I recently watched two movies, The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil and The Black phone. I’m not sure if I liked the latter but I did enjoy the first one. A korean movie about a gangster and a cop who join forces to catch a serial killer who just kills with no ulterior motives and is basically unhinged. Interestingly enough, I think these two movies have a similar issue regarding their plot; and that’s the killer’s motive. I do remember scratching my head while watching The Blake Phone and thinking ‘why is he doing this?’. Now I may miss something with the korean movie because of the language barrier( The movie is obviously in korean and english subtitles and even english is not my first language so…) but as far as I understand, they didn’t mention why he kills and what exactly motivates him. Again I apologize in advance if I missed it somehow but that was the only thing I didn’t quite like about the movie. In the Black Phone the killer hunts children specifically so the void of a proper explanation was really difficult to ignore.
Would I recommend these two movies to anyone? The korean movie for sure, but for The Black phone, probably not to be honest; sure it had its moments and was overall an okey movie but there are hundreds of really good movies out there that I think it’s not really justified to watch this one over them simply because there is nothing unique about the plot.
Also when I think about why I watched these two movies while I have dozens of good movies in my watch list that I just looked through them and ignore all of them, I realized that when you look forward to seeing a movie and you want to see it in a perfect condition, you never feel ready enough to actually see them. You either feel tired and say let's just watch something that doesn't demand any prior thinking or you just quit and open youtube instead. I just found it interesting that something even as fun as watching movies can feel like a chore if you treated like one.