01-21-2009, 11:07 AM
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0901487/
Epic.
My all-time favorite movie is "Little Big Man".
A close second is "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly". I wore out my LP of Ennio Morrcone and learned to whistle with that soundtrack. I sat through the 3 hour version at the Castro a few years back and wanted more. I wanted a pancho to wear to school in the seventies. Fortunately my parents never obliged.
So, a Korean remake of this classic film had me a touch wary.
This is no remake.
This is a complete reimagining of the key characters in a similar, but not identical situations. The subtitles were superimposed over Japanese subtitles so I may have missed something, but I believe this takes place in turn-of-the-century Mongolia, where a secret map holds the location of untold treasure. This map is obtained by the Japanese (again - not sure, judging by costumes).
Three men are after the map; the gangster Yoon-Tae-Goo (The Weird), the mercenary Park Chang (The Bad) and the bounty hunter Park Do-Wan (The Good). See the similarities?
The initial train robbery has the best single-shot I can remember since "Absolute Beginners" as you follow the character down the length of the locomotive. The robbery soon becomes chaos as different factions enter the fray. Think "Mad Max" with six-guns.
The movie gives you a couple minutes of breathing room as people are killed for various reasons one at a time during backstories.
Most of the film is shown with sweeping desert backdrops, with several characters in period costume and violent human and horse abuse.
The director certainly had a reverential attitude to his source material, and the resulting 2:15 epic could easily be shown as a double-feature with the original to those with buns of steel.
![[Image: vlcsnap-6176671.jpg]](http://www.eldingo.com/pictures/misc_pix/vlcsnap-6176671.jpg)
Epic.
My all-time favorite movie is "Little Big Man".
A close second is "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly". I wore out my LP of Ennio Morrcone and learned to whistle with that soundtrack. I sat through the 3 hour version at the Castro a few years back and wanted more. I wanted a pancho to wear to school in the seventies. Fortunately my parents never obliged.
So, a Korean remake of this classic film had me a touch wary.
This is no remake.
This is a complete reimagining of the key characters in a similar, but not identical situations. The subtitles were superimposed over Japanese subtitles so I may have missed something, but I believe this takes place in turn-of-the-century Mongolia, where a secret map holds the location of untold treasure. This map is obtained by the Japanese (again - not sure, judging by costumes).
Three men are after the map; the gangster Yoon-Tae-Goo (The Weird), the mercenary Park Chang (The Bad) and the bounty hunter Park Do-Wan (The Good). See the similarities?
The initial train robbery has the best single-shot I can remember since "Absolute Beginners" as you follow the character down the length of the locomotive. The robbery soon becomes chaos as different factions enter the fray. Think "Mad Max" with six-guns.
The movie gives you a couple minutes of breathing room as people are killed for various reasons one at a time during backstories.
Most of the film is shown with sweeping desert backdrops, with several characters in period costume and violent human and horse abuse.
The director certainly had a reverential attitude to his source material, and the resulting 2:15 epic could easily be shown as a double-feature with the original to those with buns of steel.
![[Image: magpie13.gif]](http://imagegen.last.fm/LastfmLiveJournal/recenttracks/magpie13.gif)
