Saturday, January 27, 2007

Those shoes aren't red!

Sometimes, it's fun just to go to Best Buy and look at movies you've never heard of and try to find something good in that barren landscape of anonymity. Like finding a needle in a haystack. Sometimes you find something amazingly fun, like Kamikazee Girls the rest of the time, you pick up something like The Red Shoes.

The Red Shoes is a South Korean movie written and directed by Yong-gyun Kim. The only description that the back cover has is "Mysteriously abandoned on a subway platform lies a pair of red shoes... to die for" The front cover just has the title with the tag line "one size kills all" and a bloody shoe with a decomposing foot still in it. At this point, I'm thinking "wow, this looks pretty sweet."

So, I take it home, where I decide to watch it. The movie starts on a subway platform where a young lady see an abandoned pair of shoes. She goes to grab them and put them on, but another girl saw them too. And they fight for them. And the second girl wins and walks off, wearing the shoes. As she's walking away, the shoes eat her feet!



And at this point, I'm thinking "wow, this looks pretty sweet." I was so wrong. The movie didn't make any fucking sense. The mom finds the shoes next, and her husband is cheating on her, so she turns on the humidifier and goes to find a new apartment with her daughter. Then, apparently, she meets an interior designer/squatter who is designing an office. Then the mom and daughter are fighting over the shoes, and I mean FIGHTING. And then the mom falls in love with the designer or something. And then, her friend takes the shoes and has an "accident" and gets her feet cut off. And then...I don't know, man, this movie had holes Hannibal could lead his army though. The mom really did sum the whole thing up at one point...



Yeah, what are you talking about? What the hell is going on here? The most interesting thing about this is that it feels like there's a whole Lord of the Rings thing going on. The shoes are the One Ring. The mom is Frodo, the daughter is...well, not Sam, maybe Boromir? The designer could be Sam though. And the subway is Mount Doom. In that regard, it's kinda interesting. It's like this epic quest to destroy a pair of shoes. Except, no one is looking to destroy them.

The movie wasn't very good. And, the shoes weren't even red! They were pink. All in all, I'd say it's something like 3 lone sneakers on the side of the road out of 10.