Tale of Cinema (2005)

A clever and infectious film, and the second I have seen by Hong Sang-soo. I am not exactly sure how to talk about this one, but it is one of those movies that I would like to live inside of. Outside of Todd Solondz, I cannot think of any other filmmaker that so perfectly captures the feeling of an awkward moment as well as Hong, but he also has this light, almost ethereal touch that reminds me also of directors like Lubitsch even though Hong's movies are quite different. Watching this, it seems like it was all so effortless, like anyone with a camera can just go out and make a movie. He brought these banal and ordinary settings to life and filled them with a sense of magic. And for a self-reflexive film, the film within a film looks exactly like the actual film albeit slightly, slightly off. The moral seems to be that the cinema is real, but real life is realer than real, but it is still a movie, and movies are just a reflection of reality. When Young-shil tells Dong-soo that he did not understand the movie at all, I felt as if I were watching a recording of my own life. And there is something charming about Hong's kitschy, neon-saturated Seoul that is dominated by ugly concrete buildings and gray skies. The people who think this movie is boring are simply boring themselves.