Resurrection of the Little Match Girl (Korea, 2002)
Directed by: Jang Sun-Woo
Starring: Yim Eun-Kyung, Kim Hyung-Sung, Kim Jin-Pyo, Jin Xing

In a world where Mickey Mouse has more legal rights than an Iraqi child, director Jang Sun-Woo has driven this car bomb loaded with semiotic explosives and philosophical dynamite deep into the heart of the multiplex and any minute it¹s going to send up a mushroom cloud that¹ll blast open your doors of perception and blow your mind.

Video games are the natural predator of the movie and Director Jang has smuggled their nimble narratives and endless restarts and pauses into this film that shuffles levels of reality like a Vegas dealer shuffles cards. The result is an epic, mind-bending masterpiece that flops one tentacle down into gaming hell and the other up into Buddhist heaven. Director Jang isn¹t here to praise the movies; but to bury them. If The Matrix was the first time movies got all trippy on you, you owe it to yourself to take a big hit off this one.

As rich and tricky as James Joyce¹s Ulysses, RESURRECTION OF THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL won¹t please anyone who just wants a movie, same as Joyce¹s book won¹t please anyone just looking to kill a few hours with a story. But those looking for a real experience will get more than they bargained for. If all you¹re looking to do is make it a Blockbuster night, try The Core. Ju (Kim Hyung-Sung, My Beautiful Days) is a frustrated delivery boy eternally wearing a look of affable surprise. His life is all about running food from one customer to another and hanging out with Yi, his obnoxious gamer buddy who¹s parlayed his twitchy thumbs into lucrative endorsement deals. At the arcade, Ju meets Im Eun-Gyung, a girl who¹s out of his league and who knows it. He flirts, she shuts him down, and he goes home. Movie one, ending one. But James Joyce and Jang Sun-Woo know that you can pack a lifetime into a single day, and both men use the ephemera of entertainment as tools for a shamanic ritual where we learn that we¹re not striving for enlightenment, but becoming enlightened with every second we live, with every restart we punch, with every level of fiction we build: God is in our Gameboys.

What happens next is that Ju either dreams about rescuing Im Eun-Gyung, and his dream is saturated with the video game conventions he¹s absorbed all his life, or else he wakes up and gains entry to RESURRECTION OF THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL, a fully-immersive, world-sized game whose arrival is heralded by Chuang Tzu¹s famous butterfly. Delivered to the audience like a summer blockbuster, this perverted game ends when you make the titular Match Girl fall in love with you right before she freezes to death. It¹s an ugly thing to watch: a human actress turned into a bit-mapped puppet for a gang of thugs, hoods, mobsters and lone wolf gun babes to fight over. But fight over her they do, in bullet ballets, wire-fu fist fests, motorcycle chases, helicopter battles inside narrow, concrete hallways. Fighting with weapons doled out by a fishcake seller who runs an armory out of his food stand: guided missiles, atom bombs, submachine guns, and the ultimate Taoist weapon, the Mackerel.

Are the characters in ROTLMG video game characters who think they¹re people, or people who think they¹re video game characters? Phillip K. Dick would be proud of the layers of reality on display in this flick. For all of its bullets and babes and bizarro battling, ROTLMG is a Buddhist sutra, the Action Sutra, if you will. Set pieces are deployed like well-worn prayer beads, and the ultimate goal is the dissolution of the "real" so that we can understand the Real. Watch carefully where characters fall asleep, or get high. Keep your eyes out for the butterfly that heralds yet another trip down the rabbit hole. Watch as they all fall deeper and deeper into a maze of mirrors. Like Dante¹s hell, the only way out is in.

The players are a swirl of meta-casting. Jin Xing (who plays the lesbian warrior Lara, as in "Croft") is China¹s first out transsexual, a self-created animal whose previous life as an army officer has become irrelevant to her current incarnation as a modern dance choreographer. Im Eun-Gyung, the titular Little Match Girl, is the face of a popular cell phone service provider and as she dies in the opening scene we can see her face on one of her own billboards in the background: a model, playing a cell phone user, looking down on herself, playing a character, who plays a character in a movie. Unpack that, if you can. Yi is played by Kim Jin-Pyo Korea¹s bad boy rapper, who plays a bad boy gamer in the service of corporate interests, just like he is in real life.

Layers and layers and layers are packed around this movie that is to action blockbusters what Alejandro Jodorowsky¹s seminal El Topo is to Westerns: a transcendant headtrip that¹s also a helluva lot of fun. And when you reach the center, when you¹ve unraveled the last layer, that¹s when you discover that there is no center because it¹s all center. There is no answer, because it¹s all answer. So sit back, relax, open your minds, and prepare to put your mouth over the nozzle of a motion picture firehose.