Intcatinfo A Masterpiece!

Kidskycom It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

Freeman This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Zandra The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

fetboy A very well made movie, and beautifully acted, but an American viewer will definitely take offense to it (especially if they are, or have been, a US serviceman). I have been searching for a good Korean movie or TV show that would give insights as to how the South Koreans feel about the American presence in their country, but surprisingly that topic is almost never brought up in Korean made entertainment. I read the cover of "Address Unknown" in the video store, and thought this would be a good movie about the Americans in South Korea. It is a good movie, but I was offended. The movie focused of several stereotypes that I found appalling (I will try to write this review without giving away too much movie in details, but be aware there are spoilers in this review).The movie's main characters are a horribly poor, mentally disturbed, Korean woman and her mixed racial son that was the issue of an African American airman. In the viewer's first introduction to this couple, we the viewer see the son attempt to brutalize his mother. The message was obvious; The Korean mothers of children of American servicemen live desperate lives, and their mixed racial children resent them.Having spent 6 years in Japan in the US navy, and being the father of 2 Japanese American Children you can probably understand why I would be offended by this notion.Matters may have been different in the 60s and 70s, but I can say from personal experience that every child of an Asian mother and American serviceman that I know has benefited greatly from being truly bi-lingual, and have lived well in their respective countries (I have been searching for information on the actor/rap singer Dong-kun Yang to see if he actually is half African American, but if he's not, he still spoke English beautifully in the movie). The relationship between the mother and her bi-racial son takes a terrible turn, when the son slicing off his mother's breast tattoo that depicts her former, American serviceman, lover's name. The mother throughout the movie takes pride in her son and her past love with the American serviceman, and to me these were the only touching aspects of the movie. To see the son attack his mother in this way really made my heart sink and I could not understand what point the director was trying to make, other to characterize bi-racial children negatively.The breast tattoo topic comes up again when an AWOL American soldier attempt to carve his name into the breast of his Korean lover, so that she will never forget him after he is gone. I have been searching on the web, and I cannot find any account of such an occurrence happening, in the long US-Korean relations, involving a serviceman carving his name into a Korean woman (or girl) against her will. Where that stereotype of an American wanting to tattoo a Korean woman came from, I have no idea, though it does sound a lot like what KKK members are reported to have done in the States. In any case I thought it was a very unfair portrayal or Americans, and it reminded me a lot of the myth of Vietnamese women who hid razor blades in their vaginas (might have happened, but I highly doubt it, and there is no report of it actually having happening).Early in the film we see this same serviceman offer that same Korean girl a chance at eye surgery in trade for her becoming his sweetheart. Anyone who knows anything about the US military knows that such an exchange is absurd, because a serviceman could only get surgery for a Korean woman if she was his wife. The message that that exchange attempts to give, which becomes more clear later, is that Korean women (and Koreans in general) are forced to yield to everything Americans demand (no matter how demeaning), because Americans feel that the Koreans owe them so much after all the Americans have done for them. Later the girl blinds her surgically repaired eye, giving the message that her deranged American lover's gift was not welcomed after all.I hope that Koreans who have watched (or plan to watch) "Address Unknown" will not assume that all American servicemen are deranged, because were not, or that we intend to make outrageous demands of them after all of the "gifts that we have given them," because we do not.The tone of "Address Unknown" borders on anti-American propaganda, which is really a shame because this movie is very well made.I hope someday there will be a less grim movie made about the post war Korean-American experience, because I know from personal experience that most interpersonal Korean-American relationships are not all bad (though in the 60s and 70s, relationships between Koreans and Americans were probably a lot more strained).

FilmFlaneur Kim Ki-duk's film has been a while making its appearance, at least in the UK and after viewing it, in some ways one can see why. As unflinching and as memorable as the other works which have made him out as perhaps Korea's finest filmmaker - The Isle, Bad Guy (2001), 3-Iron (2004) included - Address Unknown (aka: Suchwiin bulmyeong) is as uncompromising in its view of humanity as any of them, and with many of the director's characteristically disturbing moments intact.Set in and around a US air force base in Korea 17 years after the end of the Korean conflict, and mainly focusing on the travails and tribulations of the residents of a nearby village Address Unknown was, the director says, a way to explore and represent the dehumanising effect of war. It's also, as others have noticed, about other things too: language, family relationships, the debasement of tradition, and violence amongst them. There is no real central point to the film, although arguably the relationship between the American flyer and Eun-OK (Min-jang Ban) gives it its main drama. Korean cinema frequently has at its heart the pain caused by the 1950s' war and the painful division of the country into two halves thereafter, Here the psychic trauma created is symbolised by the base, and the pain resulting is acted out in varying degrees by those who live and work in its shadow.In Kim's unnamed village the principal business appears to be the butchering of dogs for food - a particularly brutal affair, though the film does claim no animals were mistreated during the filming - by one Dog Eye (Jae-hyung Jo, also notable in Bad Guy and The Isle). Dog Eye despises teenaged Chang-Guk (Don-kun Yang) the son of an absent American soldier, for being of mixed descent. Letters to his missing father, sent from his mother, are being returned 'address unknown'. For his part, Chang-Guk makes his solitary friend in Ji-Hum (Young-min Kim, also in the same director's much more contemplative Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring, 2003). He's a sensitive, withdrawn artist, bullied by his war veteran father. Meanwhile Ji-Hum has a crush on Eun-OK. With her eye damaged by a childhood accident, she in turn has a relationship with an unstable, drug dealing American flyer, (Mitch Malum), who promises her a corrective operation on the promises of becoming his girl...The bleakness of the film, one both of landscape and the heart, reminded this viewer of the Chinese film Blind Shaft (aka: Man Jing) made the same year. But the latter is more about the degradation wrought by political economics, whereas the malaise at the centre of Kim's work is more pathological. It is also more relentlessly grim and less cynical than that tale of couple of serial killers at work in Chinese coal mines to such an extent that the viewer at times wonders if anyone will be left alive by the end. This narrative ruthlessness, as critics have noticed, ultimately undermines some of the impact the film might otherwise have had.Another flaw is the performance of the main American actor; Malum's acting has been for some a distraction, although I found it weak, if passable. Korean directors sometimes make unfortunate casting decisions for their English speaking parts, one thinks of the problems which attend the otherwise excellent J.S.A. No doubt the home audience would not care about or notice such shortcomings, so it seems pointless to chide Kim too much over this weakness, especially as elsewhere the cast are generally excellent.Ultimately, what makes Address Unknown so striking is Kim's imagery and the choice of actions by his characters, so spiritually and emotionally rootless. Seen in this light, the writer-director's title is especially apt, both referring literally to the official stamp on front of envelopes returning to the mother, as well as to the anonymous village of his stories. Like Bad Guy and The Isle, the current film also contains individuals who exist on the edge of human relations, although here it is not just persecuted lovers. To a certain extent all of his characters have lost their way, either represented living rootlessly in an old army bus, being casually inhumane to animals or each other, or simply by valuing preferment - suggested by army medals, relics and pensions, even just good looks, over genuine human connection. And when times are so out of joint, some striking images are the result: the death of a major character head buried in a frozen paddy field; a man hung by dogs; the cut-out paper eye (an especially treasureable, Dali-esquire moment) on the face of Eun-OK, the killing of the dogs over a dirty puddle, and so on. In fact there's a touch of surreality about the film that continues right until the end, with the soldiers crawling in the field. Kim's achievement is in unifying so convincingly, and without any monotony, a multi-charactered narrative that includes such extreme concerns as disfigurement, minor bestiality, and murder. If you fancy such a strong and austere cinematic brew, then you won't be disappointed.

Mac-148 There's a scene in this film where a man plays with a puppy. When the puppy, wagging its tail, approaches, the man, at first affectionate, slaps its nose. Two or three times. It is the most heartless moment in a cruel and vacuous movie. The cruelty is everywhere and stops the audience caring about anyone or anything. Except the dogs. Couple of questions. How does a bullet in the eye get fixed with what looks like soy sauce? Since when did a traditional Korean family allow a teenage daughter to bonk her U.S. soldier boyfriend in the family home? And where did the director drag up those American actors? Friday night in Itaewon? Boy oh boy they were bad. The boyfriend was bad, out of control and saying truly scary things. He blamed it all on the Korean mountains that were closing in on him. Hello? Calling Planet Earth? On top of that, in a movie set in the 1970s, no period pop music. Unforgivable. A real dog.

sippan I love this movie! OK, it's horrible, it's disgusting, watching it mademe sick...and saying that I experienced physical pain is not a lie.There is no happiness in this film. Everyone is depressed andeveryone has difficult problems to deal with, and those problemsdon't get solved, but rather get worse during the film. But this iswhy I love it! A film that can give you such strong feelings, even ifthe strong feelings are depression and pain, is a GOOD film!Might be good to see this if you think YOU have problems. =)