Ha Ji-won

You know you've been watching too many DVDs when…

Let's say, when you pop one into the player and fail to realize for at least ten minutes that you've already seen this one and didn't much like it the first time. Not too long ago my head spun because this happened to me three times in a single week.

One of the déjà vu discs was Appleseed, the 2004 mixed-media anime adaptation (part digital, part analog) of Masamune Shirow's classic mecha manga series. This case was especially startling because I'd not only seen the picture, but reviewed it, scathingly, for the LAWeekly. (The review has apparently been purged from the Weekly site, but you can get the gist of it here. I still say it's a basic conceptual failing of this version that the supposedly warm-blooded human characters look even more glossy and synthetic than their Bioroid cyborg partners.)

DUELIST
I was even more nonplussed when this happened again only a few days later, with Duelist (2005), a visually overwrought period action/comedy/melodrama by Lee Myung-sae, whose slightly less garish contemporary cop drama Nowhere To Hide (2000) was one of the first examples of New Korean Cinema to get released and make a splash in the United States. (Costar Park Joong-hoon promptly landed a guest thug role in Jonathan Demme's misbegotten Charade remake The Truth About Charlie (2002) — and was shipped straight back to Korea.) It was unnerving to realize that I had attempted to watch Duelist at least a year earlier and blotted it from my memory. In fact, the first time I barely made it past the flashy opening sequence, in which a group of Choson Dynasty police constables, led by South Korea's revered veteran character actor Ahn Sung-ki, attempt to nab in the act a group of anti-imperial revolutionaries who are funding their subversion by distributing counterfeit money. The sequence was so distractingly embellished with slow-mo shots, fast-cuts, and fish-eye close-ups of wall-eyed extras that you barely register what's supposed to be going on. The scene seems to have no other function than to serve as a vehicle for director Lee's A.D.D. inventiveness, a carrier for all that "style." When a later episode that could have been a tense swordplay encounter in a narrow dark alley was sabotaged by the one stylized cinematic device that I would venture to suggest is never justified, cartoon-ish pixilated fast-mo, I was outta there. If I had purchased the damn thing instead of renting it, I would have chucked it across the room.

Of course, we movie freaks bring these spasms of disorientation upon ourselves. We remain gluttons, even though we tell ourselves that it is impossible to see everything and that the more we see the more it all gets smudged together. We have to find a way to impose some kind of order on the experience, to explore with a sense of purpose. I got a good deal more out of Duelist the second time around, for example, because in the meantime I had fallen in love (in a purely platonic, movie critic's sort of way) with its leading lady, the radiant tomboy Ha Ji-won.