The Good, the Bad, and the Weird

• Release Date: South Korea, July 17, 2008
• Budget: US$10,000,000 (HK$78,000,000)
  Funds Secured: US$8,000,000 (HK$62,400,000)
• Filming is to take place mostly in China (around six months), the rest being shot in Holliwood and Korea.
• The movie has been sold in Cannes for "a high six-figure pre-sale deal with France's ARP Selection".

In the 1930s, the world is in chaos. In Northeast Asia, the Korean Peninsula has fallen into the hands of the Japanese Imperialists. Many Koreans have flocked to Manchuria, the vast terrain of horses and wilderness bordering their homeland and China. Some of them, inevitably, have turned into mounted bandits to earn their living in this barren wasteland.

Tae-gu (The Weird) is a thief. He robs a train of Japanese military officers, but the incident is not as simple as it first seems. In the middle of this fierce gun battle against the Japanese, he obtains a mysterious map that leads to a treasure from the Qing Dynasty, buried somewhere in Manchuria.

Yet, the map is also sought by Chang-yi, the cold blooded hitman (The Bad). Tae-gu must fight not only the Japanese but also Chang-yi and his fellow thugs, who happen to attack the train at the same time. At the end of this intense gunfight, a mysterious man jumps into the center of the battle from nowhere and rescues Tae-gu with astonishing gunplay.

Having survived the battle, Tae-gu thanks the man for saving his life. Yet, he does not know that this stranger is Do-won, the bounty hunter (The Good), who has been chasing Tae-gu to turn him in for a reward.

These three men - Do-won (The Good), Chang-yi (The Bad) and Tae-gu (The Weird) - will soon discover that the map they are battling for is also a magnet that attracts others as diverse as the Korean resistance, Chinese/Russian/Korean mountain bandits and the Japanese army. The blazing gun battle in the train proves to be merely the beginning of the rollercoaster ride to the final showdown to come.

The GOOD
"A man who was too proud to be bad"

Woo-Sung Jung
After first finding work as a model, he made his film debut in the 1994 movie The Fox With Nine Tails, together with Ko So-young.
Jung found widespread fame in Kim Sung-soo's 1997 film Beat, in which he played a high school student who becomes caught up in gang life against his will. Jung's international breakthrough was in 2001 in Musa, co-starring international renowned Chinese star Zhang Ziyi. The movie wasn't really a success considered of its production cost, but Asian audiences started to notice Jung Woo-sung. Jung Woo-sung then starred in award winning movie A Moment to Remember alongside Son Ye-jin in 2005; and again caught the Asians' attention in 2006 with Daisy, co-starring Jun Ji-hyun and directed by famous Hong Kong director Andrew Lau.

The BAD
"A man who desired too much to be good"

Byung-Hun Lee
Lee made his debut in 1991, starring in the television drama Asphalt My Hometown. Lee's breakthrough came in 2000 with movie Joint Security Area, co-starring Song Kang-ho and Lee Young-ae. The movie was the highest grossing film in Korean history back then, surpassing the box office benchmark set by Shiri. Lee Byung-hun then starred in movie Bungee Jumping of Their Own in early 2001. These 2 movies had won him multiple awards, including the prestigious Blue Dragon Award and Dae-jong Award. A Bittersweet Life, released in 2005, where he played the super-cool hitman with motivations all his own, was well received by critics.

The UGLY / The WEIRD
"A man who was too wacky to be good or bad"

Kang-ho Song
Song first film role was role as an extra in Hong Sang-soo's The Day a Pig Fell into the Well (1996). And in 2000 Song came to the forefront as one of Korea's leading actors with the award-winning role as a North Korean sergeant in Joint Security Area. Song also starred in Park Chan-wook's acclaimed followup, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, played a leading role in yet another critically-acclaimed smash hit, Memories of Murder from young director Bong Joon-ho and he also took the lead in Antarctic Journal, a big-budget project by debut director Im Phil-sung, about an expedition in Antarctica that performed weakly at the box-office. In 2006 took a leading role in Bong Joon-ho's record-breaking creature movie The Host. The film helped to broaden international awareness of Song's talent, and indeed he beat out several of Asia's best known stars to be named Best Actor at the inaugural Asian Film Awards held in Hong Kong in March 2007.

Kim Jee-woon began his career as a stage actor, then stage director, and finally has become one of the most popular and acclaimed figures among modern Korean directors/screenwriters. His second screenplay, The Quiet Family (1998), won him the Best Screenplay prize in a local contest, and Kim went on to make his directorial debut with this screenplay. The film was invited to many film festivals. Kim's films, from The Quiet Family (1998) to last year's A Bittersweet Life, have been hailed by critics and audiences alike for his unique style and storytelling. His second feature, The Foul King (2000), drew more than 2 million spectators, while his astounding horror film of true visual elegance, A Tale of Two Sisters (2003), reached 3.5 million viewers nation-wide. It went on to be remade by Dreamworks in the US.

The broad plains of Manchuria offer a seemingly boundless landscape of earth and sky, long ruled by wild men and their horses. It became a battle
field for great powers in 1930s. And it also became a land of exile for Koreans wandering there.

Do-won, the bounty hunter, Chang-yi, the cold-blooded hitman and Tae-gu, the train bandit, are players in an epic story staged against Manchuria's striking, exotic landscape.

I would like to express the overflowing emotion filling the endless landscape with a matter of life and death, but I also want to do it in a rather humorous way. On yet another level, I want to show the audience the faces of Koreans of that era who had been abandoned by their homeland and by the insurmountable tide of history.

Personally, this film also represents a genre that I have envisioned during my previous filmmaking endeavors. With this never-before-seen genre of the "Oriental Western", I want to create cinematic excitement and the sensation of wild action staged on a vast and exotic landscape.

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Director, Jee-Woon Kim:

• I had fun violating the laws of the western in this hostile environment. Now I want to share the pleasure of seeing the chase scenes between these three men pursuing their dreams.

Woo-Sung Jung:

• I, too am very fond of westerns, particularly Clint Eastwood's films, and the spaghetti westerns in which he appears. So it's quite amusing to try to get inside the skin of these typically western characters.

Byung-Hun Lee:

• I think that basically, all these characters possess all three characteristics: the weird, the bad, and good; they're all three at the same time. The worst of the three is probably the one who's sitting next to me, and that's the director!

• Variety, by DEREK ELLEY
  http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117937273.html?categoryid=31&cs=1
  Chemistry among three of South Korea's most expensive thesps is just fine. Song, evoking Eli Wallach's wily Tuco but with a peasant bluster, motors the movie; Lee, mirroring Lee Van Cleef's icy Angel Eyes but with a Korean psycho-gangster mentality, is also commanding. Least developed of the three, but with a graceful athleticism, is Jeong, with the pure bounty-hunter code of Clint Eastwood's Blondie. Impressively, all three handle the vast majority of their own stunts.
  
• eFilmCritic, by David Cornelius
  http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=17672&reviewer=392
  Through it all, there are great performances (especially by Song, who delivers a masterfully layered comic turn) and great ideas and greater thrills. Kim, bursting with appreciation for the movies that influenced him, bolstered by a talent to make movies that are all his own, makes his mark as one of the must-watch filmmakers of this generation.
  
• Eye for Film, by Anton Bitel
  http://www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/reviews.php?id=7395
  All the stock scenes of the oater are here: wide-open plains, train robberies, gun battles, knife fights, opium dens, horse chases and tense Mexican stand-offs - but Jee-woon, a past master at manipulating mood, once again delivers a film of constant tonal surprise, with the moments of extreme sadistic violence offset by ramshackle comedy, and grand action set-pieces sitting alongside calmer character drama.
  
• Lunapark6, by luna6
  http://lunapark6.com/the-good-the-bad-the-weird.html
  "The Good, The Bad, The Weird" offers fun & excitement on a level not found in many recent Korean films. Action fans will simply love the film, while most others will find there own different reasons to love the movie.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Italian: Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo) is a famous 1966 Italian epic spaghetti Western directed by Sergio Leone, starring Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach in the title roles.

The screenplay was written by Age & Scarpelli, Luciano Vincenzoni and Leone, based on a story by Vincenzoni and Leone. Director of photography Tonino Delli Colli was responsible for the films sweeping widescreen cinematography and Ennio Morricone composed the famous film score. It is the third film in the Dollars trilogy following A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and For a Few Dollars More (1965). The plot centers around three gunslingers competing to find a fortune in buried Confederate gold amid the violent chaos of gunfights, hangings, Civil War battles, and prison camps.

Opening on December 23, 1966 in Italy and in the USA on December 29, 1967, the film grossed $6.1 million, but was criticized for its depiction of violence. Leone explains that "the killings in my films are exaggerated because I wanted to make a tongue-in-cheek satire on run-of-the-mill westerns... The west was made by violent, uncomplicated men, and it is this strength and simplicity that I try to recapture in my pictures." To this day, Leone's effort to reinvigorate the timeworn Western is widely acknowledged: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly has been described as European cinema's best representative of the Western genre film, and Quentin Tarantino has called it "the best-directed film of all time."

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