A compilation of episodes from the lives of several of the amateur actors’ (who are ‘bad teens’ and the homeless of Seoul) own experiences, this film sheds light on the dark side of Korean society. Feeling alienated and persecuted, they wonder about and come into conflict with the ‘good people’ who persist in trying to reform them. They have their own reason for remaining as they are and resist attempts to reform them: they cannot change simply because they are bad. –IMDb
Jang Sun-woo (born 20 March 1952) is a South Korean film director. Before his directorial debut, Jang made a name for himself by writing film criticism and scripts.
Jang Sun-woo is undoubtedly one of the most relevant and distinctive voices in contemporary Korean cinema. Since his debut feature, Seoul Jesus (1986), co-directed with Wan Son-u, his works have always displayed an incessant need to find and explore new resources in the language of cinema, and have often questioned audiences about controversial issues in Korean society. In the early 90s his films began to acquire international recognition, thus contributing to the detection of the first signs of a renewal in Korean cinema. In 1994, Hwaomkyung was awarded the Alfred Bauer Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival; in 1996, the International Film Festival Rotterdam chose Jang as one of its Filmmakers in Focus.
A couple of his subsequent features, Timeless, Bottomless, Bad Movie (1998) and Lies (1999) stirred… read more
censorship is wrong of course. still i'm not exactly sorry i missed a gang rape scene. anyway, stunning piece of work
what makes the movie is its structure and its humor and the overall looseness with which jang approaches the way to make the movie - a lot of movies about delinquent outcast teens are tightly packed with plot and structure but jang sun woo makes sure this movie does not
Jang's infernal masterpiece uses every medium (film, DV, animation) and all modes of performance (from realism to cartoon) to capture the breathless, uncontainable energy of society's outcasts who cling on to what could be their final gasps of life. Replacing mis-en-scene & storytelling is a mad collection of fissures, eruptions, explosions of anger & desperation. A film that burns in the night, cinema is reborn.
Jang's presence is necessary (or was), but I can't really capture him historically. No director like this has ever existed in America, to my knowledge. Maybe you could consider him like Harmony Korine, but that guy has a smaller body of work. Europe has a few enfants terribles, but Jang's so much better. His work gives me a real reason to keep my goals in front of me. At least, if someone with a personality and political statement so centered and subversive to the industry can exist, then maybe there's room for more like him. And this, even more so than some quirky, experimental picture, is the most iconoclastic film I've seen. Like some new astrophysical theory that bends our old understanding of reality. It's unbelievable.
