#chan woo min

[coffeebookslovegt]

Cha Woo-min

[haveyouseenthismovie-poll]

[Note: This poll is a re-do of an older poll, as the original poll received less than 2,000 votes.]

[pudding-bitches]

the loserism is high with these mfs

[cinematicjourney]

The Handmaiden (2016) | dir. Park Chan-wook

[jasminejarss]

The Handmaiden (2016) dir. Park Chan-wook

[dramastream]

SWEET HOME | SEASON 2 ⇀ 2.01

[conscbgb]

YES 🙏

[pinkvxdka20]

2022 Korean BL Dramas (part 1)

Just wish they had more and longer episodes :)

[moonfie]

All Of Us Are Dead!

[kpoptimeout]

K-Pop Debuts and Comebacks for the Last Week of December and 2023 (Dec 25 - Dec 31 2023)

Dec 25

No releases.

Dec 26

TVXQ! - Rebel

2nd Gen Kings TVXQ! show they are still the monarchs of the genre 20 years after their debut in this powerful comeback!

Suitz - Kick ft. Velowci

Rappers Suitz and Velowci collab in this hard track!

Yoo Yong Min - Two of us

Underrated soloist and and Heart Signal OST singer Yoo Yong Min graces us with his honey vocals in this beautiful track!

Dec 27

Park Hye Kyung - Loving U

90s artist Park Hye Kyung brings back the retro pop ballad sound in this sweet song!

Dec 28

Ha Yea Song - Don't forget me

Balladist Ha Yea Song covers Baek Jiyoung's famous 2009 drama IRIS OST to end the year.

Woo Chan - Should I say it

Soloist Woo Chan softly croons this emotional track.

Dec 29

IMLAY - STARDUST ft. XIAOJUN of WayV

SM's EDM sub-label ScreaM Record's artist IMLAY drops a fun track collaborating with Xiaojun!

Dec 30

Son Tae Jin, Shin Seong and Enoch - IN MY LIFE

The three vocalists collab in this warm ballad!

Dec 31

No releases.

What is your favourite release of the last week of 2023?

[letterboxd-loggd]

Lady Vengeance (친절한 금자씨) (Chinjeolhan geumjassi) (2005) Park Chan-wook

January 20th 2024

[addictivecontradiction]

아가씨, 2016

[anemoiawithatouchofobsession]

AM I SEEING THIS RIGHT??????????????

WHAT IS LOVE/SARANGI MWOGILLAE ON MBC'S OFFICIAL DRAMA CHANNEL???

AM I WINNING?

AM I WINNING?

YES I AM!

YES I AM! MOTHERFCKERRSSSSSSSSSSSSS LETS GOOO

Can't wait to wait every week for an upload and watch it like in the olden daysssssss

WOOOOOOOOOOOO LET'S GOOOOOOOOOOO

I had watched What Is Love on a movie YT channel, unsubbed and commented, in 5 parts to 1 hour. I had watched that while staying up the night and I really really enjoyed it.

The channel has now reuploaded it in one full video of almost 6 hours... sadly all the parts and all the comments under it are gone TT. But you can at least watch it now.

It's eye-opening and funny, touching and very emotionally involving all at the same time. Just too damn addictive. It is such a simple and realistic setting you get to believe every damn thing about the characters and just forget the actors are acting. Too damn real for it to be a drama, but there's the 90s for you

[sloshed-cinema]

The Handmaiden [아가씨] (2016)

It’s kind of cute when movies have only one twist, right?  The basic outline of Park Chan-wook’s elegant and depraved adaptation of the Sarah Waters novel Fingersmith is simple enough: a poor Korean duo aim to swindle a naive Japanese heiress out of her wealth, seduce and marry her, and then ditch her in an insane asylum to enjoy the spoils.  But as the story unfolds, it is more of a fractal in its structure.  A triptych of perspectives taking in each of the co-conspirators slowly unfolds in turn, revealing the myriad ways in which we are all manipulating and manipulated.  Layers build, folds of pleasure and pain intertwining and overlapping, revealing secrets and exposing intimate truths which had always been apparent but perhaps not immediately noticed.  A simple enough ruse is revealed to be a double-game, but it’s not even so simple as that.  Betrayal begets betrayal, and between Sook-hee, Lady Hideko, and our so-called Count Fujiwara, everyone thinks that they hold an ace up their sleeve at all times.  Escape can be promised, for escape is what is needed: both Hideko and Sook-hee have had traumatic upbringings, and “Faux-jiwara” asserts he suffered greatly to become the conman that he is in the narrative.  But as structured by our Count, escape is a self-serving plot.  He claims to go through the motions to help at least one woman in this ménage à trois, but finding him lying in a bed of money reveals his true self-serving motive.  When people say what their interests are, believe them.  Rather, Hideko and Sook-hee find release in their collusion and companionship, forging a genuine partnership as they plot to break free of their oppressive influences and make a new life for themselves.  This requires great sacrifice on both of their parts, but represents the only true emotion experienced by any two characters in this film.

Pleasure and pain, as experienced by Sook-hee and Hideko, is the crystalline structure at the center of The Handmaiden.  The two are inextricably linked, by circumstance and desire alike.  These two women’s love is clouded not only by heteronormativity, but by their desires to break free.  In a certain regard, the apparent betrayal at the asylum is asexual; “Sook-hee” as an identity simply wants not to suffer, whomever that woman may be.  But this is true of the greater sexual superstructure built into this remote and twisted world.  Hideko is always greatly tired by her reading sessions for her uncle-cum-husband, though the reasons for this initially remain clouded.  As the dark secrets of this household are revealed, as the film steps past the snake guarding the gate of knowledge in this reading room, the true nature of these sessions are revealed.  This is puppetry, the usage of a woman groomed for pleasure from an early age, allows for imaginative role-play by the men attending these sessions.  No matter how aesthetic you make the reading room, no matter how performative the augmentation to the reading itself, this is the work of impotent men seeking to control and fantasize about women, manipulating them like marionettes.  Uncle Kouzuki is an entirely false man, a self-hating Korean turned Japanese national who tortures individuals for pleasure.  His tongue and lips are stained with book ink, indicating his literary sexual proclivities.  Even when torturing Fujiwara in the close, he has to rely on fictional reference points to describe sex, recounting and taking revenge for texts which he lost by the women’s sexual rediscovery on this man he’s captured.  Fujiwara, too, operates on a field of lies, viewing himself a domineer and yet wholly incompetent.  At least our two antagonists mutually self-annihilate.  I only wish I knew what Kouzuki would have done with that octopus.  Park Chan-wook, you have your kinks…

If much of the film dedicates itself to the notion of nurture (if it can be called that) triumphing over nature, at least the close offers a rebuttal.  Throughout the dramatic cycle of ruses and lies that informs much of the structure, everyone is a false actor.  Lies flow freely and everyone is bound by their previous experiences.  Everyone uses words and phrases which they’ve heard before in other contexts to garner favor or sow fear.  Sook-hee assures Hideko about her troubled birth by using things she’d heard before, and Hideko preys on Sook-hee’s smitten nature by stealing how she’s “alone in this world” to seem more vulnerable than she really is.  The initial sex scene between Hideko and Sook-hee, initially organic and erotic, becomes manipulative once we know that Hideko has read out plenty of scenes of this nature and is not, in fact, a complete naif.  And yet there is release.  In a closing scene of passion, Hideko and Sook-hee enact the “bells” erotic novel, but it’s just for their mutual pleasure.  They’re united and freed from this toxic and controlling death-spiral even as their supposed masters destroy themselves.  I can only hope that in the future, Hideko becomes a drag king, because werk, bitch.

Park Chan-wook is fucking funny.  There’s so much humor buried in this subversive narrative in the camera language and timing of the edits.  Pratfalls, people running about like dipshits, that fucking pussy-eating POV shot.  And yet he’s deeply erotic when the moment calls for it.  “Ladies are just dolls for maids,” Sook-hee muses as she unbuttons all of those buttons on Hideko’s dress.  It’s humorous, to a degree, but also sensual, especially when Hideko reciprocates the gesture.  Another layer of performance in this performative vision of sex, yet they can realize it in a constructive way.  That darkness haunts the periphery in the hangings of generations of women here.  It’s oblique at first, Sook-hee discovering the beautifully braided rope by which Hideko’s aunt allegedly hanged herself.  It remains with Hideko as a threat from her uncle.  Later, Sook-hee “hangs” her mother figure in a silhouette with her braid, and saves Hideko from suffering the same fate.  The bonds of control reclaimed by those meant to limit them.

I really need to call out the searing, lush, romantic and fraught score furnished by Jo Yeong-wook.  Fucking phenomenal.  As with the architecture of the home, the score melds flavors of English and Japanese traditions and instrumentation to create something achingly beautiful, bringing to mind the likes of James Newton Howard within the film world, or perhaps Samuel Barber within the classical canon.  The “My Tamako, My Sook-hee” cue is an all-timer, far as I’m concerned.

THE RULES

SIP

Someone opens a door.

Inner monologue begins.

Sook-hee has to come up with a lie.

A reading session begins.

BIG DRINK

A part intertitle appears onscreen.

Kozuki licks his pen.

TOO MANY BUTTONS

Octopus imagery.

[watchingmoviesandshit]

The Handmaiden (2016)