Following Athlone Film Club’s award for originality at the St Patrick’s Day parade it is quite apt that the club’s next film pushes the borders on originality with a new kind of genre: the eastern, or Asian western.
On Tuesday April 6 at 8pm in the Dean Crowe Theatre, the club presents The Good, The Bad, The Weird, a spaghetti western from South Korea, one of the most genuinely fun and inventive movies to hit the screen.
Director Ji-woon Kim’s film is a pioneering foray into the genre’s wildest frontiers, around which are arranged some stunningly spectacular scenes of hyper kinetic chaos.
Where Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns may have borrowed a few ideas, or sometimes even an entire plot, from the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa, this new film from Kim repays the debt in full, reimagining Leone's finest work The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (1966 ) transplanted to the lawless badlands of Japanese-occupied 1930s Manchuria, a desert landscape of ever-shifting boundaries where everyone is out to make their fortune, and everything is for sale. Here anything goes - and the same is true for this anarchic epic, as unbounded and pillage-happy as its three main characters.
Three exiled Korean adventurers, played by a dream team of Korea's biggest stars - vain bandit Chang-yi (Lee Byung-hun - A
Bittersweet Life ), lucky train robber Tae-goo (Song Kang-ho - Memories Of Murder, The Host ), and relentless bounty hunter Do-won (Jung Woo-sung, Musa: The Warrior ) – come into violent collision during two simultaneous assaults on the same train, and then engage in a mad cross-country race to secure a stolen map which they hope will lead to the fulfilment of their dreams, whether it is to get rich fast, to exorcise the past, to wreak revenge or just to be proven the best.
In pursuit, are an international syndicate of bandits, some double-dealing drug dealers, and the amassed forces of the Japanese imperialist army – but no odds will prevent this trio from having their final three-way showdown, even if they must outride and outgun everyone else to get there.
All the actors do their own stunts, and it culminates in a massed dash across the desert that shows not only where old-world martial values clash with newer weapons technologies, but also where the western meets The Road Warrior.
It's exciting, funny, thrilling, and as entertaining as hell – and proves, if proof is needed, that genre knows no borders.
So for some serious fun come along to the screening of The Good, The Bad, The Weird on April 6. Temporary membership for the night is only €7. There will be a pre-screening complimentary wine reception in the theatre bar at 7.30pm.
For more information log on to www.athlonefilmclub.com or email [email protected].
