The Resurrection

What kind of movie is this? Ummm.. well it's... weird. It's VERY weird actually... It's like someone wanted to make mixture of Fallen Angels, Nowhere to Hide, Avalon, Matrix, Unreal Tournament, Rainbow Six and... Little Matchgirl!

I have to say that I liked this movie. It was beautiful, strange and full of humor and spectacular action. The actors were good and the effects were mostly brilliant.

I'm not going to tell you anything about the plot, because... it's so strange, twisted and complicated and you don't really need to know it before you see the movie.

I think that the weirdest thing in this movie is that they used NYLON BEAT'S song in the movie! It was quite surrealistic to watch a South-Korean movie and listen to a FINNISH popmusic! I have to say that I HATE Nylon Beat, but somewhy their music worked in this movie... and actually all music in this movie was quite good.

I would recommend this movie to anyone who likes to watch original an different movies..... this definitely is a DIFFERENT movie...

As I was watching "Sungnyangpali sonyeoui jaerim" I felt that it had a lot of promise as a creative, over-the-top, self-conscious thrill ride with underlying social commentary on Korean popular culture. But I thought it fizzled off to a flat, unnatural conclusion that made the movie seem like it was reaching in vain for something higher. And in reaching, it lost within itself any potential for critical self-awareness.

The film is a pretty fair summary of late 90s, early 2000s Korean popular culture. The real-life pop-star playing a pop-star is comparable to having Justin Timberlake cameo as a teenie-bopper idol; and the other real-life pop-star who plays the champion pro-gamer is like having LL Cool J star in a dramatic role (with special emphasis on the word "dramatic"). Although I must admit that Kim Jin-pyo gave a pretty convincing and successfully comic performance. And, I guess it's only fitting that a country as wired as Korea and a popular culture that drives an arcade owner to his death by a combination of starvation and sleep deprivation brought on by a fortnight Starcraft marathon could produce such a feverishly obsessive movie that could just as well have been an elaborate role-playing computer game.

In any case, I still enjoyed the film for creatively blurring fantasy and reality. I think the movie opens up an interesting exploration into the eventual merging of cinema, video games, and music video into a true single-serving multimedia experience. Indeed, without the over-arching Halo/Doom/Area51 aura, I think the excessive violence and action sequencing would not have been able to escape being accused of being hackneyed and overtly borrowed, let alone be stomached. Kill Bill it is not, but I liked it and laughed quite heartily at the expense of my peers back in the motherland.

the film purports to "parody" THE MATRIX, but instead how can you "parody" a movie if you spend just as much on the exact same special effects and pretty much re-did whole scenes and scenarios from the movie you're supposedly "making fun off?" if only the filmmakers/producers had taken the time to write a decent, original script and then shoot the movie as a straight drama instead of trying to "wink" at us, MATCH GIRL would have had the makings of a terrific sci-fi actioner. instead, it's just lame, not terribly bright (even though it tries very hard to be so), and its attempts at cleverness and breaking the 4th wall is rather understated and weak.

so, to all of you "hip" filmmakers out there, the lesson is this: if you got the budget for it, don't waste your money copying other movies and calling it a "parody". just make your own movie.

Just like Tampopo made fun of so many genres the Resurrection of The Little Match Girl is the modern incarnation. Video games, Matrix themes, wacky characters abound in a dimension hopping adventure that comes from everywhere. HK action and Wire Fu with Matrix graphics and Music Video FX make for a very busy film that goes all over the place and doesn't let up. I can see why it might have tanked in Korea because the story is really over the top and the characters aren't developed as much as the FX and Gun fighting craziness.

I didn't know what to expect so I couldn't stop watching because it was unpredictable and all over the place. Being a fan of over the top violence and unusual narratives I came away thinking this was ambitious and gets and A+ for effort. Forgot the story but did get swept away by the goofy fun and visuals.

In my experiences Korean films tend to be just as strange and baffling as their pop music is. And this film is certainly the crowning achievement of that. Loosely adapting the Hans Christian Andersen children's tale The Little Match Girl, it tells about Ju (Hyun-sung Kim), a Chinese restaurant delivery guy, who dreams about becoming a pro-gamer like his friend Lee (Jin-pyo Kim). But, we often dreams about things we really shouldn't, as Ju finds out when he shows kindness to a lonely beggar girl selling lighters and gets pulled into a strange video game where the goal is to act out the events of the original tale… while also dodging other players who all want to kill you.

It's weird, it's nonsensical, it's utterly bizarre. And like it almost always is with these types of films, either you love or you hate it. Personally I love it, to an extent. I still require a semblance of order when it comes to storytelling and the flow of the plot, and this particular movie is barely acceptable in that regard. Especially the start of the second act is very hard to follow, style over substance more than anything else, and it takes you a while to get back on track.

The characters are also not very captivating. They're mostly in the story to pull off stunts and highly choreographed fight scenes, and while all of them are gimmicky, that is to say you can easily tell them apart from one another, they're not people in the real sense of the word. They're cardboard characters. Ju has probably the most character out of all of them, but even he doesn't really evolve all that much throughout the film. Mostly he's there to act as the audience surrogate.

But, if you're going to watch this film, you're going to watch it for the visuals, the craziness. And for that it's a very good film. It's always moving, always doing something. Sure, the special effects are not as great as they could have been, had they had an A-list budget, but they're good enough to support the story and only really start to show their cheapness during the final climax when the crazy visuals ramp up.

And that's the movie in a nutshell. It's more style than anything, but the style itself is very pleasing, and you certainly won't be bored. Is it for anyone? Absolutely not. But if I have aroused your curiosity, then I definitely recommend giving it a chance.