My Weekend Trip to Indonesia, Czech Republic, New York City, and Japan

Alright, you caught me; I didn't go to any of those places this weekend. I actually went to the Busan International Film Festival.

I was rather fortunate that the weekend worked out perfectly, because it almost didn't even happen. See, at 4:30 p.m. on Friday, I hadn't even bothered to book a hostel. I wasn't sure if anybody was going to come with, so I hadn't gotten around to it yet. Then last minute, I decided to hell with this, I'll fly this one solo. I knew that Steph and Jo were going, so maybe I'd catch one or two with them and see what tickled my fancy.

But as I said, at 4:30, I still had no place to sleep, and this is a huge festival, so all of the hostels in the city were booked solid. The only one I could find was charging 47, 000 won a night (roughly $47) and was only for women. So a big no on both fronts.

That's when I remembered Che. I met Che when I went to Busan a couple weeks ago. We stayed at his hostel. At one point, Mike went out and bought some soju and poured Che a shot. From there, he proceeded to befriend us and pour shots all night long. The hilarious part was that he had said at the start of the night that he was going to take it easy tonight because he'd had a wild night the previous night. And yet he totally drank Mike and Rob under the table--two individuals who do a fine job of holding their liquor. In the end, Che was our newest, and by far most fun Korean friend. We loved the guy to pieces, he was such a blast. A fine chap, he was.

I figure if my buddy Che couldn't help me out, then I'd be screwed out of luck. Even though the movies I wanted to watch were all playing Saturday, the only way to get tickets was to line up super early at the box office, and there was no chance I'd get there on time if I left from Ulsan the following morning, so I had to get to Busan somehow by Friday night.

I gave Che a ring, and sure enough, he saved the day. Basically, he said, "Come to the Guesthouse, we'll drink, and you can sleep here." I wasn't sure where exactly he meant I was going to sleep--like did he expect me to pass out on the bar in the lobby or something?

As it turned out, we got our drink on, Che ran laps around me in typical Che fashion, we talked with a bunch of foreigners who were staying at the hostel, we had an all around good time, and in the end, I passed out in a room at the back of the first floor that had two beds in it.

The next morning, however, I woke up in a panic. One of the guests I'd spoken to the night before said that if I wanted any chance of getting tickets I had to line up at 5:00 am, not 7:00 as I had originally planned. But when I woke up, it was already 8:11. I bolted out of the hostel and jumped into a cab hoping for the best.

When I got to the Lotte Cinema, which is one of the theatres that was screening movies for the festival, there was no line in sight. But the doorman assured me that this was the right place. Plus, there were two girls who were working for the festival who said the same thing.

Once the doors were opened, I followed the two girls up to the 8th floor and got very excited at the prospect of being the first one in line. Sadly, when the girls realized I didn't actually work for the festival and I was actually looking to buy tickets, they realized they'd made a mistake, apologized, and sent me on my way.

I eventually found my way around the corner to where the actual box office lineup was, and of course, there was a huge line. Thankfully, Jo and Steph just happened to be there already. Mind you, they weren't that much further ahead of me, but they were definitely a good 60 people ahead, which could've made all the difference.

I'd done some pretty extensive research before heading out, so I knew exactly which movies I wanted to watch. First I grouped them by their time slots and prioritized my top choices for each time. Then I looked at the theatre locations and decided I'd only watch movies that were playing at either Lotte Cinema or CGV, because they were very close to one another. And from there, I was easily able to decide which ones I wanted to see. There was only one that I really wanted to catch that had already filled up, but I was pretty happy with the rest of my selections. Jo, Steph, and I would be watching the first one together, but then we would part ways. I was excited.

Of the four movies, two of them turned out to be fantastic, while one was pretty underwhelming, and the last one was just flat out bizarre and stupid. Janalan was a documentary from Indonesia. That was the one I watched with Steph and Jo. It followed the lives of three buskers from very different situations. One was a woman with three children with three different fathers. She was very loyal to her family, but at the same time, she loved what she did for a living, even if her husband disapproved, and she wanted to better herself by getting her high school diploma. She was my favourite, perhaps because she sort of reminded me of my mom. Like my mom, she came from a difficult family situation, but she worked hard to provide for her family. She was determined to accomplish her goals with the cards she was dealt, and she worked hard until she met those goals.

The second character was a Bob Marley looking dude who was a rather interesting cat. On the one hand, he was a romantic and a poet; he lived for his music and he poured his soul into his craft and believes that it unites people. On top of that, he was looking for love. During the film, he meets a girl and falls in love with her and her son. But on the other hand, one of the first scenes that features him involves him and a prostitute in a park. I think he just wanted somebody to love, somebody to connect to, even if only for a night, because he had so much love to give.

The third guy was a homeless man who lived under a bridge. As a child, he taught himself how to play guitar after watching a busker making money while performing on the street. His goal was to help his mother; he dropped out of school so that he could help her with the finances. One of the best scenes in the film involved him and a bunch of his friends working together to renovate his home under the bridge. They painted it and even added fake grass for him to lie down on. Sadly, I fell asleep from sheer exhaustion towards the end of Janalan. I ended up missing the ending of his story, but Jo told me afterwards that the city basically kicked him out from underneath the bridge. I'm not sure where he went from there.

The next movie I saw was from the Czech Republic. It was called My Killer Dog and followed the life of a Neo-Nazi who was probably somewhere between 18 and 20 years old. His best and only friend is his insanely violent dog. The plot of the movie was beyond flat; it followed the kid going to visit his mother, whom his dad is longer with, because he needs her signature on some document in order for him to sell some property. Enthralling, right?

I won't go into the boring details, but my issue with this movie was that it actually had potentially to be a very strong film. It's shot with what looks to be a digital camera, so you get an intensely personal view when you watch the movie. It's like you're there with him every step of the way, and that added to the tension within the character because you could feel his insecurities about his identity, you could feel how he was being pulled in so many different directions by different people until he lost all sense of who he was supposed to be. But the director didn't flesh him out enough for the viewer. For example, you never learn anything about the surrounding characters in this guy's life; you only get his limited perspective, which I suppose is what the director was going for by shooting with a handheld camera. But then the film ends so abruptly, and you're left with no closure, no character development, nothing. The film was such a brief snapshot into this guy's psyche that I felt like I missed half the movie because I blinked.

Movie number 3 was filmed in New York City and was another favourite on the day. It follows the lives of a Latin family: a disciplined and sometimes insensitive mother, her husband who works on some farm and is rarely home, and their two teenage children, one of whom is Autistic. One day the sister doesn't bother to walk her brother home because she'd rather hang out with her friend, and the boy ends up walking on his own. Except he doesn't actually get home, because he follows somebody on to the subway and ends up riding the subway for days. His family has no idea where he disappeared to, and tension rises between the mother and daughter. The mother was perhaps the most interesting character here because at times, you felt sorry for her, and at times she was completely frustrating. She walls herself off emotionally from everybody around her, and is never satisfied with anything or anybody, particularly her daughter. She's chronically disappointed because it's easier to live life expecting nothing rather than having your hopes dashed. And when life hands you such a difficult hand, such as hers, you see how hard she has to work to maintain her family. She's emotionally walled off because she has to put her family first. But when the boy goes missing, that's when her daughter and her husband need her to open up most, and she finds it very difficult; she blames her daughter and refuses to talk to her until her son returns, and she constantly talks down to her husband.

The final movie of the night for me was a Japanese piece of garbage called Real. I chose it because it sort of sounded like an Inception-ish movie in that it dealt with going inside people's dreams and I wanted to see a Japanese take on the concept. However, what I got was a bizarre flick that included the term "psychological zombie," a creepy Japanese boy sporting wet underwear who transforms into a terribly CGI's Lochness monster looking thing, a guy who somehow goes into a coma for a year after falling into pitifully shallow water while in a drunken stupor, and a predictable plot twist that I called ten minutes into the movie. It was terrible and nonsensical in every possible way.

Nonetheless, two out of four movies isn't a bad turnout. And considering I paid for four movies at a huge film festival, and the same amount of money probably would've afforded me one ticket to a TIFF screening, I really can't complain. I hopped on a train, got home at midnight, and called it a night. A weekend well spent. Thankfully I didn't dream of any Lochness monsters that night.