| ||||||||||||||||||
Frequently Bought Together
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
A sweet-natured grandmother fulfills her artistic destiny in Lee Chang-dong's heartbreaking Poetry, winner of the best screenplay award at Cannes. Mija (the luminous Yun Jung-hee), looks after an elderly stroke victim to provide for her demanding grandson, Wook (Lee David), whose divorced mother lives in Pusan. When Wook and five middle-school friends contribute to the suicide of a rural classmate, their fathers pressure Mija to pay into a fund to silence the press and the victim's family. Mija’s expression is easy to read: the scheme makes her uncomfortable. In her younger days, she tells one, people said she had "a poet's vein," because she "likes flowers and says odd things," so she enrolls in a poetry class, where the instructor encourages his students to make note of the details that surround them. This is particularly difficult for Mija as she can't always remember the words for commonplace objects, which her physician ascribes to Alzheimer's disease. While Mija struggles to come up with her portion of the pay-off money, she works on a poem, attends readings, and fends off the advances of her lonely client. All the while, she retraces the steps of the 16-year-old farmer’s daughter who plunged to her death from a remote bridge. It's as if Mija were turning into a sort of metaphysical detective. She can't know exactly what the girl was feeling, but in using her imagination, while she still has access to it, Mija makes a surprising decision: it is the decision of a poet. --Kathleen C. Fennessy
Product Description
Mija (Yun Jung-hee) is a beautiful woman in her sixties who moves gracefully through life, contemplating a trivial daily routine that is ill-suited to her refined persona. With elegance and a dash of eccentricity, Mija takes care of her ungrateful grandson Wook (Lee David) and makes a living by cleaning house for an elderly man who, though paralyzed by a stroke, still responds to her charm with bouts of drug-induced arousal. On a whim, Mija enrolls in a poetry class at the local cultural centre and begins a personal quest to find the perfect words to describe her feelings. However, she's plagued by the onset of Alzheimer's disease, and struggles with new vocabulary and the challenges of the creative process. When her world is turned upside down by the discovery of a monstrous crime, it is Mija's unique and touching poetry that allows her to defy the weight of shame and distance herself from a painful proximity to violence.
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
27 of 29 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD
POETRY is simply the best film ever made. The plot is about a woman in her mid 60s who is raising her grandson and wants to take a poetry class at the local community center. Her desire is to write one poem. Sounds simple. Wrong. This film is all about secrets being revealed and the consequences of actions. It is about forgiveness and restitution. I saw this film twice in the movie theater . This film was made for discussion. Writer/Director Lee Chang-Dong deserves an Academy Award for this film- actually he deserves 4 Academy Awards- best screenplay, best director, best foreign film and BEST FILM. Brilliant and genius are inadequate words to describe the masterpiece that is POETRY. I hope POETRY becomes available in the 2 DVD disc form ( with director's commentary and extras) for region one soon. VERY SOON.
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD
I am often reluctant to put myself into the hands of an art filmmaker and then have to sit passively absorbing something. Is it just some abstract philosophical notion, as I found, somewhat, with Quatre Volte a few weeks ago. It was alright, even pretty good, but I wanted something more.
As Poetry's first scenes unfolded, I wondered whether I was in for another passive couple of hours. I had just had dinner and I even fell asleep for an instant. Fortunately my wife nudged me. There was much of interest, after all. A grandmotherly woman, washing an old man who has been a stroke victim. She is a quiet woman. She goes to a clinic and is examined by a doctor. She goes home, a middle class, rather small apartment, where she provides room and board for her teenage grandson.
Scene by scene goes by, a bit of drama here and there. It is not too long before one realizes he is in the hands of a poet, hence the title, a poet filmmaker, a celebrator of the ordinary. There is no music except the music of life. Although the woman attends a poetry class, hoping to learn how to write a poem, there is little spoken poetry that is not rather banal.
It is not simply that a crime has been committed, that this film becomes so engrossing. It unfolds on many levels. There is, of course, simply the matter of allowing oneself to be absorbed in a foreign language and an Eastern culture. The story could not have been the same in the West, but I don't want to give too much away.
The woman wonders, how could her very own grandson have been involved in such a crime? Why will he not speak to her about it? She visits the various scenes involved. She goes to see the victim's mother, without telling the mother who she is.
No one else seems to be sensitive about the incident or the victim's family, perhaps because that family is a poor, fatherless one. Indeed, the only fathers we see in the film are attempting to cover up what happened. Grandmother herself seems quite insensitive about it; she is no heroine, just a rather ordinary woman just getting by.
But she wants to write a poem. She wants beauty in her life again. Somehow, beauty has gone away like her youth, and she may even be falling into Alzeimher's disease.
All of this and more unfolds like a masterpiece, a multitextured collage of many levels. And in the end, it is not disease or old age to which we must succumb, but simply heartbreak. At the end of her poetry class, she is the only one to have written a poem, and what a masterful, deeply moving story it tells. In the end she has become something so much greater than her ordinary, everyday self; I found it powerfully moving, powerfully affirming of life.
As Poetry's first scenes unfolded, I wondered whether I was in for another passive couple of hours. I had just had dinner and I even fell asleep for an instant. Fortunately my wife nudged me. There was much of interest, after all. A grandmotherly woman, washing an old man who has been a stroke victim. She is a quiet woman. She goes to a clinic and is examined by a doctor. She goes home, a middle class, rather small apartment, where she provides room and board for her teenage grandson.
Scene by scene goes by, a bit of drama here and there. It is not too long before one realizes he is in the hands of a poet, hence the title, a poet filmmaker, a celebrator of the ordinary. There is no music except the music of life. Although the woman attends a poetry class, hoping to learn how to write a poem, there is little spoken poetry that is not rather banal.
It is not simply that a crime has been committed, that this film becomes so engrossing. It unfolds on many levels. There is, of course, simply the matter of allowing oneself to be absorbed in a foreign language and an Eastern culture. The story could not have been the same in the West, but I don't want to give too much away.
The woman wonders, how could her very own grandson have been involved in such a crime? Why will he not speak to her about it? She visits the various scenes involved. She goes to see the victim's mother, without telling the mother who she is.
No one else seems to be sensitive about the incident or the victim's family, perhaps because that family is a poor, fatherless one. Indeed, the only fathers we see in the film are attempting to cover up what happened. Grandmother herself seems quite insensitive about it; she is no heroine, just a rather ordinary woman just getting by.
But she wants to write a poem. She wants beauty in her life again. Somehow, beauty has gone away like her youth, and she may even be falling into Alzeimher's disease.
All of this and more unfolds like a masterpiece, a multitextured collage of many levels. And in the end, it is not disease or old age to which we must succumb, but simply heartbreak. At the end of her poetry class, she is the only one to have written a poem, and what a masterful, deeply moving story it tells. In the end she has become something so much greater than her ordinary, everyday self; I found it powerfully moving, powerfully affirming of life.
21 of 25 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD
This is a beautiful, moving and disturbing film. As one watches it, the question arises why does the title give such prominence to poetry? Especially as the poetry class the main character follows doesn't seem to tie-in with the main plot lines. How do the circumstances surrounding an elderly woman in the early stages of dementia, who has to deal with a terrible crime committed by her grandson (who is in her charge), relate to poetry? Lee Chang-dong (the director, writer, producer of the film) has mentioned that two central inspirations for the film "Poetry" was whether poetry is dying and, also, whether film is dying. In my mind, these two questions raise two other ones: what is poetry, what is film? Poetry, the word, means making, creating something, usually out of nothing. The word is associated to the christian god in certain hymns, where the god is referred to as the poet of everything, of things visible and invisible. This point of view, I think, offers a useful approach to the main question hovering over this film. It doesn't come with an easy answer but definitely associates with poetry not the results but the actions of the main character. It remains open, ambivalent about the results: was the way she dealt with her grandson "correct", "just"? what exactly did she do in the end? As I see it, the film suggests that poetry is not in the end result but in the process of dealing with your life (problems, situations, friendships, etc) and how true is that way to your feelings, emotions, beliefs. So, if poetry (as art) is creation than this is not necessarily associated with verse or film; it is not associated with any end product but with the act of getting to the end product; and in that sense "poetry" can come about in any which way, irrespective whether it is classified or defined as making poetry, film, music, etc. In that sense, poetry can be found anywhere.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Poetry's Beauty
This movie wasn't entirely what I expected. I was under the impression it was about a woman experiencing Alzheimer's, a woman who was trying to write poetry. Read more
Published 2 months ago by APP
Soul Massaging
This movie is about many things. It is about art, how the arts make us see something sublime through the dreariness in our daily life. Read more
Published 3 months ago by L. Wang
Deeply moving, one of the best films ever made
Poetry is probably one of the most thoughtful, thought-provoking, and touching films I have ever seen. Read more
Published 3 months ago by M. Sue
POETRY is seeing and feeling
POETRY tells a simple tale of an elderly woman who is diagnosed with early Alzheimer and encouraged to keep an active mind. Read more
Published 5 months ago by Ray Andrews
Lovely, but Very Slow
I was really looking forward to this movie; it was my first from S. Korea. Beautiful cinematography and great acting. Read more
Published 5 months ago by SanDiegoJesse
I really wanted to like "Poetry" more than I did
I really wanted to like "Poetry" more than I did. A great deal of the movie is very, very good but it is ultimately undermined by pacing which is a little too slow, scenes that... Read more
Published 5 months ago by Michael Harbour
Stanza quest.
Poetry is a 2010 South Korean film directed by Lee Chang-dong. It stars Yoon Jeong-hee as Mija, a woman in her 60's raising a derelict grandson while dealing with the onset of... Read more
Published 5 months ago by T. Hunt
BEST FEMALE PERFORMANCE EVER SEEN IN 60 YEARS OF CINEMAGOING
One of the best films I have ever seen .South Korea has produced some of the world's most brilliant films in recent years and POETRY ranks as the best . Read more
Published 5 months ago by Peter Fraser
CHANG-DONG LEE, OPUS 5
Moving description of the collision between Poetry and the crudeness of Reality. Poetry is a film about oblivion. Read more
Published 6 months ago by Daniel S.
Do not understand the high ratings
Because of the high ratings and glowing reviews, I watched this on Netfilx. So, so glad I did not buy it. Read more
Published 6 months ago by H. Boehning
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
