Welcome to my 2026 project honoring the first quarter of the 21st century. In this extremely lax project I watch a movie from each year to hopefully give myself some insight with what has changed within cinema during this century. At the very least I’ll have watched 25 interesting films and paired them with a dinner inspired by the movie, the place its from, and maybe a little bit of nostalgia for the past 25 years. You can watch along with me or find out what’s up next by checking out the full list of movies.
Today’s feature is from the year 2008, we are headed to South Korea to explore a small man…
Movie: 밤과 낮 [Night and Day]
Year: 2008
Director: Hong Sang-soo
Country: South Korea
The Elevator Pitch: After the artist Seong-Nam smokes weed one time he decides to leave South Korea for Paris in order to avoid getting put in jail.
How Was the Movie?:
What’s becoming clear to me is that the 2010s and 2020s didn’t come out of nowhere. While these movies are just random selections of things that looked interesting to us we accidentally ended up with a run of movies focused on small, petty men who are mediocre and for lack of a better word, boring. This is despite the fact that we often try to pick movies about or by women. I’m not immune to the charms of a sad man but this film and the two before it really hammered home some of the subtle, unpunished ways that men get away with harming, belittling, and side lining women. Sometimes the film makers are condemning them, sometimes uplifting, sometimes simply moving the camera back and letting the viewer judge for themselves like in this film.
Despite our protagonist Seong-Nam talking quite a lot about being an artist (the title card even points it out), I called it out early on that we would spend the entire movie with this man and never see him make art. Indeed we not only don’t see Seong-Nam make art, but instead also destroy the art, souls, and lives of the people around him with how small and petty and feckless that he is. How artless he is.
While I can appreciate the reality and mundanity to a lot of this movie I did find myself zoning out because I simply did not care about a man doing horrible self inflected pain for nearly two and a half hours. I found myself in a really sour position that he appeared as just an incel who is having sex or at the very least a boring man who makes poor attempts at manipulating women to cover his own insecurities. Seong-Nam makes himself the main character of the world and is only now finding out that he isn’t even living.
A lot of the movies we watch explore a kind of liminal space that the characters are moving through, probably just because of how acts are structured but in Night and Day that’s made into a spoken dialogue about how during the summer in Paris you can barely tell night from day (despite the film taking place in autumn). All of that though is not illustrate anything literal but instead that our protagonist lives in self-made limbo, in a state where it’s neither night or day, and that makes a melancholic and strange film that I’m not sure I liked.
There’s a couple of things I did like in this film, specifically some of the drifting lazy shots of Paris streets that are outside of the tourist drags and there is a scene where the main character gets so uncomfortable that he says goodbye, grabs the bottom of his bag and runs off and it’s pure kino. I loved the portrayal of a tight-knit foreign ex-pat community and especially liked that the movie was very honest that being in France without a specific visa doesn’t allow you to get hired legally! So many movies pretend it’s still 1970 where no one would check for your visa for 20 years but as a person who immigrated myself – that’s not how that works!
In the end unfortunately I think this movie is mostly a series of downsides for me. I never resolved anything thoughtful out of the uncomfortable scenes but I can see why some people would like it.
Since it’s 2007 in the film what stands out the most to me is that the South Korean government has not moved one inch on the anti-drug policy that incites the movie. Even one time smoking weed gets you 5-10 years in jail and that policy still destroying peoples lives in the same ways as our protagonist. However because it is 2007, at this point in time a 40 year old man saying he doesn’t know how to use a computer in the film and not owning one seems extremely far-fetched to me but obviously South Korea had a different economic and technological landscape in the 90s and 00s.
What was for Dinner?:
I do feel a little silly posting these dinners because they’re kind of the polar opposite of what I was doing in my previous project and they’re just very simple. This one is dak galbi which literally comes together in about 30 minutes from start to finish and basically a spicy chicken stir fry. I might make this again because it was extremely easy to do but if you’re a person who hates chopping it won’t be the recipe for you. I don’t like rice cake and I can’t really buy them here anyway so I skipped them and was going to put in bamboo shoots instead but then, sadly I forgot the bamboo shoots on the night I was making this.
I wish I had more to say but this is a very simple chicken stew that tastes spicy and sweet and if you’re familiar with most of the spicy Korean foods or products you’ll enjoy this also. Generally this dish is served by itself and communally and then often the sauce is sopped up with rice afterwards but I just skipped the middle man and plated it with rice.
Great dinner for a week night, I would recommend to anyone who likes spicy food.
That’s it for 2008, see you in the future year of 2009!