Country: Korea
Genre: Horror/Drama/Suspense
Director: Yoon-Hyun Chang
Year: 1999
Rating: 
NOT WORTH YOUR TIME
Somebody is leaving Hefty bags full of mix and match dismembered corpses around Seoul for passerby to find. So begins Tell Me Something, a would-be horror mystery.
Detective Cho (Suk-kyu Han), a disgraced cop who looked the other way at a criminal enterprise in return for having his mother’s hospital bills paid, has a shot at redemption if he can solve the mystery. His only clue: Chae Su-Yeon (Eun-ha Shim), a quiet young woman who knew all the victims.
All the virtues of modern Korean cinema are here in embryonic form: the careful camera movements, the deliberate pacing, the subtle acting, the brutal world view. But in Tell Me Something, nothing much happens for the first hour of the movie, other than some gory scenes involving the discovery of the contents of the garbage bags. The acting by the lead actors, Suk-kyu Han, Eun-ha Shim, and Jung-ah Yum, instead of merely being subtle, is maddeningly opaque. Modern Korean actors have become masters at communicating volumes through extremely subtle facial movements and body language, but in 1999, the craft wasn’t there, with the exception of the work of the great character actor, Hang-Seon Jang. The visual compositions don’t have the flair of later Korean work. The nighttime cinematography lacks the luscious quality of recent Korean cinema. Now, it’s possible to have ugly beauty, to make beauty out of ugliness, but the nighttime cinematography in Tell Me Something is just plain ugly.
But what really kills Tell Me Something is the screenplay by writer/director Yoon-Hyun Chang. His attempts at misleading the audience are transparent. Instead of feeling pleasurably manipulated and surprised, we feel jerked around.
The only way Tell Me Something succeeds at all is as a gory freak show. A scene in which a plastic bag of body parts is placed on a busy freeway is wonderfully gratuitous. Another scene in an elevator is quite amusing. The final image would have the potential to be genuinely upsetting, if we cared at all about the characters. What little violence occurs in Tell Me Something has a gratifyingly nasty edge.
But it’s all for naught. In the end, Tell Me Something will mostly appeal to hardcore gore hounds and to scholars of Korean cinema, who will be fascinated this artifact of Korean cinema at an earlier stage of evolution.
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Comments
This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 at 2:57 pm and is filed under Drama, Horror, Korea, Movie Reviews, Not Worth Your Time, Suspense. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
The acting craft is certainly there, just not a style that travels well in subtitled form. There are cultural, verbal cues, the way people of different sexes, ages and social status (by job function, etc.) interact with each other. “maddeningly opaque” is intentional because this is a combo of Seven-style explicit gore and the subtle attraction-repulsion themes of older noirs doubling as star vehicles (which is what Tell Me Something is - the stars were set up by enormously popular “Christmas in August”, an Ozu-esque lyrical melodrama.)
What you call “embryonic form” is partially true of late-90s Korean commercial films (since artsy, political/social statement movies could be more flag-waving obvious or hammy if they wanted), but it’s also a different emphasis in style: post-2000s Korean films STILL had actors or some titles that use this subtle approach that seems “opaque” to people who rely on subtitles or want immediate, visceral “gut” reactions to intense emotions. All the same, there HAS been a rise in more physical, visceral (or corporal) acting style in post-2000s, & combined with genre movies that travel easily abroad under “asian extreme” label or taste preference, they’re seen as “more advanced” evolution in Korean cinema, when in fact it’s just a different style.
P.S. as for the “embryonic” vs. “modern” comparison, I’d say a comparison is only fair between the 90s performances of those “modern” Korean actors you prefer, and those in Tell Me Something.
Or alternatively, find the post-2000s performance of the the Tell Me Something cast, and compare them to the “modern” actors & see if it isn’t more an issue of different approach/style in acting. So much had changed in Korean film industry in a few short years - it was in fact Shiri’s phenomenal success, that investment flooded into the business enabling more genres, risks, job opportunities to open up - as well as broadening of the domestic audience base. Way too many things changed, including demographics of audience (increasingly younger, etc.), the socio-economic outlooks of said audience after ’90s Asian Financial Crisis (which in part explains the move toward dominance of more visceral, “emotional purging, physical suffering” acting style that champions WORKING class;
which means Tell Me Something was made at a time when a polished, “well made commercial film” was still quite unprecedented, due to disrupted funding & apprenticeship in the Korean film system, and as such the Star System they were attempting especially with regards to the small townie personae in “Christmas In August” being SUBVERTED by “Tell Me Something”, was very deliberate.)
In other words, you were spot-on about TMS being of interest to “scholars of Korean cinema”, but with the context and details in place, you might be able to see it as far more than just “embryonic”.
I mean if this is were crude or rudimentary (rather than just patterns of change/difference in acting style, especially vis-a-vis “foreign eyes” that rely more on behavioral cues than cultural/linguistic), what will you make of Korean films made during 1930s~early 1990s?
You might have a point. I am much more familiar with recent Korean movies than I am with films from the 80s and 90s, much less Korean movies from earlier decades. Also, I greatly admire recent Korean cinema, so I definitely have a prejudice.
It may be that in criticizing the acting in Tell Me Something, I didn’t pick up on “cultural/linguistic” cues that a person more familiar with Korean culture might have.
In my defense, note that I had no trouble following the acting of Hang-Seon Jang, an older Korean actor whose acting style has not changed much between Tell Me Something and The King and the Clown. I also have no trouble following the acting of anyone in Kim Ki Duk’s films, as far back as The Isle. I also gave a favorable review of The Quiet Family, which I didn’t find the slightest bit inscrutable, and which predates Shiri by one year. I have several Korean movies that I plan to see from earlier times, including the Kim Ki Duk-penned Birdcage Inn and Wild Animals. Perhaps in time I will develop an appreciation for this earlier acting style you write about.
If there are any specific films you think I should see in order to broaden my perspective, please let me know.
Thanks for writing. It’s always a pleasure to read informed and thoughtful comments such as yours.