A Bittersweet Life vs. My Wife Is a Gangster 3

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Both films mix Korean mediocrity with Korean brilliance. My Wife is a G 3 is pretty meh, but Shu Qi is just breathtakingly bonerlicious in that film. A Bittersweet life is often slow and sometimes sappy, but LB-h is a cool motherfucker. Love that shadow-boxing at the end.

What did you find sappy about it? Serious question. I thought it did a pretty good job at avoiding sappy.

It's not actually that sappy, at least not relative to other films (especially Korean melodrama). I think what turns me off is that it is sometimes sappy relative to itself. I dunno if that makes sense. There's such a cold brutality to so much of the film, there's LB-h's cool and his character's stoic "I'm gonna take care of things" demeanour... but then he fucks himself over because he gets attached to a basically random chick. Does he cry over her at the end as well? I dunno, but that's not so bad because the ending as a whole gives you that tragic hero formula which I like. Yeah, it's not really sappy and a lot of it is brilliant, I just would've preferred the character to be calculating enough to not give a fuck about the girl (like the ending of Heat where De Niro isn't calculating enough to not risk executing the guy that fucked them over, but is calculating enough to look at the girl and just walk away). Obviously that would require a completely different plot seeing as it's the driving force of the whole film. But yeah, my main complaint is that it's slow, particularly when you compare LB-h's more inert character here with his slick one as The Bad (I know you didn't like that film).