terrible... so disappointed.

Disapointment

I was totally surprised at how great this film.You could feel your paranoia rise as the film went on and as you gradually learned the details of the real situation.

One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.

Disclaimer: I'm a fan of Kim Ki-duk. I liked 3-Iron, Time, The Bow, The Isle, and Spring Summer Fall Winter Spring. The Coast Guard was just okay, but I thought Bad Guy was vile and repulsive. That said, this film is hands down Kim's worst.Kim Ki-duk directs this dreadful drama which showcases a bunch of grumpy people acting stupid amidst a lunatic squad of American soldiers. The sheer artificiality of each scene in this 117-minute debacle is unparalleled by any other work I can remember experiencing. Almost every line of dialogue and every character action is handled with a silliness that needs to be seen to be believed. Thus, a large percentage of events come off as unintentionally comical. I now cite the following evidence: (1) A dude gets depressed, then kills himself by riding a scooter off of a very, very small hill, thus burying half his body in mud.(2) A group of poorly acted Americans curse angrily at each other during a pick-up basketball game. The viewer will note that the tussle begins for no apparent reason. The soldiers then overreact in the most artificial ways imaginable. In addition, the most "insightful" dialogue is nothing more than an endless series of 4-letter words.(3) The most outrageous C-rate American actor in the movie (and that's saying something!) contributes about half a dozen cameos of side-splitting idiocy throughout the film, providing the only true entertainment. The actor's name is Mitch Malum – and yes, even his name is funny. In one awful cinematic moment, Mitch slaps his Korean girlfriend in an effort to show her how he feels, then randomly confesses that he takes LSD to get away from the mountains of Korea. Unfortunately, the real reason he slapped her was because she wouldn't take a hit of LSD. So the question remains: how did he make the jump from LSD to mountains to romantic feelings? It makes no logical sense whatsoever.(4) Later on Mitch Malum (I love saying that) scares off a Korean kid, only to then mistakenly hit his head on a doorframe. Kim Ki-duk apparently didn't feel like shooting a re-take of that scene; and with good ole Mitch at the helm, could you really blame him? (5) Afterward, Mitch is training with his comrades and randomly decides to quit in the middle of a training sequence. His remarkable insightfulness contributes lines of incoherent nothingness. Picturing Mitch acting hysterically with a crooked helmet on his head just gets me.(6) Eventually, Mitch's bad temper provokes an arrow shot to his groin! His response to this (after a brief uncomfortable grunt) is to shoot his pistol in the air a few times, walk into the middle of the street, wait for a group of Korean cops and citizens to walk up to him, shoot the remaining bullets of his gun into the air, limp gingerly into the field, kneel down, act hysterically, then attempt to shoot himself with the very pistol HE JUST EMPTIED! (I literally had to stop the film for 15 minutes as I gasped for air in gut-wrenching laughter.) Now add a handful of other inadvertently humorous moments to the ones above, as well as the following stupid moments: (1) Dogs are beaten and killed constantly throughout the film (not for real, thankfully).(2) A highschool girl gets a cute little puppy, slips into a nightgown and forces it to "eat out" between her legs! Like I mentioned earlier, I like Kim Ki-duk, but he should be humiliated to be associated with such a horrible film like Address Unknown. This is truly a pathetic display of film-making that earns a special place as one of the most unintentionally riotous endeavors in motion picture history.One other reviewer's comment is entitled "Not one to watch if you want cheering up." I couldn't disagree more vehemently. This was the funniest film I've seen in years. Highly recommended as comedy. Stay far away if you're looking for drama though.

A very well made movie, and beautifully acted, but an American viewer will definitely take offense to it (especially if they are, or have been, a US serviceman). I have been searching for a good Korean movie or TV show that would give insights as to how the South Koreans feel about the American presence in their country, but surprisingly that topic is almost never brought up in Korean made entertainment. I read the cover of "Address Unknown" in the video store, and thought this would be a good movie about the Americans in South Korea. It is a good movie, but I was offended. The movie focused of several stereotypes that I found appalling (I will try to write this review without giving away too much movie in details, but be aware there are spoilers in this review).The movie's main characters are a horribly poor, mentally disturbed, Korean woman and her mixed racial son that was the issue of an African American airman. In the viewer's first introduction to this couple, we the viewer see the son attempt to brutalize his mother. The message was obvious; The Korean mothers of children of American servicemen live desperate lives, and their mixed racial children resent them.Having spent 6 years in Japan in the US navy, and being the father of 2 Japanese American Children you can probably understand why I would be offended by this notion.Matters may have been different in the 60s and 70s, but I can say from personal experience that every child of an Asian mother and American serviceman that I know has benefited greatly from being truly bi-lingual, and have lived well in their respective countries (I have been searching for information on the actor/rap singer Dong-kun Yang to see if he actually is half African American, but if he's not, he still spoke English beautifully in the movie). The relationship between the mother and her bi-racial son takes a terrible turn, when the son slicing off his mother's breast tattoo that depicts her former, American serviceman, lover's name. The mother throughout the movie takes pride in her son and her past love with the American serviceman, and to me these were the only touching aspects of the movie. To see the son attack his mother in this way really made my heart sink and I could not understand what point the director was trying to make, other to characterize bi-racial children negatively.The breast tattoo topic comes up again when an AWOL American soldier attempt to carve his name into the breast of his Korean lover, so that she will never forget him after he is gone. I have been searching on the web, and I cannot find any account of such an occurrence happening, in the long US-Korean relations, involving a serviceman carving his name into a Korean woman (or girl) against her will. Where that stereotype of an American wanting to tattoo a Korean woman came from, I have no idea, though it does sound a lot like what KKK members are reported to have done in the States. In any case I thought it was a very unfair portrayal or Americans, and it reminded me a lot of the myth of Vietnamese women who hid razor blades in their vaginas (might have happened, but I highly doubt it, and there is no report of it actually having happening).Early in the film we see this same serviceman offer that same Korean girl a chance at eye surgery in trade for her becoming his sweetheart. Anyone who knows anything about the US military knows that such an exchange is absurd, because a serviceman could only get surgery for a Korean woman if she was his wife. The message that that exchange attempts to give, which becomes more clear later, is that Korean women (and Koreans in general) are forced to yield to everything Americans demand (no matter how demeaning), because Americans feel that the Koreans owe them so much after all the Americans have done for them. Later the girl blinds her surgically repaired eye, giving the message that her deranged American lover's gift was not welcomed after all.I hope that Koreans who have watched (or plan to watch) "Address Unknown" will not assume that all American servicemen are deranged, because were not, or that we intend to make outrageous demands of them after all of the "gifts that we have given them," because we do not.The tone of "Address Unknown" borders on anti-American propaganda, which is really a shame because this movie is very well made.I hope someday there will be a less grim movie made about the post war Korean-American experience, because I know from personal experience that most interpersonal Korean-American relationships are not all bad (though in the 60s and 70s, relationships between Koreans and Americans were probably a lot more strained).

Kim Ki-duk's film has been a while making its appearance, at least in the UK and after viewing it, in some ways one can see why. As unflinching and as memorable as the other works which have made him out as perhaps Korea's finest filmmaker - The Isle, Bad Guy (2001), 3-Iron (2004) included - Address Unknown (aka: Suchwiin bulmyeong) is as uncompromising in its view of humanity as any of them, and with many of the director's characteristically disturbing moments intact.Set in and around a US air force base in Korea 17 years after the end of the Korean conflict, and mainly focusing on the travails and tribulations of the residents of a nearby village Address Unknown was, the director says, a way to explore and represent the dehumanising effect of war. It's also, as others have noticed, about other things too: language, family relationships, the debasement of tradition, and violence amongst them. There is no real central point to the film, although arguably the relationship between the American flyer and Eun-OK (Min-jang Ban) gives it its main drama. Korean cinema frequently has at its heart the pain caused by the 1950s' war and the painful division of the country into two halves thereafter, Here the psychic trauma created is symbolised by the base, and the pain resulting is acted out in varying degrees by those who live and work in its shadow.In Kim's unnamed village the principal business appears to be the butchering of dogs for food - a particularly brutal affair, though the film does claim no animals were mistreated during the filming - by one Dog Eye (Jae-hyung Jo, also notable in Bad Guy and The Isle). Dog Eye despises teenaged Chang-Guk (Don-kun Yang) the son of an absent American soldier, for being of mixed descent. Letters to his missing father, sent from his mother, are being returned 'address unknown'. For his part, Chang-Guk makes his solitary friend in Ji-Hum (Young-min Kim, also in the same director's much more contemplative Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring, 2003). He's a sensitive, withdrawn artist, bullied by his war veteran father. Meanwhile Ji-Hum has a crush on Eun-OK. With her eye damaged by a childhood accident, she in turn has a relationship with an unstable, drug dealing American flyer, (Mitch Malum), who promises her a corrective operation on the promises of becoming his girl...The bleakness of the film, one both of landscape and the heart, reminded this viewer of the Chinese film Blind Shaft (aka: Man Jing) made the same year. But the latter is more about the degradation wrought by political economics, whereas the malaise at the centre of Kim's work is more pathological. It is also more relentlessly grim and less cynical than that tale of couple of serial killers at work in Chinese coal mines to such an extent that the viewer at times wonders if anyone will be left alive by the end. This narrative ruthlessness, as critics have noticed, ultimately undermines some of the impact the film might otherwise have had.Another flaw is the performance of the main American actor; Malum's acting has been for some a distraction, although I found it weak, if passable. Korean directors sometimes make unfortunate casting decisions for their English speaking parts, one thinks of the problems which attend the otherwise excellent J.S.A. No doubt the home audience would not care about or notice such shortcomings, so it seems pointless to chide Kim too much over this weakness, especially as elsewhere the cast are generally excellent.Ultimately, what makes Address Unknown so striking is Kim's imagery and the choice of actions by his characters, so spiritually and emotionally rootless. Seen in this light, the writer-director's title is especially apt, both referring literally to the official stamp on front of envelopes returning to the mother, as well as to the anonymous village of his stories. Like Bad Guy and The Isle, the current film also contains individuals who exist on the edge of human relations, although here it is not just persecuted lovers. To a certain extent all of his characters have lost their way, either represented living rootlessly in an old army bus, being casually inhumane to animals or each other, or simply by valuing preferment - suggested by army medals, relics and pensions, even just good looks, over genuine human connection. And when times are so out of joint, some striking images are the result: the death of a major character head buried in a frozen paddy field; a man hung by dogs; the cut-out paper eye (an especially treasureable, Dali-esquire moment) on the face of Eun-OK, the killing of the dogs over a dirty puddle, and so on. In fact there's a touch of surreality about the film that continues right until the end, with the soldiers crawling in the field. Kim's achievement is in unifying so convincingly, and without any monotony, a multi-charactered narrative that includes such extreme concerns as disfigurement, minor bestiality, and murder. If you fancy such a strong and austere cinematic brew, then you won't be disappointed.

The movie centers on the lives of rundown rural community of South Koreans who happen to live proximate to a U.S. military base. The lives and stories of several citizens intertwine in this bleak and gritty flick. There is a Korean woman and her half-black son, the product of a relationship with a G.I. Another local makes a living collecting and killing dogs he sells for food. A young girl lives a detached life but develops a friendship with an introverted friend who dotes on her, when he's not being beaten and bullied by local toughs. There are more characters in this tale, but most all of them have somehow been adversely affected by the omnipresent US soldiers who drift, comically at times, in and out of their existence. And, the movie overflows with brutality, mostly of Koreans against each other. At some point, most assuredly near the end of the film, the tragedy is so overwhelming it becomes lugubrious. How many bad things can happen to a small community? In this movie there is no end to it, and one wonders what is the point.