Quark Cognition: Korean Movie - The Customer is Always Right

Saturday, August 6, 2011

Korean Movie - The Customer is Always Right

I take enormous risks when I watch movies. I haven't sat down and figured out the ratio, but the amount of bad movies I watch exceeds the great movies. I consider the bad movies the price I have to pay in order to find the gems. I don't consider the money to be the price I have to pay - no. The actual price is all the crap I have to be exposed to. This is the same with books, music, and to some extent - women.
I won't be telling you about the crap because I don't want to talk about it or even think about it. The other night I sat down and watched The Customer is Always Right, completely unaware as to whether it would blow me away or ruin my day. The best word I can use to describe this movie is "magical", but with a caveat. If you're not really into Korean movies and haven't seen the early works of Lee Chang-Dong, then you might be less entranced. I don't want to potentially spoil anything, so I won't name the exact movie you should watch first.

The Customer is Always Right (2006)

DVD Front Cover

DVD Back Cover

I'm going to tell you about the actors.

성지루 (Seong Ji-Ru) is the barber in the scan. He is gullible and timid; he breaks down and is thwarted easily. It took me a long time to recognize him, since he acted very differently from his role in A Good Lawyer's Wife. In that movie, he played the seriously mentally disturbed person that rambled nonsense.
이선균 (Lee Seon-Gyun) is the man blowing the bubble in the scan. I was very surprised to watch his role in this movie because he was essentially an alpha male; very calm, assertive, assiduous, easily able to kick the crap out of people, successful with the ladies, etc. A total bad-ass. He normally plays a sexually frustrated character that can't talk to women without stuttering, or he's psychologically abusive to women.
명계남 (Myung Gye-Nam) is the man with the sunglasses. He's the mystery character, he's the customer, and he's always right.
성현아 (Seong Hyeon-Ah) is the woman in the picture. I remember her playing a psychologically disturbed person in Time who used plastic surgery as her source of paramount satisfaction. She also played the mother in the closed-loop paradox horror movie Cello. In this movie, she is a manipulative sex-crazed maniac that is content with nothing and upset with everything.

Sadly, I can not tell you why I loved this movie so much. There is much I can not reveal, due to the fact it's spoiler-heavy. The fact that I have seen so many Korean movies definitely made this a far more interesting experience, because I was able to compare how these people act compared to what else I have seen them in. Ultimately, this movie is mysterious. The man in the sunglasses had me stumped beyond hope. Well, here's the gist of it. I can tell you this much...the barber did something very bad...and somehow...the man in the sunglasses found out.

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About Me

I am made of particles, known as quarks and electrons, that are at least 13.72 billion years old. Although my body is very young, the constituents are very old and come and go as they please. It's astonishing that individuality exists when each one of us are made of the same basic parts. It's even more astonishing that self-awareness exists, since even objects as simple as paper clips are made of the same parts as human beings.

My body was here before I was born and it will be here after I die.

So while I am in this brief configuration known as life I try to learn as much as possible, since my personality enjoys it. My first fascination in this short life was dinosaurs; I won a Dinosaur Expert Award in kindergarten. For most of my childhood, I read about the Animal Kingdom. I also read more than 100 Choose Your Own Adventure books and numerous other young adult fiction from my school library. Since age 5, I have been reading at a sometimes voracious pace. I didn't start seriously reading science fiction until age 19, though.

My interest in politics is as great as my interest in professional sports and I drink alcohol as often as I get lung surgery. I am heterosexual, but I rarely date women and prefer to read a tale, rather than chase some tail.

Qool Quotes

"The brain, knowing that a person can't live forever in this world, rationalizes a future, or other-dimensional, world in which immortality is possible. In other words, religion is the earliest form of science fiction."
-Philip Jose Farmer (1977)

"Forget Jesus, the stars died so you could be born."
-Lawrence M. Krauss (2009)

"When you ask what are protons and electrons I ought to answer that this question is not a profitable one to ask and does not really have a meaning. The important thing about electrons and protons is not what they are but how they behave - how they move. I can describe the situation by comparing it to a game of chess. In chess, we have various chessmen, kings, knights, pawns and so on. If you ask what a chessmen is, the answer would be that it is a piece of wood, or a piece of ivory, or perhaps just a sign written on a paper, or anything whatever. It does not matter. Each chessmen has a characteristic way of moving and this is all that matters about it. The whole game of chess follows from this way of moving the various chessmen."
-Paul Dirac, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1933

"You will be astonished when I tell you what this curious play of carbon amounts to. A candle will burn some four, five, six, or seven hours. What, then, must be the daily amount of carbon going up into the air in the way of carbonic acid! What a quantity of carbon must go from each of us in respiration! What a wonderful change of carbon must take place under these circumstances of combustion or respiration! A man in twenty-four hours converts as much as seven ounces of carbon into carbonic acid; a milch cow will convert seventy ounces, and a horse seventy-nine ounces, solely by the act of respiration. That is, the horse in twenty-four hours burns seventy-nine ounces of charcoal, or carbon, in his organs of respiration to supply his natural warmth in this way, by the conversion of carbon, not in a free state, but in a state of combination. And what an extraordinary notion this gives us of the alterations going on in our atmosphere. As much as 5,000,000 pounds, or 548 tons, of carbonic acid is formed by respiration in London alone in twenty-four hours. And where does all this go? Up into the air."
-Michael Faraday (1860)

"In modern war, one individual can cause the destruction of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children. He could do so by pushing a button; he may not feel the emotional impact of what he is doing, since he does not see, does not know the people whom he kills; it is almost as if his act of pushing the button and their death had no real connection. The same man would probably be incapable of even slapping, not to speak of killing, a helpless person."
-Eric Fromm (1955)

“Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that people don’t have to experience it."
-Max Frisch

Quark Cognition

I may not seem like it, but I am a human.

Saturday, August 6, 2011

Korean Movie - The Customer is Always Right

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