Thanksgiving Doublog! 家有儿女 (Home With the Children) and 부l힌지옼 Possessed

This Thanksgiving, I have two films to recommend watching with friends and family: Korean horror movie by Yong-ju Lee, Possessed, and a warm and cute Chinese sitcom show Home with the Children.

 

Possessed is a psychologically thrilling Korean horror movie that friends would love watching together. Possessed ranked 6th place at the South Korean box office for its opening weekend of August 14–16, 2009. It is about a college student who returns home when her 14-year-old sister So Jin (Shim Eun Kyung) goes missing. Her mother is a fanatic evangelist and resorts to prayer and refuses to work with the lazy police. Meanwhile Hee Jin hears rumors that her sister had been possessed. The whereabouts of So Jin become increasingly elusive and dead people begin appearing in Hee Jin's distorted dreams.

The sypnosis is not that creepy, but trust me, the film is more than creepy. 

I thought Possessed was great at capturing the small, creepy details and building suspense. The actors are great, especially the actress for the slightly crazy mother. I love how Possessed captures so much terror in one look from a possessed person, or a single shadow in the distance. There were a few scenes where I thought nothing was going to happen and something – an eye, a body, or a sound catches me by surprise. Some parts didn’t scare me at all though – when the director clearly meant for the scene to be scary.

So, on my Doublog scale (1 is that it is the best movie to watch; 10 is to not ever watch this for the holiday) I rate it as a 3.

Next up; Home with the Children is a nice sitcom to enjoy with the family over a crackling fire. It is about a family with three children (two from the father's previous marriage, one from the mother's previous marriage). It is a chaotic mess of a family and yet they manage to solve every problem with zing!

The funny moments in Home with the Children are unbelievable, and inspired me to think that if I look at life in a different way, anything is laughable. The sitcom has accompanied me through my childhood and actually is a useful tool for stress relieve. The innocence in Home with the Children transports many back to their own beautifully innocent times. I rate this a perfect 1. Must see, especially for my Chinese followers!! BTW, you can watch episodes on Youtube.

There you go! :D See you Saturday for a Japanese anime movie!     

신데렐라 "Cinderella": Ah, I'm Scared?

For Halloween weekend, I watched Cinderella, a 2006 Korean horror movie by Bon Man-dae. With the assurance from friends that all Korean horror films were super scary, I expected a traumatizing movie.
 This is the general plot of the story extracted from Wikipedia (SPOILER ALERT):

"The title "Cinderella" is directed towards the orphaned girl, the black haired ghost in the story. She can be dubbed Cinderella because she was illegally adopted after the original Hyeon-su suffered near-fatal burns and disfigurement from being in a car explosion. The orphan loved her "mother" very much but after the original Hyeon-su began to recover, their mother did an operation to have the orphaned girl's face cut off and attached to the real daughter. The real Hyeon-su, having no memory of the incident was spoiled by her mother while the faceless orphaned girl was kept in the cellar. The original daughter, was forbidden to go.
Making connections back to the original Cinderella story, Cinderella was also treated badly by a step mother and was locked away in her room while her two step sisters obtained all of the fortunes.
The adopted daughter was never given any birthday parties, was never allowed to go to school, and was left inside the basement writing in her diary, hoping that one day her "mother" will make her a new face, as she promised but never did. As she grew older, she felt more betrayed after watching Hyeon-su, the real girl, grow up and become beautiful with her face and having birthday parties with her beautiful friends and thus ended up committing suicide in the basement, writing about how much she hates Hyeon-su and her friends and she wishes she could kill them all. Unfortunately, the mother finally decided to throw the orphaned girl a party and brought her a cake, only to discover that she had hung herself. Feeling it be Hyeon-su's fault, she begins haunting her friends until they go crazy with thoughts of being ugly. With those thoughts, they commit suicide by cutting up their own faces, or inflicting facial disfigurement on each other. Also, it must be noted that the orphaned girl truly loved her mother and wanted nothing more than to be with her forever. The real Hyeon-su, even before the accident, never fully appreciated her mother and was extremely spoiled. In the end, Hyeon-su's mother agrees to go onto the afterlife with the adopted girl to save her real daughter and bring peace to the orphaned girl's torturous life."

Well, the synopsis seems scary, but the movie isn't. All the gory scenes aren't bloody enough to repulse, all the suspense scenes can be easily predicted, and all the actual scary scenes (ghost appearing) are total failures. There is in several parts of the movie where the 'ghost' is just a blue eye glaring at the audience -- the thing is, the blue eyes look beautiful and not creepy...so I don't get creeped out at all. I would say it is more of a mystery movie that has connecting themes of family conflicts and love and death rather than a pure horror movie.  

IMDb agrees, with viewers rating the movie an average of 5.5/10 stars.

A viewer said in his/her review:

"It's pretty dull and offers almost zero scares."Cinderella" looks slick,the acting is fine and Korean girls are jaw-droppingly beautiful,unfortunately the action moves at the snail's pace.Skip this one. "

Basically, this horror movie is for the 'light-headed' people who normally can't stand scary scenes. Believe me, it is at best a mystery movie, and more of a melodrama than anything else.
Still, worth a shot. Maybe my disappointment arised when I watched the Blair Witch Project (brrrr) the next day and compared the scare level (out of ten stars, Cinderella ranks 4 and BWP ranks 7.5).

I give this movie an 'eh' 2.8/5 stars. The 2.8 is for the amazing lead girl and the message that plastic surgery is no good! It is dangerous and pointless! You'll get attacked by a ghost if you do it. :P
Stay tuned for my next blog post on a Japanese anime movie!!!