While much of the afternoon was spent fighting with an impact driver, a bunch of vinyl siding j-channels, the disaster zone that is the top of my desk, and low blood sugars determined to undermine my determination, the second row of Ditko Spideys are now in their new home on the wall behind the desk. Need some clear fishing line so the top row doesn’t fall, but that’s tomorrow’s battle.
This week’s newsletter - featuring with the first of my monthly FICTIONS releases – is in the send queue and I'm back to the work on the second Fic. Thought it might be fun to revisit a story I had abandoned but it ended up resurfacing the reasons I stopped it, so I've put the onus on myself to relentlessly push forward. No going back, not anymore.
BALLERINA (Lee Chung-hyun, 2023)
(****+ / *****): Few phrases inspire an automatic watch like "Korean revenge film" and BALLERINA is one of my recent tops: tight, taut, crowd-pleasing revenge story with great performances across the board – especially lead Jeon Jong-seo as Ok-ju (in a rather Michael-Caine-in-GET-CARTER-infused turn) – and narrative twists (one in particular being a fantastic subversion of the "hunt from the bottom up" fare) that jolt what can be – in less imaginative hands – a fairly rote genre with pathos and unpredictability.
