FILM REVIEW – I’M A CYBORG, BUT THAT’S OK
A very odd and occasionally inventive, but mostly dull Korean movie about mental health patients. (Korean title - Ssaibogeujiman Gwaenchanha). Cha Young-goon, played by Im Su-jeoung, is convinced that she is a cyborg robot, who has to find her grandmother’s missing false teeth, even if she must kill the hospital staff to accomplish her mission. Believing her energy source is electrical, she thinks the hospital electro-shock-therapy is recharging her batteries and imagines going on a killing rampage (the fantasy sequences of this happening are very funny, but too few and far between).
In reality, Goon isn’t eating properly and another patient is stealing her food. Another patient, convinced that he steals other people’s souls, provides Goon with confidence in herself by convincing her that he has given her an operation to install a special cyborg’s machine that will transform hospital food into the electrical energy she craves. Goon feels refreshed and in flight of fantasy, she steals the props other schizophrenic patients have stockpiled for herself to give herself the power to escape from the sanatorium. One woman has special (odd0 socks that if rubbed together, are believed to give her the power of flight, so Goon takes those and flies off with her new boyfriend to meet the granny in the woods, but the granny is attached to a bunji cord and cannot talk for long.
In despair at their now solitary existence, the young escapees 9if they have really escaped anywhere at all), decide to kill themselves by letting the lightning from a thunder storm strike them down, and trigger a nuclear explosion in her cyborg components, but when the bolts miss them completely, and the storm stops, they decide to face life anyway and the film ends. Ultimately, it makes no sense whatsoever as the boundaries between sanity and insanity, reality and fantasy, and much more, are left so surreal that the film becomes impossible to decode. Lovely performances, but long and drawn out and ultimately likely to leave audiences wondering what the Hell they just sat through.
Odd, unforgettable moments – the robot killing spree going on in Goon’s head, her flight in the flying socks, a Korean translation of a well known Yodelling song, and Silent Night translated into a song celebrating the importance of Rice.
LINKS
I’M A CYBORG on the International Movie database http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0497137/
I’M A CYBORG on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I'm_a_Cyborg,_But_That's_OK
Arthur Chappell
LINK TO THIS PAGE http://arthurchappell.me.uk/film.review-im.a.cyborg.htm
LINKS TO OTHER PEOPLES PAGES E-mail arthur@chappell7300.freeserve.co.uk
UPDATES MYSPACE - http://www.myspace.com/arthurchappell
FACEBOOK - http://profile.to/arthurchappell/
FACEBOOK BLOG http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blogpage.php?blogid=85623
MY BOOKS - http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=952521
MY TWITTER PAGE - http://twitter.com/arthurchappell