luminartly We all do have been obsessed by love once in a life time. It could be sweet, could be painful. This movie is not just about love and sex but also about obsession and violence that's driven by love. J and Y hurt each other in your view, but in fact, maybe they love each other so much just like J's father beat his son J since his distorted love toward his son. That kind of love is extremely contagious sometimes, we all could see from their aching love action while watching this movie.The 112 minutes was for me the time to find my aching missing love that was faded away by my foolishness. That's why I was deeply into this movie fully in order not to hurt any love nearby me from now.The more hurt and aching while you watch this movie, the less crooked and selfish love will be.It is very difficult to draw the boundary between love and violence always.

Andy (film-critic) I was at first disgusted with director Sun-Woo Jang because I had felt that he cheated me. Jang had the potential to create a strong, deeply emotional film about sex and its effects on people, but instead chose to focus his strength on the pornography element more than the actual human element. I couldn't see the characters at first and his sloppy introduction which blended both realism and cinema together was amateurish at best … yet this film remained in my mind for days after I viewed it. What stayed with me wasn't the story, it wasn't the characters, nor was it the apparent pornographic nature of the film, but the transition that Jang demonstrated between Y and J. If you watch this film carefully, you will see that both begin in an exploration phase of their relationship, eager to jump into the unknown, but not quite certain the next step. As they continue to meet, exploring new avenues of pleasure, they continually jump between the aggressor and the aggressed. Jang initially explores the idea that J is the one that in control of the situation, then hauntingly, the reversal happens when J becomes obsessed with Y. It is a very small change, and due to the graphic content of this film, it can easily be missed, but it is there. It becomes apparently clear near the end when J cannot live with Y, as their meetings become less frequent, and J attempts to become a part of normal society. This was a huge and very exciting element to this film to see right before your eyes, but alas, it was the only element of this film worth viewing.I will ignore those that speak of this film as nothing more than pornographic, because there are human elements at the core of this film, as underdeveloped as they are, they are there. It is a film about a facet of our lives that is very rarely explored in cinema or talked about in the papers. What happens behind closed doors is never known … or so we should believe. While the act itself does becomes repetitive after a bit, director Jang tries to change it up a bit with some constantly changing scenery. Our characters are continually moving from hotel room to hotel room to best quench their thirst for each other's flesh. This is fun at first, but again, Jang's repetitive streak seems to make it feel boring than exciting. This leads me to the biggest issue that I had with this film. Jang had a great story with Gojitmal, but where he failed (outside of the obvious choice to focus directly on the pornographic side) was that he took scenes, repeated them time and again, without changing in front of us to allow us to get to know the characters. Where was Jang going with this movie? Did he want the sex to tell the stories, or did he believe the characters would? He failed in this sense because by the end of the film we know so little about Y and J that we could care less how they resolve themselves. The ending seems almost random at best as Jang attempts to create a final resolution for our two, absolute unknowns, of this film. I have to give Jang some credit for trying, but not much. He attempted to create some sub-stories that would create the personal element that we were lacking, but they just couldn't congeal well together. Y's brother and J's wife were those plot points, but again, due to him focusing so strongly on the sexual element, these stronger sub-stories became un-rememberable and down-right dull. Maybe it was just how I viewed this film, but outside of the sexual scenes, nothing else worked together. We knew nothing about J and Y and that is why Gojitmal failed.Finally, I would like to say that this film could have benefited from having a strong score or a daftly remote music genre element to it to bring us, the viewers, closer to the emotions being felt by J and Y. From what I can remember, and I am trying to push this film far from my mind, I don't remember any musical undertones. Gojitmal may have been a stronger film if Jang either stylized it with music or done something to allude towards our character's beings. While I understand that he wanted the sex to speak for itself, there was just a technical element missing from this film that may have quenched a stronger desire for more. Technically, this was a poor film. Obviously an independent film in nature, it felt more like director Jang was trying to make symbolic references out of nothing instead of your typical independent of this nature. I didn't see as much of a social message or human element like mentioned above, I just felt like he threw this film together over the course of two weeks and understood that the sex would sell it enough. This was no Larry Clark production; this was sub-par and definitely needed some further technical clicks to develop it stronger than the final release! Overall, I think I could have liked this film and there were smaller elements that I did enjoy, but I felt this film was rushed, repetitive, and played too much towards the taboos instead of breaking them. The obvious pitfalls of this film can be seen by the last scene of this film when we are privy to how the title of this film was conceived. Our characters were uneventful, our story was underdeveloped, and we could have used something memorable to make what was happening between Y and J into something more symbolic than sex. To me, Jang was trying too much to capture art house meets pornographic … and it failed miserably. This was not a film worth the time and effort that it took to make.Grade: ** out of *****

Sennin They may say I'm wrong, but, in my own judge, the main difference between erotic cinema and pornography is that the first one has a concept behind it, with well thought camera and decoration management; while the second one is plainly sex in front of a camera, and may god take care of the rest. Other interesting difference is that while this last one every scene involving a dialogue or that stands between a sex scene and another is just in the way; in the other one there is an equitable handling of the events, in which the happening of the characters actually affects -in a way or another- the plot development, taking special care on the verosimilitude of this one. In the case of Gojitmal, we are introduced into a typical story in this class of movies: A couple -a young student and an adult man- gets in contact in the distance and decides to get together to start a sexual relation that soon leads into the ways of the sadomasochism. The movie, that follows both the couple dates as well as other aspects of their lives, doesn't fall into the gratuity nor the monotony, in which many movies of this genre happen to fall; but plays with the cameras, has some interesting travelling and (spoiler?) there even is a fast-forward over an entire sex sequence to give place to the story. In the aesthetical plain, notice the predilection for environments in where there is almost none decoration, detail that give the scenes a more simplistic mood and allows to keep all attention on the couple (in contrast with the overwhelmed environments in the average porn, in which there is an attempt to give the characters a personality through the decoration, which in some cases manage to become stand alone archetypes, such as the sexy-intellectual girl, whose house has books everywhere and/or exotic statues on the walls and corners). Being a movie from the sex genre, and not being much of a fan of it myself, there is not such a great deal I may find on it, but I must accept it entertains and that it is well done. Keep a keen eye (actually a sharp ear) on the high-on-amphets hamsters on the soundtrack, without which the movie wouldn't be the same.

verdie I just got back from seeing the new Korean film "Lies," a portrayal of a consensual BDSM relationship between an 18-year-old student and a 38-year-old sculptor.First, the bad stuff: it's not a very good movie. Amateurishly filmed, with shaky camera work and some of the weirdest directorial decisions I've ever seen. This is not "Last Tango In Paris" or anything like it.But if you can get past that, what's left at the core is one of the most sympathetic, honest and realistic portrayals I've ever seen of BDSM as it's actually played. The two types of players -- the sculptor is a primary sadomasochist, whose needs for BDSM play are strong, innate and non-situation-dependent; the student is a secondary sadomasochist, who derives her enjoyment of BDSM from her partner's reaction -- are accurately and sympathetically portrayed. Consent is scrupulously observed, with plenty of check-ins and other good communciation. The emotional reactions to play are dead-on. The bad things that happen in the movie take place because of outside intervention by the vanilla world, not because there's anything wrong or sick about the couple themselves.As far as I could tell, most of the scenes of BDSM play were real, not staged or faked -- and they're intense. Switchings, canings, paddlings -- with lingering camera shots afterwards of welts and bruises. (One scat play scene was apparently faked, which was OK by me - shudder.) Some of the play was not up to community standards of safe technique; a shot of a garden hose thudding down right across the woman's kidneys had me cringing. But it also seemed true to what might happen in a culture which provides no information or support for its kinkyfolk.Well worth seeing in a theater if you live in an urban center where it's showing, or adding to your video collection later on if you can find it.