A Bittersweet Life (isn't it, though?)

I wrote this entry on September 24, according to my records. :)

Just kidding, it’s still not actually Chuseok yet. But it is 11:55pm on Monday night, and Chuseok is tomorrow, but I’m not sure if it’s the sort of thing that starts at midnight. This weekend has been pretty surprisingly great. I’ve been productive, I haven’t murdered my host siblings, and I have a new mission, which I’ll get to in a few minutes.

I was amazingly productive on Saturday after I blogged, including studying Korean AND cleaning my room. I even vacuumed and wiped down the floor, which made me feel very accomplished. Sunday I went to Gwangju around noon to visit Tim, which is always fun. We started our adventure with Dunkin Donuts (the best way to start any adventure), and then proceeded to DVD bang, of course. Perplexingly, the movie I really wanted to see (Green Chair) wasn’t there, so we settled instead for another film I wanted to see, which was allegedly supposed to be about a hardcore gangster whose heart melts and who rethinks his life. It starred Lee Byeong Hyun, anyway, who plays the teacher in Bungee Jumping of Their Own, and who is really hot.

So, here’s my review for A Bittersweet Life, the second movie in a row that I’ve chosen that Tim has hated. I give it 4 out of 5 Bs, because despite its ludicrosity, I still enjoyed it immensely. I like LBH, and I like gangster movies, so this was a bit like a dream come true for me. Quick plot summary: LBH plays a guy who “works for a hotel,” which actually means he’s an enforcer for a shady boss character. He’s the second right hand man, I think, and the boss must trust him a lot, because in the first scene he asks LBH to spend the weekend tailing his (much) younger girlfriend to see if she’s cheating on him while the boss is in Shanghai.

The boss trusts and like LBH, he says, because LBH has never been in love. He’s a sexy bachelor who sleeps on his couch. So he meets the girlfriend, a college student, and discovers that she is, in fact, having an affair. But in a particularly ineffective scene, he watches her play the cello and simultaneously has a sort of epiphany about, I don’t know, how the love of a good woman might change his life (or something). I guess he just realizes that there’s a lot missing from his life, which consists mainly of walking around his apartment in his underwear, driving around, and beating the shit out of people fairly indiscriminately. Anyway, he bursts in on the girl and her boyfriend while they’re together and is about to kill them both (per the boss’s orders), when she starts crying, and he (surprisingly and not entirely convincingly) changes his mind and says instead that if they promise never to see each other again, he won’t tell the boss. She’s not very thankful, though—she says “You know we can’t just forget this,” and then proceeds to, I think, break up with the boss.

So, the boss figures she must have been cheating, and is angry (perhaps an understatement) with LBH for not telling him, and decides to get rid of him. And the plot just becomes more convoluted from there. Because there’s a rival group of bad guys who cause trouble in LBH’s boss’s hotel in the beginning, so LBH beats the hell out of some of their guys, which leads to the other leader guy insisting on an apology, which LBH is clearly not going to give. So for an unspecified reason, the boss turns LBH over to the other guys, who beat him up, and then takes him himself. The violence is a little ridiculous. But anyway, after being beaten senseless and buried alive, which he manages to survive, he incapacitates a guy with a cellphone battery (told you he was a badass) and escapes like, 17 gangsters. And the rest of the movie (there was a surprisingly lot more), is his revenge odyssey, because he’s really pissed at his boss, who he “served like a dog for seven years.”

Anyway, for roughly twenty minutes it takes on almost comic tone as he prepares for his great revenge, and then it introduces even more characters which I feel were probably unnecessary, including Eric, a Korean talent heartthrob. And it starts to move a little too slowly at this point, too. It was enjoyable, though, in the way that some people, like myself, find gangster revenge opuses (opi?) enjoyable, but the end, unsurprisingly, was unsatisfying. He gets his revenge, and… [SPOILER!] dies, while metaphorically asking the question “Where did it all go wrong?” Cue flashback/death hallucination to Miss Thing and her cello.

Maybe, if I were a gangster like LBH, I would be able to better sympathize with his dilemma, and be more moved by the movie, but I didn’t connect to him at all, because he had no personality and was, at least in my opinion, poorly developed as a character. He wasn’t a cold enough monster to be interesting, and his mid-movie revelation was unconvincing. But he was sexy. Then again, I could be wrong: Perhaps the message is more universal than I’d previously thought. Maybe his being stuck in the mob business and not appreciating the more important things in life is just a more dramatic version of anyone who is too wrapped up in their job to get a girlfriend.

But more likely, I’m giving it more credit than it deserves. Okay, it’s now 12:15, which means it’s at least officially Chuseok day, so I guess I should get some sleep. I have absolutely no idea what me and the family are going to do tomorrow (although I assume something, as other family members [aunt and nephew] have already arrived), so whatever it is, I’ll surely want to be well-rested. And Meghan comes back tomorrow! yay!

Now, I’m really going to bed. Take care!