Superbowl party!

I'd be lying if I said last night's New Orleans Saints victory over Peyton Manning wasn't one of the most exciting nights of my life. Holy fuck, it was awesome.

Besides partying all weekend in preparation of the biggest event in television history, I also found the time to catch up with one of the movies I missed out on last year.

Hong Sang-soo's Night and Day was a film just barely released, and mostly ignored, last year by IFC, which seems to be sadly becoming a tradition in the U.S. (His wonderful Woman on the Beach got a similar release and lack of reaction late 2008). Night and Day is a hilarious story of a buffoonish Korean man, Kim, who flees to Paris when he might be arrested for smoking marijuana. He entangles himself in various relationships with other Korean girls in Paris, trying to get rid of his long gestating sexual frustration, while having emotional phone conversations with his wife back home almost every night.
The whole thing is sublimely ridiculous. Not one character appears to be emotionally stable. The conversations Kim has with each of these girls is borerline desperate, and his little quirks, such as carrying his belongings in different colored, little plastic bags everywhere he goes, are so unnerving and strange that they become laugh out loud funny.
The extremely long comedy is mostly about the sexual id of a fish out of water type, but Sang-soo makes every conversation and moment feel necessary. He gets a lot out of his richly observed and detailed characters. This and Woman on the Beach have firmly established Sang-soo as a great director of human emotions in my book.

His newest film Like You Know it All has been playing festivals for almost a year already, and was a favorite at Cannes and Toronto. I'm really hoping it finds its way to a theatrical release and gets Hong Sang-soo the attention he clearly deserves.



Who Dat!