
A troubled gangster-movie star keeps accidentally beating up his co-stars, which forces him to recruit an actual gangster to play opposite him. This opens up three different layers of reality: the film, the film within the film, and the “real life” making of the film. I had high hopes for these maneuvers, but they stop short of the cleverness I expected. Wikipedia helpfully catalogs them: “Choreographed fights become ‘real’ and a ‘real’ fight turns out to be planned but is however ‘real’,” “the actual movie script for Rough Cut is shown being read and held several times by rehearsing characters and crew within the film,” etc. Positively Godardian! Yet Rough Cut burns a bit too much of its energy on slickness to really embody that spirit. True, its $1.5 million budget amounts to little more than bigtime studios spend on canapés, but this material needs a $15,000 movie — er, a 16.2 million won movie — shot on the streets. That, or it needs a deep revision that makes it into a more savage satire of the Korean Hollywood’s bankably glossy gangsterism — but then it would have to compete with A Dirty Carnival.

One major difference between For Eternal Hearts and Norwegian Wood: whereas Japan’s student protests, like those in Europe and the States, went down in the late sixties, Korea had theirs in the late seventies and eighties. Meaning that Korea’s “Baby Boomer” generation, with all the attendant cultural force, now enjoys the same fortysomething prime ours did a quarter-century ago. Hence all the references to main characters’ relatively recent street fighting years even in pictures as blockbusting as Joon-ho Bong’s The Host. Too young to tire of American Boomers when they really dominated things, I look forward to tiring of Korean Boomers any year now. I await even more eagerly a rough-and-ready, pre-disillusioned Korean Generation X and the Slacker-y, Clerks-y films they must surely produce.

When I watch an established filmmaker’s early movies and enjoy them, I usually enjoy them for, as I tend to put it, how much “cool stuff” they contain. For whatever reason, the most interestingly ambitious directors tend to break out of the gate with projects build out of a variety of disparate, separately amusing and/or impressive components. Bong gets bits of ridiculousness from all over the apartment complex around which the film revolves: the staff’s lore of “Boiler Kim” who haunts the basement; the stern but powerless matron who obsesses over her endlessly barking pet; the nearby gift shop, depressingly packed with chintz. He loads this stuff into a blandly realistic urban setting but occasionally uses it for brief flights into preposterous subjectivity, as when Ms. Yellow Hoodie makes a mad dash to save another endangered little dog, she sees on the rooftops around her crowd after crowd of cheerer-on-ers all clad in, yes, yellow hoodies.
But no, I don’t wish dogs ill. Sacrosanctity, on the other hand...
"Barking Dogs Never Bite" is funny because it balances absurdist humor (the cheering crowd in yellow hoodies) with banal reality (the girl's one moment of triumph is edited out of the evening news). There's also an emotional core that makes you wince every time a dog is harmed even though this happens a lot through the course of the movie. There's a sort of delicate touch that a lot of auteur directors are missing in their early films; all of the characters are sympathetic rather than mere satirized types - although he gets some mileage out of this too.
Posted by: Madelaine | April 19, 2011 at 10:34 PM
I like the movie a lot, started watching it despite its no ENG sub. Wish I could understand korean. Thanks for the upload anyway, a great movie.
Posted by: Wilmayxi042 | May 04, 2011 at 04:23 AM