The Week In Movies (28/8/11 - 4/9/11)

Anyone else having trouble with the blogger scheduling feature? I had to wake up to post this! It's making me want to break something! EDIT: Apologies for the spam in your readers. I can't criticise this scheduler enough.

Can you believe it's September already? Spring has well and truly begun in Perth, the sun has been out, I've been wearing shorts to work and my mind has drifted on to the outdoor cinema season once more. Oh how I love outdoor cinema. But more on that as soon as programs are released.

This week I have re visited 3 movies, reviewed 4 movies, turned off 2 movies and signed up for a Twitter account at last. First up the 4 movies there will be full reviews for.

3-Iron was loved and reviewed here, inspiring Tyler at Southern Vision to bump it up his queue. Fast Five was delicious cheese and reviewed here. The Maltese Falcon is this weeks Noir-a-Thon movie and will be coming on Tuesday as always and Everything Must Go should be reviewed by Wednesday. Something to look forward to.

That only leaves three more films that I finished this week.

Thor. I've been working on some nicknames for this. Bore. Yorn (pronounced yawn.) Not very inventive are they? About as inventive and interesting as the actual movie. I kept telling Leah to turn it off but neither of us did, instead reading interesting blogs such as Film Ha-Ha and The Great Movie Project with Thawn in the background. I appreciate Portman, Dennings and Skarsgard but everything, including the normal posters, is just so dull. That alternative poster commissioned by Marvel is pretty awesome though right?

Rewatching Shallow Grave this week prompted my Ewan McGregor list but could easily have prompted a Danny Boyle list. I loved it. I saw it a long time ago as a wee pup of a film viewer and Leah had never seen it. She always gets a kick out of seeing Dr Who in other things. I wish she didn't have that association as Christopher Eccleston is such a good actor. Anyone see the brilliant BBC series Shadowline recently? An enjoyable low budget British thriller from a soon to be huuuuge director starring one great, one pretty good and one mediocre actor. Watch Kerry Fox closely, her accent travels the globe. I must ask, how did she get cast? Hels at A Whole Load of Blah recently picked it as the best movie of 1994.

And then to Buried. A movie about a guy in a box. I loved the idea and if anyone was going to have the charisma to pull it off it was going to be Ryan Reynolds (I love watching him, I admit it, I haven't sunk to Green Lantern levels yet however.) I never really got in to this one though. It was interestingly filmed, I love the purpose built really tall casket story for example and Reynolds was good at being upset but I ended up not caring about him or his situation. A bad thing for a movie about a guy in a box on a mobile phone. Brian saw it and thought it was a horror and Stevee thought it was her fantasy come true.

This weeks blahblahblah turnoffs are two teeny tiny Ellen Page movies that I thought I would give a shot as Page is great to watch. However it is a shame the same couldn't be said for The Tracey Fragments and Mouth to Mouth. Tracey Fragments is a great idea, a young girl is traumatised by something and we experience the movie in flashback as she pieces together her memories of the event. The problem is that the story is told with multiple shots simultaneously and even multiple dialogue at times, representing her memories coming together; which causes your head to hurt and you to lose a lot of important information. Another problem is that it's noisy, which gives you a headache. Movies shouldn't give headaches. Mouth to Mouth is such a cheap and horrible and dull movie I have nothing good to say about it.

Leave me some blah, I'd love to know what you think of my turnoffs this week, that awesome Thor poster and whether you are as excited at the thought of trapping Ryan Reynolds in a casket as Stevee is?

Movie Review: 3-Iron (2004)

3-Iron also known as Bin Jip (literal translation Empty Houses) is possibly my favourite film from acclaimed (and reviled) South Korean director Kim Ki-Duk. Kim is the film maker who brought us such wonderful and disturbing cinema in the form of Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter & Spring, The Isle and Bad Guy.

3-Iron is a love story with a difference, the most unusual ghost story you'll ever see and quite simply a stunning and thought provoking piece of cinema.

3-Iron is the story of Tae-Suk, who lives a solitary, ghostlike life breaking in to peoples houses whilst they're on vacation, experiencing what it is like to live their lives. He does their laundry and fixes things for them. In one house he meets the broken yet beautiful Sun-Hwa and his whole life changes.

Following up my recent explanation of the filmic term mise-en-scene over at Front Room Cinema, 3-Iron is the kind of movie you can point out to people and say "that's the importance of good direction," this movie could not exist without a strong guiding hand. It's all mise-en-scene.


This beautiful, slow moving, mystical film has so little dialogue you have to wonder what the script looked like and the auditioning process Kim Ki-Duk went through to find two lead actors who could give so much meaning to their every action.

Spring, Summer..... and The Isle were shot in some of the most beautiful locations imaginable and as such you could easily ignore the skill involved in creating the images found in those two very different movies but 3-Iron is largely filmed in tiny apartments and now you have to notice the care taken over every image because this film looks just as breathtaking as either of the other two movies.

Leah used the term magic realism to describe the overall feel of the piece and she's probably right. 99% of the story exists in reality but the 1% that you think isn't within the realms of possibility is what gives the movie a real edge. You will definitely have to think about what the movie means by the time the final credits roll, it is a movie that easily elicits an emotional response from the viewer but not in a shameless or obvious way and as with all magic realism you cannot possibly have a definite answer for what you've witnessed.


The relationship that develops between the two leads is told in such a way that images do all the talking for them, they don't interact in the usual sense. Tae-Suk slowly mends Sun-Hwa and she in turn helps him to find his place in the world.

I won't lie to you, this is an unusual concept for a movie and if you can't get past the first 20 minutes of the movie without asking yourself what the hell is going on you should probably give up. If however you, like me, are intrigued by the actions of Tae-Suk, you won't even notice the complete lack of dialogue and you are in for a real treat of movie.

And now I shall let the visuals do the talking for me, leave some blah below.