Q Branch

The Udine Far Eastern Film Festival, exclusively devoted to Asian cinema, has entered its eleventh year. It is the most important exhibition site for East Asian and Southeast Asian films in Europe, other than the Deauville Film Festival held in France. Originally programmed to showcase the cinema of one different nation per year, since its conversion to first Hong Kong and later Asian cinema as a whole in 1990s, Udine has drawn industry specialists, critics, journalists and, most significantly, enthusiastic viewers from all over Western Europe.

While Udine is an old city with beautiful churches, a farmer’s market in the central piazza and extraordinarily good wine and food, the FEFF takes place in the large, gleaming and coolly angular Teatro Nuovo Giovanni. Most screenings are packed with highly enthusiastic audience, a good deal of them local Italian speakers from all walks of life and a whole gamut of generations. And the FEFF usually has something to offer to almost everyone. While the cornerstone of the festival remains muscular martial arts/action films, every stripe of Asian cinema, with the possible exception of the experimental and avant-garde, is presented: one can usually find a film that speaks to his or her taste, no matter how “exotic.” The die-hard kung fu film enthusiasts, the obsessive otakus in the lookout for the next mind-twister from a Miike Takashi or a Sono Sion, the unabashed romantics craving for a three-hankie melodrama fix, or the cinematic adventurers seeking the envelope-pushing visions of horror and dark fantasy can all happily find their niches in Udine.

Thanks to the longstanding effort from Darcy, who has been serving as a South Korean cinema programmer for seven years, Korean cinema has always been well-represented in the FEFF. Despite industry-wide difficulties in 2008, analyzed in this year’s program notes by Darcy Paquet and Ryan Law, this year’s K-film selections illustrate the diversity and strengths of individual filmmaker’s visions fairly well. Aside from what is expected to be a crowd-pleasing unveiling of The Good, the Bad, the Weird, with director Kim Ji-woon attending as a special guest, some of 2008’s most critically lauded works (My Dear Enemy, Crush and Blush) and robust commercial hits (Scandal Makers, Rough Cut) are to be unleashed upon the European fans. Choe Equan’s animation film Life is Cool, Ryu Jang-ha’s quirky melodrama Hello Schoolgirl and the Kim Ok-vin vehicle Accidental Gangster are also included. I am personally most interested in the (European) audience response to Yoo Ha’s Frozen Flower, a different kind of Asian period piece (I assume most European viewers are unfamiliar with some interesting facts of Korean history such as that the Koryo King Gongmin-wang used to keep a harem of beautiful boys for personal pleasure, and was eventually assassinated by one of them—only obliquely referenced in the actual movie: I wish more filmmakers would tackle the medieval Korean history, as its non-Confucian, non-moralistic milieu is yet to be captured convincingly in Korean cinema).

The opening night gala, attended by a thousand-and-plus very excited and happy fans (Teatro Nuovo being capable of seating 1,400 viewers), introduced major guests– Kim Dong-ho, the veteran festival director who put Pusan Film Festival on the global map: Ann Hui, whose TV works are being honored in a sidebar program: Parchya Pinkaew and Panna Rittikrai, the producer-director team behind the Muay Thai action extravaganzas: and Dante Lam and Nick Cheung, the director and star of another highly anticipated Hong Kong thriller The Beast Stalker. Unfortunately the opening film was less than an optimal choice. Considering the FEFF’s leanings, it was not surprising to see the over-produced martial arts “epic” Ong Bak 2 opening the festival.

The sequel-in-name-only is a wall-to-wall martial arts action with virtually no plot exposition or character development. Set in 15th century Thailand, the movie is like a bizarrely dour version of Conan the Barbarian (if it’s possible to imagine a sword-and-sandal fantasy any dourer than the original Conan). It’s obviously intended as a franchise pilot for Tony Jaa, complete with a cliffhanger ending, but I can’t see anyone except the most undiscriminating Muay Thai fans warming up to the movie’s utter lack of charm and mind-numbing repetition of boxing bouts. The episodes involving the teenage years of the protagonist Tien, played by Natdanai Kongthong, amounting to a total of maybe twenty minutes or so, give the film some desperately needed breathing room, but Tony Jaa as the adult Tien is, I think there is no charitable way to put it, simply terrible. But for me the most problematic element of Ong Bak 2 is that, in its desire to elevate Tony Jaa into the new global star status, it abandons the homespun virtues that made the original Ong Bak attractive in the first place. It is pretty painful to see Jaa trying to best Bruce Lee and Jacky Chan at their own games and failing miserably, at one point rather ungracefully swishing a three-segmented nunchaku against black-clad ninja assassins dressed up like Goth metal rockers. The FEFF should have chosen Chocolate– stuck in a midnight screening– as the opening film instead, a much more persuasive evidence for an optimistic future of Thai action cinema.

The 11th FEFF is turning out to be a banner year for Indonesian cinema. Like Korean films, the roster from the country, which boasts a robust and long history of eye-poppingly energetic local exploitation films (well known to fans of the Mondo Macabro DVD label), is strikingly diverse genre-wise and also in terms of political positions. The Rainbow Troops appears to be an inspiring children’s film in praise of Islamic educational institutions, while the hot young turk Joko Anwar’s Forbidden Door is a metaphysically complicated thriller with direct reference to David Lynch. Horror is represented by Fiction. (The title comes wth the period) and Takut: Faces of Fear, praised by the Udine programmer Paolo Bertolin as possibly the best Indonesian film of 2008.

Chants of Lotus, which I managed to catch in a surprisingly well-attended 9 am screening, is an omnibus film consisting of four shorts helmed by four women directors, Fatima T. Rony, Upi, Nia Dinata and Lasja F. Susatyo. The shorts cover a range of socially relevant topics, focusing on the abuses heaped on women: abortion, rape of the mentally handicapped, hypocrisies of the legal system that privileges patriarchy and condones machismo, teen pregnancy, child molestation and even intolerance towards AIDS patients. Nothing terribly insightful or cinematically innovative takes place in Chants of Lotus, even though the elemental sentimentalism and undeniable horrors of women’s suffering do strike emotional chords, especially among sympathetic female viewers. The best segment is probably Upi’s “Chant from a Tourist City,” which shows uniform-clad teenagers clearly operating in a Muslim society—including those dutifully wearing hijabs– yet engaged in shockingly open and frank conversations (and behaviors) regarding sexuality. In this and “Chant from Jakarta,” the extraordinary, almost intimidating Eurasian beauty of the actresses– Kirana Larasati and Susan Bachtiar in particular– actually work against the rather simplistic nature of the stories being told. Apparently in 2008 the Indonesian government decided to strengthen censorship against public depiction of nudity and sexual situations: one can only hope that feminist visions of women filmmakers like Nia Dinata and Upi do not fall victim to such a conservative turn in the near future.

The Udine viewers whooped and applauded The Beast Stalker, Dante Lam’s taut crime thriller with an unexpectedly thoughtful approach to characterizations. Neither its English title, which suggests a variant of a Silence of the Lambs-like serial-killer-vs.-cop suspenser, nor its Chinese title, simply “a witness,” leading one to expect a courtroom procedural, accurately describes this ultimately improbable but powerful film. It shares some plot points with the slick Korean suspenser Seven Days, but taken as a whole it reminds one more of Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, especially its characters desperately struggling against Job-like twists of fate and trying to surivive the crushing weight of guilt and obsession. Nicholas Tse plays a straight-laced detective Tong, whose pursuit of a career criminal results in a terrible car crash and a shoot-out, partially maiming his partner and killing a young girl. Nearly unhinged by guilt, Tong becomes obsessed with protecting young girl’s mother, a prosecuting attorney (Zhang Jingchu), and her remaining child. When the latter is kidnapped by a mysterious hitman Hung (Nick Cheung), Tong goes after him with the unofficial help from his former mates.

–Nick Cheung and Dante Lam are warmly greeted by the audience.

The Beast Stalker has a terrific rhythm and sweeps the viewers in an explosive adrenalin rush of its high-caliber action sequences, buttressed by ingenious sound design and superb editing job, but what distinguishes it from other above-average Hong Kong actioners is its resolute focus on the characters. Perhaps most surprisingly, Nick Cheung’s intimidatingly scarred kidnapper, slowly going blind and showing great devotion to his paralyzed wife (Miao Pu), turns out to be the most intriguing figure in the film. Director Lam manages to keep us in great suspence regarding Hung’s moral capacity, in the end making us care about him, without making us ever forget how evil he is. Nick Cheung, on his part, rises to the occasion by giving a splendidly restrained performance, cold and menacing when needed, but also making us see Hung’s numbing despair. The film’s major weak link is Zhang Jingchu’s barrister, reduced to a weepily repentant “career woman.” I found Miao Pu’s performance much more affecting, especially given that the only tools available to her were her eyes. The Beast Stalker is not perfect: it lacks the kind of auteurial elegance and ironic sense of humor found in a high-end Johnny To film, and as I mentioned above, the plot contrivances in the end stretches credibility to the breaking point. Yet, it has a virtue that other popular—and possibly better-made– actioners like The Breaking News lack—a deep engagement with the moral struggles of the characters, that aspires to the plane of Kurosawa-like hard-boiled humanism.

Not nearly as enthusiastically received but nonetheless showered with appreciation was Prachya Pinkaew’s Chocolate, starring the pixie-like dynamo Jeeja Yanin as a half-Japanese autistic teenager capable of mimicking any martial arts move she observes on TV, on training ground, etc., turning her into a mean fighting machine. Chocolate is a great fun, in my estimation, far more enjoyable than Ong Bak. Some hardcore martial arts film fans might derisively chuckle at it, saying why, it’s nothing more than a crude rip-off of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, filled to the brim as it were with weirdly synthetic takes on the conventions of Japanese yakuza films and girl’s comics, not to mention an almost hilariously bald hommages to Bruce Lee, especially his early flick The Big Boss. There’s some truth to that observation, but crude or not, Chocolate is delectable: it retains wit and charm crushed flat by the rampaging bull elephants in Ong Bak 2. It relies on a tried-and-true Jacky Chan template of staging physically punishing acrobatic action sequences one after another, each phase escalating the stake until the jaw-dropping climax (It even runs end credits over the footage of Jeeja and other actors running into various cringe-inducing accidents). What makes it all work is Jeeja Yanin at the center: perky but not saccharine, always fully present, never mugging for camera. She is actually a rather good actress and I hope she gets chances to appear in in non-Thai films as well. Sure, she is not a model-like beauty but who cares? I would rather see her than Jeon Ji-hyun as pouty Saya in the screen adaption of Blood: The Last Vampire.

On the other hand, the Udine viewer’s response to Yu Ha’s Frozen Flower was decidedly mixed. More than a few viewers seem to have been bothered by the plot that seemingly points to a negative stereotyping of gay characters: not the ultimately cruel king (Joo Jin-mo) but the pretty-boy protagonist Hong Rim (Zo In-sung), whose unwilling coupling with an initially insulted queen (Song Ji-hyo) develops into a full-blown romance, implying that his “gay tendencies” have been “cured” by a sex with women. Frozen Flower has other problems. Despite upscale production values and technical acumen, the Koryo kingdom depicted in the movie does not look lived-in: the costumes—even underwear—are just too darn colorful, and the palace grounds look like rock concert stages rather than a medieval court. (However, the musical interludes in which the king and the queen each sings a Koryo-period song are rather nice. We never get to see crooning royals in a historical drama set in Joseon dynasty!) The score samples classical music yet again (this time it’s Brahms) and is unintentionally funny (Korean filmmakers really stop doing this. They are not getting any closer to being Stanley Kubrick). The martial arts choreography is boring and turgid. It is altogether obvious that Yu Ha has not mastered conventions and tools of the period piece as well as he has done with an urban crime drama or a coming-of-age autobiography.

Yet, Frozen Flower does exert considerable power as a passionate melodrama. The best performance is given by Song Ji-hyo (Wishing Stairs): like her big, gleaming eyes that fill to the brim with tears but never overflows, she tightly controls her emotional expression and maintains the queen’s dignity. Joo Jin-mo handles an ultimately unsympathetic king with skills as well. On the other hand, Zo In-sung’s performance is uneven: at some points he looks merely uncomfortable rather than internally conflicted. Zo fans will probably have mixed reactions to the way his character is essentially reduced to an object of passion—sexual or otherwise—by two headstrong royals. Even though seriously flawed, Frozen Flower is an interesting addition to the filmography of all concerned, and a laudable effort to cultivate new grounds for Korean cinema.

(The following portion of the Festival Report is written by Darcy Paquet)

The FEFF has concluded on May 2. Two Korean directors arrived at Udine during the second half of the festival to present their films. Kim Jee-woon introduced his latest film The Good, the Bad, the Weird to a crowd seemingly already familiar with his works (His wrestling comedy Foul King was the winner of the audience award at Udine). In some ways the biggest star at the festival, director Kim not only gave a generous stage greeting, confessing his love for Italian cinema, but also participated in a panel devoted to Korean cinema, followed by a press conference with enthusiastic local journalists. Although somewhat reserved by nature, Kim’s sense of humor and love of cinema were apparent in the sincere and detailed answers he gave to all questions fielded to him. The version of The Good played at Udine was a slightly trimmed international print, which Kim himself professed to like better. Some of the trims involve the Jeong Woo-sung character’s involvement with the Korean independence army, making the movie more tightly focused on characters, and making his initial appearance much stronger. The appearance of the Japanese troops cause less potential confusion for the logistically-minded viewers. And so on. The loud and kinetic film was greeted warmly by the viewers, who clapped and cheered at the end of the film (As is common when the director is present).

The second director who flew in from Korea was Kang Hyoung-chul, introducing his domestic box-office hit Scandal Makers, together with the producer Lee An-na. Scandal Makers had a difficult beginning, rejected by many companies during its scenario stage, but the debut film proved skeptics wrong and became the biggest comedy hit in Korean film history (8.3 million tickets sold). Despite its smashing success at home, both the director and producer admitted to being a bit nervous about whether its smart dialogue and comic situations would be appreciated by Udine’s predominantly European audience. They needn’t have worried: 1,300-strong Udine viewers roared with laughter, at virtually all of the film’s physical and verbal gags (except for one funny bit: a scene at the pre-school where the child actor Wang Seok-hyun’s sitting in a posture of a very old woman, which would have sent a Korean viewer into a laugh attack). The audience reaction is in keeping with a very interesting trend of the Udine viewers embracing Korean comedies, which many Korean critics assume cannot really work outside their own culture. Koreans should seriously examine their conviction that their culture is so unique and is incomprehensible to the outsiders: the foreigners do get your jokes (if they are well done)! Ultimately among the 50-plus contemporary features screened at Udine, Scandal Makers received the second highest audience rating, giving the director a nice trophy to take home. The top honors went to Departures, the crowd-pleasing Japanese drama (and a Oscar foreign film award winner) starring Motoki Masayuki.

Audience Award rankings:

1. Departures (Japan) 4.57 out of 5

2. Scandal Makers (South Korea) 4.36 out of 5

3. The Rainbow Troops (Indonesia) 4.22 out of 5

Black Dragon Award rankings (calculated among privileged Black Dragon member’s votes):

1. Departures (Japan) 4.71 out of 5

2. 4BIA (Thailand) 4.18 out of 5

3. Connected (Hong Kong) 4.04 out of 5

MyMovies Audience Award (voted through the www.Mymovies.it website)

1. One Million Yen Girl (Japan)

Udine allows the kind of Korean films often ignored by the so-called “big” international film festivals like Cannes, Berlin and Toronto—usually mid-level commercial productions in genres like comedy, melodrama and period piece—to show their mettle to non-Korean viewers. This year I was very lucky to procure all of my top choices. Next year it might be a little more difficult, considering that precisely this type of films were hardest hit by the economic downturn. Udine FEFF is still one of the best opportunities outside Korea to appreciate the full range, a genuine diversity, of Korean commercial cinema, and also to see Korean productions in the broader context of Asian cinema.

Howdy folks, no excuse for being more than two weeks late in posting my favorite DVDs/Blu Rays of 2009, other than that we FTEs stuck with a quarter system barely have New Year’s break before having to plunge into the winter sessions. Actually, the delay gave me a chance to do something I am ordinarily unable, i. e. incorporating into the 2010 list the discs ordered in the last months of 2009 but not received until January 2010. This time the Korean-language list was put together way ahead and partly because of that the discrepancy between the two is bigger than usual. Those who can read Korean can check the alternative list here.

Many things happened to my life in 2009, a good deal of them either wonderful or at least interesting. I visited Italy for the first time, attended a horror-SF pitch meeting for young Singaporean filmmakers, wrote a weird screenplay and actually had it made into a short film by a renowned Korean director, and finally became a property owner. Does that make me a “real American” by the standard of the Bush-ite Republicans? Well, good for me, I guess. Despite all these wild things going on around me, I still had time to collect and watch more DVDs and Blu Rays than I could possible lay my hands on. According to the industry reports, DVD sales are leveling off and North American studios are curtailing their library title releases. Personally, though, I have purchased about 3.5% more titles last year than in 2008: the actual number of discs obtained gets much larger when we consider that many of them are multi-disc collections. Warner’s The Man from U. N. C. L. E. boxset with its entire 105 episodes spread out in forty-one discs is the premier example. That boxset, despite having been released in 2008, probably should have been given the No. 12 slot, except that it would have appeared like gloating.

The DVDs (and to a less extent, Blu Rays) of classical, non-mainstream or unusual cinema have claimed a lion’s share of the movies I have watched this year, a stable pattern for the last six or seven years. For North American collectors of DVDs, the launching of Warner Archive Collection was the biggest news, hotly debated online. Warner Brothers has decided to make their vast library titles, including the MGM catalogue purchased from Turner Entertainment, reportedly numbering around 6,500, available for the consumers as DVDs on made-to-order basis. Consumers can look through the catalogue, which as of January 2010 boasts more than 400 titles with thirty or so newly added every month, directly choose the films they want, no matter how obscure, quaint or specialized in taste, and have them printed as high-quality DVD-Rs in the correct aspect ratio and usually uncut and uncensored (They also offer the slightly cheaper option of downloading the movies as MPG files: I actively wonder, though, how popular these services are compared to shipping manufactured discs). Despite their rather expensive price tags ($19.95 if purchased at the official website), these WAC DVDs are apparently selling like hotcakes and now becoming available in retailing venues like DeepDiscount with surcharges added.

With the WAC, are we looking at the future sales pattern of optic-disc media before they get trounced by the refined versions of today’s Netflix and iTunes? Perhaps, but that does not exactly fill this consumer with despair regarding his soon-to-be-useless consumer habits. Like the promised advent of A. I. who can manage a freaking semi-decent translation from Japanese to English, much less thinking like a human being, we will probably have to wait for a long, long time for this trouncing to commence (Snicker).

On another front, I am finally receiving HD content-rich cable service with good DVR equipment that allows me to record HD broadcasts of films, documentaries and TV series without any loss of quality. While it is great fun to able to keep on around select episodes of River Monster and the Korean cuisine segment of Bizarre Food, 99.9% of the cable content, especially movies, range from utterly boring to dishearteningly mainstream. It would be a different story if more than one cable channel offer fares like the HD-mastered Circle of Fear or BBC’s Chinese Detective: instead, even premium movie-devoted labels endlessly recycle the latest blockbuster franchises, Star Treks and X-Mens. A very occasional non-anamorphic presentation of a Korean actioner on IFC channel or Twins of Evil on MGM-HD is not going to be enough. They sure ain’t gonna stop me from waddling in the DVD swamp. That would require a combination of the best features of WAC (consumer-determined content, with essentially all movies laid out for the public to pick and choose from), Netflix (the kind of streaming service so easy an idiot can use, with no brand-name compatibility issues) and DVR (recordable or otherwise immediately accessible HD content). Of course, all this might happen someday, theoretically speaking. Wouldn’t it be beyond cool, for instance, to have access to the HD-transferred files of all Korean movies ensconced at the Korean Film Archive, not just the public domain ones or those with murky copyrights? In reality, however, the complete collapse of Korean movie industry seems a far likelier prospect. So my prognosis is that I will still be happily buying or otherwise procuring a large number of DVDs and Blu Rays in the year of the tiger, barring a total financial collapse on our part (Hope not, knock knock on the rosewood dining table).

I am not going to repeat the jeremiad about the Korean DVD market from the last year. Secondary market in the Korea film industry seems deader than ever, as even some expensive theatrical productions are now failing to materialize as domestic DVDs. Paradoxically, however, the Korean films/TV dramas are becoming more and more accessible in the global market, as Hong Kong, Thailand and even Malaysia are coming out with DVDs of more and more obscure Korean titles. As long as Korean cinema industry continues to produce robust genre films and melodramas with basic emotional appeal, they will not be lacking in the items to sell to foreign secondary market.

In this year, too, some truly worthy DVD and Blu Ray releases were utterly bypassed by yours truly, and dozens of purchased items are yet to shed their shrink wraps. Many titles I thoroughly enjoyed this year I did not even purchase, such as Criterion’s The Hit, The Reader, Up and Appaloosa. Among the equally numerous titles I did buy, a dozen more could have easily made it into the list: British Blu Ray of Ipcress File, director’s cut of Blood Simple, Natalie Wood Collection, Nikkatsu Noir Collection, Friends of Eddie Coyle, Criterion Blu Rays of The Third Man and Repulsion, Imamura Shohei’s Black Rain and Pigs and Battleship, White Dog and Watership Down from 2008.

The final selections below reflect, as usual, utterly subjective (and twisted) viewpoint of mine. These DVDs and Blu Ray titles are the ones that gave me the biggest surprises, intrigued me most, and in general left strongest impressions on my brain. They do not represent the “best” films I’ve seen in 2009, any way you cut it. They include nostalgic favorites from my childhood as well as astonishing discoveries and re-discoveries. A few of them have stayed in my “wish list” for the legit DVD releases for more than a decade, ever since the advent of the format really, while others are re-releases that are significant improvements over the old versions. A few, such as The Human Condition, are second dips on my part, but worth every penny. And some items like Murder by Contract were total surprises that sucker-punched me into genuflecting submission, awesome reminders that no matter how many great movies you see, there are still more that you haven’t seen, or weren’t even aware of.

11. Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure (Warner Archive Collection, No Region)

What the heck… a Tarzan movie from 1959?!

Yup, it’s Tarzan all right, played by Gordon Scott. He was picked up while working as a lifeguard and did his stint as the Ape-Man for the old RKO company in early 1950s and up to the Cy Weintraub productions of late 1950s, before moving on to Italy to star in a series of sword-and-sandal swashbucklers. Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure, written and directed by John Guillermine (Towering Inferno, the 1976 King Kong) is a very surprising entry, a taut-as-a-plucked-bowstring action thriller that pits Tarz against a motley crew of hardened criminals, led by Anthony Quayle in his full, battle-scarred villain mode. Modestly budgeted, Greatest Adventure wastes absolutely no time with the juvenile “jungle adventure” nonsense, and directly plunges into a startling array of violent action sequences, with an unnerving undercurrent of nastiness thoroughly unthinkable for any Weissmuller vehicle. Added on to this is an extremely adult take on the damsel-in-distress character played by Sara Shane, an attractive blonde with a slight overbite: she leaves absolutely no doubt that her interest in Tarzan is of, ah, predatory nature. It is Tarz who at the end has to beg her to stay for a while with him, not the other way around.

From the action-genre purist point of view, Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure was the most riveting film I have seen all year. Joel Silver and Jerry Bruckheimer should really do so much to make one like this for the contemporary viewers. If they can, that is. Oh yes, pre-James Bond Sean Connery plays a slightly goofy second-banana bad guy. Nothing Bond-ish about him at all: he just proves himself to be a good, physical actor. From Warner Archive Collection.

10. Goldfinger- Blu Ray (Sony Pictures/MGM, Region A)

Really, I’ve got no excuse for putting Goldfinger in this list, the blindingly magnificent Blu Ray transfer or not. Where is my liberal conscience? My feminist education? My ethnic pride? Not only is Goldfinger egregiously insulting to women (especially lesbians) and Koreans (check out the blue pyjama uniform worn by the allegedly Korean lackeys of Auric Goldfinger), it is also an unrepentant, unreconstructed celebration of 100% white male machismo and “coolness,” ladled with one-line quips, shiny and curved machinery, the toy furniture that sink into the floor or pop out of the walls and the car with a wheel that extends whirling screw-blades to tear apart the enemy car’s tire: at the center of all these is Sean Connery as James Bond, the ever-snickering, hirsute bastard, who is like your ultra-handsome, tennis-playing cousin, always popping up in a new sports car with a hot date in his arms, goosing and baiting you with the thrills of throwing your parent’s rulebook out of the bathroom window and getting away with it.

What can I say? This is James Bond beginning to hit just the right groove, fresh and engaging, still many years before degenerating into an ironic observer of the mayhem taking place around him, and Connery-Bond here is just too damn cool for anything like egghead film criticism to even faintly scratch his armor. In terms of sheer entertainment, Goldfinger probably stands at the apex of all movies I have seen or re-seen in 2009 (Indeed, comparing it to its contemporary equivalents like G.I. Joe, Mummy 3 or even Sherlock Holmes can be a pretty depressing exercise).

9. Lonely Are the Brave (Universal, Region 1)

Universal has launched its own rather morosely titled “Backlot Series” devoted to the overlooked stocks in its library, and so far their choices have been good to excellent: Cecil B. De Mille’s Cleopatra, Pre-Code Hollywood Collection, Trail of the Lonesome Pine, Beau Geste. Cream of this new crop is Lonely Are the Brave, Kirk Douglas’s favorite among his starring roles (along with Spartacus, I assume). Like Beau Geste, it’s not exactly an obscure item, with its perennially sought-after Jerry Goldsmith score (also released in 2009 from Intrada) and featuring excellent supporting performances by the likes of Gena Rowlnads, Walter Matthau, George Kennedy and Carrol O’Connor, but it is a distinctive pleasure to see the “Ragman’s Son” elder Douglas delivering a heartfelt performance as a cowboy whose carefree values are woefully mismatched to the world around him. Not as self-consciously elegiac as Sam Peckinpah’s Ballad of Cable Hogue, the Brave actually renders its protagonist, Jack W. Burns, in a harsh light, accentuated by the aged, worn make-up on Douglas that strips down romantic glow of the “last cowboy.” The tragic ending could have either been maudlin and trivializing or, conversely, basted in the thick marinade of romantic irony: it is neither, and opts to focus on Douglas’s convulsing frame and wide-open eyes as he listens to the death-agony of his loyal companion, holding us fast to the cold inevitability of its conclusion.

8. The Stepfather (Shout! Factory, Region 1)

I have been waiting for The Stepfather on DVD for a long time. The movie is in a way a perfect model genre film from ‘80s but also one of the definite cinematic statements concerning the Father-obsessed Reaganite America, in which the perfect patriarch is also a serial killer, completely unable to distinguish between the Father-Knows-Best TV fantasy and the post-feminist, post-Great Society reality of the ‘80s US of A. Jill Schoelen as Stephanie is still the most believable and sympathetic teenage heroine in a slasher-urban-thriller film ever, but the film is held together by Terry O’Quinn’s brilliant performance, so much more affecting and frightening because so little of his “geez, I don’t know, honey” mannerisms seem faked. What Blue Velvet does with the almost surrealistic hyperviolence and the “crazy” carnivalesque turn by Dennis Hopper, The Stepfather accomplishes much more efficiently and with a lot less screaming and hollering. My only complaint is that Shout! Factory’s transfer is merely good, rather than truly spectacular. But then again I am very happy I don’t have to wait yet one more year for this gem to see the sunlight outside the vault.

7. Z (Criterion, Region 1)

Z has previously been available in a less-than-desirable transfer but Criterion rescued it with a special edition in 2009. Costa-Gavras’s “satiric” thriller openly challenges the Greek military dictators who murdered the opposition politician Gregoris Lambrakis and took over the country in early ‘60s: its defiant (and very funny) opening “disclaimer” reads “Any resemblance to the actual events and personages are intentional.” Seen today, what is most remarkable about Z is how strongly it resists the fashionable “intellectual” nihilism of the European “art” cinema, and how deftly it fuses its agit-prop agendas with the powerful narrative and idioms of a “thriller” to maximize the viewer’s emotional investment. Z is definitely not for those who think Michael Moore is a despicable twat and that the movies like Lions for Lambs are courageous statements of liberal conviction, instead of chickenshit capitulations to the right-wing’s brute manipulation of the language of patriotism.

It is an indication of just how corrupt the political landscape of the United States has become that films like Z now generate the internet comments branding it as a “liberal propaganda.” The mental termites taketh over! In 1969, Z was the winner of the Best Foreign Picture Oscar, bestowed by Americans. How things have changed since then. On the other hand, Z is just as amazingly vivacious and relevant today as it was in late ‘60s, and will no doubt continue to be so for the next several decades. I hope Criterion continues to release Costa-Gavras’s other “political thrillers,” (branded as such and therefore forever denied the sacred, critic-proof status accorded to the “true” art films like Godard’s Le Chinoise) The Confession, State of Siege and Music Box, all of which deserve at least one more round of re-appreciation by a new generation of viewers.

6. The Human Condition (Criterion, Region 1)

Image’s late-’90s DVDs were a gratifying boon to the fans of classic Japanese cinema at the time of its release but have since become out of print and outdated in quality. Criterion reissues the three-part (or more accurately six-part) magnum opus of Kobayashi Masaki in one handy boxset: The Human Condition is in many ways one of the ultimate “humanist” statements in the history of cinema, the vast scope, unflagging compassion and sheer beauty of which simply overwhelm unsuspecting viewers, who might approach the epic thinking something on the order of Saving Private Ryan. The fact that it is in the end made from the perspective of the colonizer/aggressor and cannot quite do justice to the Chinese side of the story should not deter one from appreciating this stupendous cinematic achievement. Indeed, I am yet to encounter any person, regardless of his or her ethnic/cultural identity, political orientation or educational background, who, upon watching The Human Condition trilogy, was not compelled to re-consider and reflect on what he or she had known or thought about the Japanese invasion of China in 1930s and the tragic course of events that followed it.

5. The Housemaid (Korean Film Archive/Taewon Entertainment, No Region)

A terrific gift and arsenal to those who have had to defend the “old” Korean cinema’s honor in the glaring absence of anything like convincing material evidence, the Korean Film Archive release of Kim Ki-young’s Housemaid, beautifully restored with the funding from World Cinema Foundation, allows the film fans all over the world to finally appreciate this mind-boggling classic in the way it was meant to be seen. While restoration process was not perfect, remaining imperfections only serve to remind us of the teeth-gritting patience with which we had to encounter every speck of dirt, every splice and every horizontal line that marred, corrupted and violated every frame of the old Korean films. And the movie itself? Kim Ki-young’s best known work, currently being remade as a Jeon Do-yeon vehicle, is a eyebrow-raising psycho-sexual thriller, laced with mordant wit and fairly indescribable: it’s like early Bunuel or Teorema pulverized into an Agatha Christie mystery, or a Georges-Clouseau/Hitchcock film injected with demented Joan Crawford melodramatics. I only wish director Kim was still on hand to provide key commentaries to how this strange, wonderful production could have come about in ‘60s Korea.

4. Hardware- Blu Ray (Severin, No Region)

Richard Stanley’s rarely seen masterpiece Dust Devil finally received a deserving DVD release in 2007 from Subversive Cinema, but his feature film debut Hardware still languished in the netherworld. Severin, seemingly specializing in Eurotrash erotica, has done a tremendous service to the genre fans by not only dusting off the old negative/print of the film but releasing it in the new Blu Ray format. This disc will go a long way to convince my kind of niche consumers to switch to Blu Ray, now that they can plainly see that low-budget cult films that had built their reputations brick by brick via VHS rental services can benefit as much, or perhaps more, from the high resolution of the Blu Ray as the latest summer blockbuster.

I still get more kick out of the grungy, mangy Hardware than almost any SF-horror film I can get hands on in theater these days. Some complain that it’s not particularly original. Er, sure. I am not saying Stanley is a god or something, or even that he is more talented than Jim Cameron, but if he was given 1/10 of the total budget for Avatar, the result would not have been an equine version of Pocahontas, I bet.

3. Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics Vol. 1 (Sony/Columbia, Region 1)

Sony Pictures, along with Warner Brothers, the perennial champ of classic American cinema fans, has dug deeply into their vaults to uncover the nuggets of film noir that are sure to play havoc with the standard film studies textbook definition of the genre.

Even though one of its five titles, Fritz Lang’s Big Heat, is quite well known, the rest of its selections are highly idiosyncratic. The Sniper is a ahead-of-its-time story of a mentally disturbed serial killer prowling the streets of San Francisco, killing women with a rifle from rooftop, a clear antecedent of Scorpio in Dirty Harry: except that this Stanley Kramer production is also a liberal message film that dares to portray the killer in an almost sympathetic light. The Lineup, directed by Don Siegel and starring Eli Wallach is a brutal action thriller (also set in San Francisco) with Wallach and Robert Keith playing a pair of hideously perverse hit-men who pick up and appraise their victims with the aplomb of restaurant critics. Five Against the House, the weakest film in the bunch, is a mild but well-acted (especially by Brian Keith) caper film, a sort of war-trauma-impacted college-bound Ocean’s Eleven.

But the true discovery of the collection is Irving Lerner’s Murder by Contract, the object of an enthusiastic introduction by Martin Scorsese, who acknowledges the film’s influence on Taxi Driver, especially conception of the Travis Bickle character. Yet Murder by Contract is nothing like the De Niro-Jodie Foster vehicle or, for that matter, any noir film I have ever seen. Jean-Pierre Melville’s Les deuxieme souffles and Peter Yates’s Friends of Eddie Coyle are both great examples of noir tradition re-interpreted by European directors, released in 2009, but Murder by Contract, without the help of stars like Robert Mitchum, basically kicked their butts. It remains the most astonishing film discovery of 2009 for me.

2. M Butterfly (Warner Brothers, Region 1)

Dear Lord, how long have I waited for the proper DVD release of this film. Every movie fan has at least two or three films they are at a loss to explain their “unnatural” attachment to, the ones they watch over and over until the VHS copy gets mangled: the uncomprehending criticisms and snooty dismissals hurled at these personal favorites make them blanch in fury. One of these films for me is M Butterfly.

It may well be the single most misunderstood film among those that ever dealt with the Orientalist perspective. The fact that John Lone, playing a Beijing opera singer for whom Jeremy Irons’s French diplomat Rene Gallimar fall heads over heels in love, does not strike one as “feminine” has been cited in many reviews as the film’s serious oversight, when that exactly was David Cronenberg’s point all along. What did these people expect? An actor who in drag looks like Lucy Liu? Critics overwhelmingly preferred the misogynistic exoticism of Farewell My Concubine over M Butterfly’s far more uncomfortable message, that sexual and romantic attraction easily seeps through the categories like “gay” and “straight” and is in fact no less real for being a thorough “invention.” Academics always write about how “sexual identity is a construction” but when a movie like M Butterfly actually appears and directly, boldly states this point, they respond by giving it cold shoulders. Personally, I think we eggheads should be less of invertebrate parasites living off the suet of the “inferior” mass culture products, snootily pointing out how they toe the line and “don’t get the message,” whereas in fact plenty of talented filmmakers like Cronenberg and plenty of movies like M Butterfly do get the message. I think we fulfill our “critical” functions much better when we flat-out acknowledge that some makers of these unwashed mass culture products are more intelligent than we are and deserve to be treated as such.

1. The Prisoner: Complete Series- Blu Ray (Network/A&E, Region A)

Finally the top DVD-Blu Ray of 2009! As I had predicted two years ago that something like this might happen, a forty-two-year-old classic TV series has beaten many cinematic masterpieces and rare gems and rose to the top in my list. It is also a triumph for the Blu Ray, since had not the Network/A&E’s presentation been so eye-poppingly amazing, it surely would not have claimed the current position. The Blu Ray of The Prisoner is my current choice for the most astonishing restoration of decades-old film elements on the video that I have ever seen, beating all Criterion restorations. This TV show, first broadcast in 1967, now looks like it was filmed this year: this is not a rhetorical or figurative statement. It literally looks that beautiful. In this particular case it is not a hyperbole to claim that no living consumer has ever seen the series look this magnificent, as surely the best-quality TV broadcast at the time would have been only an approximation of what we see here.

It is pure magic. That’s the only right way to describe it.

As for the series itself, I find myself despairing at my lack of ability to describe its special appeal to anyone who has not seen it. The Prisoner is the seventeen hour-long episodes of sheer madness and utter brilliance, the kind of TV series that would have qualified for and won Nobel Literature Prize, as powerful as the best works of Borges or Kafka in letters. Originally conceived as a sequel of sorts to Patrick McGoohan’s hit spy series Danger Man, with the latter’s John Drake fighting himself free out of a strange community called The Village made up of “retired” spies, constantly subject to almost subliminal forms of interrogation and behavioral manipulation, not to mention never-ending surveillance and an absolutely frightening punitive-policing mechanism known as The Rover, The Prisoner has mutated, under the guidance of its star and executive producer McGoohan, into something utterly unique in the annals of popular entertainment: a show that is on one level an extremely ’60-ish espionage escapade with dollops of paranoia and anti-establishment sentiments, and on another a startlingly intelligent science fiction that explores the points of intersection among technology, social norms and political power, and finally an allegorical treatise on the possibility (or impossibility) of being a truly free man in a modern society enclosed by, as Max Weber famously put it, the “iron cages” of bureaucratic machinery. Some episodes are straightforwardly frightening in their prophetic presentation of the mind-screwing tactics now practiced widely in today’s world: others are maddening riddles that will add a few dozen knots of new wrinkles to the cerebral cortex of your brain. Just the same, they are all viciously smart, awesomely cool and hellishily addictive: you will, for certain, never see a big white balloon and feel the same again, after witnessing how it—The Rover—dispatches the occasional recalcitrant Villager in The Prisoner.

So terminates, rather reluctantly I must say, another hugely subjective and garrulously boastful “my favorite” list. May 2010 bring more and more unappreciated, unacknowledged, unseen and unknown gems, precious stones and heck, even glass beads, to my attention. Thanks for the reading, folks, and I will be back soon with more DVD reviews of specific titles and rantings about whatever strikes my fancy. Be seeing you!

© Young Mi Angela Pak

Season’s Greetings to ye who have stumbled on this blog. God help ye if you actually searched this page out, or were notified by Facebook and intentionally decided to take a peek! Well, Season’s Greetings to ye all the same.

The wreath displayed above is made mostly from the materials found in our unassuming little backyard: Holly (Ilex aquifolium, I think), pine branches, tree barks, sage and a bit of rosemary. Courtesy of the multitalented artist Angela, my wife. She just puts together something like this lickety-split overnight and then moans that it doesn’t look “professional enough.” Thanks to her efforts, we were invited to a neighbor’s party, had a good time, did not overspend on holiday decorations, and actually got a lot of work done for the new house (We moved to a new place just this November but I won’t bore you with the details).

Which does not mean the work was easy. I’d packed about eighty medium-sized moving boxes for my books and DVDs and I finally opened and poured them out all in my study. A bulk of DVDs have emigrated out to the living room, but the books, or whatever else that could not be accommodated by six tall bookcases, are, as usual, stacked on top of one another into a series of very dangerous-looking piles on the study floor, like termite lairs badly mimicking the Tower of Pisa. The last time I have packed all my books and moved was nearly thirteen years in the past. Of course I expected the size of the piles to have increased, but nonetheless it was fascinating to re-discover how my cultural tastes, intellectual agendas and sources of entertainment have evolved in the last decade and a half. Well, that sounds mighty pretentious: the truth is that my personal library of survived tomes reveals what a weird, “eclectic,” spendthrift and yet sometimes eyebrow-raisingly obsessive reader I have been and still am.

Nonetheless, I am quite surprised and pleased that I still can find many ‘80s and early ‘90s horror in print among my old books, even small-press magazines like Grue and Haunts. I still remember the feeling of my brain shaking like a lump of Jell-O as it tried to absorb Thomas Ligotti’s “Mad Night of Atonement,” published in Grue (I just checked the date of the issue in question, No. 9, and it came out in, Holy Humboldt Squid, nineteen eighty-eight! ).

© Hell’s Kitchen Productions

The only magazines I have ever subscribed in my life (aside from trade publications like Journals of Higher Education) are Lingua Franca and Film Score Monthly (which has since become an online publication), so I must have collected them by regularly checking the newsstands at Harvard Square. I even have the slightly-less-well-preserved copies of a few issues of Night Cry, the horror-exclusive sister magazine of Twilight Zone, lavishly illustrated by J. K. Potter.

© TZ Publications/Montcalm Publishing Co.

Browsing through them brought back all these haunted memories from the days of my brain-damaging immersion in the American horror literature. How many Koreans, out of 50 million, are there, who are not only fans of both Ramsey Campbell and A. A. Attanasio, but also were introduced to them specifically through their early Lovecraftian pastiches (Inhabitants of the Lake and “Star Pools” in New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, respectively)? Statistically, there should be at least… several. Um, maybe not.

And then I find that I still own (not exactly dog-eared but suitably yellowed) copies of John Brosnan’s (writing as Simon Ian Childer, try make an acronym out of this name) Tendrils, about a gigantic man-eating fungus, and The Fungus, about many different families of gigantic man-eating fungi. Let me show you a little orange Post-It “comment” of mine still stuck to the back cover (Les Edwards’ joyously hyperbolic and rather inaccurate front cover is nonetheless a thing of beauty) when I managed to haul the paperback out of one moving box.

© Grafton Books

Argh! I am chagrined to think that I thought Tendrils was somehow misogynistic. As opposed to what, a David Mamet play? Mr. Brosnan, wherever you are, I didn’t mean what I wrote then, no doubt pleased as punch for having used the word “misogynistic” (misspelling it, too)… but wait, the main villainess in The Fungus allows her son to be eaten by the fungi to “atone for his maleness,” and you did write that. Hmm.

Saint Nicholas’ Love Handles! What manner of in-appropriate rubbish am I prattling about on the Christmas Day?! Here’s hoping that everyone I love and/or care for have grand time celebrating, or, not quite making that, have peaceful and relaxed moments for him- and herself. I know it is too much to ask for an even day-long restraint of killings and bombings in the world, but wishing for it doesn’t cost anything, so let’s keep trying.

I now have to design the Year of the Tiger New Year’s card for my wife, and fulfill all other day-job obligations before 2010 really, seriously commences. Will be back in a few days to post the selections for my favorite DVD/Blu Ray discs of 2009: it should be a fun reading.

Earlier this year I sat down with Michael Saler, Professor of modern British history at University of California, Davis, to discuss the future of science fiction. Professor Saler is a brilliant cultural historian with a wide range of interests and expertise that cover J.R.R. Tolkien, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Le Carre, Roberto Bolano, avant-garde and modernist art, computer games and of course science fiction. He is currently finishing a book-length study of the imaginary worlds dreamt up in literature, entitled Geographies of Imagination: The Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality.

Interviewee: Michael Saler
Interviewer: Kyu Hyun Kim
Interview conducted on February 15, 2009

Q (Kyu Hyun Kim): Let’s start from the issues closer to our, shall we say, day jobs. Would you say that mass culture is now altogether legitimate topic for study in our professions?

S (Michael Saler): I think we should still approach it with some caution; some disciplines are more open to it than others. But, on the whole, the academy doesn’t marginalize mass culture in the way it did only a generation ago.

Q: Do you think there is actually a clear distinction between fandom and academic researchers?

S: The most sophisticated level of fandom, of genre literature anyway, is not necessarily concerned with the theoretical approaches. But otherwise, sure, the level of scholarship is very high. Look at, say, H. P. Lovecraft scholarship coming out from the Necronomicon and Hippocampus Presses, among others. I believe Lovecraft’s books render themselves rather nicely to complex theoretical interpretations. Cultural Studies and American Studies have been at the forefront of studying mass culture, like comic books, and the best of them combine empirical research and theoretical reflections.

Q: Do you see any meaningful change in the canonization process over the years?

S: Sure, I do. To give you an example, I was able to write a review of Michael Chabon’s Maps and Legends for Times Literary Supplement. [which can be found here and ends with a provocative quotation from Chabon: “All literature, highbrow or low, from Aeneid onward, is fan fiction.”] I mean, graphic novels, if not all forms of comic books, are clearly taken much more seriously now. The New York Times and other mainstream newspapers and newsmagazines have been reviewing graphic novels and computer games for some time. This is driven by a demographic change which is in many ways global and frankly irresistible.

Q: Can I inquire about your take of science fiction as a modern literary genre?

S: I see science fiction as representing specific forms of “modern enchantment.” What I mean by this is that science, secularism and other traits of the modern world are re-imagined by these works as something marvelous, mysterious and enchanting. In this way, these works render rationality itself fantastic and adventuresome.

Q: So it’s a recovery of magic in a way.

S: Absolutely.

Q: Would a similar observation be made for detective fiction?

S: Yes, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes is of course a great example.

Q: Some Japanese writers in the early twentieth century experimented with the form of the detective fiction, in some ways pushing against the genre’s envelope, bending their formulaic structure. The original short story that served as a base for Rashomon, called “In a Grove,” by Akutagawa Ryunosuke, can be seen as a variant of a detective fiction in which the climactic “resolution” is totally negated, leaving the readers in the dust.

S: That’s very interesting. You should check out Harry Stephen Keeler. He’s really amazing. He crafted a form of detective fiction based on his concept of the “webwork,” with these completely ridiculous plot strands all criss-crossing the narrative, and somehow tied up neatly by the end! One of his mysteries introduces the culprit at the very last page [Laughter].

Q: That’s worse than The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

S: Definitely worse [Laughter]. He also had a knack for most bizarre titles you could imagine. One novel was called “The Man with the Magic Eardrums.” [Laughter]

Q: Not to be read too aloud [Laughter].

S: Exactly.

Q: Do you read a lot of British science fiction? Any comment on new development on the other side of the Atlantic?

S: The British have re-invented the “space opera” subgenre in the past decade. The British are fairly conscious of the space opera as a genre that replays the history of the British Empire, so I believe some temporal distance from their actual historical experience might have been needed before they became comfortable again with the notion of space conquest and such.

Q: Any particular authors?

S: Iain Banks is great. I also enjoy Alastair Reynolds, Peter K. Hamilton, Stephen Baxter, Ken Macleod.

Q: What do you think the future holds for science fiction?

S: The future is bright! I am optimistic. I think cyberpunk affectation is becoming passé. We are ready to move onto the next level, perhaps. I think it won’t be the ideas themselves but the media format in which the writers work that will be extremely influential in determining the future of the genre. By the way I don’t consider the pervasive influence of the electronic publication bad at all, either. The transition from our still print-media-oriented readership to something almost fully electronic could be a bit bumpy, but in the end good stories and good characters will continue to matter.

Q: Please tell me about your latest project.

S: A new anthology regarding the “re-enchantment” of the modern world is now out [Re-enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age, Stanford University Press, 2009]. We [editors Michael Saler and Joshua Landy] are arguing that modernity does not necessarily entail “disenchantment.” We do not directly deal with religion, but we do look into what filled in the vacuum left by the God’s absence following the secularization of the world. The question is whether science could comfortably fill God’s shoes: after all, God had fulfilled so many different functions for the believers. It is our argument that science can actually be harnessed to serve some of these functions, thought to be totally at odds with its basic character. Charles Darwin, as you know, did not reject the world of transcendence. What he wanted to do is to understand the world without resorting to theology. This was also a concern of H. P. Lovecraft. Sure, his stories were meant to scare and disturb us but at the same time they are wholly accepting of the mystery of the universe. He endorsed the modern understanding of the imagination as intrinsic to rational cognition (just as Sherlock Holmes claimed he was engaged with the scientific use of the imagination). I think that’s the real reason why Lovecraft and Doyle’s Holmes are so popular and lasting. In fact, Lovecraft continues to be interesting almost in spite of some of his stylistic predilections. He never met an adjective he didn’t like.

Q: Yes, the “indescribable horror…” which he goes on to describe anyway [Laughter].

S: Yet he could often be a wonderful stylist. I remember he once wrote a phrase, “Concave space that somehow behaves like convex.” [Laughter] It’s really brilliant.

Q: It’s almost a Zen koan [Laughter].

S: Lovecraft had a core artistic vision that I believe gets communicated to the readers no matter how pulpy the story itself became, or no matter how dense his writing got. This is in contrast to, say, Robert E. Howard, who was a passionate writer with great skills but, as far as I can see, lacked Lovecraft’s cosmic vision.

Q: OK, we are approaching the closing time, so I will ask you a quick question. Which do you think will happen in your lifetime, 1) contact with an alien life-form, 2) creation of a fully operational artificial intelligence, and 3) discovery of the means to travel faster than light [Laughter].

S: #2 will probably come first. Then that superior intelligence can answer questions 1 and 3 for you.

Q: Thank you so much for agreeing to be interviewed for my humble blog.

S: My pleasure.

2008 has been a pretty eventful year in my life, as it turned out—what with the book finally coming out and also with nearly killing myself in a car accident– but enough about little old me… it’s time to select the favorite DVDs of 2008, girls and boys.

The big non-event of the year, DVD-collecting-wise, was that I finally relented (after Criterion announced its first spate of Blu Ray releases) and bought a Blu Ray player as well as a slew of discs in the new format. I think losers in a war should shut up and not make any excuses, so as a former supporter of Toshiba and HD DVD, I will refrain from cracking “I told you so”-’s to those who got stuck with the Blu Ray discs unplayable in your instantly obsolete players and have to deal with the consumer-insulting concept of “firmware update.” So far my unassuming Pioneer player has shielded me from any major hiccups, and that’s just the way I hope things stay. Blu Ray, while not God’s perfect solution to the problem of high-def upgrading, still does allow us to have access to a goodly number of cinematic arts in the form that makes us a lot more appreciative of their visual and aural capacities. I guess I have made peace with the format, for now: I don’t expect me to switch over to downloadable files in HD anytime soon. I am watching the latest season of Law & Order: Criminal Intent on iTunes, for sure, but that will not stop me from buying them on DVDs, or even Blu Ray, if NBC bothers to release them at all.

Korean cinema industry continues to struggle with a host of problems, most of which are of their own making. The truly pathetic decline, or near obliteration, of the secondary market for motion pictures has been an ongoing issue for several years now, but no one is doing anything about it. The DVD market is on the last lines of life support and is paging Dr. Kervokian or anyone else who could just put it out of its misery. The proposed bill to apply the more strict anti-trust regulation on the distribution of motion pictures languishes on the shelf, gathering dust. Hollywood-ization of Korean cinema, in the sense of relentless pursuit of “high concept” movies, slavery to fashions and fads and marketing-driven film production, continues unabated, exactly when the old Hollywood models are crumbling into pieces to make way for the new architectural designs of the Darren Aronofskys and Christopher Nolans.

As for illegal downloading, all I want to say is that this is not the problem that can be fixed through legal or political means. The heart of the problem lies in the Korean consumer’s basic lack of respect for a motion picture as cultural products, and the idiotically myopic industrial policies that cater to such lack of respect to make quick bucks: the kind of marketing campaign, for instance, that suggests a movie-goer paying regular ticket price is a sucker compared to some teenaged sharpie getting discounts from using certain credit cards, etc. If you are not willing to pay your own hard-earned bucks for a product, then you don’t give a poop about it, I mean, really. You cannot call yourself a fan of Korean movies if you didn’t make any contribution to the livelihood of the people who make dem movies (unless you are Kim Jong Il, of course). Down with the illegal download!

One bright spot that warms my heart is the Korean Film Archive’s heroic and greatly underappreciated effort to preserve, excavate and make available in public old Korean films, some of which have been dug up among archives of North China and never seen the light of day for more than 40 years. And the Korean film industry continues to draw ridiculously talented men and women thoroughly devoted to filmmaking, still capable of knocking us out with films like The Chaser.

Oh well, enough of patriotic jeremiad. Let’s get down to business. As was the case with the 2007 list, the following choices do not reflect my calmly collected, rational evaluations of the movies, animations and TV series found in the respective DVDs and Blu Rays: neither do they represent what I consider to be the highest-quality presentations of the titles. This is simply a very personal and subjective list of the discs that I found intriguing, delightful, surprising, emotionally galvanizing and/or otherwise memorable. And again like last year, there is a separate list for Korean-language speakers at Djunaboard here. I know, the items are not identical. It was actually extremely difficult to pare the list down to even twenty, much less ten.

10. How the West Was Won- Blu Ray (Warner Brothers- No Region Code)

Is How the West Was Won the kind of timeless classic that can be compared favorably to the best works of John Ford and Henry Hathaway? Probably not. Still, this title was one Blu Ray disc that I thought the disc producers (in this case, Warner Brothers) could proudly point to when confronted with a consumer’s cynical question, “So what does this incredibly enhanced capacity of a Blu Ray disc do for us exactly?” The second disc features the “Smilebox” presentation of the movie that curves visible areas of the screen to simulate the original Cinerama projection: in a regular widescreen, the image projected onto three-panel screens becomes inevitably distorted. I had initially expected something borderline cheesy or in any case pretty gimmicky, but no, as soon as I started watching the first three minutes of the Smilebox version I got totally sucked into the jaw-dropping vista of snow-bound canyons, raging river currents, etc. Breathtaking is the only appropriate word here. Also included in the set is the documentary Cinerama Adventure, an exhaustive run-down on this specialty format, that is worth the price of purchase by itself.

9. The Invaders- The First Season (CBS/Paramount- Region 1)

I have still managed to miss The Man from U. N. C. L. E. but otherwise no classic TV series was as much of compelling viewing as Quinn Martin’s The Invaders. Starring Roy Thinnes as an architect who is privy to a planetary conspiracy by the aliens from outer space (whose true form is never revealed), The Invaders is a quintessential paranoid thriller in the serial form, ahead of its time in its cynical attitude toward the military and government (In one stunning episode, Jack Lord—that’s right, Steve McGarrett himself—portrays a disabled former military hero who unrepentantly sides with the aliens just so that he can reclaim his “heroic” status) as well as its subtle critique of the rural America’s parochialism and conformity. Seen 30 years later, The Invaders still does its job extremely well, in many ways remaining superior to its more obvious descendants such as X-Files in its no-nonsense dramatics and cool, unsentimental presentation of alien beings.

8. Kim Ki Young Collection (Korean Film Archive/Taewon Entertainment- Region 3)

In 2008 Korean Film Archive also released the second volume of The Past Unearthed DVD collections, this time focusing on the freshly discovered Korean motion pictures from late 1930s, and other classic titles, but for the sheer non-academic, movie-nut desirability, nothing could surpass the Kim Ki Young Collection, which gathers together four major films of the idiosyncratic filmmaker: Goryeojang (1963), The Insect Woman (1972), Promise of the Flesh (1975) and Ieodo (1977).

A filmmaker of unique talent, Kim struggled mightily against the horrid material conditions of the Korean film industry in 60s and 70s, producing arch melodramas and bizarre thrillers that defy classification or even explanation. While many of his films, including their titles, were clearly inspired by the Japanese New Wave (Even though his Goryeojang, made in 1963, is intriguingly positioned between the two internationally renowned versions of The Ballad of Narayama, one by Kinoshita Keisuke and the other by Imamura Shohei), he was far from a copycat. Simply put, no one makes movies like Kim Ki Young’s. Sometimes his films are nightmarish and otherworldly in the most fundamental sense of the words. At other times, they are unbelievably kitschy, stupefyingly pretentious or just unimaginably bizarre, funnier than any intentional satire ever could. Who could possibly forget a prostitute’s necrophilic tryst with a drowned corpse in Ieodo (1977)? Or the “vibrating multicolored candies” sex scene, filmed from below a glass table in Insect Woman (1972)?

Alas, the films collected in this box set are pretty beat up, horrendously marred by scratches, spots and splices. The Insect Woman, in particular, is shown in what is reputed to be the only surviving print, one made for submission to the Sitges Festival, badly discolored in spots with burnt-in Spanish subtitles. It grieves me to think that his films remain outside the purview of the kind of loving restorations given to a Dario Argento or a Mario Bava in the Region 1 DVD market. Still, the Korean Film Archive has done its best, especially from the academic end, including with four DVDs a hefty booklet with two bilingual critical essays and a reconstructed scenario of the permanently lost sequences from Goryeojang.

7. Man of the West (MGM/UA- Region 1)

This year’s most amazing blind-purchase DVD discovery was hands-down Anthony Mann’s Man of the West, which, despite its plain (even boring) title and bland opening sequence, is one of the most mind-boggling Westerns I have ever seen. Man of the West wrecked the entire frigging concept of “revisionist Western” for me and stunned me into contemplating just how many unsung masterpieces you haven’t even heard about are out there. Had it not been directed by (recent critic’s darling) Mann and not starred Gary Cooper, would it have even seen light of the day? The only weak point of the movie is that Cooper is obviously too old to play Lee J. Cobb’s nephew, but otherwise Coop’s as dangerously ambivalent—he’s darn right scary when he begins to violently undress the howling Jack Lord while pummeling him into pulp—as I ever seen him.

6. Hammer Films: Icons of Horror Collection (Sony/Columbia- Region 1)

Sony and Columbia also released another fan favorite this year, the mis-named Icons of Adventure Collection with the sinister (and racist) Stranglers of Bombay, but I am leaning toward this one. The draw for Hammer fans is the inclusion of the rarely-seen Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll, but for me a beautifully remastered Gorgon was the big surprise: compared to the drab VHS version, it really was like seeing an entirely different movie, the Sony DVD version totally unexpectedly managing to evoke the Gothic-romance atmosphere (courtesy of the superb direction by Terence Fisher), despite the sorry quality of make-up on the Gorgon. The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb and Scream of Fear are the other selections. All in all, a highly satisfactory package, with the quality of presentation decidedly superior to the earlier Anchor Bay releases of Hammer titles.

5. The Dark Knight- Blu Ray (Warner Brothers- No Region Code)

For some reasons a few people whose opinions I greatly respect seem determined not to like The Dark Knight. Ah well, it would actually stimulate my Contrarian Impulse if everyone agrees with me on the merit of this summer blockbuster that also happens to be a head-spinning crime thriller qua film noir, a complex multi-character drama with a miraculous ensemble of actors delivering thoroughly satisfying performances on all accounts and a startling treatise on the hypocrisies of American law-and-order mentality and yes, even comic-book super-heroism. Can a super-hero franchise movie deconstruct its own myth to this extent and get away with it? Sure, to the tune of 900 million bucks in worldwide box office performance. And this is way before even mentioning the terrifying mystery that is the Joker as interpreted by the late Heath Ledger.

I claim that The Dark Knight has a far, far more perceptive take on the post-9/11, Bush-year American Zeitgeist than any so-called liberal anti-Iraq War film made in last two years (Rendition? Lions for Lambs? I don’t think so. In the Valley of Elah, a very good movie, still cannot match the diagnosis of the problem and prescriptions provided in the Batman sequel), but hey, let’s not get too excited. All I want to note here is that it is a movie like The Dark Knight that indeed provides rationalizations for switching to Blu Ray, or run to the nearest IMAX theater.

4. The Exquisite Short Films of Kihachiro Kawamoto (Kim Stim Collection/Kino Video- Region 1)

The “exquisite” in the title is not hyperbole. Neither would be adjectives like “haunting,” “enchanting” and “mystifying.” This DVD collects seven short animated films of Kawamoto Kihachiro, a master of puppet animation and long-time President of the Animator’s Association in Japan. Kawamoto, who had apprenticed at Kratky Studio in Prague under the mentorship of Jiri Trnka, soon developed his own unique style that combines the austere aesthetics of bunraku and noh with the stop-motion techniques. The DVD includes the utterly unforgettable showcases of this style, “The Demon” and “Dojoji Temple,” both adapted from folk stories in the Tales of Now and the Past, but it also demonstrates, in other works including the Kafkaesque parable “An Anthropo-Cynical Farce” (with dialogues in French) and the indescribable “A Poet’s Life,” the stunning range of his skills and the sumptuousness of his tastes as an artist. Finally, even though most of the animated shorts are squarely intended for adults, I would be remiss if I neglect to mention the subtle yet expansive sense of humor that infuses them.

3. The Naked Prey (Criterion- Region 1)

‘50s minor action star Cornell Wilde was also an independent producer and director. Taking the real-life story of the explorer John Colter and his dire experience with Blackfoot Indians as a basis, he fashioned a harrowing tale of survival and filmed it in South Africa with some of the top-class black actors living under the apartheid system. Dismissed by some critics as in poor taste and overly brutal at the time of theatrical release, Naked Prey is now positioned to be properly appreciated not only for its directorial acumen and wonderful performances, but also for its lyrical beauty and astoundingly cathartic finale. Criterion’s 2.35:1 widescreen transfer is absolutely magnificent, standing out even among its staple of restorations.

2. The Fire Within (Criterion- Region 1)

Watching The Fire Within was at once an explosively exhilarating and a deeply unsettling experience. With apologies to Michelangelo Antonioni, L’Aaventura feels like a fashion show with a very egotistical designer harboring in the background next to this searing portrayal by Louis Malle of a man who is slowly sliding into spiritual, and soon to be culminating in physical, death.

Malle has always been my favorite nouvelle vague filmmaker, even though there are few films of his that I could enjoy or have fun with, as I could with Truffaut or even Godard. The Fire Within is probably one of the monumentally feel-bad movies I have seen in my life, and yet the particular truths laid bare in it, embodied in the extraordinary performance of Maurice Ronet, a European actor of yesteryear whose early passing I mourn more than anyone else’s, haunt my dreams like no other.

1. L. A. Confidential- Blu Ray (Warner Brothers- No Region Code)

And here we go, the no. 1 disc I bought this year. L. A. Confidential. This velvety-on-surface but tough-as-iron-inside dame has not aged at all. No, I take it back, she actually improves with age, in all aspects. For me this is what contemporary American cinema is all about, and to build superb characters around an exceptionally well-managed narrative and come up with a story that alters the reality of the lived world through our newfound perception of it. The very definition of cinematic art.

Enough ramblings! I hope you enjoyed my list this year around, too, and as anyone who puts something like this together would wish, you might be a tad more interested in checking out one or more items mentioned in it for yourself. Thanks for reading, and I will be back with more DVD reviews and interviews of creative people very soon.

CROSSING THE LINE. A Very Much So/Passion Film Production. 2006, United Kingdom, 1 hour 32 minutes. With participation of BBC, E Pictures, Koryo Tours, Cine Qua Non, Dongsoong Art Center. Directed by Daniel Gordon. Cinematography: Nick Bennet. Edited by Peter Haddon. Music by Heather Fenoughty. Sound edited by Stevie Haywood. Sound mixed by Adam Mendez. Sound effects by Samantha Storer. Narrated by Christian Slater.

In 2002, the BBC documentarian Daniel Gordon made a heartfelt and crowd-pleasing chronicle, The Game of Their Lives, of North Korea’s football team and its incredible advance into the World Cup quarterfinals in 1966. Greatly pleased by the final product, North Korean authorities granted Gordon an unprecedented level of access for a foreign filmmaker, allowing him to record daily lives of two young girls preparing for an eye-poppingly grandiose (and for many people, obscenely totalitarian) “Mass Game” in celebration of the Great Leader Kim Jong Il. The resulting documentary, A State of Mind, sharply divided the viewer responses: some consider it nothing more than a detestable apologia for a quasi-monarchical dictatorship, while others see it as a refreshing corrective to the usual anti-Communist palavers that reduce North Koreans into little more than brainless termites. Instead of playing it safe for his next project, however, Gordon went ahead and tackled an even more potentially controversial topic—the life-story of Private James Drasnok, an American soldier who walked over the DMZ, riddled with uncharted mines, and “defected” to North Korea in 1962, and has lived there since. The result is one of the most fascinating documentaries about North Korea ever made: but the film also unexpectedly uncovers some truly interesting, even poignant, episodes of intersection between American and Korean histories.

Despite his somewhat heavy-handed effort to (visually) draw the parallel between the aggressively nationalistic cultures of North Korea and the United States, Gordon manages to keep afloat in the air disparate, often mutually incompatible, perspectives on the bizarre life history of Private Drasnok, ably navigating through the treacherous ideological waters. Certainly most North Koreans will be hard pressed to see “Crossing” as a negative portrayal of their own country (Kim Jong Il himself acknowledged abduction of Japanese citizens as a part of its insane “spy training” scheme in 2002, so discussing that issue is no longer officially discouraged), but those who insist on seeing North Korea as an oppressive totalitarian state will also find plenty of evidence here to back up their view. Perhaps the surest indication that Gordon has pulled off this difficult balancing act is that we as viewers cannot easily come to a conclusion about the film’s protagonist.

Drasnok’s life is indeed the stuff that proves the adage “truth is stranger than fiction.” A young Southern man, raised in poverty and a broken home (described by him as a “living hell”), he was a failure as a soldier as well. Cocky, ignorant and totally devoid of discipline, Drasnok crossed the DMZ seemingly out of sheer adolescent stupidity, like a teenager who has no loose change in his jeans pockets so decides to rob a liquor store, armed with a switchblade, and was as surprised as anyone when he was welcomed as a valuable tool for anti-American propaganda, eventually given a chance to lead a materially comfortable, middle-class life that surely would have been denied to him had he stayed in the U.S. (It might surprise some viewers to learn that North Korea was well ahead of South Korea in economic growth and overall quality of living conditions at least until mid-1960s, exceeding the average annual growth rate of 20 % in the years between 1954 and 1960)

Soon enough, he and his fellow U.S. army defectors (yes, there were more) fell into the pretty familiar routine of the annoying young American expats, cruising in a cluster, drinking, horsing around and chasing after women. The life in North Korea had begun to go sour by late 1960s: the Americans were unable to withstand the monotony of a “peaceful” Communist country and the lack of purpose in their lives. They finally attempted to jump ship to Europe via the Soviet embassy, which promptly sent them packing. Eventually, it was Comrade Kim Jong Il who came to their rescue, by casting Drasnok and his colleagues as seedy imperialist villains in his ambitious film productions. This portion of the documentary is simply amazing, as we are treated to rarely seen (certainly for me, never-before-seen) excerpts from such legendary North Korean megahits as Nameless Heroes, and footages of the American defectors hamming it up as hilariously grotesque caricatures of their own countrymen. Dresnok in these films suggests in appearance a no-talent cousin of Laird Cregar. Sargeant Charles Jenkins—Dresnok’s arch-nemesis, resembling Ross Perot after a Jenny Craig diet regimen, more about him later—at one point shows up with a huge skullcap makeup, as if he is possessed by the Brain from Planet Arous: they must be seen to be believed.

Equally amazing is Dresnok’s family history. One neat trick Gordon pulls off is casting Dresnok and other defector’s children as “actors” playing their fathers in a ‘60s black and white re-enactment sequence. Dresnok’s son, James, half-American and half-Romanian, is a handsome, white young man, studying English in the prestigious Pyongyang Foreign Language University: it’s positively unreal to hear James speaking in fluent Northern-accented Korean and then in halting Konglish for the interview. Dresnok’s cute-as-a-button youngest son from his second marriage to a half-Somali Korean woman is one-quarter white, one-quarter African and half-Korean. So Dresnok’s own family in the perhaps world’s most ethnically and culturally homogeneous nation—as Professor Bruce Cumings points out, that never wavers in the belief that “Koreans are the most superior people on the planet”—turns out to be many degrees more multiethnic than a typical American one.

The docu abounds with such ironies scaling the height of surrealism, not the least of which is the fact that Dresnok still resolutely remains such an unreconstructed “American,” shoveling bonhomie in thick Southern drawl, teaching NK students English as a “native speaker” (this will sound very familiar to many South Korean students) enjoying illegal fishing expeditions, and hailed by old Koreans who recognize “Arthur the Evil American” from the movies. One cannot help think that it was his quintessential qualities as an American, which made him a misfit in the U.S. army, helped him survive and even flourish in North Korea.

In the latter half, considerable dramatic tension is generated when Sergeant Jenkins chose in 2004 to leave North Korea with his two daughters and join his wife already in Japan, and authored an autobiography condemning North Korean regime (translated into English and published from University of California Press). Dresnok angrily rebuts much of the claim made in Jenkins’ account of how the defectors were treated, including the claim that NK officials scorched tattoos on their bodies as a part of re-education procedure (according to him, the burning of tattoos was a strictly voluntary act). It’s clear that underlying the politically charged mutual denunciations is a longstanding feud between Jenkins and Dresnok that seems to hark back to the 1960s: Dresnok relates with pride a story of beating Jenkins up when the latter tried to pull his rank on the former.

In the end, we are left with Dresnok’s sly, gold-capped smile. Like all good documentaries, by showing an organically linked whole of the elements that are at first glance totally incompatible with one another and deftly maneuvering out from ideological agendas of its principals, Crossing the Line re-focuses our attention to the human foibles and ingenuity usually swept beneath the grand narratives of ideological struggles and national conflicts. I most certainly wouldn’t buy a used car from Dresnok, but at the same time he is way too uncomfortably “ordinary American” for many viewers to be dismissed as a devious traitor or a mouthpiece for socialist ideals. It is not difficult at all to imagine him voting for Mike Huckabee in the Republican primary, had he lived in the States. The Novel Prize winning writer Orhan Pamuk once stated to the effect that the real task of an artist is to show the people so utterly divided by language, culture, custom and beliefs are, in fact, exactly the same at their core. Whatever your opinion may be about this docu, and many viewers will come away from watching it with their negative views about North Korea confirmed, or even reinforced, I have no doubt that it achieved its artistic (and humanistic) aim in this sense.

DVD Presentation:

Kino Video. NTSC. Single Layer. Region 1. Video: Anamorphic Widescreen 1.85:1. Audio: Korean and English Dolby Digital 2.0. Subtitles: English. Supplements: An interview with director Daniel Gordon, photo galleries.

Kino Video is not exactly 100% reliable in terms of quality presentation of foreign titles, but Crossing the Line’s predominantly HD-lensed visuals are shown in a reasonably attractive fashion. Considering the large number of archival footage, the quality of video fluctuates wildly, especially in the first half, but I haven’t noticed any significant transfer problem. The soundtrack is quite ordinary: the techno-minimalist music score sounds a little tinny, but it serves the purpose. The only substantial supplementary material is a 30-minute interview with the director. It is informative but the questions basically make him re-cap the film in a digest form, so it will be a total spoiler for those who haven’t seen the main feature. I’d like to know why Christian Slater was chosen to narrate the film: maybe Gordon explains it and I missed it.

Herewith is the second part of the interview with John Shirley, the SF/horror author and one of the founders of the cyberpunk SF.

Interviewee: John Shirley
Interviewer: Kyu Hyun Kim
Interview conducted on November 12, 2007.

© Kyu Hyun Kim, 2007. All Rights Reserved. Not to be cited without an explicit permission from Kyu Hyun Kim

Q: Would you say you were first noticed as an SF writer through the short story collection, Heatseeker?

JS: Yeah, it did get plenty of attention. It got some really good reviews and one really negative review.

Q: Really?!

JS: Um yeah, I later found out the reason behind the negative review and I cannot tell you the whole background story behind it. It was in a British publication. A friend of the reviewer was a powerful guy who was mad at me…I’m not kidding. I know it sounds made up, as an excuse for that hostile review, but it’s true. But I don’t want to name names.

Q: Oh no. (Laughter)

JS: Well, anyway, yes, Heatseeker was the first bona-fide cyberpunk fiction collection that I wrote.

Q: When did In Darkness Waiting, one of my favorite novels of yours, come out?

JS: In the ‘80s.

Q: It seems that you have dabbled in genres other than science fiction from the very beginning of your career.

JS: Right, the first novel I wrote… not the first one published… but the first one I wrote was Dracula in Love. It wasn’t published until five years after I’d written it, and it was a kind of combination of horror and occult fantasy. I was reading Carl Jung and Aleister Crowley, as well as the biography of Vlad the Impaler. I was one of the first writers to combine the real life of the Vlad the Impaler and the character of Dracula as written by Bram Stoker. This was some years before Francis Coppola’s movie, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. [The filmmakers] probably didn’t read my novel. Probably.

Q: Well, I am one of your fans who had read In Darkness Waiting first, and then discovered Heatseeker. It was several years down the lane that I became aware of your reputation as one of the founders of cyberpunk fiction.

JS: In Darkness Waiting was originally a science fiction novel.

Q: It does retain a lot of SF flavor.

JS: It does. I was really desperate to sell a book at the time (Laughter). I really needed money. This is the reality of writing business. Anyway the editor asked me to change the story so that it could be marketed as horror. That was the time when Stephen King was getting big, and I said OK.

Q: Was it successful?

JS: Well, it didn’t sell like hundreds of thousands of copies but it did sell, enough so that they bought another novel of mine. So yeah, it was successful in that regard. Originally it was about a parasite who suppressed empathy in people. I guess it had some commonality with other SF stories about various parasitical organisms, like “Who Goes There?” and Robert Heinlein’s…

Q: The Puppet Master?

JS: Right. The basic idea is that we are subject to a kind of devolution of character, at the behest of any arbitrary stimulus, so that we go in the matter of seconds from human beings to the most brutal form of animal. That is the central horror of human life. To be crucified in the condition between the higher and the lower being.

Q: Reading your earlier works, I remember being very sympathetic to your severely critical view of a cluster of scientific positions, which might be loosely identified as “behavioral science,” and which survives in different forms today, that claim a wide range of human behavior can be codified as formulae, as responses to external stimuli, for instance, so if you know these formulae you can manipulate human beings.

JS: Yeah, I reject reductionist interpretations of the human mind. And eugenics and other types of deterministic views, I reject them too. But I do accept that we are actually largely “programmed” creatures. I agree that 90% of our personalities are determined in the womb. However, whatever small percentages not determined by our genes and hard-wires and biochemistry are genuinely free, and these are the most important and also most ignored or under-nourished parts of ourselves and maybe the most important. So the larger truths of socio-biology I think obscure its limitations.

Q: Yes, yes.

JS: Now there is a resurgence of controversies about the relationship between genetic determinants and social traits like intelligence. James Watson and others want to bring this argument to bear upon, say, race relations. But how can we measure something like intelligence in terms of race when we have barely dealt with the legacy of slavery and all its historical, psychological and cultural repercussions? After all, civil rights have been around only for two generations in the U. S., and not even strictly enforced at that. On top of that, we have a damaged society which passes crippling effects of the oppression of one generation to another. So when people assume that genetics is the primary determinant of how human beings behave they are not looking at the full picture. History is also a determinant. On the other hand, if we deny the big role biology plays [in deciding how we act and live] then we are condemned to live as machines because we’re unaware of our automatic nature. Unless we acknowledge our own mechanicality, we cannot struggle with it.

God help you with transcribing all this. [Laughter]

Q: Stephen Jay Gould’s Mismeasure of Man comes to mind.

JS: Yes, I’ve read much of Gould’s works. I firmly stand on the side of evolution but I am not, shall I say, “strictly materialistic” as he is…

Q: I actually consider you one of the most spiritual fiction writers I have ever known.

JS: Yeah?

Q: Yes. I mean, if I compare the depiction of Jesus in your novel [Silicone Embrace] and Jesus in, say, Gore Vidal’s satire [Live from Golgotha], Jesus in your novel is a lot more convincing, even though he turns out to be a space alien (Laughter). What I mean is your Jesus is portrayed as someone who I can imagine as inspiring devotion and faith in real life.

JS: Well, I read a lot of spiritual and mystically-inspired works.

Q: All right. Shall we talk about A Splendid Chaos? Was it from ‘80s?

JS: Yes, early ‘80s.

Q: So it can be classified under cyberpunk?

JS: I suppose so. But it was… also an attempt to put into words the ecstactic vision of an alternative world. Something Saint Theresa of Avila might have had, you know. But it also had a very old-fashioned adventure-tale structure to it. There’s some Edgar Rice Burroughs and Jack Vance in it, maybe even Tolkien. The premise of all these beings brought from different worlds and planets to one place…

Q: That was the first time I have encountered so many alien species in one book, other than in a compendium of Japanese TV monsters (Laughter).

JS: I tried to imagine as many types of aliens as I could, and crowd them all into a global kind of menagerie, to induce a frisson of the fantastic. I probably had too much of that and not much of a plot. (Laughter) But I was trying to develop a surrealist landscape that also had an internal logic to it. If anyone wants to read it fresh I hope they get hold of the new edition out from Babbage Press, which I have revised somewhat. It reads smoother. I have also revised and updated the Eclipse books and Cellars. They are not watered down at all, just made more in line with the reader’s contemporary world, and I took out some clumsy, jejune bits.

Q: This is an opportune time to move onto the Eclipse books. I think I heard you once saying they may be the best pieces of writing you have done. I don’t know whether you still feel that way about them.

JS: Certainly they are the best sustained science fiction writing I have done.

Q: Do you feel “attached” to some characters?

JS: I was very identified with rock singer characters in the novels. I was young, after all. I went out of my way to make women characters strong. I was influenced by feminism in the 1970s. I was criticized in some quarters, even by Samuel Delaney, I think…

Q: Really?!

JS: Yeah, and anyway they criticized Eclipse books for containing gender bias. But you know, not only were there powerful women warriors in my books but also a full-blown lesbian character. I might be the first SF writer to put in a lesbian sex scene in a novel, unless Joanna Russ beat me to it. (Laughter)

Q: Many of things in Eclipse books that were totally science fictional when they were first published have since become reality, sometimes in interestingly round-about ways. The planetary environments are threatened by neo-liberal, world-spanning, multinational corporations: new technologies, including information technologies, turned out to be double-edged swords…

JS: Yeah. In the Eclipse books corporations get bigger and bigger by consolidating themselves. In my new novel, coming out this year, Black Glass [see Interview No. 1] there are only 33 corporations left in the world, except for tiny “micro-companies” that fly under their radar. Black Glass describes an underground stock market: a black stock market ran for these micro-companies. In Eclipse, I wrote about the emergence of a gigantic media conglomerate named WorldTalk, which is basically controlled by a group of racist, fundamentalist Christians. Well, in 1990s and 2000s similar if not exactly identical situations have developed, as we all know: Enron, Fox News and its support of Bush, the Christian right ideology actually dictating Bush’s foreign policy, and so on. I wrote about the Neo-Soviet movement in Russia, a combination of nationalist and authoritarian movements, and again, there is a real danger that someone like Putin can push Russia in that direction.

Q: Would you agree that Eclipse books are more closely aligned with the “dystopian” outlook of the early cyberpunk fiction?

JS: I would call it “realistic.” Not dystopian. We [cyberpunk writers] were realists. Global warming is certainly one factor that can precipitate massive military or other conflicts in the future. Population growth and depletion of resources still remain big problems. These are not matters of speculation, or projection into the future. They are realities we live with.

Q: I don’t want to name names but there are some hard science fiction writers who seem to assume this position that… say, 500 years of human civilization is nothing compared to the geological or astronomical scale of time… and are more concerned with really big questions like whether the universe is contracting or expanding, or contracting first and then expanding, and sort of become cavalier and humdrum about the issues that might literally wipe us out… their attitude is, like, science will eventually find a way to fix all these problems, so what’s the big fuss?

JS: It’s a choice of perspective. We’re more practical than they are. But I can’t argue with them, anyway, since unfortunately, I haven’t read much of them (Laughter). Hard science fiction is not my favorite genre. It hasn’t been since I was young. I’m sure there’s good science fiction out there, but I love historical fiction and biographies.

Q: Really, wow.

JS: Yep, I am reading a biography of Lord Nelson at this moment. And I just finished reading Plutarch’s chapter on Julius Caesar. Very up-to-date. (Laughter) I think science fiction writers who think there will be some magical technological solution, I don’t know, like nanotechnology, that will fix our current problems in one bang, are living in a fantasy-land. We are all living on one planet with demonstrably limited resources, okay? I definitely think things will get worse before they get better. We might have millions of people rendered homeless, starving or dying from war and global warming. We might lose some major cities: they might go underwater, or blown up by a terrorist nuclear bomb. But I think human race will muddle through it all, and if we are lucky, we will end up with a more thoughtful and less wasteful civilization around 22nd century.

Q: Hey, you sound like H. G. Wells.

JS: He was a genius, you know (Laughter).

As anyone with a modicum of knowledge about the history of science fiction should know, John Shirley is one of the founders of “cyberpunk” SF. But during his 35-year career, he has reached out to make his mark in a wide variety of genres and literary formats. Aside from the paradigm-shifting short-story collection Heatseeker, a freaking mind-altering cosmic extravaganza that is Splendid Chaos, the frighteningly prophetic Eclipse trilogy and numerous other SF novels, Mr. Shirley has written poetry, urban crime thrillers, Westerns, Lovecraftian horrors, and novelizations based on such cinematic/comic book characters and creatures as John Constantine, Alien, Batman and Predator. He has written lyrics for the band Blue Öyster Cult and performed in punk bands including Panther Moderns. Cinema mavens not quite so well-versed in SF literature might recognize him as the hand behind adapting James O’Barr’s comic book The Crow to the big screen, along with David J. Schow. (Mr. Shirley’s distinctively spiritual take on the villainy as lack of enlightenment and empathy may be gleaned in the way climactic death of Top Dollar is presented) You girls and boys should check out a webpage devoted to him, www.darkecho.com/JohnShirley, where you can download Mr. Shirley’s vocal performances, connect to his regular rantings in the text-jammed blog (it’s simply wall-to-wall, column-to-column writing) and join his other fans (Speaking of fans, make sure you read Bruce Sterling’s note on a “Typical John Shirley Fan” in the “Oddities” section of the webpage) in the message board.

While much of his SF stories and novels are essential readings for anyone seriously interested in the genre, it’s his “dark fantasy” novels, In Darkness Waiting, Wetbones, Demons and The View from Hell that have the power to instantly make a palpitating fanboy nut out of me. Truly, you haven’t read anything in modern horror until you have splattered your living brain all over a copy of Black Butterflies, a collection of his most perception-warping and mind-shredding tales of terror. His most recent short story collection is Living Shadows, an eclectic assembly of the works not overtly identifiable as SF or horror, gathered together from the early and late stages of his adventurous literary career. It’s a damn fine introduction to the amazing versatility and prowess of John Shirley as a writer.

Due to a strange twist of fate—eh, but actually, mostly, like 90%, due to John’s generosity, and maybe 10% to my own effort, which involved hauling my fat ass all the way across San Francisco on foot, to attend a 1999 reading of his short story collection Really Really Really Really Weird Stories (that’s not two, not three, but four “Really”s, girls and boys!) at a Haight Street bookstore—I have somehow become a friend of John’s, meeting his wonderful family, joining him in his frequent trips to San Francisco to catch new SF/fantasy/horror films, and even making cameo appearances in a number of his novels, for instance, as a scientist-turned-spare-parts-for-the nanobot-creatures in Crawlers, or as Commander of a space cruiser—yay!—belonging to the Chinese-Asian Nation Cooperative, only to end up as—sigh…–an incubating host for one of the Alien larvae… you get the picture. Well, I wouldn’t say I’m not evolving as a character.

In person, Mr. Shirley can be pretty intimidating-looking: very pale, with blonde moustache, occasionally dressed in all-black Western cowboy getup that flatters his big frame, you can easily imagine him cast as a charismatic bad guy in a neo-noir film set in San Francisco, cracking a hapless stool pigeon’s arm, say, in a smoky bar, or nonchalantly quoting poetry while clinched in a Mexican stand-off. His voice is surprisingly musical and his eyes go a-twinkle above a boyish grin, when he scores a point against me during our banters. He is a straightforward man, truthful to his emotion, and genuinely spiritual, maintaining a fascinating balance between a consulting detective’s skepticism and faculties of ratiocination on the one hand and a monastic’s open-minded quest for the knowledge and wisdom that can unlock the mysteries of our existence on the other. Mr. Shirley is not a man without his personal demons, but he is also the kind of tough guy who would engage them in a bare-knuckled hand-to-hand combat. I can imagine him keeping one in a wrestler’s head-rock until it coughs up some wisdom, some clue to the enlightenment, a bit like Jacob grappling with an Angel. Trust him to show us things about ourselves that we would rather not admit, honestly and sometimes painfully, but always with fairness and compassion.

For the inaugural segment for (what I hope to be) my informal interview series with artists, thinkers and all-round interesting people I know, I could think of no one more appropriate than Mr. Shirley, surely one of the most innovative, challenging and talented writers I have known throughout my life, personally or otherwise. So, without further ado, here is John Shirley in his own words, discussing his current projects, literary preferences and other issues.

Interviewee: John Shirley
Interviewer: Kyu Hyun Kim
Conducted on November 12, 2007.

© Kyu Hyun Kim, 2007. All rights reserved. Not to be cited in any form without an explicit written permission by the interviewer.

Q: How would you characterize the way you write these days?

JS: “Retro-writing,” I’m afraid. I am back to working on a new cyberpunk novel, which I haven’t worked on for twenty years. A small press, Elder Signs, asked me to complete it. Currently I think there is a resurgence of interest in Cyberpunk, so these two things combined led to this novel, which is called Black Glass. It’s based on a movie I and William Gibson were originally working on. At about that time we were also trying to adapt New Rose Hotel, from Gibson’s story.

Q: Have you seen [Abel Ferrara’s] movie version of New Rose Hotel?

JS: No. It had nothing to do with our script. I considered the idea of checking it out in a theater but I ended up not seeing it. We wrote a good script but they never used it.

Q: When did Black Glass start off as a project?

JS: Hmm… late ‘80s… ’89 or ’90. Sometime around there… I wrote a screenplay based on an idea I had, and some input from him, called Macrochip, and I reworked it on my own, without Gibson’s involvement, into a novel. I asked him to revise the novel but he didn’t have time so he released the project to me. Anyway, Gibson’s contribution was to the main premise of the story, which has to do with “mind-cloning,” making a semblance of yourself that talks to people online, on video and so on and people really have no idea whether they are talking to you or your recreated semblances, which say what you’d say. They get periodically updated so that they can catch up with your progress in life, so they are meant to be exact copies of your present mind at work, in large part anyway. And then somebody finds a way to consolidate five of these semblances into one being, to take over and run a huge corporation. They are copied from five board members of the company but what happens is the semblances end up becoming an amalgamation of their worst characteristics, a single, independent malevolent entity. They are opposed by an ex-cop who went to prison trying to protect his brother; his brother’s a “V-Rat,” addicted to a virtual reality equivalent of crack cocaine, and he’s a washed-up grungy rock star, so there’s an echo of my Eclipse trilogy there as well.

As you can see, this novel overlaps with my earlier works more than anything I have done in recent years. And of course I had to do a lot of updating, making it in tune with contemporary technology and so on, but I don’t carry it out as far as, say, Cory Doctorow or Richard Morgan, the contemporary cyberpunk writers for whom being up-to-date is like something they do faithfully every day the way a nun goes to Mass. I do keep my work up-to-date but not so far as to use the contemporary jargon from a computer science journal or Wired magazine. ‘Cause if I do that I will just sound like an old guy imitating younger guys. I am bringing the old and the new together and trying to write a noir tale of the future.

Q: Where does the title Black Glass come from?

JS: It’s the name of a nightclub in the novel.

Q: Anything else you are doing?

JS: I am scheduled to complete a novel for Simon & Schuster called Bleak History. It’s about a guy named Bleak but of course it’s also about the bleakness of history, too. Although it’s not yet finished, there are chapters and outline and it has already been optioned by a movie production company.

Q: But it’s not an alternative history novel?

JS: Hmm, not really. It’s about a secret history. I don’t think I am the first one to use this for a fantasy novel but it uses Isaac Newton’s interest in the occult as a background. It’s about a machine that prevents magic from taking place on Earth, and what happens when that machine is turned off.

Q: Sounds wickedly fascinating! So the Enlightenment thinkers have figured out ways to overcome magic, literally. What do you think about your current status as one of the founders of cyberpunk fiction, I mean that’s how you are known in Korea…

JS: Do they have my books in print, in Korean?

Q: Umm… dammit, I cannot access my brain implant for some reason… it always happens when I try to connect to Korea. (Laughter) But anyway, what I meant to ask was, you have evolved since your cyberpunk days, even during the eight years I have known you personally you have tackled a lot of different genres, different formats and so on… do you see more of a continuum between what you were as a writer in ‘80s and what you are today, or more of a disjuncture? Do you feel you have evolved out of the cyberpunk writer you were, in a sense?

JS: I feel my writing changed a lot. It’s become more nuanced and mature but there is a negative side-effect to maturing. You are not likely to take as many chances. Certain ideas look to you now as so improbable you don’t write about them anymore, whereas when I was young, I really didn’t care about how probable an idea was. If it was cool enough, and as long as it gave rise to a surreal image I liked, you know, I just wrote about it. I had some difficulty getting published because of that but on the other hand these things eventually found their way to print and people loved the freeness of those works. So I try to keep freshness to my imagination and try to make things reasonably believable as well. Unfortunately the tendency as you get older is you get more doubtful about what is possible. And that constriction finds its way into my writing. I struggle against it constantly. I mean, I am not that old but I am old enough to feel the conflict in me.

Q: What’s the good side of having experienced all that you have experienced, having matured as a writer? Is there a kind of wisdom that comes from having been a writer for so long?

JS: Sure, of course. I understand human nature better and can evoke it better.

Q: So [maturity is displayed] mostly through characterizations.

JS: I also have more control over my writing. And I have learned more about the nature of the world– politics, history, and so on. I am not as reckless in my writing. Long time ago I’ve written a novel– I’d love to revise the book–titled Three-Ring Psychus, originally called Up!, where gravity gets selectively cancelled on the Earth. But the main focus at that time, for me, was just portraying the image of people and civilization literally floating up in the air. Like something Salvador Dali would have painted. At this point in my life, I would probably be reluctant to write such a thing. But I miss writing recklessly, so sometimes I write stories like “Miss Singularity” [in Living Shadows], to consciously let go of the restraints, let imagination run like a wild horse and create the world where almost anything can happen, as I used to.

Q: I’ve read a lot of your stories, and some in which the images, say, abstract paintings, Cubist and whatnot, have lives of their own, they are almost like living creatures, speaking directly and immediately to our brains without being mediated through a rational process…

JS: Like A Splendid Chaos?

Q: Ah no, I’m thinking more of your short stories. These images elicit responses from us, like “What the hell is that?” or “Wow it’s really beautiful but also somehow disturbing.” And you just spin whole stories out of these images and our non-articulated reactions to them, which I find really interesting.

JS: Yeah, if you look at surrealist paintings they seem to contain whole other worlds within them, you know. A Max Ernst painting, it seems to operate with its own laws, and artists like Tanguy, they did paintings, landscapes with their own internal logic. I try to create settings in some of my stories in which people’s inner landscapes can be totally fantastic, but from their points of view, they are internally logical.

Q: You think maybe you are like Edgar Allan Poe in that respect?

JS: Well, Poe was into taking an idea and extrapolating from it…

Q: But he was also graphic and immediate and you can relate to his writings on a visceral level, too.

JS: I’ve been an avid reader of Poe since I was very young… I did collaborate with him, you know, in “Blind Eye,” [Expanded from the actual unpublished fragment written by Poe, and originally published in Poe’s Lighthouse] even though he died on me, like a hundred years ago. (Laughter)

Q: Ah, that’s right! (Laughter) OK, can you tell me anything that pops into your mind when you hear the following names: Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce and H. P. Lovecraft?

JS: What about them?

Q: Oh, you can just tell me what you think about them.

JS: Well, Poe is a master of atmosphere, and when he was great he was great, you know. He experimented a lot, too, and I respect that. Lovecraft is more derivative of Poe than many people realize. I think Lovecraft’s prose is heavily influenced by Poe’s poetry, but having said that, obviously he was a very imaginative writer, and people have been stealing from him for many, many years. He was a bigot but I read from biographies that he did get over some of these negative racist views, at least to a degree, just before he died. I recently wrote a story for High Seas Cthulhu, a kind of effort to lay the ghost of Lovecraft’s bigotry, in which African former slaves use Dagon to wreak vengeance on white slave-masters. As for Ambrose Bierce, his sense of irony probably affected me, and of course, everyone has read “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” That’s really a story that haunted me for all my life, because it lays down this situation of you surviving a horrible situation only to find out that you haven’t really survived it at all. We can only temporarily keep mortality at bay, in other words. Also to me, the real horrors of the world are dealing with human monsters, and I believe Bierce had the same attitude.

(To be continued to Part 2)

I am a devoted collector of DVDs and used to compile a year’s end list for Djunaboard in Korean, strictly among the ones I have purchased or otherwise acquired in that particular year. Now that I have a blog space, I am going to do the same here.

2007 was the year that industry observers were putting out prognosis about the flattening if not actual decline of the DVD sales figure, but this year I saw more releases of desired titles in this year than any other year since perhaps 2004. I have been an early convert for the DVD format—I already had a small collection of DVDs and two DVD players by 1999—which is unusual for me, since it took me long time to switch to CD from vinyl and cassette, and I’ve bypassed laserdiscs altogether. I can truthfully say, though, that DVDs, unlike VHS (or Betamax) tapes, have greatly enhanced not only my viewing pleasure of seeing old classics, obscure cult films and nostalgic items from my childhood in the best condition imaginable, but also the surprise and joy of discovering new films, from all over the world (the pesky “region code” they’ve put into the disc was, of course, easily overcome).

Since 2000 or so the majority, I would say 70% or more, of the movies I watch every year have been on the DVD format (I watch a lot of movies by the common standard, but not as much as the true movie nuts do: hey, I’ve got a demanding day job, okay? How much would you enjoy grading 800+ pages of student papers and navigating online grade submission programs right up to the Christmas day?). I do watch episodes of a TV series online, but unless I get over my gut feeling that online downloading of films—works of art, really, for the most part anyway—is making, perhaps even encouraging, the perception of them as disposable material, I won’t be joining the mp3 bandwagon. And as for the high-def format, since I now have a fairly good HD TV, and most of the DVD labels are releasing products transferred in high-def, I will eventually have to deal with this idiotic “format war” and buy either a HD DVD player, a Blu-Ray player or something that plays both. Right now there are so few desirable titles on either format, I am going to sit on it for a while. I think my decision will be swayed not by industrial bigwigs putting out spiffy hardware but by the choices of the DVD labels that release my kind of movies: Criterion, Synapse Films, Mondo Macabro and so on. As for Korea, I assume they will all go Blu-Ray (Samsung wants Blu-Ray in Korea, then Blu-Ray it is) but the next-gen DVDs are probably not something Korean filmmakers are worried about just now, or even perhaps for next three or four years. They have other bigger concerns, like how to prevent the total collapse of the movie industry. [10/’09 Addendum: Well we know how the format war ended, and I have become a reluctant covert to the Blu Ray format, as detailed in the later posts]

All right, the preamble was too long. These are the titles that gave me the pleasure and frisson of discovering something totally new, re-appreciating what I have thought I have known but didn’t, or simply confirming what I have always known to be true: they are the discs I will be spinning again and again and again, for fun and for edification, and for years to come.

This is strictly a subjective list and in no way reflects directly on the quality of the films represented therein, or strictly speaking the quality of the packages and presentations. In other words, don’t argue with me why Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange is not in the list but Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man! is. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I hold O Lucky Man! in higher esteem than Clockwork Orange (actually as a matter of fact I do, but that’s another issue altogether). And frankly I have missed out, as usually is the case, quite a chunk of the 2007 releases, so to be fair, I’ve included about twenty 2006 DVDs I’ve bought this year to consideration. None of them actually made the list but a few of them will show up in the Honorable Mentions section. And oh, for Korean speakers, this list is slightly different from the one I’d put up in Djunaboard. There is no explanation about why this is so, except to say that the English-speaking and Korean-speaking parts of my brain don’t seem to agree with one another all the time.

So then, here goes, in the reverse countdown toward No. 1, although the rankings don’t strictly reflect my preferences.

10. The Host: 2-Disc Collector’s Edition (Magnolia Pictures- Region 1)

The Host was a stunning surprise for me when it came out, a great monster movie set in the drably mundane setting of the Han River, Seoul. Magnolia Pictures went out on their limb to give this scrappy, sly monster flick a first-class presentation, not only porting over all Region-3 supplements (all subtitled in English) but commissioning an English (!) audio commentary with director Bong Joon-ho and critic Tony Rayns. I confess the choice of this title is a slight conflict of interest since I was marginally involved in the presentation of supplements, which by the way are a must-see for anyone interested in either Korean cinema or SF-horror genre in general.

9. Three by Teshigahara Hiroshi (Criterion- Region 1)

Ever since the old Image disc of Woman in the Dunes went OPP, I’ve waited patiently for the release of this most idiosyncratic and uncompromisingly modernist director’s oeuvre in Region 1. The wait has been handsomely repaid by Criterion, which presents the above-mentioned masterpiece but also Face of Another, a sarcastic parable on the modern identity and Pitfall, a kind of cerebral ghost story with overtones of film noir, all in high-def remaster, along with a bevy of special features. Criterion’s package stresses the unique collaboration between director Teshigahara Hiroshi (who, by the way, was an iemoto of a powerful ikebana or flower arrangement school in Japan: he most certainly did not have to go into filmmaking to make a living, or even succeed as an artist) and the great SF-fantasy writer Abe Kobo. Oh yeah, if you wondered where that faceless-children-dumped-into-meat-grinders imagery in Pink Floyd the Wall came from, check out Face of Another.

8. Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Warner Brothers—Region 1)

Perhaps not the greatest but my personal favorite among the British “Angry Young Man” films of late ‘50s and early ‘60s, Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner is one of those films I watched as a kid, speaking very little English and understanding even less, late night in the AFKN (now AFN) channel (which by the way used to show uncensored prints of movies like Blood Beast and Blood and Black Lace, no kidding), and had to re-construct its real meaning, implied or explicit inside my brain, over long period of time. With this DVD release I was allowed to watch the pic in the correct aspect ratio for the first time, and it gave me the joy of re-confirming as an adult the essence of my insights as a child concerning politics and aesthetics of this masterwork. Of course, now I have reached an age where I can read more in—perhaps even sympathize a bit with– Governor Tower’s grimace than I used to, but I am glad to report that the shock (of recognition?) that Colin’s defiant smile at the climax gave to my childhood self has not faded with the passage of time.

7. Tyrone Power Collection (20^th Century Fox—Region 1)

Darkly handsome Tyrone Power, one of those movie stars who seem to constantly outshine their leading ladies in their beauty, was perfectly capable of essaying a wide range of characters, some with more complexity and depth than was probably given credit to. After being taken aback by the mind-boggling spiritual noir Nightmare Alley, I bought this box-set, more or less expecting a gaggle of high-quality old Hollywood swashbuckling fantasies. Instead, I and my wife sat slack-jawed at the panoramic display of incredible beauty (almost every scene looking like an oil painting), intelligent dialogue, superb characterizations and, yes, majestic Alfred Newman scores. The box collects Blood and Sand, Captain from Castile, Prince of Foxes, Son of Fury and Black Rose, with classy cover illustrations and reproductions of lobby cards. Not really a set for those inclined for swashbuckling heroics, it is ripe for those ready for re-discovering the diversity, meticulous craftsmanship and sheer intelligence of the old school Hollywood flicks.

6. The Unearthed Past Collection: The 1940s Korean Films Made During the Japanese Colonial Period. (Korean Film Archive/Taewon Entertainment—No Region)

This startling DVD box-set makes it available to the general public four films produced in 1940s Korea under the Japanese rule, thought to be completely lost, and only recently discovered in a Chinese local archive. At least two of these films—Volunteer Corps and The Joseon Straits –are explicitly designed to express support for Japan’s policies for war mobilization. Korean Film Archive has done a marvelous job presenting these films, even including an eye-opening exact replica of the original screenplay for The Vagabond Angel, written in Japanese as a text supplement. Also worth mentioning is that all films as well as the entirety of special features—introductions by the senior critic Kim Jong-won, four-part documentary on the 97-year-old Kim Hae-il, the oldest living Korean actor and the star of Vagabond Angel, and others—are subtitled in English (The quality of the subs vary, unfortunately). It is well-nigh miraculous that we are able to watch these films at all, let alone gathered together in such an educational and informative package: Korean Film Archive really deserves a round of applause for this release, from anyone remotely interested in Korean cinema or history.

5. O Lucky Man! (Warner Brothers—Region 1)

Ach, I can’t believe that I missed out on this insanely funny, marvelously perceptive, beautifully acted and altogether delightful second collaboration between Lindsay Anderson and Malcolm McDowell until this year! Yes yes I know, I saw If… and my first impression of that film was, it’s a darn special movie but you know, this reminds me a lot of Japanese gakuen-mono comics (manga set in high school, some of them could get quite crazy and surreal—and no, I don’t mean this as a put-down. If you don’t know much about Japanese manga, just move on to the next sentence), whereas there is simply no movie I can recall like O Lucky Man! And no, don’t bring Clockwork Orange into this either. Warner’s DVD splits the movie into two discs, which I suppose will make some consumers unhappy, but I think it’s just fine.

4. Film Noir Collection Vol. 4 (Warner Brothers—Region 1)

This collection gets the place here in part as a representative of three other film noir box-sets Warners has released so far, 15 movies in all. Volume 4 ups the ante by including ten titles for a price not much higher than others in the series, and the titles I’ve watched so far have ranged from simply great movies showcasing sheer brilliance of filmmaking and script-writing, to eye-opening fresh finds (for me, at least) and to solid pieces of genre entertainment, helmed by the likes of Fred Zinnemann, Nicholas Ray, Andre de Toth, Don Siegel, John Sturges and Anthony Mann and starring Ricardo Montalban, Robert Ryan, Edward G. Robinson, Sterling Hayden, Jayne Mansfield, Jane Greer, Farley Granger, Janet Leigh and, who else, Robert Mitchum.

3. Fires on the Plain (Criterion—Region 1)

While Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima is a monumental effort by an American filmmaker to truly see one of his country’s most traumatic moments from the point of view of its enemy—something no other American filmmaker has ever achieved, not John Ford, not Martin Scorsese, no one—, as Professor John Dower of MIT has pointed out, the story of the horrors of Japan’s failed attempt to hold onto sanity and dignity as their empire unraveled in the Pacific War has already been told by Japanese filmmakers themselves. The greatest of these is Ichikawa Kon’s Fires on the Plain, which is not only a harrowing, unforgettably horrific exploration of the degradation and dehumanization visited by a war, but also a magnificent artistic achievement, finding poetry, beauty or even humor in the unlikeliest of circumstances. Its unabashed humanism is deeply moving, while thoroughly rejecting sentimentalism and conceding absolutely nothing to the postwar complacency. A masterpiece by a true maestro, who has enjoyed artistic success in every conceivable genre under the sun, still active at the age 92.

2. Fox Horror Classics (20th Century Fox—Region 1)

Before I bought this DVD, I had not seen a single film directed by John Brahm, and had had no inkling of who Laird Cregar might be. Only after I saw The Lodger and Hangover Square did I recognize him as the frightening corrupt cop, immense as a mountain but with a strangely melodious, sonorous voice, from the Victor Mature vehicle I Wake Up Screaming. While The Lodger was a beautiful piece of classic mystery, Hangover Square

completely blew me (and my wife) away. After watching it I could barely suppress my wish to kick myself in the butt (hmm, not really a practical thing to do, without the knowledge of some special yoga positions) for having pretended to be a film buff—and yet I didn’t even know this film existed! I can only wish I could experience more than one discovery as surprising and exciting as this box-set in the next year.

1. Blade Runner 5-Disc Ultimate Edition (Warner Brothers—Region 1)

For the record, I believe (like Roger Ebert used to say, I don’t know of his most current views on this) the “goofy” narration does not hurt the movie that much. I also believe making you-know-who into a replicant weakens the movie. It has to be about a human being learning about the ironic truth that a replicant is more of a human being than he is, not about a replicant re-discovering his (presumably superior) “true nature.” Sorry girls and boys, don’t try to talk me out of this: I have had 25 years to brood about this question. I can’t stop talking about Blade Runner once I get started, so I will just finish off here with a grand finale. The great science fiction film, that has done so much to literally shape our view of the future, and our present, receives the special treatment that it deserves from Warner Brothers. Just get the damn thing, and if you don’t “get” it in the first viewing, don’t worry. You will come back to it over and over.

SNAKE WOMAN’S CURSE (Kaidan hebi onna). Toei Pictures Production, 1968. Japan. 1 hour 25 minutes. Directed by Nakagawa Nobuo. Written by Nakagawa Nobuo, Konami Fumio. Cinematography: Yamasawa Yoshikazu [Giichi]. Music: Kikuchi Shunsuke. Cast: Kawazu Seizaburo (Onuma Chobei), Kuwahara [not “Kuwabara”] Sachiko (Asa), Negishi Akemi (Ms. Onuma), Nishimura Ko (Yasuke), Tanba Tetsuro (Police Chief), Murai Kunio (Sutematsu), Kagawa Yukie (Kinu), Yamashiro Shingo (Onuma Takeo).

Panik Hose Entertainment, which has so far released Screwed (Neji-shiki) and other important works of Ishii Teruo and other Japanese cult films, teamed up with Synapse Films and launched the “Asian Cult Cinema Collection” line, starting with Ishii Teruo’s Horror of the Deformed Man and this title. Its director, Nakagawa Nobuo, was born in 1905 and had enjoyed a long and fruitful career that basically traversed the entire range of Japanese film history between its birth (Before joining the Makino Studio in 1929 as an apprentice cinematographer, he already had contributed several essays to the Kinema junpo magazine, founded in 1919, as a twenty-something cinema enthusiast) and its second Golden Age in the postwar period. Even though Nakagawa is famous today among connoisseurs of Japanese cinema for such iconic horror films as The Ghost of Yotsuya (Tokaido Yotsuya kaidan, 1959), arguably the best cinematic adaptation of the story of Oiwa’s vengeful spirit, and Jigoku (1960), he had more than 50 films in every conceivable genre under his belt before he made the first horror film (Which, depending on your definition of the genre, could either be The Vampire Moth [1956] or The Ghost of Kasane Swamp [Kaidan Kasane-ga fuchi, 1957]). In late 1960s, Nakagawa divided his time between directing TV dramas and a long string of low-budget programmers for Toei Studio. Snake Woman, released in 1968, belongs to the latter category.

Those who have only watched Jigoku or know Nakagawa by reputation should approach Snake Woman with lowered expectations, since it is pretty typical of the Toei genre films churned out at the breakneck pace in late 1960s and 1970s, right before the Japanese cinema was brought down by the boob tube. While the film has a strong sense of aesthetic integrity, it is brought down a few notches by lack of resources and its unimaginative screenplay, a slapdash stitch-work of various supernatural story ideas, many of which would be familiar to East Asian, if not American, viewers. The story basically has no narrative drive, as it merely serves as an excuse for a series of setups in which the evil landlord family (headlined by the veteran villain Kawazu Seizaburo, best-known as the sleazy yakuza boss Seibei in Kurosawa’s Yojimbo [1961]) abuses and exploits a poor sharecropper and his wife and daughter. The latter all return as ghosts, but are rather devoid of character, and the daughter Asa’s relationship with snakes is actually tenuous (She is technically not even a “snake woman,” as the scaly, reptilian transformation takes place on her nemesis Takeo’s betrothed. According to the commentator Jonathan Hall, Nakagawa was apparently uninterested in the “snake woman” angle thought up by the younger screenwriter Konami Fumio, and continued delaying the entrance of the snake woman as long as he could). Some viewers might also be nonplussed by the relentlessly passive attitude assumed by the victimized characters—with the exception of Asa’s boyfriend Sutematsu—which may be explained by the film’s emphasis on karma (go) rather than individual choice as the basic engine of life (Alexander Jacoby in a very good liner notes points to these Buddhist underpinnings, although unlike Mr. Jacoby I don’t see Snake Woman “acquiring a revolutionary dimension” in any way). In the end, supernatural vengeance wreaked on the Onuma landlord and his arrogant family remains curiously lackadaisical and uninvolving. The film is also marred by inclusion of a bumbling handyman who, in a fascinatingly quixotic Meiji-Japanese fashion, dabbles in hypnotism, and his boisterous interactions with female textile workers. The big ‘60s star Tanba Tetsuro shows up in a totally perfunctory cameo.

On the other hand, Snake Woman’s Curse is very impressively directed by Nakagawa, whose sure directorial hand and signature use of (sometimes relentless) long takes and formal composition making full use out of the 2.35:1-ratio widescreen, sometimes shot from startling angles such as direct overhead, build up uncanny sense of tragedy and make for captivating visual imagery. I was particularly surprised by Yasuke’s death scene, which begins with a medium-long shot then slowly creeps up to become extreme close-up of his horrid death-mask, surrounded by wailing family members. In terms of the cast members I must single out Kuwahara Sachiko, who looks startlingly fresh in the early scenes sans any visible makeup. Her desolate, pale face becomes heartbreaking when her dunderhead of a boyfriend refuses to help her on the score of her having become a “damaged good.”

Snake Woman’s Curse, while far from a good showcase for Nakagawa Nobuo’s talent, nonetheless retains enough artistic integrity to slightly raise it above its formulaic story. It is also much less exploitative than one would expect. Those who expect rampant nudity and smirking quasi-cynicism of the Toei exploitation movies might find this outing overly tame and even boring. But as a phantasmagoria Japonica of minor distinction to spend your evening with, you could do worse than Snake Woman.

DVD Presentation:

Synapse Films. NTSC. Dual Layer. All Region. Video: Anamorphic Widescreen 2.35:1. Audio: Japanese Dolby Digital Mono. Subtitles: English. Supplements: Liner notes by Alexander Jacoby, Audio commentary by Jonathan M. Hall, Original Japanese trailer, Nakagawa Nobuo biography.

Synpase Film’s Don May Jr. can be usually relied upon to prevail over near-impossible situations and to miraculously restore all-but lost cult films. He and his Synapse team have previously pulled this off on a number of titles, most impressively on Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural, Thriller: A Cruel Picture and Blue Sunshine. So I did expect a high quality presentation for Snake Woman’s Curse. Still, this DVD transfer simply blew me away. The jacket boasts that the transfer is “mastered in high-definition from Toei’s original vault elements,” and it looks high-def, original negative-mastered every inch of the way. The video is remarkably clean and devoid of artifacts, not to mention showing a remarkable range of natural-looking colors and wonderful levels of detail discernible in Nakagawa’s signature darkly lit scenes (Similar scenes in the Region 2 Japanese discs of his films fairly churn and bubble with compression artifacts!). It is decidedly superior to most DVD presentations of a vintage Japanese color film I have seen, regardless of region codes (For the record, digital restoration was performed by Screen Time Images, compression and authoring by Alex Webster and Keith Prokop at Radius60 Studios). Dolby digital mono soundtrack is also quite strong and delivers dialogue, ambient noises and the dated but fun score with crystal clarity.

The extras include the above-mentioned well-informed liner notes by Alexander Jacoby and a full commentary track by Jonathan M. Hall, who teaches Japanese cinema at University of California, Irvine. He does a great job of explaining the motifs taken from traditional Japanese tales of supernatural and the movie’s relationship to other Japanese visual arts such as the puppet theater, and rightly situates Nakagawa in the larger context of history of Japanese cinema, rather than focusing on his (stateside) reputation as a purveyor of outré genre cinema. Professor Hall also provides good information on the filmographies and biographies of cast members and the cultural iconography of Meiji Japan (1868-1911), with its fascinating mixture of the traditional and the modern, as displayed in this work. The only fault I could find in it is perhaps that there is a fair amount of dead air, especially in the middle section. The Nakagawa Nobuo biography is written by Chris D and is amazingly detailed, again, like Prof. Hall’s commentary, clarifying the Japanese director’s wide range beyond that of a horror film specialist. All these supplements are extremely informative and go a long way in rehabilitating Nakagawa as a Japanese filmmaker deserving of serious consideration. There are usual supplements consisting of a trailer and poster gallery. To cap it all off, Synapse provides a reversible jacket cover with the original Japanese-language poster on the backside (The new cover design is very well done, too, respectful of the film’s flavor and historicity).

Synapse Films ought to be congratulated for a first-rate presentation of a rarely seen Japanese genre film. I am peeling my eyeballs for more titles in their Asian Cult Cinema Collection!

WAR IN SPACE. (Wakusei daisenso) Toho Pictures Production, 1977. Japan, 1 hour 31 minutes. Directed by Fukuda [not Fukuta] Jun. Written by Nagahara Shuichi, Nakanishi Ryuzo. Producers: Tanaka Tomoyuki, Tanaka Fumio. Music:Tsushima Toshiaki. Special Effects Director: Nakano Teruyoshi. Cast: Morita Kensaku (Miyoshi Koji), Asano Yuko (Takigawa Jun), Ikebe Ryo (Professor Takigawa), Miyauchi Hiroshi (Fuyuki Kazuo), Atarashi Katsutoshi (Tadashi), William Ross (Dr. Schmidt), Hirata Akihiko (Commander Oishi), Mutsumi [Mutsu] Goro (Commander Hell).

Unlike Sayonara Jupiter, which at least had nobler intentions at heart, War in Space is an unabashedly juvenile programmer that probably holds some kind of international record for the earliest theatrical rip-off of Star Wars. The flick was rushed into production in late 1977 to meet the January 1978 deadline, to compete directly against Star Wars, scheduled to open in Japan on the same month! To Toho’s credit, they eschewed copying any overt plot element or character from the American mega-hit (no annoying R2-D2 stand-in: well, okay, a mean-looking furry giant with buffalo horns shows up, wielding a Grim Reaper’s sickle, which is pretty embarrassing) and instead relied on the crack team of largely TV-trained young cast, stunt expertise of the Japan Action Club, and abilities of the veterans of late ‘60s-mid ‘70s Godzilla franchise, including special effects director Nakano Teruyoshi and director Fukuda Jun, to produce quickly and cheaply a reasonably entertaining space opera(The equally hastily-produced Star Wars rip-off from the rival Toei, Message from Space, which does feature an annoying R2-D2 clone, is still MIA in Region 1).

The result is not by a long shot one of the finest hours of the Toho studio, but if your expectations are scaled down to the level of, say, an extra-long episode of Ultraman, you can have some fun with the film. It most certainly is not taxing on your brain, and whatever “huh?” moments you might have with the unnecessarily convoluted plot zip by really fast, never giving the film the chance to actually get boring. For the followers of the Japanese popular culture, it is also an excellent opportunity to watch the ‘70s TV stars Morita (also a singer and known to Japanese as “Moriken”), Miyauchi (a cult actor with many devoted fans for having played title roles in Masked Rider V 3 and Kaiketsu Zubatto) and Asano (one of the original “idol entertainers,” who was only seventeen at the time of filming) in the same movie. Morita is suitably cocky and macho, Miyauchi, legendary for turning shameless mugging into an act of art, is surprisingly subdued and charming, Asano is… well, at this stage of her career… appropriately decorative, shall I say (She has since become quite successful TV actresses with a string of hits in ‘80s and ‘90s).

Working with the slightly bigger budget than was given to the wretchedly cheapskate Godzilla films of mid-’70s, (Godzilla vs. Megalon, say no more) Fukuda and the special effects team do their best to suggest a large-scale interplanetary warfare with hastily constructed models of UFOs and spaceships, but they trip up occasionally, especially in the hilariously under-populated interior of the alien mother-ship. Moreover, the aliens are for some weird reason made to look like Roman soldiers, with their Great Demonic Spacecraft Carrier (Daimakan) seemingly straight out of Ben Hur. No doubt the film’s enduring cult appeal partly comes from the bizarre designs of both the earth’s defense vessel Heaven-Shaker (Goten) and the Daimakan, that traverse the point at which the cool and brash becomes the eye-poppingly ridiculous, and finally just plain weird. There is no point asking why Goten has to shoot off its fighter planes like bullets from a gigantic revolver attached to its hull (and how, when it runs out of fighter planes, the revolving holes somehow blast blue laser beams… then again, every hole, dish or pointy thing appears to blast some kind of death ray, by the final phase of the death battle between two spaceships!). Neither is there any sense in asking why Commander Hell (a green-skinned, breast-plate and silver-helmet-wearing villain who has apparently traveled thousands of light years in that… outfit) dresses the captive Jun in black leather hot pants. (I suppose that does serve the purpose of showing off her notorious “99 centimeter” legs) By the final battle, the filmmakers freely acknowledge that it’s basically two cool-looking (if designed in overtly phallic and in other amusingly excessive ways) children’s toys blasting light and belching smoke at one another, but instead of cringing from shame, they just throw themselves at the task of hurling these toy-ships at one another. Their enthusiasm is definitely infectious. Most viewers with (appropriately scaled-down) levels of expectation will probably find themselves enjoying all this, with silly grins on their faces.

DVD Presentation:*

Discotek Media. NTSC. Dual Layer. Region 1. Video: Anamorphic Widescreen 2.35:1. Audio: Japanese Dolby Digital Mono & 5.1, English 2.0. Subtitles: English. Supplements: Interviews with special effects director Nakano Teruyoshi, theatrical trailer, photo gallery, an insert describing the history of the film, poster art, “vehicle diagrams.”

Discotek Media presents War in Space in its 2.35:1 widescreen glory. As are the cases with many transfers from Region 2 discs, the image is rather soft in places, and the color scheme tends toward dusty yellow, but overall the transfer is quite satisfactory. The soundtrack offers the choice between Dolby Digital Mono, as originally recorded, and a souped-up stereo channel.

The making-of docu, seemingly ported over from Region 2 Japanese DVD, is totally geared toward the special effects mavens and does not even pretend to take other elements of the film seriously. In a way, quite refreshing, although the so-called extensive insert materials really smack of a plastic toy merchandise catalogue, complete with a ludicrous pickled-brain-tokusatsu-otaku “essay” by one “Dr. Takeuchi,” which ends his musings with a lament that Asano Yuko is not dressed in a bikini. It is by no means “detailed booklet” as advertised in the back of the DVD cover, so those who care about this sort of things should beware.

* Review copy courtesy of Discotek Media.

SAYONARA JUPITER. Toho Pictures/IO Corporation, 1983. Japan, 2 hour 20 minutes. Directed by Hashimoto Koji. Written by Komatsu Saikyo. Producers: Komatsu Saikyo, Tanaka Tomoyuki. Cinematography: Hara Kazutani. Production Design: Sakuragi Akira. Art Direction: Takenaka Kazuo. Special Effects Director: Kawakita Koichi. Cast: Miura Tomokazu (Dr. Honda), Diane Dangely (Maria Basehart), Ono Miyuki (Anita), Rachel Hugget (Dr. Wilem), Andrew Hughes (Senator Shadllic), Hirata Akihiko (Dr. Inoue), Paul Tagawa (Peter).

Depending on where you stand, Sayonara Jupiter is either one of the Holy Grails among the Japanese tokusatsu (special effects) cinema, or an excellent example for illustrating why Japan, with its bountiful financial resources (at least in early 1980s) and technological acumen, was totally unable to come up with a hit on the scale of Star Wars. Sayonara Jupiter is a unique concoction, really, in its head-spinning combination of extremely sincere (and, for the most part, well thought-out) science fictional premise and ideas, impressive special effects (for its day, and seen in the right context, of course), ultra-dated sixties-style peaceniks vs. space capitalists plot, ridiculous performances (mostly by barely professional “foreign” actors) and, finally, the kind of dour, lugubrious, we-shall-not-forget-your-sacrifices attitude more appropriate for a wartime propaganda film that ultimately drags down the entire production into the bottom of the swamp. Certainly interesting (and valuable) as a piece of puzzle needed to complete the history of special effects cinema in the world, and capable of presenting scenes and imageries imbued with poetic grandeur, Jupiter in the end is no fun as a space adventure, seemingly unaware how downright laughable it occasionally becomes.

Quite a chunk of Jupiter is embarrassingly silly: no arguments there. The more the director Hashimoto (veteran assistant director for many of Toho’s prestigious and expensive projects, including Kurosawa Akira’s Dodes’kaden and responsible for the 1984 Godzilla) and the writer Komatsu, one of Japan’s most celebrated SF writers and author of the mega-seller Japan Sinks, try to infuse adult contents into the basically juvenile space-adventure story, the sillier it becomes. How about the zero-gravity sex scene between our intrepid hero Dr. Honda and his long-lost girlfriend Maria (Why do Japanese always name Anglo/American actresses MARIA?!), in which they grapple with one another in the buff, looking cringingly uncomfortable, with a swirling Milky Way projected in the background?

How about Senator Shadllic (whose character was supposed to be played by Orson Wells, or so the IMDB tells us), whose gruff confrontation with Dr. Honda has all the persuasive power of a traffic cop asking the latter to see his driver’s license? How about a hippie (!) song-writer with his pet dolphin—no, make that the commune’s pet dolphin—named Jupiter, leading a campaign against the solarization project? Add to this the 2 hours and 20 minutes of (mostly blond) actors and actresses droning out, in variously accented Japanese and English, reams and reams of technical exposition and “philosophical” dialogue about man’s position in the universe, et cetera et cetera, and you can’t really blame an average filmgoer for concluding that it’s gotta be a comedy, intentional or otherwise. Thankfully, Jupiter does not descend to the level of adding a cybernetic pet monkey to its cast (Remember Battlestar Galactica?—I mean the old one with Lone Greene).

But amidst its groan-inducing silliness and the puffed-up air of self-importance are germs of a good science fiction film. Certainly Komatsu had done his best to cinematically illustrate the idea of “solarization,” i.e. turning the gas giant planet into a second son, thus allowing the mankind to terraform its satellites and outer planets in the solar system. (An idea that also anchors the narrative drive of Arthur C. Clark’s 2010) Indeed, Jupiter sports more than a few interesting details that anticipates other science fiction literature and films made later, including a distinctively cetacean alien ship, a variant of which was later featured in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

I believe the premise of exploring the mysterious alien intelligence ensconced in Jupiter’s cold, stormy atmosphere, and the dilemma faced by the earth explorers whether to destroy alien forms of life encountered in Jupiter in order to create an energy resource for the mannkind, would have sufficed to sustain a theatrical film. So Komatsu and his team should have stuck to it. Unfortunately, they decide to go for a safer route and introduce a wandering black hole that just happen to approach the solar system at the very opportune moment in which the mankind is trying to solarize Jupiter. This plot turn has the expected effect of reducing the last third of the film to a (boringly directed) action film, with laser guns blaring, race-against-time suspense building (which actually doesn’t, as post-’60s big-budget Japanese films seem singularly incapable of generating cinematic suspense of this kind) and heroes making noble sacrifices to save the Earth against that pesky black hole. The lovers are reunited in death, the grumpy Shadllic relents and pays respects to their monument, everybody at the controls dabs their eyes with handkerchiefs. Boo-hoo (One guy who jumps with joy is quickly stared down into silence. Hey, the Earth was just saved from extermination! Can’t we at least express a little bit of jubilation?).

As for the special effects, yes, we can tell that the spaceships are miniature models strung up on wires and hurtled through black star-field backdrop, and nothing here approaches the eye-opening sense of wonder generated by similar effects in Star Wars, but they are indeed high-quality, and occasionally impressive, in their design and execution. The artificially-induced flood that reveals alien landscape paintings in the Martian arctic region is one example that demonstrates how modulation of slow motion photography combined with the exquisitely scaled miniature landscape can create an impressively believable illusion of massive tons of water roaring down toward the viewers. While not an underappreciated gem by a long shot, the pic will please fans of Japanese genre cinema and is at least a historically interesting curio for open-minded casual viewers coversant with the SF genre.

DVD Presentation:*

Discotek Media. NTSC. Dual Layer. Region 1. Video: Anamorphic Widescreen 1.85:1. Audio: Japanese Dolby Digital 5.1, English 2.0. Subtitles: English. Supplements: Making-of documentary, trailer, photo gallery, background information.

Discotek deserves praise for issuing this big-budget but rather obscure (in the English-language market, at least) SF extravaganza of yesteryear as a Region 1 disc. Its fans would have been otherwise stuck with an expensive Japanese import or a gray-market bootleg copy. The print used for telecine transfer is not in perfect condition and minor specks and wears are sometimes visible, although overall the transfer is good, if a bit soft as a whole, with the slightly canned dialogue for the otherwise robust 5 channel audio. The lack of depth in black levels, a constant problem with the Japanese Region 2 DVDs, is not as prominent with Jupiter. All in all, the transfer is satisfactory if not exactly comparable to Region 1 studio releases of the big-budget movies of the same period.

Discotek has seen it fit to assemble a nice bento box of extras for the film. Aside from Toho-produced making-of video documentary (presented in an awful full-frame, definitely not appropriate for HD presentation), detailed, proper and pretty boring, the disc also includes a long text section entitled “About the Film,” which turns out to be an English translation of an introductory essay written by Komatsu Sakyo. The essay gives an impression that Jupiter was more or less Komatsu’s personal project, with the nominal director Hashimoto really serving as no more than technical executor of the former’s vision. A rather unexpected but welcome addition is Yuko Weisser’s recollection of having put together a regional theater production of Sayonara Jupiter, reconceived as a burlesque comedy with the chatty and rambunctious yakuza molls taking a group tour to, where else, Jupiter, mercilessly skewering the seeming idiocy and ludicrousness of the would-be blockbuster. Surprisingly enough, Ms. Weisser’s account is accompanied by rare still photos from the theater performance. The vintage trailer and photo gallery rounds out the special features.  Here’s hoping that Discotek will eventually get around to release some more Japanese tokusatsu extravaganzas unknown to most American viewers, such as the seriously unhinged Catastrophe 1999: Prophecies of Nostradamus and Okamoto Kihachi’s UFO-invasion flick Blue Christmas.

* Review copy courtesy of Discotek Media.

Well, as those who are following koreanfilm.org news may have noticed, Q Branch and Seen in Jeonju (Tom Giammarco’s blog chock full of wonderful information on Korean film) have been lost in the limbo for a couple of months, as the website was going through the server change.  At one point it looked like all data was lost, and I had to fold the tent and find some other venue.

But as you can see, we are back again!  The  2007 portions in the first year of blog-launching has survived intact, and the back-up files for other entries have been safely ensconced in my trusty Cavalry external hard drive. I will eventually put most of them back up in these pages, giving priority to DVD reviews and interviews.  It will take time, but I don’t want to rush things so I will alternate between new entries and old, retrieved ones.

Meanwhile, I promise to make up for the slackened pace during recent months and considerably step up the speed and volume.  At one point I let literally several months to slip by without writing in a single entry: I definitely don’t want to let this happen again.  Especially since, now that I have lived without Q Branch for more than two months, I am surprised to learn how much I missed it: a space in which I can just post my thoughts as they come to me, where I can delve into a favorite or intriguing (non-academic) subject in any depth, where I can interview the people whose works I have always admired, and where I can share my discoveries and re-discoveries of unique cultural artifacts and products with the wider world.  Definitely a space to be cherished, and I will humbly take this server-change-occasioned near-disaster as an admonition not to neglect it ever again.

Okay then, thanks for all the support you have given to Q Branch over the last three years, and don’t forget to click in very soon.

CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED. England-US, 1963. 1 hour 29 minutes.

Director: Anthony M. Leader. Director of Cinematography: David Boulton. Screenplay: John Briley, based on the characters created by John Wyndham. Music: Ron Goodwin.  Cast: Ian Hendry (Tom), Alan Badel (Dr. Neville), Barbara Ferris (Susan Elliot), Patrick Wymark, Sheila Allen, Ralph Michael, Martin Miller (Professor Gruber), Harold Goldblatt, Patrick White, Andre Mikhelson, Bessie Love, Clive Powell (Paul), Roberta Rex (Nina), Mahdu Mathen (Rashid), Lee Yoke-Moon (Mi Ling), Gerald Delsol (Ago), Frank Summerscale (Mark).

Following the success of the compact, low-budget chiller Village of the Damned, MGM organized a team to produce an inevitable sequel. Taking the helms at the project this time are the respected screenwriter John Briley, an American expatriate living in London, who authored the Oscar-winning Gandhi and Cry Freedom for Richard Attenborough, in addition to a rather wacky but fascinating SF misfire Medusa Touch, and director Anton Leader, a veteran of a slew of popular TV series episodes in the US. Unlike Village, which only partially alluded to the Cold War anxiety, Children is an unabashed leftist commentary on the Cold War. The sequel, rather than regarding the glowing-eyed wunderkinder as an evil task force from the outer space, posits them as a higher form of evolution for the mankind. By concocting a storyline that openly portrays major nations and the “adults” who work for them as bloodthirsty power-mongers seeing these children only as potential weapons, the filmmakers turns their product into a science fiction parable about the folly of the arms race.

The anti-Cold War leanings of the filmmakers are certainly laudable. But as we know, good politics does not necessarily make good science fiction, not to mention good horror. Regrettably, Children is hampered by a self-righteous, “holier-than-though” attitude as well as its rigid adherence to the parabolic structure of the story, which robs the characters of spontaneity and the film of imaginative development. 

It’s not that Children is a badly made film. Far from it. Again, unlike Village, which remained faithful to the modalities of a classic Anglo-American supernatural thriller, Children goes for more overtly symbolic and “art-house” aesthetics, employing such techniques as slow motion and wide-angle lensing to convey the fantastic nature of the proceedings. Leader’s direction is basically good, and does not appear too TV-like. Hendry and Badel make for realistic and engaging protagonists, sarcastically defiant when confronted by a dour-looking secret service agent, and believably expressing frustration with the military knuckleheads as well as the pouty super-children without appearing whiny.

–”Are they dead?” “No… but they would be better off dead.”

Despite the film’s put-on air of sophistication, however, Children remains a predictable genre film with rather weak characterizations. Barbara Ferris’s Susan is like a fidgety marionette, almost entirely controlled by Paul, the leader of the super-children, and is notably unimpressive compared to the previous film’s Barbara Shelley. The children are basically rendered as tiny-tot versions of U.N. representatives, barely a notch above the typical ethnic stereotypes as perceived by the “well-educated” British: A dog-loving, emotionally stunted American kid, a pretty Russian girl with braids, a Chinese girl mouthing off “poetic” observations (played by a child actress named Lee Yoke-Moon, a Korean adoptee?) and so on.

Typical of this film’s idea of science fiction is some kind of sound amplifying contraption the super-children put together (complete with glowing coils and an antenna) to use against the pesky government agents. This machine is hooked to the pipe organ in the abandoned church they have sequestered themselves in, and when turned on, apparently generates mind-destroying sonic waves. Of course, the children themselves remain completely unharmed, although the noxious sound shakes the whole church building like a gong. Obviously the filmmakers could not envision them manufacturing poison gas or some such genuinely dangerous materials.

Children of the Damned, although black and white, is made with a noticeably different type of film stock from “Village.” The aspect ratio appears to be 1.85:1, although it probably squeezes off to 1.78:1 on a widescreen TV. The picture is impressively clean, with a little bit more instances of debris and artifacts showing up than Village, but still remarkably pristine for a vintage genre film from early 1960s. The sound is functional Dolby Digital Mono. 

The commentary track this time around is by the screenwriter John Briley. Evincing more than a little bitterness over the political conditions of ‘50s America, which we surmise was one of the reasons for his relocating permanently to England, he provides a spirited defense of the film’s pacifist (and slightly sanctimonious) philosophy, along with nice, generally positive anecdotes about the film’s cast and staff, working conditions, and so on. Not as informative or analytic as the previous film’s Steve Haberman commentary, it is nonetheless a nice chance to hear a screenwriter expressing his opinions about a sort-of-classic film he wrote.

As a vintage sci-fi thriller, Children of the Damned is nothing to be ashamed of and is reasonably entertaining, but is no match for its predecessor.

VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED.  England. 1 hour 17 minutes. Director: Wolf Rilla, Screenplay: Wolf Rilla, Robert Kinnoch, Stirling Silliphant.  Cinematography: Geoffrey Faithful. Special Effects: Tom Howard. Music: Ron Goodwin Producer: Robert Kinnoch.  Cast: George Sanders (Dr. Gordon Zellaby), Barbara Shelley (Anthea Zellaby), Martin Stephens (David), Michael Gwynne (Major Bernard).   

Some remakes exist only to remind us just how darn superior the originals are. The main accomplishments of John Carpenter’s Village of the Damned, which I mostly remember for making me notice how fat the always-attractive Kirstie Alley had become by 1990s, (I could be polite and say “orotund” here, but I don’t think Ms. Alley would mind me calling her fat: after all she did star in a sitcom entitled Fat Actress), are that it allowed talented actors like the aforementioned Ms. Alley, Meredith Salenger and the late, much-missed Christopher Reeve to collect their paychecks, and possibly spurred some viewers to check out the black-and-white original. 

Indeed, the 1960 Village of the Damned, in my estimation at least, is one of the bona fide classics of the SF/horror hybrid.  This profoundly unsettling little shocker left a lifelong impression on me when I first encountered it on TV, dubbed into Korean.  Particularly frightening and mysterious was the film’s final image, the gleaming eyes of the alien children wooshing into the night sky.  As a little kid, I remember being intrigued beyond speech by this scene, unsure whether what I saw was supposed to be a metaphoric representation or a literal illustration: was the essence of the aliens in fact the light emanating from their eyes?  After more than 30 years since I have first seen it, the scene retains its eerie power despite its primitive technology (it is no wonder that the film’s Japanese release title was Hikaru me [The Glowing Eyes]), a fine example of the cinematic magic with which a well-conceived and well-executed vintage science fiction film can keep us enthralled despite the passage of time.An idyllic British country village named Midwich is hit by an inexplicable phenomenon: its residents are simultaneously knocked unconscious, and an invisible and impenetrable bubble encases it for the duration of their unnatural sleep.  When the residents recover, no visible ill effects are observed, until it becomes known that all fertile women in the village are pregnant, some without having the benefit of a sexual experience.  The retired scientist Dr. Zellaby and his much younger wife Anthea are initially delighted to learn the news of her pregnancy.  However, the twelve children born out of the “incident” turn out to sport virtually identical looks, claiming little resemblance to their parents, and capable of super-powers.  The villagers cower in fear, the government agents fret and wring their hands in anxiety, whereas Dr. Zellaby tries his best to communicate in a civil manner with the super-children, led by his son David (Martin Stephens, Miles in The Innocents).

Village of the Damned owes much of its potency to its literary source, John Wyndham’s Midwich Cuckoos.  To be sure, the novel’s sexual politics have become dated, and the author’s unbridled elitism (given a full-blown expression in the climax of The Chrysalids, an otherwise brilliant, pioneering novel about the mutants with “special abilities”) does seep through the meshes of its fabric.

Yet the novel’s core idea of a human community invaded by an alien species, whose chosen method of invasion is impregnation of women with their own seeds, remains a powerful one. After all, how many prurient and juvenile “sci-fi” horrors, ridiculed and put down by the likes of Mystery Science Theater 3000, have clumsily attempted to portray the Unholy Encounter between The Thing From Beyond and our screaming women-folk and their Ghastly Progeny? SF and horror films continue to return to this premise precisely because it still has the power to unnerve us. In Village, the Ghastly Progeny turn out to be super-smart, doll-pretty tykes, blonde and fair-skinned, straight out of a Nazi eugenicist’s wet dream. They also constitute a Gestalt mind, with each individual “unit” telepathically linked to one another, allowing for the interpretation that they evoke the fear of Communist collectivism as well (Ironically, the Soviets become more quickly aware of the dangerous potential of these wunderkinder, nuking and wiping out their own “infiltrated” town). It was a great strategy on the filmmaker’s part to never hint at what the alien species, the children’s “fathers,” so to speak, even looks like, and to keep the children’s behavior coldly logical and rigorously survival-oriented. The children are more frightening and disturbing when they seem indifferent to the Big Existential Questions or Ethical Dilemmas that some folks fancy SF films should really be about (as I shall discuss in a separate review, Children of the Damned, a competently made picture with virtues of its own, falls victim to the self-righteousness of precisely this type). 

Director Wolf Rilla and veteran screenwriter Stirling Silliphant (also responsible for Charly, an adaptation of Flowers for Algernon) and producer Robert Kinnoch do the right thing by not wandering far from the source material. The movie has no real “special effects” to speak of (the children’s glowing eyes are simply superimposed over still frames of their faces) but the combination of judicious direction and sincere acting draw the maximum mileage out of the film’s set pieces. At the center of the narrative, and crucial for maintaining the credibility of the whole shebang, are two extremely good performances by George Sanders and Barbara Shelley. Sanders, typecast as suave, sarcastic villains in his later career, is presented with a rare chance to portray a fully rounded character, a scientist who admirably rises to the challenges posed by the alien intelligence. As Dr. Zellaby, Sanders communicates the genuine sympathy he feels toward the children as a surrogate father, rendering his final confrontation with them all the more gripping. (I can only wish all scientists in real life are as reasonable and open-minded as Dr. Zellaby! Dr. Hwang Woo-suk he ain’t)

Shelley, a Hammer horror queen, is also excellent as an intelligent woman who, despite being coldly rejected by her son, never gives up her efforts to understand him.  The Zellaby’s relationship, with the subtle hint of lack of physical consummation, is a believably adult one, rarely seen in a science fiction movie of its kind. (I won’t spoil the harrowing “brick wall” scene for the readers, except to note that it serves as a dazzling example of how to sensibly illustrate in cinematic terms a “mental struggle,” a fight that takes place only in one’s mindscape) 

Warner Brothers double feature DVD (contains Village of the Damned and Children of the Damned).  Region 1.  Purchased at Borders Books for appx. $15.  Audio: English, French.  Subtitles: English, French and Spanish.  Supplements for Village: Audio commentary by horror film specialist Steve Haberman, theatrical trailer.

The Warner Brothers label gives Village of the Damned a respectful treatment befitting a science fiction classic, with a cover art that reproduced the original poster ad and an excellent transfer.  The picture is perhaps a bit on the soft side, but I did not notice any breakup of pictures or smudges during the film’s night scenes, especially those with flaming torches in the foreground.  Steve Haberman’s commentary is a good listen, focusing on the production and distribution history of the film, interweaving with it informative narratives about the careers of Sanders (which ended rather tragically with the now-famous suicide note) and Shelley.  I was intrigued to learn that the Catholic church and other moral authorities were very disturbed by the content of the film, presumably because it centered on the issue of pregnancy, not to mention the immaculate conception, except by an evil, demonic presence!   His commentary also points out several gaffes and weak points in the film, such as the rather inappropriate “martial” upswing of music at the final fade-out. As for the movie itself, Village of the Damned has lost little of its power since its birth.  It remains a shiver-inducing, suspenseful little classic with nasty, pessimistic undertones, anchored by economical, efficient filmmaking and superb performances by its two leads.