A Dirty Carnival (Ha Yu, 2006)

[krillov]

Título: A Dirty Carnival Título V.O: Biyeolhan geori Director: Ha Yu Año/País: 2006 / Corea Duración: 139 minutos Género: Acción, Thriller, Crimen Reparto: Yoon Jae-Moon, Ho-jin Jeon, Ku Jin, In-seong Jo, Byeong-chun Kim, Yun-Hee K Enlaces: Subs Ficha de: krillov

[krillov]

The best Korean gangster movie since "Friend," "A Dirty Carnival" elevates the genre to an epic narrative level as it follows the rise and emotional decline of a smalltime hoodlum. Full of swiftly etched, well-developed characters and peppered with taut action sequences, pic has the kind of long-reaching dramatic span more often seen in regular dramas. With platforming by perceptive programmers, this could become a cult attraction in offshore markets, though critical support will be essential due to the mass of other Korean crimers. Film snagged a healthy but not huge 1.6 million admissions (some $10 million) on summer release.

[Silien]

Gracias Krillov, probaremos a ver que tal y si es cierto lo que has puesto...

[krillov]

probaremos a ver que tal y si es cierto lo que has puesto...

Es el encabezamiento de una crítica de Variety.com, dejo el enlace por si a alguien le interesa leerla entera:
http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117931366.html?categoryid=31&cs=1

[Silien]

Variety ejem...    Bueno, la verdad es que lo de "mejor película de gansters desde Friends"... ¿Y dónde metemos "A bittersweet life"? Pero bien... Lo dicho, probaremos.

[krillov]

Variety ejem...  

Sí, la verdad es que a priori variety no parece una gran fuente, pero bueno, habrá que darle una oportunidad.

[kairocure]

Sacado de Koreanfilm.org...

Byung-doo, lanky and adorable (played by TV drama star Jo In-seong from Hearts in Bali) is a 29-year-old career criminal, working for the middle-rank enforcer Sang-chul (Yoon Je-mun, the annoying communications expert in Antarctic Journal). Burdened with a terminally ill mother and taking care of younger siblings, Byung-doo is feeling financial pressure as a substitute patriarch. When the big boss President Hwang (Cheon Ho-jin, The Big Swindle, Crying Fist) is cornered by a corrupt prosecutor, Byung-doo volunteers for a whack job and wins the big man's trust. However, his real trouble begins when friend Min-ho (Namgung Min), an aspiring movie director, asks him to be a "consultant" for the latter's debut film, a gangster epic not unlike Dirty Carnival.

A Dirty Carnival Poet Yu Ha's highly anticipated follow-up to the critically and financially successful Once Upon a Time in High School, Dirty Carnival's Korean title references Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets, and there are similarities to the latter's Gangs of New York and Goodfellas. But Scorsesian expressionism and irony are not what Yu Ha is after. Instead we get a straightforward rendition of the oft-told narrative of the rise and fall of an underdog criminal, almost Chandler-esque in its quasi-romantic, melancholic appraisal of this rotten world we live in. As was the case with High School, Yu's assured direction and literate screenplay are at their best when they calmly illuminate the spider-web of back-stabbing deviousness and hypocrisy that enmeshes Byung-doo ever more tightly, until his life juices are sucked out, leaving an empty husk. Thugs in this film are truly thugs: they are not the goofy cretins with extravagant tattoos populating My Boss My Teacher and its ilk, but loan sharks who skulk around naked in your living room until you pay up, enforcers for real estate dealers who smash your grandmother's soybean paste jars into pieces, and the disembodied voice in the cell phone threatening rape and murder for your teenage daughter. President Hwang, who quips "real gangsters don't use knives, they use calculators" and never once raises his hand or voice against his underlings, sits on the top of the food chain sustained by this pestering, fungoid evil known as "loyalty" (euiri) in Korean society (It is wonderful to see Cheon Ho-jin returning to the type of classy villain role first shown in the underrated Double Agent).

Yu Ha also deserves credit for keeping the film's violence resolutely unglamorous. Dirty Carnival's fight scenes are too ugly and painful to be called "action" scenes. They can only be aptly described as eruptions of violence, as each baseball bat swing lands with a bone-cracking crunch and each sashimi knife stab is felt by the viewer with an involuntary cringe. You are impressed as hell at Yu's directorial prowess, but only afterwards: while you are watching these scenes, you want them to be over.

The movie-within-a-movie subplot could have been a mess, but is handled surprisingly well. Unlike the dime-store novelist in the Eastwood-directed Unforgiven and other similar characters who make fortunes by turning other people's misery into marketable myths, Min-ho, an obvious identification figure for Yu Ha himself, pays a steep price for not realizing his complicity in perpetuating the vicious cycle of violence and hypocrisy in real life. No tasteful "ambiguity" that sneakily rehabilitates the filmmaker's "art" here. At times this section appears to be a barely veiled commentary on the symbiotic relationship going on in real time between Korean filmmakers and career criminals, especially the rather ugly aftermath of Friend's financial success.

Jo In-seong, who occasionally looks like an overgrown junior-high school kid with his crew-cut plate and doe eyes, was a risky casting choice for the title role, but he pulls it off. While not a brilliant actor (yet), Jo is believably awkward and conflicted in key emotional scenes, especially working opposite terrific supporting players Yoon Je-mun and Cheon Ho-jin. Ironically, it is his romance with the childhood sweetheart Hyun-joo (Lee Bo-young), terrain that Jo and Yu Ha should be familiar with, that feels lifeless and cliched (Jo Young-wook's saccharine score over these sequences make them feel much worse than they are).

A Dirty Carnival illustrates what a gutsy and sensible filmmaker Yu Ha is, firmly reining in the film's narrative drive and not seduced by stylistic razzle-dazzle. At the same time, I find his semi-autobiographical films always stopping short of completely winning me over: there is something achingly lyrical and sad threatening to burst out of his tightly controlled stories of sensitive, "nice" boys corrupted and/or destroyed by the evil world, but it never happened in High School and it does not happen here either. Nonetheless, thanks to Carnival, my expectations are hoisted way up for his next film, said to be the final installment of the "street violence" trilogy. Perhaps in it the older protagonist will finally learn how to either fight back against the system, or renounce violence and stop living as the peculiarly noxious species known as the macho Korean male.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

Creo que le daré una oportunidad. ¿Alguien ha visto las películas anteriores de este director?

[Bondurant]

Creo que le daré una oportunidad. ¿Alguien ha visto las películas anteriores de este director?

Once upon a time in a high school estaba bastante bien.
Probaremos a ver que tal, que no pinta mal.

[lordvampir]

Gracias por la ficha!!
 

[Pismo]

¡Otro que se apunta! Muchas gracias por la ficha.  

[krillov]

Fingolfin (Asia-team) se ha puesto con los subtítulos, le verdad es que se agradece, porque son un huevo de líneas.

[kaishakunin]

Gracias krillov por la ficha.   Que sea algo mejor o peor que las mencionadas da igual, hay que bajarla y opinar, que éste es del poquito cine coreano que puede salvarse (mensaje a lovecraft   )

Gracias también a fingolfin por la ristra de subs que saca últimamente.

[Chico Viejo]

Ufff... llevaba tiempo esperando esta película. Tiene muy buena pinta.

Muchas gracias!!    

[Thug_Life]

Creo que me espero a opiniones "de la casa". Miedo me dan estas pelis coreanas ultimamente..jejeje. De todos modos, gracias por la ficha.

Saludos

[oscarriutort]

A la espera de esos subs y de mas opiniones, saludos