Three... Extremes

THREE... EXTREMES (2004) - Mar. 6, 2005 (S)
Featuring three short films, one by Takashi Miike, one by Fruit Chan, and one by Chan-wook Park, this was a surprisingly bad movie. Miike's film was first, and was about a woman who killed her sister by mistake and still lives with the grief years later. It was well-directed, I suppose, but aside from that it was slow and bizarre and ultimately pointless. So that's forty minutes of my life I'll never get back, and I figure it can't go anywhere but up at this point. Astoundingly, the next film, by Chan, managed to be even worse. I don't know who thought this was a good idea for a movie, no matter how short: a woman attempts to regain her youth by eating dumplings made out of baby fetuses. Baby fetuses! It's just as ludicrous as it sounds, if not more so. Fortunately, the final film, by Old Boy's Chan-wook Park, was actually good. It wasn't great or anything, but compared to the first two crap-fests it looked like Citizen Kane. It helped that it had a premise that's pretty hard to mess up: a man is told that if he doesn't kill a child, his piano-playing wife's fingers will be chopped off -- one finger every five minutes. So that was pretty good, but it still wasn't worth having to sit through those first two stinkers. (** for the first one, *1/2 for the second, and *** for the third). **