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美國報章的太極旗影評(2)
source: washingtonpost.com
'Tae Guk Gi': Of Brothers And Battles
By Michael O'Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 3, 2004; Page WE37
TWO ASIAN WAR EPICS opening this weekend FORM a study in contrasts.
Both "Bang Rajan" (see capsule review on Page 38) and "Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War" depict intense, one might even say flamboyant, violence. Set during the Korean War and filmed with a "Saving Private Ryan" degree of bloody verisimilitude, "Tae Guk Gi" goes splatter-for-splatter with "Bang Rajan," a film that commemorates the violent resistance of a small but determined 18th-century Siamese village against the massing Burmese army.
Whereas "Bang Rajan," however, seeks to glorify the struggle it reenacts with one over-the-top on-screen clash after another -- so much so that the effect, after a while, is numbing -- "Tae Guk Gi's" equally horrific war scenes merely act as a crimson backdrop to the quieter, more intimate and ultimately more stirring main story. It is a story of two brothers and the toll war takes on their love. The point, in other words, is the emotion, never the violence itself.
When he is unwillingly drafted off the streets of Seoul into the South Korean army, 18-year-old student Jin-seok Lee (Won Bin) is immediately joined on the troop train by his protective older brother, Jin-tae (Jang Dong-gun), who seeks to forcibly rescue his sibling. Unfortunately, Jin-tae ends up getting drafted himself, despite an official military policy discouraging the conscription of more than one son from each family. From that moment on, Jin-tae makes it his life's mission to keep his kid brother out of harm's way.
What this means is that, in order to curry favor with the brass, who have the power to send Jin-seok home on humanitarian grounds, Jin-tae must put himself in harm's way, volunteering for every risky mission that comes along. The problem is, this makes him a kind of hero. And he soon finds himself enjoying the adulation so much that his heroism becomes, in effect, monstrous. While capturing a fleeing North Korean officer, for example, Jin-tae allows a friend of his and Jin-seok's from Seoul to be killed.
This is just the beginning of the siblings' estrangement. As our "war hero" slowly morphs into a perpetrator of atrocities, the gulf between Jin-tae and Jin-seok threatens to become too wide to cross.
Echoing "The Deer Hunter" more than "Saving Private Ryan," with its emphasis on the moral ambiguity of war, "Tae Guk Gi" is a complex film about the minefield of loyalty and betrayal. Avoiding bombast and jingoism -- despite its unblinking gaze on carnage and scenes of ugly hostility between the communist North and democratic South -- the story of brothers rent asunder can be read as a metaphor for the Korean War itself. "Tae Guk Gi," in fact, is a name that refers to the South Korean national flag.
And yet, at heart, the film's subject is not political, but personal.
Its scale is grand, yet its subject is simple. Against the soul-altering drama of a nation at war with itself, two brothers try to save what matters most in the world: each other.
TAE GUK GI: THE BROTHERHOOD OF WAR (R, 140 minutes) -- Contains obscenity and hyper-realistic war scenes. In Korean with subtitles. At Loews Rio, Majestic Cinema and United Artists Fairfax Town Center.
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評級3星半(最高4星),評價甚高. 稱東健是著名演員,他的演技出彩有深度,特別堤到火車一幕他的內心戲.
Source: chicagotribune.com
Movie review: 'Tae Guk Gi'
By Robert K. Elder
Chicago Tribune Staff Reporter
3½ stars (out of 4)
Korean wartime epic "Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War" belongs to that brand of sweeping, conflict-era drama epitomized by "Saving Private Ryan," "Gone with the Wind" and TV miniseries "North and South."
What makes "Tae Guk Gi" such an extraordinary film isn't its solid, family-based core or the choreographed chaos of its battle scenes--although both contribute. Instead, writer/director Kang Je-gyu dedicates himself to the human side of a grand tale, to people who've been uprooted by history.
When brothers Jin-tae (Jang Dong-gun) and Jin-seok (Won Bin) are forced into the South Korean army in 1950, an officer tells older sibling Jin-tae the only way to send his baby brother home is to win medals and fame. Thereafter, Jin-tae volunteers for the most brutal, dangerous missions (caught on film with handheld "Saving Private Ryan"-style cinematography) with little regard for his life.
This would ordinarily be enough to fill an entire movie, but Kang follows his characters into darker territory. As Jin-tae shelters his younger brother, he does so with almost blind disregard for anything else. War changes him, warping his moral compass until Jin-seok begins to question if his older brother's motives are for the good of the family, or his own glory.
When the brothers' platoon runs into a family friend forced to fight on the North Korean side, Jin-tae simply wants to slaughter him and his whole group--a conflict that draws one of many wedges between the two brothers.
Director Kang doesn't play politics, although the name "Tae Guk Gi" is the name of South Korea's national flag. He isn't interested in retelling the story of the war, or the finer philosophical points of each side. He's almost singularly preoccupied with war's realities, and how conflict lays siege to family and friends.
While Kang owes much to "Saving Private Ryan," he avoids Spielberg's tendency to make the military company a microcosm of ethnic and social stereotypes. Kang also doesn't moralize much, and the film is served much better by his embrace of the battlefield and its consequences.
As Jin-tae, famous Korean actor Jang has the most to do; his perFORMance requires the most range and steely-eyed determination. Especially in a heart-wrenching scene on the train that takes the brothers to the boot camp, we're riveted to his inner struggle, even when the subsequent battle scenes run near-continuous to the point of desensitization.
If the gritty triumph of "Tae Guk Gi" suffers at all, it's from a lengthy running time and a twist ending that threatens the credibility of Jin-tae's character arc. But even with this damaging bit of cinematic shrapnel, "Tae Guk Gi" will be talked about for years to come--and it deserves to be.
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Revisiting the Korean War in a Tale of Two Brothers
By DAVE KEHR
The New York Times
Published: September 3, 2004
South Korea
The Korean filmmaker Kang Je-gyu is the Steven Spielberg of East Asia, and not just because his movies routinely become blockbusters. Both his 1996 first feature, "The Gingko Bed," and his 1999 "Shiri" broke box-office records in South Korea by building compelling genre stories around questions of national identity, a FORMula that has long been a winner for Mr. Spielberg.
And with "Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War," Mr. Kang seems to be deliberately forcing the comparison. Set during the Korean War, the picture is plainly Mr. Kang's "Saving Private Ryan," a tribute to a passing generation of heroes that begins with an elderly man's visiting a burial site, a sequence that practically quotes Mr. Spielberg's film.
The old man is Lee Jin-seok (played by Won Bin in the flashbacks that make up the body of the film), a war veteran with a complicated personal history. Together with his older brother, Jin-tae (Jang Dong-gun), Jin-seok was forcibly drafted into the South Korean army when Northern troops staged a surprise attack on the South.
In the flashbacks, Jin-seok is a slender, fragile young man, a budding intellectual who is his family's hope for the future. His older brother, Jin-tae, is a burly, boisterous shoemaker whose priority is to protect his younger sibling by winning as many combat medals as possible and using his status as a national hero to have his brother sent home.
The theme of brotherly sacrifice is a popular one in Asian cinema, but it is used here for more than its melodramatic appeal. When the younger brother figures out what his sibling is up to, he turns against him, mirroring the suspicion and distrust that characterized then and characterize now the division between North and South Korea, fraternal countries locked in a permanent struggle.
"Tae Guk Gi" (the title refers to the name South Koreans give to their national flag) is a far more ambivalent and ambiguous film than Mr. Spielberg's. Both North and South are portrayed as brutal, abusive regimes that use their citizens as so much cannon fodder. The battle sequences aim for the intimate violence of Mr. Spielberg's depiction of the D-Day invasion and even make use of the same curious strobelike effect that "Saving Private Ryan" employed to communicate the panicky adrenaline rush of warfare.
These scenes do not depict just democracy triumphing over authoritarianism, but something more morally queasy and brutally pragmatic. Jin-tae becomes a monster of aggression, almost forgetting about his mission to save his brother as he becomes more and more caught up in the hysteria of pitched combat. If he is a hero, he is a deeply flawed, almost demented one. The Northerners commit atrocities — slaughtering entire villages as they retreat — but so do the Southerners, who summarily execute even those villagers who were forced to collaborate with the enemy in order to eat. One of those executed is Jin-tae's fiancée, Young-shin (Lee Eun-joo), a development that pushes Jin-tae even further over the edge.
"Tae Guk Gi," which opens today in the New York region, is a film that will inevitably mean more within the culture that produced it than outside. Reportedly, it has become the highest-grossing film of all time in South Korea, even topping that worldwide phenomenon "Titanic," though it will certainly not escape the art-house ghetto in the United States. But the film does offer Western viewers rare access to another country's innermost anxieties and contradictions, and as such is a fascinating document.
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TVguide.com
TAE GUK GI: THE BROTHERHOOD OF WAR
Kang Je-gyu, 2004
Brother's keeper
You would be forgiven for thinking spending the first half-hour of this sweeping war epic wondering if you'd accidentally stumbled into a Korean remake of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1998), but while director Je-guy Kang liberally borrows from Hollywood's chest of combat movie cliches this tale of two brothers torn apart by the Korean War eventually overcomes FORMula and delivers a genuine emotional wallop. Following his father's death, carefree Seoul cobbler Jin-tae Lee (Jang Dong-gun) has become the man of the house, working hard to earn enough money to put his younger brother, Jin-seok (Won Bin), through college. When war breaks out and Jin-seok is forcibly enlisted in the army, Jin-tae volunteers for combat duty so he can keep an eye on his sickly brother. Jin-tae quickly strikes a deal with his commanding officer: If he earns a Medal of Honor, Jin-seok will be sent home. But seeking this reward requires Jin-tae to constantly put himself in danger on the battlefield, which at first frightens and then angers his brother, who can't help but wonder whether Jin-tae is doing this for his benefit or for his own personal glory. As the war drags on, Jin-tae grows more ruthless and trigger-happy. The breaking point comes when he almost executes a childhood friend who was forced to join the enemy. After that terrible moment, Jin-seok can no longer look at his brother the same way again. The stage is set for tragedy, with both men having to confront each other one last time on the battlefield. A smash hit when it was released in South Korea (it became both the country? most expensive production and its highest-grossing film), TAE GUK GI opened internationally in the wake of two other high-profile Korean films: Kim Ki-Duk's SPRING, SUMMER, FALL, WINTER?AND SPRING (2003) and Cannes favorite OLDBOY (2003), directed by Chan-wook Park. It? glossier than either of those movies though, and bears an unmistakable Hollywood imprint. Kang uses every convention in the book, from the ragtag squad of colorful misfits to the corny framing device that bookends the film. Still, the movie? scope overcomes its generic narrative: The battle scenes are terrifically filmed, often reaching PRIVATE RYAN's level of intensity, and despite your better judgment, you do get caught up in the melodrama. Kang truly seems to believe in the story he? telling and that makes the many contrivances feel almost fresh. It helps that he tones down the relentless jingoism that often plagues the genre; this is a grunt's eye view of the Korean War and Kang doesn't sugarcoat some of the less-than-heroic actions of the South Korean army. Indeed, it's easy to view the story of these brothers as a larger metaphor for the relationship between the two Koreas, which gives the film an added resonance that your typical Hollywood war movie wouldn't possess. — Ethan Alter
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雖然批評此片過多不太高水準的戰爭場面,但選角成功,特別點名東健是銀幕焦點.
The Onion's A.V. Club
September 1, 2004
Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood Of War
Director: Kang Je-gyu (R, 140 min.)
Cast: Jang Dong-Gun, Won Bin, Lee Eun-Joo
The gore-drenched opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan may not have had much effect on the eagerness with which the world goes to war, but it's had an undeniable impact on the way war gets depicted onscreen. A film with no polite cutaways and with an explosion for virtually every scene, Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood Of War attempts to portray the horrors of the Korean War though simple immersion. Bullets whiz, limbs fly, skulls burst, and no one walks into the sunset toward a happy ending.
Previously responsible for the taut action thriller Shiri, writer-director Kang Je-gyu borrows a lot from Ryan, even importing its drippy present-day framing device to set up the story of two brothers whose quiet life changes irrevocably with the onset of war. Fleeing a North Korean invasion, simple shoeshine man Jang Dong-Gun and his college-bound brother Won Bin are forcibly enlisted to fight the communists. Continuing a lifetime of sacrifice, Jang volunteers for one dangerous mission after another on the vague promise that doing so will make life easier for his more delicate brother.
This allows Kang to take his film through some explosive setpieces, and, as with Shiri, he repeatedly proves he has fine technical chops. He steers the camera into battle while capturing each speck of flying dirt, making war look neither thrilling nor glorious, only terrifying. Sadly, Kang seems not to have noticed that without the quiet moments between shrapnel barrages, Ryan wouldn't have been half as memorable. After a sentimental opening sequence, he scarcely lets the film pause to breathe, which dulls its effectiveness. After a while, it becomes too easy to entertain thoughts like "Oh, so that's what brains would look like on a dirt floor."
Kang has chosen his cast well, particularly Jang, a singer and model with a haunted look and a striking screen presence. If Kang had given his actors a meatier, less cliché-dependent story, it might have worked out better. (When one soldier proudly passes around a snapshot of his family, his company members should just go ahead and break out the shovels.) Of course, it might be that war simply invites clichés, but while it's easy to admire Kang's attempts to bring those clichés back home, and to impart his country's history in the epic language of classic war films, the results still ring a bit too familiar. —Keith Phipps |
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发表于 2004-10-5 10:58
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发表于 2004-8-1 20:44
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