Friday, January 25, 2008

Movie Review: Barking Dogs Never Bite

If you’re anything at all like me, you not only love movies, but you tend to fall in love with directors as well. You enjoy a certain style, the way the dialogue is brought to life in a scene, or the way a certain scene is shot. I end up liking a movie, looking into who “did it,” and following up by watching their other movies. I started, in this case, with The Host, a fantastic Korean monster movie directed and written by Joon-ho Bong. I moved on to his Memories of Murder, a movie about the first documented Korean serial killer, and from there I discovered the one I’m going to talk about here: Barking Dogs Never Bite.

Please note: this is not a movie for the animal lover who can’t bear to see a single moment of cruelty to animals. Trust me. I’m not one of those people, and some of the scenes made me cringe.

The story starts out with a man and his pregnant wife living in an apartment complex. He is working part time at a local university and trying frantically to secure a full time position. Between his periods of inactivity and his desperation to become full time, he is not quite sane, and snaps one night when a neighbor’s dog won’t stop barking.

One thing leads to another, and soon there are posters around town for not one, but two missing dogs. The girl who works at the municipal building becomes involved with the owners in trying to find the dogs, and through a cunning plot twist, the professor and the clerk end up befriending one another.

I don’t want to spoil anything about what happens to the dogs OR the people, but I’ll say that it’s definitely a quirky little movie and worth watching, especially if you’ve seen Bong’s other movies. You’ll enjoy the performance here by the clerk, who played the aunt in The Host, and was great in both movies. (Also, her best friend, who works in the coffee shop, is one of the women in jail in Chan-wook Park’s Lady Vengeance.) Keep an eye out for those! And enjoy.

2 comments:

Elizabeth Thorpe said...

new reviews! nice job.

Unknown said...

i'll follow you into the dark...