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Haeundae (Madman)

Column: The Word on DVDs | Date Published: Wednesday, 31 March 10 | Author: Justin Hook | | 1 year, 10 months ago

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Here’s some simple analysis even the most economically-challenged movie studio executive should understand: Roland Emmerich’s 2012 cost $260 million and is universally acknowledged to have sucked total ass whereas Yoon Je-kyoon’s Haeundae cost $16 million and is one of the finest examples of disaster porn to grace the screen for quite some time. The former is a horrendous example of Hollywood at its most overblown, under-performed, formulaic and downright offensive. The South Korean entry on the other hand is a mind-blowing experience balancing in-your- face technical wizardry, goofy humour and actual delicate human stories revolving around characters that have actual relationships. That’s one of the joys about the current crop of South Korean big (relatively) budget flicks; white-knuckled action sequences can co-exist quite happily with dialogue, emotions, feeling and acting. 2007’s The Host was a perfect example of a monster movie that re-taught mainstream Hollywood how to make a monster flick. And gratefully, it was success. Likewise Haeundae was rewarded with significant commercial success in its homeland. The story itself is actually pretty standard disaster film stuff. A series of increasingly severe earthquakes in the Sea of Japan suggest the ‘big one’ is on the way. Kim Hwi (Park Joong-hoon), a divorced geologist at the National Earthquake Centre, raises the alarm but no one takes heed, of course. His ex-wife works in real estate (boooo!) and her evil boss is about to open a new development right on the shoreline. The next thing you know a bloody tsunami is bearing down on the resort town of Haeundae-gu. The ensuing chaos tears the town apart in a way that $260m worth of CGI cannot accomplish, and in this film heroes die – and stay dead. I know, amazing. Haeundae conforms to the broad rules of these sorts of film, but at its heart there’s a tenderness and lightness of touch that is staggeringly original.

	Chevolution (Madman): Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara either is a revolutionary hero driven to eradicate hunger, poverty and disease in Latin America or an over-intellectualised tyrant of the worst order who sided with ruthless military dictatorships and oversaw the murder of innocent civilians. The man is divisive, but Chevolution thankfully doesn’t get too bogged down in mythology and politics, instead focusing on the iconography of that image: Guerrillero Heroico or Heroic Guerilla Fighter. That intense, tousled-haired, distant-gazed image of a young Che was taken as he stood at a memorial service for the victims of a suspicious explosion in Havana. Alberto Korda was the photographer and this doco is equally his story; a man who revelled in the bohemian, boozy lifestyle of pre-revolution, pre-Castro Cuba; a man who excelled in the field of taking photos of floozies and bimbos; a man not given to revolutionary zeal; a man more familiar with the business end of a Leica M2 w/ 90mm lens than a Kalashnikov. The image itself was deemed too bland for immediate publication and it wasn’t until a few years later when it began popping up at rallies and demonstrations that it began to take on a life bigger than its subject. The tumultuous late ‘60s proved the perfect incubation ground and with cheap re-production and printing methods the image launched onto the walls, banners and t-shirts of students the world over. Would Che have been disgusted at the commercialisation of his visage or would he approve of it being the clarion call for protests spanning generations and countries? Probably the former, but in the end the image represents something undefinable transcending Che’s mottled and contradictory life story. Chevolution is as both a primer on Che and a fascinating thought bubble on the power of political, commercial and revolutionary imagery.
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	Bronson (Madman) : Born Michael Peterson, Charlie Bronson adopted his nom-de-plume to toughen his image as a bare-knuckle boxer. Completely unnecessary as name change as Bronson was a violent recidivist thug who derived peculiar pleasure at being on the receiving end of a steady stream of punches, kicks and all-round good time thrashings meted out to him courtesy of Her Majesty’s Prison Service. It’s a predilection that has made him the most dangerous man in the British prison system. This is his story. It’s vulgar and repellent. Tom Hardy inhabits Bronson in all his thick-necked, crazy-eyed, cock-out glory and there’s no doubt it’s a performance that holds together an otherwise incredibly flimsy piece of filmmaking. But few films escape the tangle between a solitary bravura performance and undercooked scripts, and Bronson is no different. Bronson’s inner dialogue is dealt with through both a tiresome theatrical one-man show concept and simple, bold, straight to the camera retelling of key events. Wobbly as they are, they sure as hell go some way for making up for the lack of cohesive plot development – it seems to be one adrenalised punch up after another with little thought given to context or meaning, and a few slow scenes chucked in for good measure. It looks fantastic – thank Stanley Kubrick’s late-career cinematographer Larry Smith for that – but Bronson so clearly wants to be a cult film it practically gets lost up its own reference points. The excessive use of grand operatic, classical music surges is risible and manipulative, it’s far too Clockwork Orange-y to be a coincidence. Peterson/Bronson is obviously a unique individual, but this film is unable or unwilling to address the complete story – why is he still in prison? Is he beyond redemption? What should society actually do with this guy? Some would argue Bronson poses those questions. It doesn’t. It’s a punch that doesn’t connect.
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