I watched "Despicable Corner" three times in a row for work reasons in the past two days. This Korean gangster crime film has really great stamina, because his reality is terrifying.
The film was inspired by Martin Scorsese's "Mean Streets" in 1973. The original English name of the film was Mean Streets. Yoo Ha's "Despicable Streets" puts chilling realism in the brutally hierarchical environment of South Korean gangsters.
The background of the film is set in the "modern corporate violence period" of Korean gangsters after the millennium. The internal structure and business model of modern organized gangs have undergone many changes with the development of the times. From the past "simple extortion-type" organizations to "power-involved" organizations, some gang leaders have turned into entrepreneurs. They put a lot of money from organizing gangs into real estate, construction services or education and culture in legitimate industries, thus laundering the black money.
"Despicable Street" is a metadrama, that is, a play within a play, which means that in a play, the theater things and stage techniques are explicitly used in the conventional use and plot [1]. In the movie, the turning point that changed the fate of the protagonist is also a movie, which alludes to "The Struggle History of the Southern Gangs", which alludes to the protagonist's experience in the struggle of the underworld gangs. Such a design creates a triple contrast in the film: the ideal world of the protagonist, the world of the characters' storyline, and the real world of the audience. Under the heavy contrasts and contrasts, the audience is more likely to develop empathy, so that they can think about themselves as characters.
Director Liu Hexiang asked the audience to think: What kind of society are we in? When friendship and interest conflict, how do we choose? The story line in the movie is actually an open loop structure that keeps "repeating the same mistakes": kill others, replace others, be killed by others, be replaced by others. Before sacrificing others for profit, everyone in the film had a struggle between rational and emotional thoughts, but in the end they made the same choice invariably. In the end, the three people who survived by betraying others, the film does not continue to explain how they developed later, but who knows whether they will one day be the praying mantis that is behind the mantis catching the cicada or the oriole?
Despicable Streets is a dystopian underworld movie. The short life of an underworld leader reveals the essence of human beings seeking advantages and avoiding disadvantages, and shows the simplest and most rude interpersonal communication: gathering for the sake of profit, and dispersing when the profit is exhausted. The director made Bingdou focus on justice and love, but let him die for love, which ironically portrayed the dark side of human nature. There are many scenes of violent fights in the whole movie, there are no exaggerated and gorgeous stunts and flying superhumans, it is as close to life as possible, and it restores the reality of fisting to the flesh, which makes people shudder.
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- Edinborough, Campbell. Theatrical Reality: Space, Embodiment and Empathy in Performance . , 2016. Print.
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