Beasts Clawing at Straws: Survival of the Wicked

"The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means." So quipped Oscar Wilde. And while Wilde clearly didn't have Beasts Clawing at Straws in mind, the 100-something-year-old epigram definitely applies to Kim Yong-hoon's enjoyable thriller. Which says a lot because there are so many bad guys vying for that Gucci bag of cash. Many are psychos: the madam (Jeon Do-yeon), the guilt-ridden lover (Jung Ga-ram), the loanshark (Jeong Man-sik). Others are more like infuriating foils: the foul-mouthed grandma (Youn Yuh-jung) and the jerky manager (Heo Dong-won). Some are just complicated: the indebted call-girl (Shin Hyeon-bin) and the shady customs official (Jung Woo-sung). The only good people seem to be the naive janitor (Bae Sung-woo) and his cleaningwoman wife (Jin Kyung).

If this sounds like a lot of characters, you're not wrong. And they're hardly the only memorable ones. For instance, there's also a cannibal hitman (Bae Jin-woong) who never speaks, and a dim-witted best friend (Park Ji-hwan) who you may quickly write-off as doomed. Yet despite the huge cast, Beasts Clawing at Straws is never confusing or confounding. To his credit, Kim has crafted an intricately plotted crime pic in which your alliances are constanty changing and in a weird way, justice kind of prevails. Granted, in a very twisted manner. Side note: One of the production companies credited at the top is called Artsploitation and Beasts Clawing at Straws more than lives up to that description.

Obsessed: Repressed

I'm aware that the erotic romance Obsessed is all about a Vietnam vet have an extramarital affair with a subordinate's wife. But Kim Dae-woo's suffocatingly repressed film reminds me more of the perverse Reflections of a Golden Eye than Coming Home or The Deer Hunter. There's the way Song Seung-heon fills out his white T-shirt a la Brando; the fawning officer (On Joo-wan) whose marital sexlife is dead. There's a scene in which two men (Song and Bae Sung-woo) dance together for God's sake. I'm not struggling to locate queer subtext here! The sex scenes implicate as well: The first one finds the husband doing all the work (and it looks like work); the second one finds his mistress (Lim Ji-yeon) making all the noise while he looks detached; the third one almost looks like he's giving it to her up the butt, doggy-style.

I don't know that any of this is intentional on Kim's part but goodness, the gender-studies term-paper practically writes itself. What else are we to make of the bit when the mother-in-law tells her cheating daughter that she's glad the young woman's a cheater because the cuckolded son is nothing short of "evil"? From what I observed, he's simply ambitious in the same way that the antihero's wife is. Is smuggling the devil's work? Or am I reading too deeply? Could be. There's a terrific moment midway through the film where a dance instructor (Yoo Hae-jin) comments on the America's televised moon landing: "Damnit there's nothing. Using all that money to get to such a place." I suppose the same could say about my review. Obsessed might just be an exquisitely costumed movie without salacious subtext but definitely with a temperance message.