Ehirerapp Waste of time

Griff Lees Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Marva-nova Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

Beulah Bram A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Zoe Cheung Young-goon is mentally ill, who imagines herself as a combat cyborg. Her problems are: first, she doesn't want to eat and thinks she needs electricity to be charged; second, she wants to send denture to her grandma, who has already been sent to a mental hospital for thinking she is a rats and eating radish only; third, she needs to figure out what her grandma wants to tell her about the ultimate meaning of living. After she fails to charge herself, Young-goon is also sent to a mental hospital, where she meets a bunch of wardmates with different symptoms but equally powerful imagination. Il-sun is one of them with schizophrenia and kleptomania. believing he can steal everything in the world. Il-sun is to help Young-goon solve her problems and meanwhile pacify his own inner wounds.This story is generally about how the two schizophrenic patients comfort each other and fall in love. Crazy!Chan-Wook Park is the director with his unique style in film language. His works are very recognizable and always with great fun (to some extent, as those of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Wes Anderson). I like Chan-Wook Park's works for their beautiful appearance-jumping cut, flexible camera, bright colors and interesting soundtrack- rather than the story itself. Olyboy, Stoker and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance are all about cruel revenge and are a little too bloody for me. Besides, for me. it's difficult to get why those stories develop and end in a certain crazy way, maybe because I'm just not as crazy as those characters in the stories.But I really enjoy "I'm a Cyborg. But That's OK". Yes, it's still crazy. But who cares how crazy it is, since all the characters live in a mental hospital. We cannot understand their imagination world. Just enjoy! There is no much bloody in this film. Happiness and cruelty are very well balanced.

Jonny_B_Lately First, I want to readily acknowledge that long-time fans of director Park's works hated this film. It was nothing like "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance," "Oldboy," or "Sympathy for Lady Vengeance" and that is understandable. This is a very different film. But it is clear from box- office receipts that this was a flop as far as Park's country-men were concerned; they hated it too.WARNING: SPOILERS PRESENT! Young-goon (played by Lim Su-jeong) has lost her sanity. While assembling a radio in a factory she imagines that the assembly instructions coming from loudspeakers are telling her to open her wrist, insert house current wires, and plug herself into an outlet so she can recharge. She thinks she's a cyborg and her mission in "life" is to avenge her grandmother's commitment to an asylum for Alzheimer's victims. Once committed to her own asylum she refuses to eat. The staff do not understand this, but from Young-goon's perspective it makes perfect sense; she has to recharge not eat. After all she often tells the staff "I'm not a psycho: I'm a cyborg."Naturally this is a delusion, but a very complete one and since she's convinced that she is a cyborg she feels no obligation to explain her reasoning to the staff, instead preferring to converse with vending machines, radios, and light fixtures. Il-soon (played by Rain), another inmate, is a known theft of quirks, attributes, and ailments. He is often asked by other inmates to steal their insecurities or the very social quirks that got them committed in the first place. Apparently he is very effective as the inmates that have asked for his help improve mentally. Young-soon learns of this and convinces him to steal her "sympathy" (a cyborg sin) so she can effectively gun down the staff of the asylum.Of course Young-soon's "hunger-strike" is killing her and fellow inmate, Il-soon, manages to convince her that he has created a "rice megatron" that converts eaten rice directly into electricity. Once he "installs" this in her back she feels free to eat and her health improves.Of course the staff is grateful, but they don't really understand what he did or how he did it.The story is told with such care and humility that you can't help but love the characters, feel complete sympathy for them, and relate fully with them even though they are clearly not in full possession of their mental faculties. Park has deftly treated the subject of mental aberration with care.As should be expected of a Park film, the delusions of violence against the staff are blood drenched gore. After all, Young-soon as a cyborg, once her sympathy is stolen, she is a highly effective killing machine.As a love story it is very different. It is not about sex; it is, instead, a story of care and compassion for one's fellow human being.I predict that in the coming decades this will be seen as Park Chan- wook's finest film. Much like Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life" was widely panned when released, but is now one of the few films he is remembered for.

Imdbidia South-Korean director Chan-wook directs an original story about friendship and love in a mental asylum.Cha Young-goon (played by Im Su-jeong) develops a mental illness after her schizophrenic grandmother is interned and separated from her. Cha believes she is a killer cyborg and does not eat, and has been told that she has to master a cyborg's seven steps of perfection to get rid of her human psyche and be able to seek revenge on her grandma's captors - the men in white (paramedics and nurses). When interned, Cha meets Park Il-soon (played by Rain) a ping-pong player antisocial guy that steals other people's souls, who takes an immediate interest in her.What makes this film so especial is that the movie offers the reality both as the insane see it, from their subjective point of view, but also as what it is, that is from an objective point of view. In fact, the real facts are used more to anchor to story and makes the rest understandable than to focus on the reality itself. The craziness, manias and obsessions of the insane are presented as an an essential part of their personality, not as an aberration of the same, therefore, the para-reality they live in becomes real and acceptable for the viewer. More importantly, the script does not try to redeem the characters from their insanity, but make that insanity meaningful and tolerable for their survival. It could have been really easy to present the insane as pathologically aggressive and nasty, as most movies about madness do, or like loonies without feelings or real human heart, but the script deviates from the obvious and presents a surreal world that is full of magic, pain, suffering and happiness, in which different people with a different pathology are able to tick and connect to a deep human level.All the characters are treated with empathy, tenderness, warmth, naivety and a great sense of humor. The characters' studio combined with a light playful approach to the stories works perfectly on the screen and makes the craziness completely engaging. The movie is also a good reflection on personal identity and how important is the way we internally see ourselves to position ourselves in society and the world.The film is extremely stylish and artistic, too, from the credits to the cinematography to the lighting. The start is fantastic and the way the credits are presented and incorporated into the story. Grand class are the initial scenes of Cha working in her factory before she tries to "recharge her batteries": the contrast and sharpness of the colors, the camera angling and scene pacing create a wonderful eye candy moment that is a big contrast to the rest of the movie, dominated by pastel and white-ish colors. The movie has many surreal and dream-like scenes, beautifully filmed, which really help to convey the reality as perceived by the insane.Although the movie is cataloged everywhere as a romantic story, to reduce this story to a romance story is to devalue a film that has much more to offer. Romance is just another piece in the puzzle, the one that gives its magic to the story, the redemptive element of Cha's survival; it develops piano piano, but is not cheesy but wonderfully quirky and special.All cast members are good in their respective roles, and the main actors, Im an Rain (and the actress who plays the food-obsessed lady) are believable in their portray of their fragile but complex characters.My main critique to the movie is its pacing, that is sometimes a bit too slow, and the cohesion among all the insane in the asylum, which is obvious in some parts of the movie, but it is not well explained or shown at times. I would have liked that the director used strong colors for the whole movie, which would have been much more intriguing and worked perfectly with the stories, instead of the expected asylum whites and pastels; still, this is a personal preference, not a critique.This is a mesmerizing movie for on-mainstream film lovers. It has something special and unique that will stay with you for a long time.The movie won the Alfred Bauer Award at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2007.

Tweekums Having seen Park Chan-wook's Vengeance Trilogy and enjoyed them I was keen to see how he would tackle a more light-hearted film. With this he clearly demonstrates that he is not a one trick pony. Here he manages to make a film with plenty of laughs as well as some sadness. It would be too easy for a comedy set in a mental institution to descend into a freak show where we are invited to laugh at the patients condition but he skilfully avoids that.We are introduced to the protagonist Cha Young-goon in the opening sequence where she is working in an electronics factory, she hears a voice telling her what to do and cuts open her arm, pushes wires into the wound, tapes them in place then plugs herself in to the mains. She survives this but as there is clearly something wrong she ends up in a mental institution. As she is convinced that she is a cyborg she refuses to eat, instead spending her lunch time holding a battery. She grows to believe that her purpose is to kill the doctors there but her sympathy is preventing her from doing this because of this she forms a friendship with another patient who claims to be a thief who can steal just about anything... if he can steal Thursday surely he can steal her sympathy. As she isn't eating she is getting weaker and her new friend Park Il-sun is determined to persuade her to eat, he does this by giving her a device which he tells her will enable her to eat food.The film has many poignant moments as well as several surreal scenes such as those where Young-goon believes she is gunning down the medical staff at the facility. The actors did a good job especially Su-jeong Lim in the lead role who had a strange detached look which was somewhat increased by her blonde eyebrows. With this film Park Chan-wook has clearly demonstrated he can make light hearted films.... I certainly wasn't expecting him to make a film that featured yodelling.