so he kidnaps a very rich chemical magnate who is the head alien. That's the first ten minutes or so. It's completely bizarre. There's slapstick, there's extremely dark comedy, there's torture porn, and of course there's a scathing satire on modern society. Which films like this pretty much have to have, or else they fall apart if you accidentally think about them. Interestingly, this is the second film in the past month that I've seen that has a character shooting insects out of the air with a gun. Well, normal sized insects, as there was that scene in King Kong as well. Unfortunately, I can't think of what the other film with shooting insects, although I'm pretty sure it was The Eel. The movie just was strange from the beginning, and the ending scenes were just fairly unexpected, unless you go in thinking that strange things will just be the norm. Then again, bizarre films don't always have a lot of characters that you genuinely care about. You have to give points for effort and originality, which this movie has in spades. And this time, Sundance had subtitles that worked fine.