![]() ![]() Yet watching Under the Sun reveals so much more about the country than you’d expect we observe government officials commandeering the actors like puppets, staging their carefully crafted performance of life in “the best country in the world”. In other words, the resulting documentary would become an unashamed piece of propaganda, presenting a day in the life of the young Zin-mi and her ordinary family, who live in the capital city, Pyongyang. The North Korean government decreed they were to be official production partners for the film, selecting all the locations and writing the entire script. After two years of negotiating with the North Korean authorities, he succeeded in gaining unprecedented access to the country to film, but was soon to discover that the government would take total control over his endeavour, forcing him to completely rethink the concept for his documentary. Russian filmmaker Vitaly Mansky decided he wanted to break down these barriers, determined to reveal the truth – or rather, façade – of life under the regime. This restriction forces us to imagine horrors within its borders, relying upon satellite images to gain insight into its day to day reality. ![]() Get more TV and movie news from Yahoo Life on our Entertainment page.North Korea represents a sort of black hole in our modern world: not a Columbus-style mystery waiting to be solved, but rather an ominous enigma formed by our exclusion from it, the only 120,540 km² on a 510 million km² planet to which we are prohibited access. Just skip the wanton stabbing scenes if they make you feel squeamish. ![]() It's action-packed and is never short on much needed heart-racing tension and a tightly scripted, fast paced plot to get the adrenaline going. It's easy to see how My Name has shot up to No. And even after being stabbed 11 times in the liver, the victim still survives and is back in action without much preamble or pretence of recovery. Where director Kim falls flat in are his action scenes, which involve lots of wild flailing, gratuitous stabbing and squelching noises. Ji-woo's precarious situation as a mole in the police force does induce heart palpitations and sweaty hands, particularly in one scene where the narcotics team launches a surprise raid on her benefactor Choi Mu-jin's floating drug factory with Ji-woo in tow, fully intent on catching the drug lord with his hand in the cookie jar. She continues to feed information to Choi Mu-jin while remaining convincingly undercover, even daring to strike up a covert romance with her superior, Sergeant Jeon Pil-do (Ahn Bo-hyun).ĭirector Kim Ba-da definitely does tension well, if not so much violence. ![]() The real action happens when Ji-woo eventually becomes a police corporal and joins the Narcotics Division under the pudgy and balding Captain Cha Gi-ho (Kim Sang-ho) as a double agent. Park Hee-soon's charisma and enigmatic charm as an underworld boss of a large drug cartel is impressive and reminiscent of Tony Leung's performance in Shang Chi, as he takes Ji Woo into his care, training her in the arts of gangster fighting with the sole purpose of molding her into a killer to take down her father's assassin. Those acting scenes from Nevertheless with heartthrob Song Kang must have helped loads. Han So-hee definitely lends an authentic tortured-orphaned girl look to Ji-woo as she punches, stabs and guns her way through life, underground fighting pits and drug rings in order to find her beloved father's killer. Ji-woo walls off her emotions and steels herself to take revenge, and begs the biggest mafia boss Choi Mu-jin (Park Hee-soon) to take her into his drug crime group, Dongcheonpa. She plays Yoon Ji-woo, a girl whose father Yoon Dong-hoon (Yoon Kyung-ho) is brutally murdered in front of her home by an unknown assailant. ![]()
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