Reviews

I believe this is the fourth or fifth film I've watched starring Min-Sik Choi, who is quite an accomplished actor. The DVD cover proclaims Happy End to be "one of the most controversial Korean films ever made!" It's not difficult to imagine why this film might cause controversy. On the one hand, shortly after the film begins, a semi-explicit sex scene takes place that seems to go on for a gratuitously long time. But nothing is shown during the sex scenes that wasn't shown in the much less controversial, more traditional Korean period piece, Chunhyang. Perhaps it is the nature of the sex taking place, that of illicit extramarital liaisons, that contributed to its controversy. But I believe the bulk of the film's controversy is due to what ultimately emerges as the film's theme.

This film could be viewed as a sadistic wet dream pandering to certain men who are disgruntled by what they feel is an emasculating and increasingly common situation of this modern age: that of the unemployed, stay-at-home husband. Except that when this unemployed husband is home, he spends most of his time watching soap operas, only occasionally lifting a finger to help with the baby. Instead of looking for work, he kills time each day crouched in the used book store, reading romance novels, to the chagrin of the store owner, whose policy regarding such patrons is less welcoming than that of Barnes & Noble. The husband is mopey, and never expresses affection towards or sexual attraction to his wife. Since he barely helps out around the house, when his wife gets home from work she ends up having to do the cleaning and the chores on top of her job, even though he has much more free time and is home much more than she is. As a companion, he is ineffectual and impotent. At one point during the final third of the film, as she's alone at home on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor, she tells herself that she has to "end it". It's unclear at the time whether she's talking about her relationship with her husband, or with her co-worker Il-bum. For the most part, she endures the imbalance in her relationship with her husband without much complaint, perhaps contritely due to a sense of guilt she possesses over the fact that she is engaged in an affair.

It's revealed that Il-Bum is actually baby Yun's father, and that they were a couple before her current husband came into her life and married her. Why would she leave her former lover to be with such a pathetic, and ultimately deranged and lethal man? There is an indication that at one time he was successful and financially more secure. But her past and present boyfriend is more attractive, more passionate, and more considerate. For reasons that aren't fully explained, she reacts negatively to his small, caring gestures. When he buys a toothbrush that she can use when she's over at his place, she lashes out. She does the same when she discovers toys that he's bought for the baby. She seems conflicted by emotions of desire, guilt, and annoyance with both the men in her life and her situation in general. There is also at least one major plot hole in this film that I could not overlook. At one point near the end of the film, she mixes a bit of sleeping medication into her baby's formula, so that she can leave her in the apartment to go confront her lover and break off their relationship. But her husband could come home at any minute, and yet she apparently doesn't stop to consider that. Perhaps the simple, though inadequate answer to the questions raised by her acts is that she just isn't a very sensible woman. But nor is she portrayed as being mentally slow. Distracted, certainly.

Inevitably, her husband comes home to find the baby there alone, and eventually discovers that he's being cheated on. He premeditates a vicious revenge, in which he terrifies her before committing brutal murder, bludgeoning her over and over with her lover's knife which he stole from the former's home, gradually slowing to pause and stare at the body for a couple moments in between stabs. He then uses the weapon to frame her lover for the murder he's committed. The last time we see Il-Bum is in custody, being pressured into giving up his right to remain silent without a lawyer. We're only left to imagine what becomes of him.

There's a misanthropic sense of self-satisfaction in the supposedly "clever" irony of the film's title. Not knowing what the filmmaker's intentions were, I'm led to wonder after watching this film if those who wrote and directed it consider the end which befell Bora and her child's true father to be a "happy" one. The superior tone of one of the previous comments here glibly indicates with a wink and a nod that she deserved to be horribly and brutally slayed by her baby's "touching motherly daddy" because SHE'D gone too far. How alarmingly vile.

At one point midway through this film, we see a chauvinistic American woman, gushing with the fervor of an evangelist or Tupperware saleslady about how wonderful the lives will be of the "Amerasian" children who are getting shipped away, and then casually coaxing a Vietnamese woman holding her child in her arms to "participate". However, little did Heidi's biological mother know that in her case, Heidi was being delivered out of the frying pan and into the fire, that fire being the hands of an emotionally and physically abusive woman. Among numerous other parenting failures, Heidi's new adoptive mother never discussed her daughter's racial background with her, and warned her not to discuss it with anyone else either. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, this wasn't difficult because Heidi is not what I think most people would consider Asian-looking. She could easily pass for someone essentially Caucasian, with some possible Native American ancestry.

Because she left Vietnam when she was 7 years old, she still had a few memories of her life there, and undoubtedly she'd always carried a curiosity with her about her former family. But like me, she'd probably also heard of and seen happy specials on shows like Dateline, where the climax is the tearful reunion, and the denouement leads viewers to believe that all involved lived happily ever after. From the beginning of the movie, we know that contact has already been made, and so their meeting is a foregone conclusion. But it turns out that these people she was related to yet barely knew were apparently awaiting her arrival with dollar signs in their eyes, thinking "Jackpot! She's our ticket out of this sh*#hole! Who would have guessed that giving her up would have paid off after all, right Meh?" When they realize that this doesn't fly with Heidi, they shift their tone a bit to something more like "Well, if you can't take Meh off our hands, then you could at least support her (meaning us) with a monthly stipend." Her sweet but smothering mother is more understanding towards Heidi's reaction, although naturally disappointed. And not even she seems to fully comprehend that in the country where Heidi comes from, making such tremendous requests of a virtual stranger regardless of heredity would be considered totally inappropriate. I sensed though that her brother, even to more civil members of his own culture, would be thought of as ill-mannered.

Which isn't to say that her family were the only transgressors. She mentioned that all her life she'd wanted to feel like she was loved unconditionally. She was expecting to find some sort of familial bliss. But apparently she didn't study the language at all, not even a few phrases. Nor did she seem to have given any forethought to what the living conditions might be like. She walked into that situation without any considerations of preparedness, expecting ideal results. And when things didn't happen the way she'd wanted them to, she ended up turning her back on them completely.

One of the other reviewers here was offended by the presence of certain people and images in this film. I say presence, and not portrayals, because the people in the film were not random strangers picked and filmed by the director in order to manipulatively create a false sense of environment. The southerners interviewed in the film were people who had direct relationships to Heidi. The KKK parade took place in her hometown, though one of the "southerners" (who the aforementioned reviewer was apparently offended by nonetheless) said that most people didn't support them, although most of them knew people who did. As for the images of the Vietnamese, they showed the environment that Heidi's family was living in. Of course not all southerners and Vietnamese are like or live in the same kinds of conditions as those shown here. But the complaints were about something outside the context of this film, (that context being Heidi's life as well as, to a lesser extent, the lives of those directly involved in hers,) and therefore they were unreasonable.

One last thing I found noteworthy was the possible culpability of the American Vietnamese wife of the lawyer in the way the situation unfolded. If anyone had an ethical duty to advise at least *some* caution, it was her. Near the end she actually ponders aloud her possible role in how things turned out for the others involved, while at the same time showing no trace of actual guilt in the matter. Maybe part of her failure to volunteer mention of negative scenarios was that she didn't think anybody would actually be naive enough to involve themselves in such a situation without asking anybody any questions or at least wondering about such possibilities.

POSSIBLE SPOILERS

I watched Ring and Ring 2 back to back as a double feature, and instead of commenting on them separately I thought I'd just comment on them both at the same time. I thought Ring was good. Not great. I watched Audition (another Japanese horror film) in the theater just a couple days before and knew several of the details and therefore what to expect. Even so, that film was quite shocking and there were a couple moments that made me jump and even more that made me cringe. It also had a few moments of (somewhat twisted, off-the-wall) humor to it, which this film didn't. Going in to watch Ring 1 & 2, I knew the storyline but not as many of the details, and I was anticipating a good scare. Yet despite knowing fewer details about this film than about Audition, which scared me, this film did not. I found it intriguing but felt very little tension. The first sign that I was in for a letdown was in the beginning scenes when the two girls are home alone and one goes to use the bathroom. Meanwhile, the other who is cleaning up in the kitchen turns around and sees... something--the ghost of Sadako apparently. But all that happens is that the screen freezes on her suddenly terrified expression. I was expecting the buildup to explode in horror like the somewhat similar but much more terrifying scene with Drew Barrymore that began Scream. The buildup--the phone suddenly ringing while they're discussing the legend, then the TV coming on by itself, etc, created expectations that only resulted in disappointment, in my opinion.

Before I watched these two films, I thought, and still think, that the film's concept had great potential for being really scary. I think perhaps one major factor which detracted from this potential was that the cause of the deaths was somewhat humanized. The deaths were caused by an angry ghost. Her name was Sadako. She had a psychic mother, was murdered by her father, and dumped in a well. She kills people (apparently by simply scaring them to death) in vengeance. etc. Several people here have compared this film to Blair Witch. I found Blair Witch to be much more scary, and the reason why is because the Blair "Witch" never had an actual name, family, personal history, etc. It made the menace of that film much more unknown, un-/less human, more visceral. The Blair Witch itself was never seen, only described.

Despite my disappointment at not being thrilled, after awhile I began to appreciate this Ring in a way similar to The Sixth Sense. That is to say, in a more thoughtful and less slasher-esque way. The film climaxes in a revelation, not terror. And it had a look that created a mood. Ring 2 has the same look. However, the goings on in it seemed to me to break down into incoherence, contrived situations, and affectation. And one thing in particular that really started to bore and annoy me was that the female lead in Ring 2 was continuously playing the "panicked woman in peril", always reacting to situations as though they were vastly more terrifying than they were. It was as if she was dictating through her reactions of terror the terror that the audience was supposed to be feeling in those moments, i.e. "Look! I'm scared! That means you're supposed to be scared too! Be scared!" I got so tired of the second film that I considered leaving early. But I stuck it out because I was curious to see how it ended. Sadako crawling out of the TV screen was interesting, as was her moment in the well--which was actually a swimming pool? I'm not sure, come to think of it. I eventually began to zone out. I was surprised by the discrepancy of how much less I enjoyed part 2, since they're supposed to be two parts of the same novel, and they were directed by the same person the same year. I'd give part 1 a 6, and part 2 a 3, out of 10.

I love this cartoon. It's one of a number of delightful and ingenious cartoons I first discovered a couple years ago on the Cartoon Network. The humor is absolutely zany. There are a lot of wonderfully quirky things about the show, but I think one of my favorites is the incongruous endings. The episodes will often end immediately at the point of climax. The first few times this happened, I sat there for a second or two, confused and disturbed and caught by surprise, and then I laughed uncontrollably. The two episodes I remember most distinctly in which this happens are the one where Chicken has his neck stretched so he'll be tall enough to ride the rollercoaster, and the episode where Chicken eats too much "caffeine flakes(?)" cereal, and eventually ends up without any feathers and horrifically bloated after being shot full of Cow's milk to help him sleep.

I also recommend Dexter's Laboratory, and 2 Stupid Dogs/Secret Squirrel, both of which are cuter than Cow and Chicken (and all three of which I think are more humorous and clever than Johnny Bravo or the Powerpuff Girls, although the latter are in the same eye-pleasing visual style). The I. M. Weasel show is ok too, but I like the Cow and Chicken characters better. The "naked Red Guy" makes appearances on I. M. Weasel as well.

Over at the user reviews of 2 Stupid Dogs, many people were comparing it to Ren & Stimpy, but Cow and Chicken is much more similar to R&S in its visual style and gross-out-ness. And in my opinion it's a lot funnier. Cow and Chicken is probably the most irreverent of all the shows on the Cartoon Network, and I'd personally have reserves about letting my kids watch it if I had kids. And furthermore, I don't know if most can appreciate a lot of the satire and outright ridiculousness as much as older "kids" can.

'Shut yer pie hole' and see these shows!

This is the charming little story of a small Irish girl with a big accent who travels to New York with her dog to join her mother. On the ship, she meets Rita Hayworth. After they dock, she is told that her mother is sick, and detained. She escapes from the immigration officials on a milk truck leaving Ellis Island, and makes her way to the mansion where her mother is a servant. However, once she arrives, she learns the terrible news that her mother is dead. She has no other place to go and no relatives back in Ireland, so the kindhearted servants decide to hide her at the risk of losing their jobs and being criminally prosecuted for harboring an alien fugitive. The other residents of the house are a young, bookish, scatterbrained man (Pinky Tomlin) and his two, crabby, domineering aunts. The little girl accidentally encounters the man, and they become friends. Eventually she reunites with Rita Hayworth, who Pinky Tomlin falls in love with. His new influences lead to rebellion against his aunts, and with his financial support, Rita Hayworth's brother is able to open a nightclub. All this is interspersed with occasional musical numbers, mainly sung by little miss Paddy.

This movie was made WAY before my time, but I'm guessing it was an attempt to cash in on the Shirley Temple phenomenon. It looked like the voices were entirely dubbed over, which I found interesting. I watched it through mainly just to gaze upon the beauty of Rita Hayworth, but also because I was a bit transfixed by Jane Withers. She was adorable. She was precocious. She also had that "so-cute-you-wanna-strangle-'em" quality that cynics will probably find unbearably annoying to watch. However, she was a good actress. I found the scene where she learns her mother is dead to be genuinely sad. Her final song and dance number in the movie is probably the cutest (or most annoying?) part.