태극기 ~ Tae Guk Gi—The Brotherhood of War

The movie Tae Guk Gi—The Brotherhood of War was one of the most emotional films I have ever seen. By the end of the film, I could not stop crying for the bitter lot of the two brothers, especially Lee JinSeok (이진석), the younger brother. He desperately tries to keep his brother from sacrificing himself for him, and through this, he is forced with unbelievable hardship, to grow out of an innocent schoolboy and into a mature soldier.

The main theme of the movie is exploring how the bond between two brothers can be ravaged and thrashed to absolute extremes by unimaginable forces, which in this case is the war in 1950 between North and South Korea. Albeit this monstrous force, the bond is still able to hold on until the very end.

The two brothers start out being poor but happy shoe-shine boys in the streets of a village near Seoul. Then, by an evil twist of fate, they are drafted by merciless recruiters to join the unexpected war effort. There, JinSeok’s older brother JinTae (이진태) tries to do everything he can to both keep his brother out of danger, and to get his brother discharged and sent home. JinSeok, on the other hand, is alarmed by his brother’s mindless boldness on the battlefield to achieve these goals, and wishes that JinTae would not risk so much for his brother. The movie then takes us through many tense battle scenes as the South Koreans slowly advance on North Korea, and at the same time, JinTae becomes more and more absorbed in trying to get the medal that will in theory allow him to send JinSeok back home. After North Korea reconciles their war effort with Chinese reinforcements, JinSeok ends up imprisoned under suspicion of being a Communist. JinTae attempts to rescue him, but seems to fail as the commander who should have issued JinSeok’s release orders him to be burned instead. This drives JinTae insane and he joins North Korea to fight the evil South Koreans who killed his brother. Meanwhile, JinSeok is alive and learns of his brother and flees the South Korean army to see him. After a long, gut-wrenching scene of trying to make JinTae come back to his senses, he finally realises that JinSeok is really still alive and tells him to flee, promising to return. Here, the movie comes full circle with the archaeology scene it started with, but now we see an old JinSeok looking down at the bones of his boor brother and crying his remorse about how his brother never returned.

Even though this movie has so many special effects and stunts created to make the battles seem realistic, which are in fact, extremely successful and effective, these are only background effects. They are not what you remember about each scene they are featured in after seeing them. What you remember is the tension and how you plead in your mind for the characters not to do something (such as run through enemy fire, or hit each other), and how you can almost literally see the bond that ties the brothers together being violently jerked and stretched to the breaking point. It is one of those movies which I don’t want to keep watching because of the exhausting emotional experience, but cannot stop watching at the same time because of the suspense and beauty of it all.

Tae Guk Gi is an unforgettable emotional experience that will make you rethink how you take those close to you, and their love, for granted in such an eye-opening way that it will stay with you for a very long time.

스캔들 ~ Untold Scandal

The movie Untold Scandal, by Lee JaeYong, was very intriguing and an ingenious story, though unnecessarily stretched out. There were many confusing parts, but in the end, everything was brought to-gether to make shocking sense. The main character, Cho Won (Bae YongJoon), wins a bet with his cousin, Madam Cho (Lee MiSuk), but in the process creates a fatal wound in the hart of others, as well as his own.

The main theme of this movie is that it is dangerous to play with other people’s hearts, bycause the repercussions can be unimaginable. Here, it not only causes the deepest emotional pain, but even death itself, and the lessons learned from this horrible experiment are lifelong.

The plot starts out with Cho Won making a bet with Madam Cho that if he is able to seduce a 27-year-old virgin widow, Lady Jung (Jeon DoYeon), then Madam Cho will give him one night of lovemaking as a reward. Otherwise, Cho Won must forefeit his enormous love life and lust, and become a chaste monk. Madam Cho will know he accomplished his task by receiving a cloth with the blood of Lady Jung. Through much intrigue, lying, and secrecy, Cho Won manages to break through the thick walls of Lady Jung’s heart, and make her believe he loves her. But the bloody rag is not enough for Madam Cho as evidence. This causes Cho Won to take more heartless measures. When Lady Jung visits him next, she finds him with another girl, and he tells her that he never loved her. Lady Jung is devastated and returns to her home village to tend to those ravaged by the plague going on there, and refuses to eat or drink. Word of this convinces Madam Cho that Jung really is in love with Cho Won, but by this time Cho Won’s heart is already with Lady Jung. After failing one last time to ask Lady Jung for forgiveness, Cho Won returns home, where he is stabbed by Jung’s outraged brother after hearing rumours about Cho Won and Jung. News of this takes the last shreds of hope away from Lady Jung and she takes her own life in despair, and Madam Cho, who was in love with Cho Won all this time, is devastated as well, and forced to flee the country with a leaden weight in her heart.

One of the strangest things in the movie is that every little prop in every scene is simply immaculate. Even in the secret Catholic meetings every garment is perfectly pressed and every inch of wooden floor is shining. Are the Koreans trying to please a certain audience with this, or does it carry some symbolic meaning to the movie? Additionally, many of the scenes seem very drawn out. If they were shortened, then the movie experience would be much better. What is most memorable about the movie (other than the pristine condition of everything) is poor Lady Jung and how her heart was completely shattered by a careless Cho Won.

Though mostly geared for women, Untold Scandal is an entertaining and fascinating rendition of the novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos that highlights the importance of keeping a game involving people’s hearts from getting out of hand.

Wall Street Movie Essay

The movie Wall Street demonstrated how the dollar, the fundamentally scarce resource, is traded, utilised, and allocated in the stock market. The two main characters in the film, Bud Fox and Gordon Gekko, exploit this allocation medium by using inside information. The main focus of the economic aspects of the movie is how greed contributes to our society.

The stock market is a great tool in to-day’s economy. It allows companies to raise money much more easily, and also has great liquidity in the exchanges which reduce the time and effort of selling securities. The limitations of this system, on the other hand, is that it is similar to gambling. If one invests money into stocks of a certain company, it is almost impossible to predict whether one will gain or lose money in the long, or short run. Thus, many people have lost a lot of money in the stock market. If this system were applied universally to the economy, it would most likely actually detriment the economy. For example, real estate is not part of the stock market. If it was, then people could invest their house into a company, and then if the company started to lose price, the investor could lose their house. Universalising the stock market would probably hurt a lot more people than it would benefit.

Our economy is largely driven by the guiding principle of self-interest, which states that people will only undergo transactions that benefit them directly, and they will always pick the one that benefits them most if there is a choice. However, this is not enough to drive the optimal functioning of the economy. If personal self-interest were to be allowed to have complete control of the economy, one consequence could be the creation of economic giants such as Rockefeller that can take over the economy of the entire country. In a less extreme scenario, people would lie and double-cross each other in nearly every transaction to ensure they get the most out of the bargain. This is clearly an unesireable world to live in. The way to counterbalance it is by introducing a government which guides the nation in the proper course, and an accompanying set of laws imposed over economic proceedings that will return an economy threatened by the aforementioned consequences into relative equilibrium. Such resolution is evident at the end of Wall Street when Bud Fox’s illegal transactions are uncovered by the police and he is arrested and incarcerated. Otherwise, self-interest is a sufficient guiding principle for the economy within these legal restrictions. In fact, it is what assures that economic supply and demand returns to equilibrium in every possible scenario.

Thus, as long as it does not get out of hand, personal self-interest is a sufficient guiding principle for the optimal functioning of the economy.