come anticipate Park Chan-wook's English-language debut STOKER with me (Nicole Kidman, Matthew Goode, Mia Wasikowska)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXaanQkzrXU

written by wentworth miller of tv's 'prison break'(!)

inspired by 'shadow of a doubt', though i understand it only goes as far as a character named uncle charlie and some other minor bits.

kidman can do no wrong imo. intrigued!

bwa ha, she's done plenty wrong

thirst was a misstep but this has his look and feel, interested to see if he can bring the buck wild to our distant shores

it's always painful to listen to kidman struggle to keep her accent in check tho

good job to that fish guy from that Buffy episode

oh don't get me wrong, she's been in piles of shit, but she rarely gives the impression of check-collecting.

i liked thirst - overlong but visually unpredictable in a cool way. psyched for this.

kidman is bad half the time but always super compelling. this looks really great

looks amazing imo

yeah I'm pretty psyched. apparently filmed in sept 2011 in nashville, wonder why the far out release date and no festival screenings.

either a financing issue or a quality issue, or both

quality's my guess but i still want to see this

I will watch dees movie

Want to see this. Also want Matthew Goode as my "uncle."

your uncle who touches you inappropriately

ok Eric, sometimes you hit paydirt.

My guess on the release date is post was taking awhile or they couldn't figure out how to market this film or when a logical release time would be.

given korean successes at film festivals, and park's own palm d'or, it's weird that they wouldn't shoot for venice or push that march 2013 back a couple months for cannes, especially since a trailer's being released like 6 months in advance

maybe it's not finished lol

the sound design in this is really really cool. The plot not so much

welcome to s korea

this looked p corny until they revealed what i assume is the 'twist,' and then it seemed cool but the twist was ruined :{

this is out in 2 days!

this is the trailer they're using in uk cinemas - works really well when the music is loud:

http://bcove.me/wj8n467v

commercial I saw for this was pretty rad.

Jesus, what a stupid thing this was! I am sort of baffled that anyone decided this was a movie that needed to be made in 2013. It's one of those films that's boring and doesn't make sense for a while and then "all comes together at the end" but when it does come together it's totally underwhelming and a bunch of stuff is left sorta unexplained and mysterious but I couldn't even be bothered to try to make sense out of it because I just didn't care. It was shot and edited competently enough so it wasn't as insipid as it could have been, but it was still fairly bland.

STOKER is ridiculously dull. a poor by the numbers attempt at doing a proper 'arthouse' movie. handmaiden is better, but also a bit boring, strangely dully twisty, too plotty, constrained by its period setting, no real interest in the interior lives of its two lead females, and feels strangely detached for most of it, sort of gleeful, but never really giving you much of the stuff you would expect. even the sex scenes are weirdly pedestrian. its like he couldnt get interested in it beyond the surface visuals, which admittedly do look pretty incredible. not seen all PCW's films, but i think he might be better at violence than anything much subtler/character-based and this film didnt really let him do much with that part of his expertise. no wonder QT loves him so much. last thing i liked of his was thirst really. he might need to stop trying to enter the international market so hard.

Handmaiden rules

even the sex scenes are weirdly pedestrian. its like he couldnt get interested in it beyond the surface visuals, which admittedly do look pretty incredible.

sounds like u watched the wrong movie

I love the term 'surface visuals' as if Film isn't a visual medium. Yeah, The Handmaiden is a visual film, and all the better for it. By far my favorite of his films.

'surface visuals' is sort of like saying a record is 'incredibly produced'.

It's nonsense...

First of all, it's a softcore lesbian heist-film, it's not really a genre known for deep thoughts. Second of all, thematically, the film is so much about objectification, gaze, pornography; the handmaiden treating her mistress like a doll, the spectacle of the woman performing erotica for the men, the final act of the women in the library. It's not really a subtle character based film. It's about surfaces, bodies, objectification.

im not expecting some deep penetrating character study, but it wasnt even that good as a sort of delicious female exploitation revenge movie, cos it seemed too caught up in making sure the period drama visual flourish part of it was done right, more than the women-in-love-against-the-patriarchy angle. maybe i will watch it a second time when less tired after work and have a completely diff response but after stoker, i wonder if PCW is more interested in making brilliant looking films, rather than visceral ones.

Well, I agree that Stoker is crap :) Also, perhaps he is interested in making both kinds of films, and he just tries to make different types every now and then? I was really surprised at how much I liked The Handmaiden, and I wouldn't just say it's period drama visual flourish, he really goes for something very unique and interesting, especially in the editing. It hits a sort of manga feel in a way a manga adaptation like Oldboy really doesn't.

it did make me think of certain manga stuff, yes. i might watch it again though im not feeling quite that inspired. basically i like PCW less inhibited.

I also really need to watch it again as well at some point, but preferably from my couch where I can pause and rewind and figure out why I thought so many little things were so weird.

I probably like Park most at his most inhibited, my other favorite is probably Sympathy for Mr Vengeance. Beautiful compositions in that one.

oh wait sry i can't tell if you were calling Handmaiden or STALKER's sex scene's pedestrian. if the former, U RONG (the scene where she sands down her tooth with a thimble!!!!!!) if the latter i haven't seen it

Liked it quite a lot. Was the extended version the one most cinemas got? Because it seems that was the only version shown in UK.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/16/t-magazine/park-chan-wook.html

weirdly, his new thing is a six part adaptation of a John Le Carre novel for the BBC & AMC.

http://collider.com/little-drummer-girl-images-alexander-skarsgard-michael-shannon/#images

that looks kind of awesome

Is this the only Park Chan-wook thread?

Not gonna lie, feel a little sick with excitement for the new one

he's yet to make a truly bad film imo

God yes, trailer for the new one looks great too

I feel like he's still getting better, The Handmaiden probably my favourite at the moment

DECISION TO LEAVE is an utter masterpiece

I was planning to concentrate on smaller LFF fare this year instead of big galas with films that are coming to the cinemas here anyway but this one's giving me major fomo.

the subs are a little poorly translated on my copy which is my excuse for watching it twice already

I have been trying to download this from my nzb site and keep getting "article not found" which is a pisser.

actually got it from Pirate Bay i think

i'm having a look at upload options if anybody's interested

Which theater did you go to, The Angelika?

Anyway, while I reserve the right to change my mind, I couldn’t find a hair out of place.

i went to nitehawk which was a weird way to see this but whatever
so am i correct in thinking that what he says to her in korean when he says "bury it deep in the sea" etc can be phonetically translated to chinese as "I love you" and that's what he realizes while he's on the beach?

I thought this was great and there were just so many interesting things going on visually that made it a delight to watch. Not sure I'd call it an utter masterpiece though - like others upthread I think it could have been tightened and was a bit too long, also I found the end a bit histrionic and over the top

the ending made more sense to me this time, but yeah

Long Criterion post here that halfway skimmed but didn’t read yet: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/7811-park-chan-wook-s-decision-to-leave

Don’t know it’s just because she has a retro on right now at the Film Forum or not, but something about Tang Wei’s performance reminded me of Isabelle Huppert.

she was fucking great

Something about her performance also reminds me of…the subject of my 2023 1DS.

Although that’s probably a more obvious comparison.

His official statement that he wasn’t consciously channeling Hitchcock but he sees why people might say that is almost laughable given that some of the Hitch callbacks seems as obvious as the nose protector on Mickey Rourke’s face in Angel Heart is an obvious reference to Chinatown (RIP Mike Davis), but who knows, maybe Hitch is just in the water.

Or just in the mist, I should say. It’s in his mist.

I wasn't particularly thinking of Hitchcock while watching it, I'd say the plot driver - troubled cop falls for prime suspect - is a pretty well-established noir trope rather than Hitchcockian per se...

Plot stuff, yes, is standard, but some of the tropes and a few specific scenes are more in his particular line.

so am i correct in thinking that what he says to her in korean when he says "bury it deep in the sea" etc can be phonetically translated to chinese as "I love you" and that's what he realizes while he's on the beach?

Where did you get this from? Do you speak Chinese and/or Korean?

I didn't notice this linguistic component at all but that recording is clearly an admission that he loves her in its substance without him having to literally say it.

oh no I meant to put the end spoiler tag at the end of the post, sorry all

Daniel:
it's a total guess based on context clues and the movies overarching themes of desire to be understood being mangled by emotional/personal distance and technology, but it clarifies the ending neatly so i'm giving it a test run here! Can't find anything immediately from reviewers but there's been a great deal of conversation on the movie server i frequent about how hard this film is to translate for lots of reasons.

what i enjoyed most was how the puzzle pieces in this fit together without pomp or circumstance, sometimes clarifying only when you look back. her decision to commit suicide in a way that echoes exactly what he's told her to do but to do it so that he can never truly know what happened to her is the only way she can be sure she'll never lose him. he'll obsess over her forever and that's enough.

^this

I was thinking it might be a little more simple than translation, just some kind of pronoun trouble. Maybe some of the pronouns for “it “ and “you” are the same in Korean (I only know a handful of words myself) so “throw it into the sea” could also be interpreted as “throw yourself into the sea.”

Hmm, that seems to not be the case, but maybe some similar thing. I guess sooner or later we’ll find out, hopefully before the next October 26th, but maybe exactly then

In addition to the film noir side of things, this obviously has one foot in the doomed, star-crossed, geographically-challenged couples pantheon with things like JR&tB's favorite Lovers of the Arctic Circle.

Saw Decision to Leave without reading anything about it beforehand. Instantly thought of Hitchcock… Vertigo yes, but also Tne Birds, with which it shares a blue-green color palette. In fact, blue vs green is an important plot point in the film. The plot did lose me, though I’m not good with complicated plots in general (cue people to say the plot wasn’t at all complicated… well to me it was). The subtitles often felt stilted to me, though I saw the film with a Korean friend who said the translations were spot-on.

"cue people to say the plot wasn’t at all complicated"

don't worry, that certainly won't be happening! So there might not be some better subs when this gets a dvd release.

it is a very complicated fast moving plot!

Again, check your phone once and you've missed a crucial millisecond.

Including milliseconds on phones.

the moment where they jumped ahead thirteen months and now the lead actress is being beaten up by "slappy", happened so abruptly and with so little explanation that I heard someone in the audience loudly say "WHAT?" and then i realized it was me

A dissenting voice: https://www.vulture.com/article/decision-to-leave-movie-review-directed-by-park-chan-wook.html

The kind of film where if you bend down to tie your shoelaces or something you miss a subtle editing choice your hands get wet because you're standing in an apocalyptic tide

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, October 19, 2022 4:56 AM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

Lol!

Trying to watch THIRST before it leaves Criterion.

https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/what-i-learned-translating-decision-to-leave

a park chan-wook film with the highest ratings from the festival just went home empty-handed..... pic.twitter.com/2qOc0YxwCJ

— ✉️ (@seoraehaejun) September 6, 2025

Alexander Payne getting some well earned pelters

Very excited for new Park, it's coming to the London Film Festival soon.

Only found out the other day that No Other Choice is based on a non-comic Donald Westlake novel - that's already been filmed by Costa-Gavras! Always happy to see Westlake's work kept alive in this way...

very excited for this film. but complaining about the venice jury ignoring the "highest rated" film, as though film festival juries were required to consult rotten tomatoes before voting, is pretty dumb.

some were suggesting it was a political decision because Alexander "not prepared to talk about Gaza" Payne didn't like Park speaking out about US backed genocide. Anyway it's not just about ratings, Park's one of the greatest directors of this era.

or maybe payne and his fellow jurors simply preferred the jarmusch film? we're talking about the difference between a 100% rt score and a 95% score, so a small group of people favoring the latter doesn't seem egregious. (also, jarmusch did better than park on the ics critics' panel, whose highest rated film was something else entirely.)

I don't see a conspiracy yet either.

Jarmush has spoken out about Gaza as well.

I'll probably enjoy the Park more than the Jarmush but I can't be bothered to care what wins Venice, neither of them are in danger of obscurity either way.

I'm kind of with the mindset of people suggesting that Alexander Payne sucks and as well as being a shit director and a terrible coward of a human being, also he isn't fit to preside over a festival jury. I'm going to bet from a later perspective, it will be much clearer that he made some questionably biased and shit decisions here.

more bummed by this tbh: https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/park-chan-wook-expelled-wga-breaking-strike-1236482956/

oof!

Yeah he def fucked up on that one.

Friday night entertainment sorted - just acquired a leaked screener of No Other Choice. Quite psyched because watching a new Park always feels like an event.

I suspect you'll like it.

It's very good. Westlake the perfect fit for him.

Oh you lucky boy calz

I've been assuming that Westlake is an inspired choice of source material

Didn't realise this had leaked might need to explore the Web when I get home

Lol at Park being maybe the only working director i get this fanboy dreamy about