Foreign Language Movies

My Little Bride (Eorin Shinbu) : This is a delightfully cute romantic Korean movie, my heart melted towards the end. It tells the story of how a 21 year old man and a 16 year old girl are forced to get married because of a pact their grandparents made or something like that. So these two are thrust into an arranged marriage that neither of them are excited bout. But the guy turns out to be real cute, he loves his little wife dearly… the girl on the other hand, takes time to fall in love with him. When she does realize towards the end, its heartbreakingly sweet. Loved the movie, the actors were pretty good too… the girl as usual was pretty.

3 iron (Bin-Jip) : This Korean movie was different, there were hardly any dialogues and the ending was intriguing. Very engrossing movie, the actors emote well and the movie had a nice concept. A young guy breaks into people’s homes and lives in them when they are away (also known as a squatter), but this young guy is a squatter with a difference. He merely doesn’t live in them, he cleans up the place, washes the bathrooms, cleans slippers, dishes… repairs things lying around the house. I liked watching the way he breaks into houses and how he sets about cleaning them and sprucing up the place. The leading lady is the abused wife of a rich man, and she is beaten and ill treated on a regular basis. One day the squatter breaks into this rich mans house and goes about cleaning the place without being aware that the wife is at home, seeing her swollen lips (she just had a beating from her husband) and the agony in her eyes, he takes her away from that place and they both become squatters. She helps him in cleaning up the houses they break into and slowly they fall in love and its beautiful. But eventually the husband catches up with them and the young man is thrown in jail, what follows next is the intriguing part. You gotta see it to know what’s happening I can’t explain it, but the young man perfects some form of art he has been practicing and he appears to disappear at will and only the wife can see him. It ends nicely, with the husband hugging the wife but the wife is actually leaning in to kiss her true love. I liked the movie… it was different.

The Bicycle Thief (Ladri di biciclette) : This Italian movie was okay, showed the struggles of a working class man named Antonio due to the effects of economic depression in Italy post World War II. Work is scarce and Antonio has to feed his wife and two children, so when he gets a job sticking up posters he is overjoyed, his bicycle is a necessary part of this job, in fact its a mandatory asset for the job. So when his bicycle gets stolen, he goes crazy trying to find it. He and his little son roam the streets and the markets trying to find their bicycle and desperation drives him to steal a bicycle and this results in a sad ending. I can’t say I liked the movie… the ending was not happy, it was realistic and showed how humans fall.

Rashomon : This is a Japanese black and white movie, its a crime/mystery drama. A samurai is found murdered and four people are brought before the judge to give their account of what happened. Each of these four people tell a different story and you are left wondering what really happened. The samurai and his wife are seen walking through the forest and they encounter a bandit, after this encounter the samurai ends up dead, a woodcutter passing through witnesses the entire thing. The wife’s story is different from the bandit’s story which in turn differ’s from the dead Samurai’s story (they use a medium to talk to the spirit of the dead samurai, it was scary) which in turn differ’s from the woodcutter’s story. I didn’t like the movie and the Japanese wife was downright ugly, something was seriously wrong with her eyebrows.