The President's Last Bang (South Korea, 2005)

I had read something long ago about art censorship. In South Korea, an art forger was arrested. He was making his own watercolor paintings and selling them as Picassos. He was arrested not for forgery or fraud, but for promoting Communism because Picasso was a Communist Party member.

They discuss this in this movie. They show members of the KCIA beating a man arrested for owning a painting by Picasso. They discuss how saying that you prefer the no-tax system in North Korea was a crime, and if someone tells you they prefer that system and you don't argue with them, you, too, have committed a crime.

Noam Chomsky was once smeared for equating Tiananmen Square to the mass killing of pro-democracy protesters in South Korea. More people were killed by the South Korean military than in China, so by equating the two, Chomsky was actually making Tiananmen Square look bigger than it was.

The President's Last Bang was about the assassination of South Korean president/dictator Park Chung-hee by KCIA director Kim Jae-gyu, perhaps with the permission of the Carter regime in Washington. They mention that Kim had met with officials at the US embassy shortly before this happened.

In one scene, the South Korean leader makes fun of Jimmy Carter for being a peanut farmer. How could they expect Carter to understand anything?

The KCIA director was in bad health and seemed to be upset at the killing of student demonstrators.

I had seen the movie several years ago, but my impression at the time was that the KCIA agents were just regular guys in suits who had a rather shocking task to perform.

Watching it now, the head of the KCIA who did the actual assassinating (as opposed to the others who murdered the bodyguards and a by-stander or two) carried it out for his own reasons and the others were thugs without a clear reason for going along with the plot.

An assassination isn't a revolution. The military junta that took over was no better and the guys who carried out the killings were tortured and executed.

The movie was censored by South Korea. Newsreel footage cut out so people wouldn't think it was a documentary or a true story.

In a way, it made it look so easy. If you were head of the KCIA and friends with the president and were having a party with him, all you needed was a willingness to do it. Even the director of security sitting at the table with Park was unarmed. It didn't require any genius.

[In Kind Hearts and Coronets (UK, 1949) the narrator mentions how difficult it is to murder someone you're not friends with.]

Maybe it would make a double feature with The Interview, the pro-assassination "comedy" Sony Pictures put out with the support of the U.S. government.