{"id":21374,"date":"2016-07-10T03:39:27","date_gmt":"2016-07-10T07:39:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=21374"},"modified":"2016-07-10T03:40:08","modified_gmt":"2016-07-10T07:40:08","slug":"alone-hongmin-2015-new-york-asian-film-festival-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2016\/07\/10\/alone-hongmin-2015-new-york-asian-film-festival-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"Alone (Hongmin) (2015) [New York Asian Film Festival 2016]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"AloneHongmin\"<\/a>Sumin is a photographer documenting the gentrification and changes of his neighborhood.\u00a0 One day, as he\u2019s taking more photos, he witnesses the murder of a woman.\u00a0 The killers come after him and he wakes up naked on what looks to be a gazebo in his neighborhood.\u00a0 Odd things happen; Sumin is rendered unconscious and wakes up in odd places over and over again. Alone, or Hongmin in its original language, was directed by Hong-min Park who co-wrote it with Hye-jin Cha.<\/p>\n

The film is built in a way where the lead character of Sumin lives many events and those events may or may not be connected to each other.\u00a0 The story built with these does bring up questions but answers few of them.\u00a0 The film moves at a good pace, but with no established goal or point to it, it all feels a bit useless.\u00a0 Why is Sumin going through this? Is he alive? Is he dead and this is his purgatory?\u00a0 Was something lost in translation?\u00a0 The proceedings are somewhat interesting but not captivating which makes the film feel long even with its pace moving things along nicely.<\/p>\n

The cast for this film is fairly small and everything revolves around Sumin who is played by Lee Ju-won.\u00a0 His performance is good with some nuances but with nothing really standing out which makes his presence a bit monotone through the film.\u00a0 However, it does feel like it may have been the point as his character seems to lead a bit of a humdrum life leasing to a less than exciting personality.<\/p>\n

There is one scene with a major special effect and it\u2019s quite good.\u00a0 However, to not spot it, details will not be discussed.\u00a0 The effect is, well, effective and well done.\u00a0 The sound accompanying it is a bit cringe-inducing, in a good way.\u00a0 A few other bloody bits are found here and there and they all look realistic as well, even when how they happen feels out of context for their scene.<\/p>\n

As is the case with a lot of middle of the road films, neither great nor horrendous, Alone is hard to review without making it sound worse than it is.\u00a0 Alone is not a bad film and it has some good ideas, it\u2019s just that the execution comes off as rather bland and that despite all of its efforts, it fails at really captivating the attention of its viewer.\u00a0 It may very well be a case of a film that is just not for everyone, so feel free to give it a try.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sumin is a photographer documenting the gentrification and changes of his neighborhood.\u00a0 One day, as he\u2019s taking more photos, he witnesses the murder of a woman.\u00a0 The killers come after him and he wakes up naked on what looks to be a gazebo in his neighborhood.\u00a0 Odd things happen; Sumin is rendered unconscious and wakes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":21375,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1284,12],"tags":[50,113,302,367,703,1087],"class_list":["post-21374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-festivalsevents","category-movie-reviews","tag-a","tag-asian","tag-drama","tag-foreign","tag-mystery","tag-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21374"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21376,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21374\/revisions\/21376"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}