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Another mean world By Chuck Stephens WHEN LOCAL FOUND -footage prankster-genius Craig Baldwin rewrote the history of the modern world with his 1992 future shock-meets-Old Testament classic, Tribulation 99 – wherein the secret history of U.S. military interventions in South America is revealed through a strategic montage of excerpts from '50s sci-fi schlock like The Hideous Sun Demon – Baldwin couldn't possibly have known he'd be setting the template for one of the headiest bits of South Korean celluloid ever made. Not that director Jang Jun-hwan had Baldwin's agit-plop mini-masterpiece even remotely in mind while making his astonishing first feature, Save the Green Planet, in which an amphetamine-addled beekeeper kidnaps a corporate CEO, believing that an alien prince from the planet Andromeda with plans to annihilate our humble planet lurks beneath his hard-boiled hostage's all-too-earthly disguise. No, Jang was riffing on more terrestrial cinematic reference points. First, there was his feeling that the kidnapper played by Kathy Bates in Misery hadn't been given a fair shake. Then there was his inkling that the Web site he'd happened across – theorizing that Leonardo DiCaprio's master plan was to seduce Earth women in order to conquer our world – might be somehow, shockingly, right. Jang – a 30-ish graduate of the Korean Academy of Fine Arts who first appeared on film-festival radar screens with his 1995 short "Imagine: 2001," a John Lennon-related whatsit to rival Chris Munch's The Hours and the Times – is a very funny man, and he gleefully likes to admit that he sometimes feels as if "movies from all over the world have melted inside me." And Save the Green Planet (which flopped in Korea when first released, then went on to cult success both at home and around the world) is a very funny film – until you begin to realize just how deadly serious it is. Sure, there's something dizzy and delightful about its speed-freak and seriously deluded abductionist, Boon-goo (played by rising star Shin Ha-kyun), and his girlfriend, Sooni (Hwang Jeong-min), a somewhat rotund tightrope walker in an all-too-tight pink tutu – even when Boon-goo starts torturing CEO Kang (Baek Yun-shik), hoping he'll cop to his plan for planetary dominion. But what at first mainly seems like a loopy-kooky genre-splice of flat-footed police follies, gravity-mocking martial arts moves, and every leftover mannequin part from a decade's worth of prop-shop serial-killer thrillers slowly reveals itself as something much more unsettling: a deeply political piece of popcorn cinema that will leave you filled with anxiety, panic, and dread. A beam-me-up megadowner that begins with a sprintingly punk rendition of "Somewhere over the Rainbow" and never looks back, Save the Green Planet isn't your average "The aliens are coming!" matinee wind-up. It's an extraordinarily heartfelt examination of 21st-century social psychosis – and a far-above-average indictment of the environmental, ideological, and complexly cinematic-industrial evils that are very much already here. Woven from the same sparkling ur-skein of Earth-ruling dinosaurs, Kubrickian obelisks, underevolved ape-men, and newsreel glimpses of industrial accidents and the Kwangju massacre (the 1980 street protest turned slaughter of unarmed civilians that figures as South Korea's Tiananmen Square) as the history of the silver screen itself, Jang's film surmises that if aliens really are controlling all of Earth's other industries, why should the dream factory be exempt? "They're the ones who made the movies!" Boon-goo, Jang's bug-eyed surrogate, finally exclaims, as if realizing that only moviemaking, or movie-watching, can truly rip away the 3-D glasses that make our daily lives seem real. There hasn't been a movie this panicked over the far too literal truth contained within the words "The End" since 2001: A Space Odyssey or Two-Lane Blacktop – two films that were also concerned about the (im)possibility of life after their own final frames. As idea-rich as any five films this year, Save the Green Planet may be the exemplar par excellence of a certain kind of current South Korean moviemaking that cherishes a cinema of emotions and adrenaline above all else, but you'll never catch the film, by turns harrowing and hilarious, reminding you of that. It's also an extremely welcome corrective to that other recent Korean kidnapping import, director Park Chan-wook's ice-blooded Oldboy, a piece of mildly stylized substancelessness to which Jang's heartfelt and ultimately heartbreaking film is superior in every way. Brimming with keenly detailed visuals (mutating cell-structure montages, speed-scribbled notebook ravings, Claymation accounts of dinosaur extinction) that owe less to Jang's background as a painter than to his love of Japanese anime and cheap fantasy-spectacles like The Seven Wonders of the World, Save the Green Planet reminds us of why we love movies in the first place. Not because they magically take us somewhere else, but because no matter how out of control and utterly apocalyptic our realities all too often seem, there's still no place quite like home. 'Save the Green Planet' opens Fri/13 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times. |
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