SFAFF: Arahan
You can tell we were excited to see the SFAFF movie Arahan Friday night, because we crossed the Tordesillas Line of Market Street and actually ventured up to the (gasp!) Marina -- where we were promptly almost run over by a group of five guys in fraternity sweatshirts violating the open container law, barrelling down the street. (Do they keep that posse around just for local color or something?) We're not hating, just appreciating.
Anyhow. The showing at the Presidio Theater was about 2/3rds full for this Korean martial arts movie. It's described in the liner notes as a Korean Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, but it might be more accurate to call it Tae Kwon Do Hustle -- it's got that same sense of madcap absurdity that Stephen Chow's movies have, along with the same strong moral message (sacrifice, self-control, saving the world -- you know, the usual stuff).
Will good prevail over evil? Find out after the jump!
Picture still from Arahan
So the plot is that in modern Seoul, ancient tao masters have been forced to blend into everyday society in order to survive. So as the tao masters get together and complain about the decline of the modern youth, a dorky and rule-enforcing police trainee is wondering why he never seems to win in fights. He has a run-in with a tao master's beautiful daughter (who works at 7-11 while dreaming of achieving enlightenment and a spot at the beauty academy) and the tao master discovers that this police trainee has ... the strongest ch'i they've ever seen!! As they try to convince him to tap into his martial arts ability (cue dramatic music)..... an evil master reemerges from captivity!! Will our hapless hero learn to control his ch'i -- before it's too late? We can't wait to find out!!!
Now, no one's going to be winning any Oscars for this or anything, and okay, there's some questions we have about the plot. But Arahan (which is the name of the Korean Taoist paradise in the movie) was a box-office smash in South Korea last year and we definitely had an excellent time at the theater. We love us the martial arts movies!
In general, based on our viewing of this one movie (our first Korean martial arts movie ever), we'd like to grossly overgeneralize and say that it seems like the Korean martial arts movies emphasize the need to learn self-control, as opposed to the Chinese martial arts movies, which seem to push the "the power of martial arts should be used to better society" angle. It's a nice comparison to the usual diet of Hong Kong kung fu that usually comes over to the States, and we hope to see more Korean martial arts movies in the future (so we can test out our brand-new film studies theory!).