Dear friend,

this is a short post because I only managed to see two films.
To expand it, I had written a long-ish detour about the latest drama in the ‘good guys’ social network, but I ultimately decided it doesn’t belong here. I may or may not publish it as a separate post.

It made me remember that I never point out how the opinions on these pages are mine only and don’t necessarily reflect those of my employer. Now I wonder what my employer thinks of Rami Malek…

4인용 식탁 / The Uninvited, written and directed by Lee Soo-youn, South Korea, 2003 - ⭐⭐⭐½

Reading that The Uninvited was both the title of the American remake of A Tale of Two Sisters and the English title of a different Korean film made my neural circuits collapse and led me to believe this one was also directed by Kim Jee-Woon.

Which is not the case. Perhaps the English-language distributors were worried that the more faithful A Table for Four would sound like a romantic comedy.

Instead, this is definitely a horror drama, dealing with the encounter between a man (Park Shin-Yang) who has just started to ‘see dead people’ and a woman (Gianna Jun) who has been ostracised all her life because of a similar, more powerful, ‘gift’. She tries anyway to use her ability to uncover the past trauma that may have awakened his power, while he is so scared that he can’t discuss the situation with his soon-to-be wife.

At least, this is what I understood from the actual film, which starts focussed on the male character, then slowly shifts its interest to the female one and a whole other subplot involving a trial.

Its changing focus is the most discouraging peculiarity of the film, and to be honest I watched it in three sittings because I kept falling asleep, but I was left with the overall feeling that I’d like to revisit it sometime in the future.

The Amateur, directed by James Hawes, written by Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli, based on Robert Littell’s novel, US, 2025 - ⭐⭐⭐

My lack of love for Rami Malek is well documented, and I’m not sure that it is justified, but I always see ‘Rami Malek doing things’ instead of a character in a story.

Here, Malek speaks and acts as a CIA cryptographer, whose wife (Rachel Brosnahan) is killed in a terrorist attack in London, and, frustrated with the high-level strategic view of his superior (Holt McCallany), decides to get justice by himself by tracking down and killing the people responsible.
But he’s just a poor brainy shy analyst with no experience on the field!
Luckily, he has just received secret intelligence to blackmail his manager into providing the training he needs to get good at offing people, provided by Laurence Fishburne.
Soon he’ll be out and about in good old Europe, chased by the bad baddies as well as the good baddies, and using that big brain of his to exact his revenge in the most implausible ways.

It’s an OK movie to spend a couple of hours when your brain has asked for the evening off. My brain came back home before the end of the film, and started asking questions for which I had no answer.

Starting with, why is Jon Bernthal in this film at all? What’s the point of his character? And why is he called ‘The Bear’ when we know from the TV show that ‘The Bear’ is actually his brother Carmine?

It took me a while to recognise Michael Stuhlbarg as the main villain, who - I reckon - is supposed to be German.

You can find the index for all weekly visions here.