FilmBuffAdam

I've been a fan of Sang-soo for some years yet his frustrating insistence to continually repeat himself is now annoying me.

Sure you can guarantee failed romance and time wasted drunk in korean bars in Sang-soo films and I'm fine with that in theory.

The problem I have is that everything else once you've seen a few just seems so repetitive as well...

Ie the kinds of creative characters he chooses to portray, the form of the films, the dynamics between characters, the voice over narration, I could go on and on.

In totality, they are just far far too repetitive for me. I was absolutely fine with all this until this film. For me this film was like the product of a once great now semi-senile 90 year old director just repeating himself after a golden age of great films decades before.

He really is starting to make the decrepit Woody Allen look original!

I'll probably watch the next Sang-soo film that comes out as well but with a lot more caution not expecting much.

I found some of this footage fantastic, yet the overall result with the pretty constant drone of the Kronos Quartet (I normally like their work) just somewhat uninspired and hard going.

I felt that a lot of the footage would probably have worked a lot better if deconstructed a lot more and broken up into a much faster paced collage of ever mutating sequences.

As stills many moments of the footage was absolutely beautiful and at points due to its bad condition and smearing effect looked like a painterly work by Stan Brakhage.

Aside from what I understand to be the natural state of the nitrate footage there was no other beauty to be found in the resulting film.

Whilst the duration and some underlying themes of each of the 15 chapters to this film may vary, the overall feeling I got from them was not difference but their likeness.

Many of the pieces were shot in the same locations and nearly all the film seemed to have been filmed during the colder winter months of the year, resulting in the same very drab and oppressive look to most of the chapters. That may have been the idea but this combined with the lack of variety in the content left me very uninspired. Alone the amount of in taxi/airplane footage could have been cut by about 90%.

I've been to many of the places visited by the director and enjoyed the shared interests in places and details yet was constantly left left wanting better shots... more interesting attention to details and also of interesting eccentric locals (like the old lady ripping the credit advertisements off the advertising board).

A lot of it felt like filler and the shots of the bands and the directors friends in particular I felt added nothing. I could imagine the film being much more interesting as a travel journal short at half the length.