Sept 30 @ 8PM
FREE!
Resurrection of the Little Match Girl is unquestionably one of the most ambitious examples of video game cinema, despite the “Matrix Style FX” sales pitch, lazily tacked on by distributors desperate to recoup even a tiny bit of their losses (more on that in a sec).
It’s the final film by Jang Sun-woo, a political dissident who spent time in jail for distributing anti-government literature; while behind bars, he came to the realization that making movies would be a far more effective means of spreading the truth. Fast forward several years and you have studio execs, high off the success of New Korean Cinema, going “why the hell not” with some art house hot shot’s idea for a video game movie based upon a Hans Christian Andersen poem.
Resurrection of the Little Match Girl is widely acknowledged to be the biggest production in the history of Korean cinema (spanning 4 years and 10,000 extras) and might still be (17 years later) its biggest bomb to date, one that single handedly killed Jang Sun-woo’s career as well three separate studios; Oldboy, released the following year, is the only thing that saved New Korean Cinema’s street cred. Sure you’ve seen a bad video game flick or two, but has any of them tapped into the Wachowski’s The Matrix, David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, AND Wong Kar Wai's Fallen Angels simultaneously, PLUS had terrible K-pop?
"Finding out Resurrection of the Little Match Girl was made by Jang Sun-woo, was for me the theoretical equivalent of finding out Avengers: Infinity War was directed by Woody Allen." - https://cityonfire.com/resurrection-of-the-little-match-girl-2003-review/
"You know your film's great when one of your characters is Asian lesbian gunfu ninja master Lara Croft." - someone on Letterboxd