2018 ‘메기’ Directed by Yi Ok-seop
A couple's hospital tryst is caught on X-Ray. Thinking she and her boyfriend are the ones in the compromising radiograph, nurse Yoon-young goes in the next day to resign only to find that everyone has called in sick except the head doctor.
Me-gi, Maggie: The Fish Who Saved the Planet, 매기
A quirky and stylish South Korean comedy that I caught on MUBI. A pretty decent watch.
Vegan points:
The title character is a fish.
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Strangely I liked it. I think the visual metaphors and that magical realism give it a very new and cool touch. I haven't managed to connect with the characters, but it's still quite entertaining.
Final Score : 78% 🍎
"Once, I doubted one of my co-workers. Thinking back now, I was letting my imagination expand like a balloon. If you think you also have something expanding inside you, I would like to pop it with an enormous needle. But painlessly."
Wow: the ending LANDS. It can be unfocused at times, but the perspective of this film is so fresh and curious. A quiet killer with plenty of afterthoughts to digest. Both director Yi Ok-seop and actress Lee Joo-young are ones to watch!
And I just found out that Chun Woo-hee (Vertigo, 2019; Han Gong-ju, 2013) was the voice of the catfish, Maggie, narrating the film! 🥰
Reason as imperfection in a study of hearing realizations. Heart Attack Hospital inside a magical-slacker realism. Fishies are the greatest narrators; the greatest interpreters. And whether you like this truth or not, giving it face is by all means a dramatic necessary.
oh I’m blown away. this is Ok-seop Yi’s first full-length feature and it was randomly added to Mubi so I didnt know what to expect from it, or her. that was probably the best way to watch it
modern Korean cinema is known for blending genres but this does it so seamlessly you get mad that someone on their first movie can just do it. it oozes confidence and creativity. the love of the medium is felt in every shot.
and there’s a rawness to it too that reminded me of Barking Dogs Never Bite
best end scene ever?
1st Lee Ok-seop
A meandering kind-of comedy that promises much but ends up delivering little. What appears to be a story about a nurse and her lover at the centre of a hospital faux pas quickly tails off into the story of another nurse and her boyfriend, as well as the strange events happening around them, like the magical appearance of sinkholes in the city. The stylistic conceits owe a fair bit to Wes Anderson, including the font-precious text and the flat staging, but this appealing off-beat quality is spoiled by a rubbish script that is far too desperate to strike a pose than provide us with anything of real note. Fun concepts, like the narrator who happens to be…
I wished I like this more because the style is totally my thing. The eccentric shot compositions, the vibrant color palette, the upbeat music, the variety of editing and camera blocking techniques, and the cartoonish tone of the whole film would have definitely clicked with me in another movie.
Unfortunately for me I just wasn’t all that interested in the happenings and the participants. The dilemmas the characters find themselves in are fun to watch but I thought their motivations were too unfounded and the significance of their roles in the overarching story to be either unclear or uninteresting. We don’t learn much about these individuals outside of what we’re directly told by the screenplay— this isn’t to say that…
an absolute mess in the plot but it’s made up by being completely weird, really colorful, and overly out of the box.
Dans le genre des « films dont le narrateur est un poisson », j'ai définitivement préféré ça à Maelström.
52 films by women 2020: 9/52.
So we're all aware it's been Quite The Week for South Korean cinema, and you'd better believe there'll be something about that on tonight's podcast. And since we're all inclined to fear the worst as soon as anything good happens these days, I've noticed a lot of people asking if this is going to be a fluke. Obviously the big international names - Bong, Park, Lee et al - will keep on rolling, but is there anyone coming up who has the potential to keep the fire burning?
It shouldn't be mistaken for a frivolous challenge. The directors who have brought South Korean cinema to international prominence have done so with a mixture of…
