Instead of seeing one of those movies, last night I did something that I haven't done in a while, probably since watching Berberian Sound Studio as part of MIFF a few years ago: I watched an old movie in the theater.
I was actually supposed to watch this old movie a week and a half ago, but it was sold out, in what may be the most confounding commentary on the state we currently find ourselves in. Confounding in a good way. On the one hand, Cinema Nova can only seat 20 per screening room as part of its COVID precautions. On the other, it was still bizarre that a movie that was first released in 2003 reached that capacity of 20 two Sunday nights ago. Says very positive things about the moviegoing climate we have here in Melbourne.
When Memories of Murder was sold out on that trip, I shifted to the Australian remake of Rams, which I actually liked quite a bit. Murder seemed likely to get lost in the increasing torrent of these pretenders finally getting a release, but on Thursday night, I bought my ticket in advance and finally made good on the viewing.
Part of the reason I wanted to see Memories of Murder, Bong Joon-ho's second feature after 2000's Barking Dogs Don't Bite (which I also have not seen), is that it has heretofore been very difficult to get my hands on. I have of course known about it and its reputation for some time, but streaming or renting it had thus far been impossible. A friend of mine put an illegally obtained copy of it on his Dropbox for me to pick up a while back, and even though I myself don't sail in those pirate seas, I would have happily watched it. Except that getting access to it required upgrading my minimal Dropbox plan to greater storage space, and that has seemed like a bridge too far, even though there are probably plenty of reasons that would be a useful thing to do.
So having it appear at Cinema Nova -- it is also playing at the unaffiliated Cinema Lido, so this is some kind of coordinated re-release rather than a Nova one-off -- gave me the perfect excuse to finally see it.
The viewing didn't remind me of Berberian Sound Studio or other repertory viewings I've attended over the years. But rather, it reminded me of another viewing of a Korean film at Cinema Nova from 18 months ago.
On April 28, 2019 I saw Lee Chang-dong's Burning, as it finally got its release in Australia, long after American critics had named it one of their best films of 2018. The two films have some obvious elements in common, such as their South Korean origins, being more than two hours long, and dealing eliptically with sociopaths.
But the real common element is that I was way too tired to watch both of them.
I don't remember the circumstances that led to my exhaustion on Sunday, April 28, 2019, but on Thursday, November 26, 2020, they are plenty fresh in my memory.
Yesterday started on a really bad, or at least foreboding, note when I started waking up around 5 a.m., for no reason I could determine, and never got back to sleep. By the time I had to walk the kids to school around 8:30, I was already feeling a bit loopy. I did get a nap during the day, but not nearly as long a one as I wanted. I even clocked myself out of work for an hour, with a whole quiet house to myself, but could not sleep more than a few minutes.
Undeterred, I went for a run after work anyway. I didn't go the full 7.5 miles, which is my most recent peak capacity, but 5.4 miles, on top of a bad night's sleep, is still enough to make the prospects for the rest of your day quite dim.
Of course, I was not done. At 7 I had to go do an hour or so of shopping at the shopping center, which is only open at night two nights a week. As the places you need to go are invariably at opposite ends of the place from each other, this always tacks another couple thousand steps on to your day, plus an immeasurable amount of additional mental exhaustion.
So it was with all this under my belt that I rocked up at Cinema Nova just before the 9:10 movie was about to start.
In fact, if not for the necessity of buying my ticket in advance, I might have just packed it in. (As it turned out, I could have waited, as the 20-seat capacity was only about half full. But I didn't want another Rams situation.)
Memories of Murder has two things going for it over Burning, at least as far as my current circumstances were concerned: 1) It's 17 minutes shorter, 131 minutes vs. 148 minutes; 2) It's far more concrete in terms of its action and plotting. But in both cases I knew I had made a miscalculation in terms of my preparedness for the movie on this particular day.
I don't remember what snacks I had brought with me that time, but this time, perhaps subliminally fearing a Burning redux, I had a Coke, a bag of sourpatch kids and a sleeve of mint cookies. I should have had two Cokes. The liquid and the caffeine are what I crave most in this type of experience, especially as the two other things were drying my mouth out. I finished neither of the snacks, as I could literally not stand eating them anymore, but the Coke was finished with an hour left in the movie, even with forcing myself to delay starting to drink it as long as possible. (To give you some idea of what a bad idea the sourpatch kids ended up being, my teeth physically hurt when I had to brush them at home later on.)
The real problem is that when you are tired, it is especially difficult to watch movies that you know will not have a conventionally satisfying payoff. When you're fighting sleep, it helps to have a quick pace, plus challenges to your mind in terms of obviously clever twists and turns. When a movie has a more determined pace, as these movies do, and when the narrative reflects the messiness and lack of resolution of real life, its all the more challenging.
The good news is, I recognized that both movies are really good, and ended up giving both four stars. The bad news is, I might have liked both of them better had I not been struggling to stay awake the whole time. I should have plenty of other opportunities to give Burning a second chance through a revisit, but as discussed earlier in this post, Murder has been particularly hard to get my hands on.
Maybe I'll have to spring for that deluxe Dropbox subscription after all.
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