200+Pounds+Beauty

The film that I watched was a korean romantic comedy called 200 Pound Beauty. The movie revolves around a 200 pound woman who is known as “fat and ugly” but has a natural talent in singing. Because of her looks she was the backstage “voice” of a singer who cannot sing. She’s also in love with the stage manager as well. However, due to the amount of harassment and bullying that she gets, she decides disappear for a year to go through a year of plastic surgery (on her whole body) and to loose weight as well. She comes back as a beautiful glamorous lady, and returns back to the stage manager with her new identity to become a star. She realizes that after she became skinny and pretty, she had lost all of her family and friends, whom she gave up for the fame and fortune.

First of all, I thought that the lighting really gave a big push towards the theme of the film. The lights give the audience a message throughout the scene, and what the characters are like. One of the most memorable scenes for me was when Ammy (the lip-synching singer) and Sang-Jun (the stage manager that Hanna has a crush on) were talking about Hanna (The fat girl) and how they’re just using her for her voice. The place where they were at was a bathroom inside a club. The bathroom was extremely dark, with some lights on the mirror that were white and some that were red. When the two characters spoke to each other the white light shines on one part of their face and the red light shines on the other half of their face. There’s a streak of dark light on their noses because the lights were pretty dim as well. I thought that this was incredibly symbolic and it contributes to the theme as well. The two lighting showed the dark side of both characters. And the fact that these characters were known as the “genuine” and “sweet” towards the public showed that they were both actually really shallow.

The cinematographer of this film won several awards, and I agree that he/she deserved it. Every aspect of the movie was well planned out. The main character of this film was Hanna, and the cinematographer made sure every single shot of the film would somehow relate it back to her. Because this was based on what and how Hanna was feeling in the story, the shots were basically medium shots, american shots, and occasionally some wide shots (to set the scene). The editing of the film was pretty noticeable as well. There were two types of editing that the editor had used in the film a lot: montage and split screens. The biggest montage in the film was the part where Hanna goes through her plastic surgery and weight loss in a year’s time. The different shots of both Hannah’s transition, Sang-Jun’s transition, and Ammy’s transition throughout the year were indicated in the montage. The split screen edits were seen throughout the movie as well. I didn’t know that many movies that used split screens, however the split screens were extremely effective in contributing to the movie: to show the moment and the expressions of two characters talking to each other at the same time, and to also to display to the audience how each of the characters are doing on screen at the exact same time. The use of split screens was also incorporated into the montage of Hanna’s transformation, which adds a bit of a specialty into the montage.

The film was aiming for a realistic story rather than a fantasy story, many of the sound made within the film were diegetic. Other than the beginning, there was a voiceover of Hanna introducing herself and what her life is like as an obese girl, and that would be the only nondiegetic sound we hear throughout the movie. There were large amounts of singing involved in the film (because the characters are all mostly singers), but there were all diegetic sounds because we can see the sound coming out from the singer’s throat. During the concert scenes, the cinematographer made sure we can see where all the sounds came from. For example, the large crowd that was waiting for Ammy to come out, we can see everyone screaming and chanting for her, which makes up our noise. Then the shot turns to the band playing music, showing the source of where the music came from. And finally, we see Ammy coming out to the stage, and lipsynching to Hanna backstage. We can also see Hanna singing backstage with a microphone and a video footage of how Ammy looks like on stage.