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- Disclosure Day (2026) ☆☆☆1/2(3.5/4): Familiar but masterful nonetheless
- Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man! (2026) ☆☆☆1/2(3.5/4): His life and career full of ups and downs
- Pee-Wee as Himself (2025) ☆☆☆1/2(3.5/4): Reubens behind Pee-Wee
- Afternoons of Solitude (2024) ☆☆☆1/2(3.5/4): The clinical but disturbing presentation of bullfighting
- Masters of the Universe (2026) ☆☆1/2(2.5/4): Mildly goofy and serious
- Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026) ☆☆(2/4): A mediocre special episode
- Pilgrims (2025) ☆☆1/2(2.5/4): Why do they never return?
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Category Archives: Movies
The President’s Analyst (1967) ☆☆☆1/2(3.5/4) : The loneliest (and the most paranoidal) analyst in the world
While it is one or two steps behind “Dr. Strangelove”, “The President’s Analyst”(1967) is a very good black comedy sniggering at Cold War paranoid. Maybe it is not as ruthless as that great comedy, but the movie romps cheerfully on its subjects with a take-no-prisoner attitude. And during this loony joy ride, we eventually discover that the movie foretold something very accurate more than 40 years ago.
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Posted in Movies
Tagged Analyst, Comedy, Communication technology, Conspiracy, Paranoid, President, Psychology, Spy
6 Comments
My first movie review in English
This is my first movie review written on 08/12/07. I found several errors, but I decided to keep them intact. By the way, the movie was one of the worst Korean movies of the last decade. I initally gave the movie one and half stars out of some pity, but I want to give it BOMB now. The movie was far worse than “The Last Airbender”. Continue reading
Educating Rita (1983) ☆☆1/2(2.5/4) : When the movie doesn’t believe in characters
The main problem of Lewis Gilbert’s “Educating Rita”(1983) is it does not believe in its two characters much. If the movie just had concentrated on the dynamics between these interesting people, the result could have been a lot, or a little at least, better than what we get now. However, it pads their story with useless elements, and that is the major mistake of this movie. Whenever it does not have two good characters created by two fabulous performers on the screen, the movie loses its power in most cases, and, alas, that happens quite frequently throughout the story. While enjoying good parts of it, I lost my interest minute by minute. Continue reading
Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988) ☆☆1/2(2.5/4) : So, where is The Man behind the Car?
Francis Ford Coppola’s ambitious movie “Tucker: The Man and His Dream”(1988) curiously reminds me of nice-and-clean biography sets for elementary school students I used to read during my childhood years. In those books, there were always good-looking pictures depicting what great men and women did in their lifetime whenever I turned each page, and, of course, they were accompanied by the story written for them. From these books, I learned how great their achievements were, but I do not think I learned anything substantial about them as the human beings from the story. Of course, those books were well-intentioned for me and other kids, and I liked them. The problem is, they were hollow, and they did not leave me any big impression except those nice pictures.
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The Kids Are All Right (2010) ☆☆☆1/2(3.5/4) : Everybody all right?
“The Kids Are All Right” is quite conventional inside in contrast to what it seems on the surface. We see a unconventional family at the beginning, but we begin to see the dynamics within this family is not so different from the one within conventional families. The family has problems familiar to us, the drama of conflicts and hurts is unfolded in a way we expected, and, in the end, everyone is almost all right as we have seen in many family dramas. However, the movie is more than that. It is not just conventionally unconventional; it is also emotionally honest story with lots of heart.
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Breathless (2009) ☆☆☆1/2(3.5/4) : Abuse is thicker than water
Sang-hoon is a terrifying piece of work. He is someone you never want to mess up with. He is callous, narrow-minded, vulgar and, above all, very volatile. Whenever his hair-trigger fury erupts, there is more than hell to pay – and that happens often. Even when his temper relatively abates, he is still difficult and hostile to communicate with, probably even with himself. In the opening sequence, we see a young woman being beaten by some guy in the night streets. Sang-hoon appears and he savagely beats that guy. And then, he spits at her, smacks her, and insults her.
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I Saw the Devil (2010) ☆☆☆ (3/4) : It has everything – including a toilet stool
“I Saw the Devil” provides almost everything to shock you and repel you – and I admired it at some degree. The movie acquired its notoriety even before its release in South Korea due to the conflict with Korean Media Rating Board(About 1.5 minutes was cut from the original version in the end). It has been striking our Korean audience with a little mercy since this Thursday while inducing discussions among them about the violence in the movies. I guarantee you, the movie will be the most controversial South Korean movie of this year.
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Toy Story 3 (2010) ☆☆☆ (3/4) : A dreaded moment has finally come for them
“Toy Story 3” has nostalgic quality to me. Come to think of it, I virtually grew up with these two wonderful animations. When I was about to become a teenager, “Toy Story”(1995) was released and I was fascinated by the new kind of animation as a young moviegoer(Ah, I love those days when I could watch the movie as many times as I wanted). When I was about to go to the university, “Toy Story 2” (1999) arrived in a local theater in my town and I was delighted to meet these loveable characters I came to like.
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Inception (2010) ☆☆☆1/2(3.5/4) : Descent into the labyrinth of dreams
Surprisingly to me, “Inception” is a small movie when viewed objectively from the outside. The story is not ground-breaking; it’s in a very familiar area where “Matrix” and other movies about the mind-bending world belong. The movie stays inside its settings and rules, and sticks to them even at the finale. Continue reading
Moss (2010) ☆☆(2/4) : A rural mystery – more than 2.5hr
After so much hoopla before its release, “Moss”, a much-anticipated Korean thriller of 2010, turns out to be very, very disappointing in almost every way you can imagine due to the fatally misguided direction. It is lazy, incompetent, and, above all, not compelling at all. Despite some good basic elements of a thriller in the screenplay, it is more close to the ennui of the bright summer days in a country town, and, boy, the running time is more than 2.5 hours even if you exclude the end credit. Continue reading
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