And there are cinema critics and film studies academics who develop concepts such as genre, auteur, style, form, periods, and apply them to a canon of authorized films conserved in national archives. There are movie industry specialists who may teach in professional schools or in economics and sociology departments, applying the standard tools of their discipline to one particular sector that represents up to one percent of the US economy. Industry or art: these two approaches give rise to two distinct bodies of literature, one focusing on professions, publics, and profits, the other one on visual style, narrative content, and film textuality. For cinema-or some portions of it-is also an art. But very often aesthetics gets in the way of analyzing it as such. In the wake of the Asian Financial Crisis, the back-end of 1990s Korean cinema threw a lens on the economic strife in the country, particularly its impact on its youth.Cinema is an industry. Challenging, but purposefully so, this is teenage rebellion without limits and remains an important film as a touchstone of 90s youth culture. Moralistically nihilistic, in what should be a period of youthful joy and discovery is portrayed as a fight for survival on the street. You increasingly feel this world you have been submerged in for over two hours is one you now desperately want to exit, which seems to be the point. This is followed by violence against a woman. “Bad” has lots of meanings, says one screen character in reaction to the previous episode which showed a gang rape, portraying it as a party-like joyfully passage. The final passage of the film proves the most challenging. Ignoring the warnings, pretending the cautionary tales do not exist, or matter. Is is perhaps the spirit of the wild youths which carries it through. Labelled “the most controversial and ruptured film text in the history of Korea” by academic Kyung Hyun Kim, you will have to feel comfortable with the piece-meat filmmaking and the delinquent themes on display. Song plays a homeless man, briefly seen joining a street Christian group to clap for Jesus. One scene where the blurred lines between real footage and actors at work becomes clearer, for a modern audience at least, is the appearance of Song Kang-ho (Memories of Murder, The Host, Parasite). Sex and sexual favours are handed out on a whim, a combination of a liberated nature, but also one with scant respect for consequences or traditional notions of conduct. At times they are even purposefully sped up on screen, at others they are sprinting through the alleyways, or jumping out of windows to avoid paying bills. Hearing them discuss how someone died of the act they are doing now, but continuing all the same.Ĭhaos emanates from the characters themselves and their various actions, but also in the kinetic direction. The lust of recklessness courses through the veins of almost every character. Potato’ and ‘Douchebag’ and a wider cohort of youths as they attempt to fill the void of boredom with crime, abuse, pranks, violence and sex. Titled Timeless Bottomless Bad Movie in some overseas markets, the opening credits pride themselves on the unstructured nature of the film, detailing the ‘No fixed script’ and ‘No fixed actors’ heading our way. Shot in a documentary-style, but including some real citizens, most controversially some homeless men, the lines blur between the real and the staged as we jump between various episodes and events. While the foursome in Park Jung-woo’s Attack the Gas Station (1999) centered their fury on the local gas station, there is a more sprawling ensemble of debaucherous crime-hunting youngsters swaggering around Seoul here. BAD MOVIE (1997) Jang Sun-woo A chaotic, bacchanalian quasi-documentary on delinquent Seoul teens and their spiralling disillusioned recklessness In the wake of the Asian Financial Crisis, the back-end of 1990s Korean cinema threw a lens on the economic strife in the country, particularly its impact on its youth.
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