Nowhere to Hide

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Product Description ------------------- Detective Woo is on the trail of the mysterious gangster Sungmin, a master of disguise who always manages to elude his pursuers. Eventually, the cop tracks down and confronts the master-criminal in the suburbs of a coal-mining town. .com ---- The most kaleidoscopic crime thriller you'll ever see. Nowhere to Hide is about a team of cops tracking down a murderous drug lord--but the plot is the only ordinary thing about the movie. Nowhere to Hide uses just about every visual trick imaginable: slow motion, rapid-fire editing, different film textures (from gritty black and white to luminous color), freeze-frames, as well as techniques that have only become possible with computers and that are impossible to describe. But the movie has more than visual razzle-dazzle: scenes go off in bizarre directions, the tone shifts radically from hyperviolence to total sentimentality (in one scene, the loose-cannon detective is brutally beating a handcuffed prisoner; moments later, he's as happy as a little boy when his sister gives him a pair of gloves), the characters are outrageously melodramatic. The soundtrack shares this amazing cinematic schizophrenia, featuring light pop songs, shrieking heavy metal, moody Spanish guitar, and soaring classical. The overall effect is dizzying, disorienting, but at the same time giddy and exciting. The closest American equivalent is Charlie's Angels; these are movies that have moved beyond story logic and character development into sheer sensory enjoyment; movies that push action-movie techniques to the point of becoming almost avant-garde, some insane hybrid of John Woo and Jean-Luc Godard. Not to be missed. --Bret Fetzer