- Title
- 'East meets West meets East again': The Good, The Bad, The Weird and the Transnational Dialogue of Auteurs
- Creator
- Christensen, Joyleen
- Relation
- Unbridling the Western Film Auteur: Contemporary, Transnational and Intertextual Explorations p. 183-201
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.3726/b13339
- Publisher
- Peter Lang
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2018
- Description
- Though it is easy to initially dismiss Kim Jee-woon's 2008 film Joheunnom, Nabbeunnom, Isanghannom - literally translated as The Good, The Bad, The Weird - as a direct pastiche of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (Leone, 1966), an examination of how Kim employs variations on a range of tropes of the Western genre reveals that the Korean film is far from a straightforward imitation of the Sergio Leone classic. Utilizing the familiar plot of a thief, a hitman and a bounty hunter drawn together in a tense race to discover a buried treasure, The Good, The Bad, The Weird transposes the desperate search for confederate gold amidst the backdrop of the American Civil War with a battle to find Qing Dynasty treasures in the Manchurian desert during the time of Japan's occupation of Korea. Like the Leone 'Spaghetti Westerns', Kim's film - dubbed a 'Kimchi Western' - is highly stylized and hyper-violent, but it is here that the most distinct departures can be noted. Essentially, the film acts less as a form of derivation of the original than as a more nuanced transnational translation, recreating the original story in such a way that it reflects Kim's easy movement between genres alongside traces of the influence of other auteur directors - most notably, Quentin Tarantino. With an oft-noted emphasis upon humour and action, Kim's film distinguishes itself, ultimately aligning itself more closely with the action and martial arts films of Hong Kong cinema that so strongly mark Tarantino's oeuvre. Concisely described as 'East meets Wests meets East again' (Elley 2008), The Good, The Bad, The Weird is a rare example of an Asian Western that effectively highlights the complex nature of auteur-centered transnational cinematic flows.
- Subject
- western films; kimchi western; Asian western; Kim Jee-Woon
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1450985
- Identifier
- uon:44070
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781787071551
- Language
- eng
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