I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK

The ROSSMAN With Crazy Person

What. The. FUCK?! What the fuck has happened to writer and director Chan-wook Park? Park, who was responsible for one of the greatest trilogies of all time (the Korean Vengeance Trilogy), has made a movie so utterly lame that it appears to have been filmed by the inmates of the psycho ward that it features. You may argue, "That's the BRILLIANCE of Park! He made a movie about psychos that looks like it was made by psychos! He be a geniuses!" And you would be wrong. You see, a movie made by crazy people is incomprehensible — and so is I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK. Incomprehensibleness is never good in any entertainment medium. Unless you're a Nirvana song.

The whole thing starts off with young Cha Young-goon hearing voices giving her instructions on how to power up her cyborg body (that would be by slitting her wrist and inserting a couple of live electrical wires into the wound), which then gets her a one-way trip to Insane-o World, complete with pajamas and an odd assortment of other fucked up individuals who are a danger to themselves and society as a whole. Apparently the idea of Darwinism has not taken hold in South Korea yet.

While in the nut farm, Young-goon meets a crazy cast of (supposedly) loveable loons who help her... well, who help her pretend that she's really a cyborg more even more than her fuck up of a mind has already convinced her of it (Yeah, I'm not really sure that this was really help per se). Let's see... There's the woman who's memory gets erased with every electro-shock therapy she receives (and she pretty much has a daily standing appointment), the old man infatuated with table tennis and ass scratching, and the psycho who steals other people's emotions, singing voices and socks, to name a few. Oh, and they all have really shitty, retard haircuts as is required by law for all mongos to wear.

The basic PLOT of the thing (holy shit is that word used loosely) is this: Young-goon thinks she's a cyborg (I already told you this part), and as such she doesn't think she can eat food because it will ruin her internal systems. Il-soon, the mental patient who steals emotions and ping-pong skills, falls in love with her (in a crazy fucking way) and decides to help her start eating again.... That's what TWO GODDAMN HOURS of this thing are about. Oh, Young-goon's equally batty grandma's dentures play a role too... I think. And after Il-soon cures Young-goon of her crazy not eating he helps her decipher her grandma's last words to her (as spoken through the psycho-ward's ambulance's rear glass door as they took her insane ass away. Then the last 10 minutes of this thing are about Young-goon turning herself into an A-bomb with the help of a bolt of lightning.

I so wasted my Sunday evening with this shit.

I'll admit, that just hearing the name "Chan-wook Park" and knowing that this flick was about bizarre, crazy, fucked-up people really got me interested in it... But it's got NOTHING going for it beyond those wasted ideas. It's boring, dragged out, and it's been done before (just with more lovable yahoos in the Dudley Moore-led movie Crazy People from 1990 [I still sing that "Hello Song" whenever I'm in the shower and not thinking of Sung-hi Lee... Hell, sometimes when I am]). The characters (what this movie is really all about) aren't even all that endearing. Yes, Young-goon is really, really cute, but she's as one dimensional as the soulless automaton that she thinks she is. Plus she's really stupid and easily tricked. And okay, I admit, this movie does have ONE thing going for it: the scenes in which Young-goon flips out and starts shooting the shit out of the entire nursing staff in one of her delusional hallucination fits of cyborgness... those (few and far between) scenes are a blast to watch... But that's it. That was the only thing to look forward to in this whole mess.

I guess I can see why Director Chan-wook Park chose this as his next big work after Sympathy for Lady Vengeance; he wanted something different from the typical revenge yarn, and a completely unrelated genre from the tales of whoa and violence that he himself perfected. But still, Chan-wook, buddy, there were ways of doing this that did not involve royally sucking. There HAD to have been. I'm a Cyborg, But That's Okay actually makes me fear that Director Park is a one-trick pony. So sad, if true.

And at the end of this movie I stood up, breathed in deeply, and bellowed as loud as I could, "WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT ABOUT?!?!?!" Nobody responded.

So, what did I think of I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK? It is made up of the diarrhea-filled diapers stuffed by finger-to-lip bumbling psychos. I award it no points, and may Buddha have mercy on its soul.

The Committed BOB FROM
THE FUTURE

This movie was quite traumatizing to me. It brought back vivid flashbacks of that one mission when I had to help the Rossman travel back through time in order to alter Happy Amy's past, and make it so that she never met George Clooney in his trailer while he was filming ER, and they never had a lovechild together and raised little Georgie Jr. in the perfect family environment, so that the Detroit Lions would never win the 2001 Super Bowl and therefore cause the decline and then eventual destruction of Western Civilization decades before it was supposed to happen.

Well, the Angry Amy that you all know today eventually found out about this change in her history, and she stole my time-belt and got me registered at Bellevue, where I stayed for 4 whole years (not even my future self knew I was there because of the time distortion caused by all of the crazy people and their psycho-waves... kind of like radiation, only massively more devastating). The only way I even escaped was by caving in and claiming that the electro-therapy that they were giving me was indeed working, and that the president of my future time was NOT Harry Potter III (brought about by a mishap with a Reality Distributor that accidentally brought the boy wizard [and Voldemort] to life, and ultimately caused the Wizard War IV to break out... but that's neither here nor there), and that I was actually from the past, errr, I mean the present.

The Rossman tells me that he didn't know I was trapped in the mental asylum, and that he wasn't using my time-belt which he and Carl had stolen back from Angry Amy for personal gain before my past self had visited him for another mission while I was locked up. He also swears that it was not he who told Angry Amy of her original state, and that he did indeed own 4 mansions and 6 Ferraris the whole time. He says that I just must not have been paying attention. It does make me wonder.

I find that I cannot rate this movie. I found that I was shaking and crying 15 minutes into it, and... And it was just too much. I'm sorry, but I don't want to talk about it anymore.

The WOLFMAN

Craziness is all in the eye of the beholder. Believe it. Fuckers have been saying that I'M insane for years now, I'm guessing because of all the human sacrifices and the orgies and whatnot... Well, those fuckers don't say it for long — I see to that — but they do tend to raise a stink about it all the way up until they're placed on the Blood Altar, and up until the drugs make their speech incoherent. Oh, that reminds me. I need to wash some robes before the next full moon. And I'll need plenty of bleach.

You should bathe in the radiance of the crazies of the world, people. The Wolfman does. Sometimes the Wolfman even bathes IN the crazies. Two Wolfy thumbs up for any movie about insane-o-wards.