hard for me to get around the sense of this being decidedly minor Hong (probably his slightest since In Another Country), but then the ending comes through and makes everything he's been doing throughout the film both clearer and less specific, in a word: bigger. and the more I think about that ending the more I like the film as a whole — it is really such a sublime ending.

also, it knows it is a modest film. and still…

suspect I might like this even more on revisit, but couple things that stood out.

one thing that I've not seen commented on about Hong's films, while some have noted that the dialogue is largely concerned with minutiae, it is conducted in generalities, and characters make constant reference to the abstract. it is such a simple trick to refine this natural way of speaking (that people all over the world do) into a kind of narrative simplicity, and it is…

of fools and happiness indices. with the arrival of arch villain with a bullet-in-the-head Wallace Chung, the plot burns like a lit fuse. three opposing egos each bent on playing god compete amid a steady accumulation of plot details that ought to surely add up to something. a moral parable set to a ringtone whistled tune whose blitheness suggests a vast emptiness, Mozart skeletonized, though it might just as easily have been Grieg. it's either horrifying or it's black, black…