Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh

Tag: film reviews

  • “Drag Me to Hell” (2009 Film) – movie review

    Image credit: Google

    At first, I didn’t like the movie poster, which was too screaming of “HORROR” aimed at the teenage audience. So, I avoided watching it for over a decade since its release in 2009. But for some reason, unbeknownst to me, the movie advertisement kept popping up on Amazon Prime and NetFlix until I clicked on it last week out of curiosity blended with 90% boredom and 10% of my brother’s words to try it. I know I was destined to watch it now that I have watched it.


    The movie’s protagonist is Christine, a relatable character, a young woman from a country to Los Angeles, the City of Angels, who wants to build her own life as a successful career woman so that nobody will look down upon her. She is more naive than innocent, with a good heart, if not golden. Nevertheless, she cares about people’s feelings and does not have the iron will to harbor her vengeance against those who insulted her. But sometimes, it’s those little people who get the biggest shoutout. She meets her Waterloo and literally crosses the Rubicon to face the demon. Still, the question echoes: did she deserve the curse? Why is it always that the ones who are good ninety-nine times get picked on and punished without mercy for a one-time fault? What makes them scapegoats for an offense in the eye of the beholder?


    The movie’s director is heartless and sarcastic about human nature in the face of reality by being merciless to the protagonist as if he were trying to play God, who he appears to think is remote and unsympathetic to the plight of his children. Otherwise, why does he let things happen to her and do nothing to protect her from evil? Christine might be nervously anxious to prove herself worthy of better opportunities as a single woman away from her not-so-pleasant past, but that cannot be the cause of sinister consequences. She could have loved herself the way she was, and all would have been well. Indeed, we should be kind and attentive to those in need. Still, the politicians and the celebrities with money are evasive of punishments for their wrongdoings because they know they can get away with anything, even from the curse. And I do not pity the spiteful Gypsy woman who drags the meek, not the powerful, to hell.

    Christine deserves no place in hell.

  • Old People (2022) – Film Essay

    Old People shows the issue of the generation gaps between the young and the old, not in the adolescent revolt against the adult institution, but in the societal and cultural context regarding the weakening familial bond between wife and husband, child and parent, and grandchildren and grandparent.

    Melika is a successful lawyer from a city heading with her children to her sister’s wedding at their childhood home in a village. Upon arrival, Melika finds her once beloved father, who loved her and her children so much, is sent to a nearby nursing home whose environment is no better than a mad asylum in atmosphere and appearance. Seeing her father spiritless and aimless alone in a dark room gives her a pang of leaving him behind for her ambitious future as a city lawyer, but she tries to suppress it by bringing him home just for the wedding day. But that is her self-induced wish to relieve herself of guilt, for her father is so broken with a shattered heart that his daughters deserted him, driven away from their home, their happy life that he still longs for. Such sadness is collected among all the old people in the nursing home, abandoned in dreadful isolation from the community that has put them into such an institutional grave and buried alive. The rest is a prelude to a symphony of carnage burning in the fury of the undead and neglected.

    Although this movie is presented as a horror movie, it really isn’t in terms of its thematic and contextual subject. It is a horror that we as a society have become Logan’s World, where ageism and lookism prevail over humanity and discriminate against those who do not fit in their touchstone of the ideal. And what is old, and how old is old? Are we not all advancing in age? Youth is wasted on the young, as Oscar Wilde cleverly concluded. Being old should not be a curse but a celebration of experience in life and, therefore, must be embraced with respect and dignity. Just because we become old doesn’t mean our feelings are dead, as the grandfather tells his beloved grandson: “Oh, yes! I love you so terribly much!”

  • Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead (Netflix- Manga and Live-Action film) – 1-minute Film review

    Zombie flicks are in vogue. From Netflix to Hulu and others, they are roaming across the boundaries of the digital world, hungry for popularity and craving high ratings. But none of them is ingeniously fresh, and all are infallibly doomed. If you hold on to it, apocalypse doesn’t necessarily kill off a human spirit. A dystopian world may overwhelm your sensory perception, but it won’t kill you if you don’t dwell on it with humor, a handmaid to strength and hope. That is what this film is about.

    The story develops around Akira Tendo, a young office worker fresh out of college, who soon becomes disenchanted with his innocent vision of the work he does because of the unreasonably demanding high workload and gaslighting of his boss. So, when he wakes up the next day and finds himself living among zombies because of an unexpected bio-weaponry disaster, Tendo becomes ecstatic, lest he should go to work any longer. The optimism galvanizes him to pen a bucket list of 100 things to do before he succumbs to the pandemic. What a jolt to live!

    The film stands out from all other dystopian worlds of zombies with humor, hope, and hooray. It weaves a unique perspective to a heartfelt story about a man finding meaning to live amid hopeless situations and ways to huddle through life’s challenging moments, which we can all relate to daily. Nietzsche was right. “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

  • About Backrooms

    It’s gone viral. Sensational it’s been. The latest scare, the newest horror, comes in Backrooms, a YouTube phenomenon that has swept the world’s compass in muffled terror. I have seen it through an algorithm, and I think I have entered the door into the backrooms – willingly by the winks of intrigued moments. Is this the way people get lost in the maze of horror? Even if they are fictional, or so they like to think, nothing is purely fictional without some foundation in reality. Be it ever imaginary, a mental void, emotional distress, continual depression, or perpetual heartaches will be of their backrooms with seemingly no way out. And I think this feeling of utter hopelessness is where Christianity fills or saves the wretchedness of a soul with a promise of hope, the existence of a reason to go on in a seemingly purposeless life.

    Watching a few of the Backrooms series makes me realize that this is how the present-day MZ generation sees a concept of a labyrinth where King Minos of Crete at Knossos kept his illegitimate half-man, half-bull son Minotaur and feeds him on Athenian youths until the Athenian hero Theseus with the help of Adrianne’s thread ball came to the rescue and killed the monster. Is it considered too cheesy for today’s youths to think of Adrianne’s thread ball? Backrooms are all devoid of Christian hope and Greek wit because new generation kids are too smart to believe the existence of such saving grace because there is none of such nonsense, and because they are simply the best of all generations wallowing in the advanced civilization only countable steps below the most advanced extraterrestrial beings in the universe.

    Notwithstanding the ingenious idea of creating such terrifying liminal places within a minimal budget, the whole series will shine in its brilliance as a genre of online game series rather than a film in the fashion of a fake documentary as a new Blaire Witch Project. As civilization gets more technologically advanced, the people become more highly primitive, returning to the laws of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth with no signs of light-heartedness as if it were synonymous with simple-mindedness or backwardness. And I don’t know why Verdi’s “The Chorus of Hebrews” keeps playing in my mind these days.

  • “The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It” (2021) – film review

    “The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It” (2021) is the newest in the Conjuring Universe Series, a new artifact to the Museum of The Haunted All and Sundry. The legendary Ed and Lorraine Warren are as inseparable as a couple in love and benevolent as rescuers of souls afflicted with the forces of evil as ever. But the mysteriously noble and spiritually convincing atmospheric elements are barely there, albeit the mix still has the thematic Catholic flavor. They said that when fact becomes legend, publish legend. So the story of the movie may be based on an actual event that has become American folklore, a modern legend, and it is the legend that the movie published.

    As with the tradition of the Conjuring World, the movie evolves from the actual event of the supernatural phenomenon beyond the reasonable explanation on what the eyes only can see. First, an insidious ambiance surrounding a family house that seems strangely alienated adumbrates a sinister force lurking behind the bathroom door, over the shower curtains, and finally inside your head. Then comes a Catholic priest, thanks to the rite of exorcism popularized by The Exorcist and the Warrens’ association with the religion as their spiritual base. But he is usually not too much of significant help, if not a trouble, so it is always the Warrens’ job to ghost-bust with a style of a medieval magician who used to reconcile esoteric paganism with Christian faith. In this installation, Lorraine proves to be a mighty Christian mystic and a white witch in crossing over the space and reading memories of the dead, all for the fighting the devil’s deputy in a tunnel that promised to capture as many human souls as possible to fill up Hell’s Circles.

    The essential thematic elements of good v. evil, love v. hatred, violence v. peace are unfailingly ubiquitous in this installment. Still, more violence and hatred make up the scenes than the others, making the movie more aligned with screaming scary movies than classified as supernatural horror. Perhaps the application of Catholic elements as a credible supplementary spell on the movie’s ambiance might have slightly fared well with the director’s intention (or the producer James Wan, the original creative director) to make the film elevated to a canon of classic supernatural movies. But it doesn’t give much of the movie’s intended effect when the Warrens can do what priests can do. Besides, the characters other than the Warrens themselves are not convincingly real, sympathetic, or natural. Instead, they are either surreal or theatrical to the point of playing a masque in Elizabethan time, so to speak, which would have been excellent.

    I watched the movie with high hope when it first started showing on HBO Max last Friday night. But my expectation was already turning ominous when I had trouble viewing it at first for some unknown technical reason. Once I got into the third world of Conjuring Universe, I knew it wouldn’t be what I had expected. The real Warrens have become the ghosts themselves, and I wonder what they would have thought about the movie. Judging from their celebrity status in the society of paranormal investigators, I think they would probably have been thrilled about their being the creative subject of the movie. Then maybe, it’s time for me to leave the Conjuring Universe in search of a new world of the supernatural without celebrity.

  • ‘The Fugitive’ (1993 Film) – film review

    The Fugitive (1993) is an adventure and a drama cleverly put together by the elements of popular entertainment and thought-provoking thematic subject of human nature in dealing with the malice of fortune. It consists of elegant scripts, solid storyline, and outstanding performance of the already cracking cast with Harrison Ford as the Fugitive and Tommy Lee Jones as Senior Deputy U.S. Marshall. Brilliantly, veteran actors do not vie for the best shot of cameras to claim the title of Hollywood aristocracy. Still, they only do their very best to portray their roles as possessed by their fictional characters.

    Ford plays the role of a renowned cardiologist with the brain and the heart to care for patients in need. Then one day, the doctor finds himself on the run for the crime he didn’t commit, and above all, for the love of his wife. He has to find who killed his beloved wife, and the Marshall played by Jones has to catch him alive because, well, it’s his job. So much so that when the doctor confronts the Marshall face to face within an arm’s reach and tells the latter that he didn’t kill his wife, the henchman of law says, “I don’t care!” But the marshal isn’t all grim-faced reaper of death hell-bent on capturing the Fugitive, which makes him hard to dislike. Both the Fugitive and the marshal are alike as the mythological Teumessian Fox that never gets caught and the Laelaps Dog that never fails to catch, whether they like it or not.

    Harrison Ford is one of the greatest American actors whom I think belongs to the last 20th century’s Hollywood nobility of actors, including still alive Clint Eastwood. He has the face of a romantic adventurer, an intelligent doctor, an ambitious corporate man, and a no-nonsense prosecutor. From the galaxy far away to the offices in cities, Ford is a protean actor who can pull out the characters as if conjuring them from his grimoire without trying too hard or with overtly effusive sex appeal. The emotions wanting to outburst are nuanced in the power of his voice carried in the elliptical words. He is an action adventurer who seems so natural living in our real-world yet so ideal on-screen, making us wonder whether life imitates art and vice versa.

    The Fugitive is worth watching again if you want to watch something smart and thrilling to forget about the momentary existential dilemma or frustrations. The movie is at present for free to view if you are an amazon prime member. It is a one-of-kind American movie that has become a classic of our own time, and I wish there would be more movies such as this.