Plantiana Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Jeanskynebu the audience applauded

Darin One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

Staci Frederick Blistering performances.

zetes Hong Sang-Soo reminds me a lot of Eric Rohmer, which seems to be a comparison many have made before. But I would definitely rank him quite below Rohmer. I've seen four films by Hong now. I liked the first one I saw, Woman Is the Future of Man, a lot, but the other two, besides the one about which I'm currently writing, I only barely recall. Woman on the Beach seems far too similar to Woman Is the Future of Man for me to like it a lot. I didn't hate it, by any means, though I did eventually grow tired of it. I liked the initial conflict, where a man brings along a woman whom he thinks of as his girlfriend on a trip with a film director friend of his. The director is kind of a jerk, and the girl is immediately attracted to him – either that, or she is so bothered by the meek guy that she just wants to spurn him. Later on, she discovers that the director's jerkiness is a pretty clear character trait. Well, duh. Much as I remember from Woman Is the Future of Man, Hong's major insight seems to be that men (particularly film directors) are jerks, and that women like jerks, but also think they can change them. It's a pretty trite observation, really, and, in the end, kind of hateful toward both sexes. It doesn't help that the woman becomes a completely jealous shrew. If I'm remembering correctly, I liked the woman of Woman Is the Future of Man much better. She seemed, in the end, better and stronger than the men in her life.

lastliberal Sometimes a Korean film really grabs me, like Il Mare, which was remade into The Lake House. It was a beautifully romantic film; just what this wasn't.The dialog throughout was superficial and boring. It never really rose above the level you would expect in a bar or nightclub.Superficial is a good term to describe Director Kim Jung-rae (Seung-woo Kim). he was really self-conscious and a bit misogynist. He was only interesting in bedding whomever he could; not in anything resembling a relationship.After he had Kim Mun-Suk (Hyun-jung Go) he was ready to move on and get rid of her. He immediately started looking for someone that looked like her (Seon-mi Song) to bed.It was a big disappointment, and, for a comedy, it wasn't even funny.

kyanberu It has been said that in America sex is an obsession, while in Europe it is a fact. If the characters in Sang-Soo Hong's Woman on the Beach are representative, it is also an obsession in Korea.In the film, the male lead, film director Jung-Rae Kim, has affairs with two women, Moon-Sook and Sun-Hee, during a spring weekend at a seafront resort. Late in the film, when the two women meet for lunch, they ask each other about their deepest fears. One says it is obsession; for the other it is betrayal. These two themes, embedded within the overriding question of whether life is truly better in the new affluent Korea, dominate the 2 hours and 7 minute version of the movie that was shown at the Philadelphia Film Festival.According to IMDb the American version is only 1 hour and 40 minutes, and indeed, for American tastes, much could have been shortened. For example, the scene in which one of Moon-Sook sees Director Kim with the other woman, Sun-Hee, through the resort's picture window that overlooks the sea. She gets into her car parked beneath the window, starts the engine, and for an interminable minute, we watch the car sitting there with the engine running. Finally she turns off the engine and walks away. Powerful stuff? Well, not for this American moviegoer.Indeed Director Hong beats the viewer over the head with symbolism to make sure no one misses his points. A white dog abandoned by the side of the road represents the betrayal that all the key players show toward one another. A bicyclist left choking on the dust of a passing car is just one reminder that the new Korea is not always better than the old. But when it comes to showing obsessions, Hong outdoes himself. In one scene, Director Kim draws a triangle on a napkin to graphically display the three images of his former wife's affair with a friend that obsess him. Only now he has something new to obsess over, for Moon-Sook admits she had two or three sexual encounters with foreigners when she lived in Germany. Were their dicks bigger than mine, he wonders. New dots on the napkin to obsess over! Ah, he must have new affairs to create new images in his mind so that he can replace the old triangles of obsession with new dots that create a more hopeful shape. Why doesn't he just see a therapist, we ask.Hong is a talented director and the film gives Western audiences a feel for Korean obsessions and angsts. For that it's worth seeing, but after sitting through 127 minutes of beachfront betrayal and recriminations by people who are not really that likable—kind of the Korean equivalent of the self-obsessed New Yorkers in Squid and the Whale, I'm not quite ready to see Hong's earlier works, such as The Day a Pig Fell into the Well.

liehtzu Pusan Film Festival Reviews 10: The Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo)Leave it to Hong Sang-soo to blow everyone else out of the water. After a frustrating beginning to my last day at the fest, I capped the whole thing off with a masterpiece. It's a long haul for me to get to Busan from where I live, and the first movie, the awful "Hamaca Paraguaya" - which I'd raced across town to see - was easily the worst movie I saw in all four days. Why isn't Hong Sang-soo more popular in Korea? The house was packed, the film got a lot of laughs, and I didn't see anyone walk out, but I thought I sensed a few awkward silences. Hong hits some painful bullseyes. More than most countries, Korea is a huge movie-date place, and why would a fellow take his sweetheart to a movie that paints such a wince-inducing picture of the local men? The filmmaker punches holes in the male ego, and though his little stabs apply to all men across the board, they're also very specifically aimed at Korean men. If only every country had such a razor-sharp dissector of the inadequacies of the male half - I shudder to think. His genius is that his male failures are usually artists of some kind (in the new one, for the third time in a row, a film director - a self-depreciating touch) whereas, say, Bruno Dumont's male losers are inbred country thug types who don't surprise much when they choose to act uncivil. Hong completely demolishes the notion of the sensitive, intelligent, elevated artist type. In the end, like everyone else, they're out to get laid. Hong's women rarely emerge unscathed, either, but they're usually smarter and more grounded than the men. Their fatal flaw is their passivity. Hong gets criticism for this by feminists, but in Korea the kind of scenarios he presents on film - brutish fella, weak-willed gal - is a common occurrence. The women in the director's films know the men they shack up with are clowns, but for some reason - is it that they don't expect anything more? or that they're attached to the idea of the sensitive, intelligent, elevated artist type so strongly that they succumb to it despite being confronted with the brutal truth? - they almost always end up folding. "Beach" is Hong's finest illustration of the second possibility - that the idea holds power, though the truth inevitably disappoints. The woman of the title, Moon-sook, mentions a few times in the film how much she admires Joong-rae as a film director, with the unspoken indicator that he doesn't measure up as a man. Unlike most of Hong's women, though, Moon-sook has the strength to disentangle herself from a relationship that's bound to go nowhere (Hong's women generally prefer to wallow in their martyr complex). Joong-rae, the film director, is stunned when during a late-night soju session Moon-suk says she "seriously dated" two or three men while living for a few years in Germany. He continues to be fixated on this idea throughout the film, bursting out in front of Moon-sook once or twice, "I can't believe you slept with foreigners!" Hong's men are stuck in an adolescent state, and though they may be able to pull a fair approximation of adult behavior while sober, soju brings it all crashing down. "Woman on the Beach" has been called Hong's most "accessible" film, and that's probably true. Though it contains a couple of his priceless soju-drunk scenes, it's his first without at least one painfully awkward sexual encounter. A concession to mainstream tastes? Or did Hong (unlike Tsai Ming-liang and Bruno Dumont this year) feel that it had just been overdone, that he simply had nothing to add to his gallery of such scenes? The lead actress, Go Hyeon-geong, supposedly voiced some trepidation when signing for the film at the thought of taking her clothes off - it's almost a requirement in a Hong film. Did he simply decide to respect her wishes? Hong's painful bedroom scenes are always memorable, but this film loses nothing from their exclusion. More accessible it may be, but it's not a sell-out. The invention, the accumulation of brilliant little details, and the cutting portraits of people in their folly is still there - and I haven't even mentioned the second woman yet, or I'd go on all day - and Hong Sang-soo is still one of the sharpest, and very best, filmmakers working today.