Did you know about the corrupting influence money can have on a person, or several persons? Were you aware that the pleasures of the high life come at a dark price? The Taste of Money has both of these big, obvious questions on its mind among many others, and the film– the seventh to come from controversial South Korean filmmaker Sang-soo Im– tackles these ideas with melodramatic zeal, never once shooting for anything resembling graceful subtlety in its portrait of South Korea’s wealthy ruling class. Frankly, the film scarcely even seems interested in dealing with reality, instead engaging in brash, lurid mythmaking ripped straight from headlines chronicling the battle between…
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Last Stands and Bittersweet Lives: Getting to Know Ji-Woon Kim
January 18th came and went without much critical or commercial fanfare for Ji-woon Kim, the first of three South Korean directors to break into the American studio system this year*; that’s sort of a king bummer, at least in part because The Last Stand, his half self-aware, half self-serious, respectably actiony Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, deserves to be more of a hit than its paltry $7.7 million box office take will allow. (You may recall that we had a lot of fun with the film ourselves.) But mostly this is sour news because Kim’s a great filmmaker, and nothing would be more disappointing than seeing him shunned out of the States…