The Beach & The President's Last Bang

The Beach is the Alex Garland novel that the pretty disliked film directed by Danny Boyle with Leonardo DiCaprio, Tilda Swinton, Virginie Ledoyen, and Robert Carlyle was based on. Now, I am not nearly as anti-the film as a lot of other people I know. However, after reading the book, I can certainly see why others dislike it. The extra relationships just are completely unnecessary. The story of a British tourist who is left a map by a suicide in a Thai hotel and then goes to find a secluded beach with two beautiful French people, smokes an insane amount of pot, fishes with harpoons, and then goes insane somehow actually spoke to me. Even though I've never done any of those things. As much as I have always wanted to. I enjoyed the book as it was very much, and, as an admitted purist and very protective of media I love, I now dislike the movie more, but I would need to see it again to know just how much more I disliked it. And I'm not sure I want to spend the time on that, when I could watch something else. It will happen at some point, when it's on a channel I have.

The President's Last Bang made two of the three other people I watched it with fall asleep. Well, actually all of them fell asleep at some point. I don't know if that has something to do with the day we'd had or what, but I liked it a lot. Not quite as good as I was expecting, and I thought it was directed by a different guy. The movie did start with a crawl basically explaining the parts of Korean history relevant to the film, which was helpful. And then came the first actual shots of the film, at a pool, with people yelling at a few girls to take their tops off, which they do. That's the only female nudity for the rest of the film, so if you wanted, you could just watch the first couple minutes. The rest of the film is a mordantly funny film about a failed coup attempt in 1979 that appears to have been caused by making fun of the director of the Korean CIA. It's one of the things in the film along with the singing of enka songs that seems to possibly have been rumors rather than actual fact. Then again, a movie about an assassination of a dictator where all involved are either dead or have lots of reasons to lie is certainly not going to be the truth. There was one scene I wanted to mention, as it was a long tracking shot showing the fallout of the assassination going from room to room shot from above showing the dead. It's one of those scenes that just sticks out as extremely impressive.