One badass kid shows up in the neighborhood, she’s mysterious and nobody knows what is her agenda. Our protagonist is named young shik, he is the son of a kind business man who owns the main business in town, an insurance company. Young shik meets the badass kid, her name is amanda, he goes for a bikeride, they wordlessly engage in a race that turns exciting, blistering through city streets and swerving in and out of cars at SUCH high speeds. At the end of it, the kid, she says, “Hey, nice riding. You want in on the job?” she’s gonna rob an office park. The protagonist says “No way! Are you insane?” and she response. “You got the legs. Let me know when you’re ready to do the real thing.”
The protagonist follows the badass kid’s exploits in the newspaper, heist to heist. He overhears from his father at the table, his dad is talking about how bad it is for business to have all this theft and robbery and how the cops can’t catch the first robber and now there’s two. Young shik is upset; that was supposed to be him, it was his riding, he finds amanda and her accomplice, toby, “You want to ride with us? Prove it.” They do a daring heist.
They do a series of heists. The town grows hysterical, “How horrible, we are being attacked by bike gangs!” Young shik’s dad asks for some emergency measures to help police catch the criminals, and bicycles are banned, “It’s only for a little while and only until we catch these bad guys.” he says, supposedly a comfort to young shik who is not furious but pleased at this latest success. A boy is biking in contravention of the law and he is shot in a “mistaken identity”, one of the three, perhaps toby, he says “Mistaken identity, bull-shit, they targeted him for the same reason it appears: because of his bicycling.” The crew decide to go on a revenge spree and they find a policeman who is working as a surveillance boss at a big company store and they circle round him, they are so menacing, each of them nominally individual, young shik has a chain, amanda has a bat and toby has a gun, they menace him for a bit and hit him and tell him they have a message: “It’s war-time.” They draw a bicycle on his face for emphasis, in permanent marker.
Back at the compound, the unwatched corner of a service warehouse, amanda and toby and young shik have a tremendous fight about what to do, young shik wishes they had killed the cop, but amanda says thats stupid and ultraviolent, toby says they’re all fuckers, top to bottom, it isn’t the cops fault because they’re all fuckers, young shik asks what they should do, amanda doesn’t know, toby doesn’t know, but he says, “we should get these fuckers, all of them, top to bottom” he mutters.
They do some planning, young shik hears his dad say the insurance company is on a razor’s edge right now because of the disturbances, “investors are getting really antsy” so the plan is afoot. They are going to do three things: 1) start a protest against the police for their bike policies and their fascist attacks on bikers 2) rob a number of rich people of extremely expensive things, 3) start a lot of arson fires around town at the companies, including their own warehouse 4) smash up an insurance company truck and steal a lot of documents including certain policies.
All the kids in town are out for a protest, the robberies start, they are being done by amanda and toby, then young shik starts some fires at companies, the police can’t detect anything, their ability to control the mob is getting out of control, they try to catch all kinds of kids but each one extracts the maximum energy and difficulty in its capture, exhausting the police, causing broken cars and big mistakes everywhere, also it is v.v. slow and they can barely catch anyone. In the madness, the insurance documents need to get the hell out of town, ASAP, but it’s also the worst possible moment, young shik, amanda and toby converge on the van and rob it in the middle of the swarming bikes. “This town is completely out of control!” the van driver says, he is crying very hard in frustration and confused fear.
The documents show fraud and abuse on the part of young shik’s father and all the company presidents, they don’t have any money after all the insurance claims, the businesses go bankrupt because they can’t get paid, people move away from town, devastated. Young shik’s dad tries to explain to him why he was a criminal, “This game is bigger than any law, I didn’t make the rules, I was just trying to provide for you and your mom and your grandmother.” but young shik doesn’t care, “Get the fuck out of my face.” he tells his dad. Young shik’s mom moves away and so does most of the rest of the whole town, except all the kids with their bikes. Amanda and young shik and toby meet in one of the old warehouses, they display all the expensive things they stole and then they smash them up, smashing up diamonds and crystal glasses and jewels.
At the end of the movie, the bike kids have taken over the city government. Amanda is the mayor. She says “Let’s go for a ride” and they show up at a neighboring town, looking innocent but they are planning to rob something.
Vertov’s Three Songs Dedicated to Lenin
가슴에 돋는 칼로 슬픔을 자르고 (Cutting The Sorrow With A Knife Stuck In The Chest) 1992
Trailer for LE HAVRE? Oh amazing, I bet it’s going to be a great experience to see it at the GOSUNG CINEMA, Daegu’s landmark film screening series, truly breathtaking, wow, truly.
1st DECEMBER, Daegu’s GOSUNG CINEMA returns from our November Hiatus with Aki KAURISMÄKI’s film, LE HAVRE. The screening starts at 7:00 PM, entry is ₩5000, with stacks of beer, wine and popcorn for sale.
NEW POSTER for SATURDAY’S 7 p.m. SCREENING OF The Reflecting Skin
Ontic - that which exists inside the frame of the film, the literal being of objects, natures and spatio-temporal reality as it occurs within the film. This includes the events of the film and the composition of all the objects. From this frame, there is, for instance, no universe past the end of the film, or in the cuts.
Ontological - the ground from which the ontic exists, the boundaries that form it. Here is where the nothing between scenes exists, the metaphysical and physical laws that produce the phenomena as they arise, the extrafilmic events that precede, intercede and succeed the film, as well as the psychological and phenomenological frames of the characters. These are things like the moral foundation of the film, the rules and operation of time and space, the determinism of events in a series, or how that series must appear in order to exist. This ontological mode is both closed and total, in that each film can exist as a hermetic completeness in itself, but should also be described as plural, in that forms and forces within the ontological predominate at a given moment.
Onticontological - The onticontological is a style of moment, where the ontological intervenes in the traditionally “miraculous” sense, causing an event that would be ontically impossible or ridiculous, in order to preserve the closed coherence of the ontological. Morality, for instance, in 1980’s horror films with regard to lost virginity, causes the ontic death or targetting of a feminine character. Or, another moral example, the ontic cruelty, unpleasantness, etc., of the protagonist’s partner if the protagonist is going to cheat on them. But the moral is only the most narratively glaring example. Other examples are in the way moods or locations influence the way light works, causing meaningful or differentiated palettes. Or what is lazily referred to as pacing, the way events stretch and distort due to the existence or need for other events. The most interesting example is that of expositional dialogue, where the ontic event is deeply inappropriate to its context, because some strain or other of the ontological requires it. Suppose an ontic event is going to occur whose basic contours would be understood, given the ontological nature of the characters pasts and psychologies, but wouldn’t be expressed given that these are mutually understood by all participating characters. Here, the viewer is the source of the onticontological, because hem exists in a median location between the ontic and ontological, perceiving differences invisible to the ontic world of the characters and objects, but missing the unconscious or shared facts of the characters. Sometimes the effect is minor, a line that interjects pointlessly (on an ontic level) the amount of time passed, or distance passed, or events taking place between scenes. More seriously, you have “introduction” protagonists, arriving artificially unprepared for the world as it exists, in order to have that world’s ontological ground explained or demonstrated to them. All deus ex machina are versions of this at the level of plot, the collapsing-into-view of the mechanics of a film in order to complete whatever telos aspect of the ontological exists.
Contolontical - This is the sphere of effects resulting from onticontological intervention. These can be divided into interfilmic contolontical, transfilmic contolontical and extrafilmic contolontical varietys. The first, interfilmic, is onticontology’s opening of the film upon the viewer. Breaking or not of the fourth wall, for instance, where the style of intervention produces an awareness of the onticontological. Godardian technical estrangement is another variety of the interfilmic, as well as all so-called “materialist” filmmaking that unearths the composed nature of films or film conventions or usurps the expectant phenomenology of the viewer. The second, transfilmic contolontical, such as the proceeding theory of endings, is the structural consequences of all films that contain an onticontological dimension, and the ways that domain conditions them as a strain amongst the larger composition. The third, extrafilmic contolontical, is the way contolontical readings of films themselves produce changes in the understanding of the film, as well as their production. Here we can imagine things like the rise of filmic literalism, where onticontological intervention is itself an aesthetic. Overbearing and narratively redundant voiceovers, describing ontic text or events or images, sometimes even as they are being ontically presented is one aspect. Another is in the aesthetic use of tropishness, either as verification (Snow White and the Huntsman’s Disney renshrinements), or as a nihilistic surrealism, where each line and image is calculated to be both anti-realist in its absurdity as spoken, and wildly familiar (the recent Red Riding Hood).
LATE NIGHT POSTER RELEASE: This Saturday, at seven p.m., GOSUNG CINEMA is screening THE REFLECTING SKIN
A BOY TOO INNOCENT TO UNDERSTAND HIS TRAUMATIC TIMES, instead he makes of them a nightmare. Philip Ridley’s 1990 creep-horror catastrophe has vampires and angels and madness and terror, all set to the fear and silence of the American prairie. It’s pre-Halloween at GOSUNG CINEMA, with THE REFLECTING SKIN. The film starts at 7:00 this week, and entry is 5000 won. With winter rapping at our poorly insulated door, this may be one of the last Gosung Cinema screenings of the year!
Poster for 田園に死す
SCREENING TOMORROW, at 8 PM, the story of a PIG who goes to the city and talks his way into many an adventure, GOSUNG CINEMA presents BABE PIG IN THE CITY
TOMORROW 22nd September, Jim Jarmusch’s film NIGHT ON EARTH is screening at GOSUNG CINEMA in old DAEGU CITY.
