Results tagged “chanwookpark”

       

Despite facing a brutal marketing challenge, Funny People managed to top the box office this weekend. Though it was the lowest-performing champ of the summer, the Judd Apatow-helmed laugher brought in $23.4M to hold off a resilient Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince ($17.7M | $255.4M). The awful G-Force was a hair behind ($17M | $66.4M), followed by the awful The Ugly Truth ($13M | $54.4M) and the, uh, awful Aliens in the Attic ($7.8M). Orphan ($7.2M | $26.7M), Ice Age 3 ($5.3M | $181.8M), The Hangover ($5M | $255.7M), The Proposal ($4.8M | $148.8M) and Transformers 2 ($4.6M | $388.1M) rounded out the top 10.

                     

If you're planning to see one movie this weekend, you should re-jigger your schedule and see four! Funny People would be an excellent place to start. It's Rogen, Apatow and Sandler's best film to date (LAist review here). Sure, it's not a straight comedy, but it is damn funny. You'll leave the film in a good mood, but that will quickly turn into righteous anger once you've seen The Cove. The best movie at the Sundance Film Festival this year (LAist reviews here and here), it's a thrilling and sad documentary about the annual dolphin slaughter in Taiji, Japan. I mean seriously, how many eco-documentaries have scenes inside ILM? The Cove is that cool. More to the point, it almost feels like a narrative film with all the intrigue and plot that go into capturing the wrenching footage of dolphins being mercilessly pitchforked in the water by giggling fisherman. See it!

       

Chan-wook Park cemented an already burgeoning reputation among passionate cinephiles with his 2003 film Oldboy. While his latest effort, Thirst, doesn't rise nearly to that level, it is an alternately fascinating, rigorous and maddening piece of cinema. Loosely based on Emile Zola's novel Thérèse Raquin, the film follows Sang-hyeon, a Catholic priest who is accidentally transformed into a sort of vampire by a failed medical experiment (note: Zola's novel does not have Christian vampires). Sang-hyeon is naturally conflicted by his brutal new nature and tries to find ways in which he can live as a vampire while preserving his humanity.