Koreanfilm.org

Site Update: Review of Life is Cool (2008)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:57:08 +0900

Review by Darcy Paquet

Life is Cool

The development of rotoscoping techniques, first seen in Richard Linklater's Waking Life, has given filmmakers an entirely new kind of imagery to work with. By shooting actual footage and then converting it into animation, a director can create a strong sense of realism while at the same time remaining free to experiment with color, texture, and various added or subtracted visual details. In Korea, Choe Equan's Life Is Cool ranks as the first feature film to adopt this technique. Although it didn't attract much publicity when it opened in theaters in summer 2008, the film is worth viewers' time for a number of reasons.

The story opens with a man named Il-kwon (veteran comic actor Kim Soo-ro) on a plane back to Korea from the US. Sliding into a business class seat, he immediately sets his sights on the attractive woman sitting next to him. However he hits on her so obviously and obnoxiously that she soon gets a stewardess to send him back to economy class where he belongs.

After the plane lands, Il-kwon is met at the airport by two friends: Tae-young (Kang Sung-jin, Attack the Gas Station), who teaches at an after-school institute and feels frustrated with the state of his career, and Sung-hoon (Kim Jin-su), who is an interpreter for an African-American basketball player participating in the Korea league. Neither of the two men suffer from Il-kwon's lack of tact, but in their own ways they are just as desperate for romance. The rather sad state of their love lives is thrown into relief when Il-kwon announces the reason for his month-long trip back to Korea before resuming his graduate studies: he has come to find a wife. At first, they do their best to help him in his mission. However among the many blind dates arranged for Il-kwon in that month, there appears a woman named Yeonu (Park Ye-jin, Memento Mori) who will set all three hearts aflame.

The setup for Life Is Cool (Korean title: "She Was Pretty") sounds like a romantic comedy, however Choe is going for an entirely different tone here. What we get is a comparatively clear-eyed, realistic depiction of the lives of three men in their 30s. This may not sound very interesting, but Choe is skilled at filling out the characters' lives with interesting details and little twists. As for the animation, there is little in the film that could not have been expressed in live action, and that director admits this. However there is a clash between the realistic story and the unrealistic images which gives the film a distinctive tone. Given that the film is essentially about three men's romantic delusions, it's appropriate that as you watch it, the tension between reality and fantasy remains always at the front of your mind.

The animation also filters our perceptions of the acting performances. In the case of Yeonu, the reduced level of visual detail helps to give her character an aura of mystery, while also perhaps suggesting that none of the men are really "seeing" her clearly. Nonetheless one downside to the rotoscoping technique in this film is that many of the director's attempts to lighten the mood with humor fall flat. These are very talented comic actors, however they are just not as effective with animated faces.

No amount of technology or visual effects can transform a bad movie into a good one, so it is encouraging that this film, which will inevitably be remembered for its rotoscoped images, relies so much on its script. Weak stories have been the biggest hurdle for Korean animated films as they have attempted to make a name for themselves at home and abroad. In that sense, Life is Cool is a good start.

Still, I couldn't shake the feeling that something was missing emotionally from this film. It's worth watching, in the sense that it is unusual and memorable in the context of recent Korean cinema. But it falls well short of greatness. (Darcy Paquet)

Site Update: Review of Hello Schoolgirl (2008)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:56:22 +0900

Review by Darcy Paquet

Hello Schoolgirl

Two awkward love stories sit at the center of Hello Schoolgirl, a sweet and unexpectedly effective romance based on a well-known Korean comic book (manhwa). The first is awkward because of an uncomfortably large age gap, while in the second it is a gap in life experiences that causes problems. Yunwoo is 30 years old, and he holds a low-level position as a civil servant, working in a district office. He lives alone, having lost his parents at a young age. It is at the recycling bin one day when he catches his first glimpse of the 18 year old high school student Soo-young who lives in the apartment directly below his. Yunwoo is not the kind of guy to take an interest in schoolgirls, but due to circumstances a sort of brother-sister friendship develops between them. Though neither one of them are dealing with any major crises in their lives, each seems to be hiding a lonely spot inside themselves, and as time passes their companionship begins to fill that space.

Meanwhile, a younger man named Sook has just started working at the same district office. His infatuation with Ha-kyung is more typical (and less interesting dramatically): after seeing this beautiful woman lingering at the same spot in the subway station day after day, he begins to think of practically nothing else. He is stalking her in a way, though he can't work up the nerve to speak to her. She notices, and one day they finally start a conversation.

It's become almost expected that with the development of computer generated imagery, any comic book adaptation worth its salt will feature stylish visuals and/or highly saturated colors to capture the artistic look of its source material. However sophomore director Ryu Jang-ha (Springtime) takes the completely opposite approach. One of the most notable aspects of Hello Schoolgirl is the way it brings such feeling to very ordinary-looking settings and events. Nothing in the film comes across as exaggerated or false; perhaps this is why it is so easy to fall for its charms. Fans of Korean cinema might not be surprised to learn that Ryu worked as an assistant director on Hur Jin-ho's Christmas in August (1998) and as the co-screenwriter on One Fine Spring Day (2001), two beloved melodramas that plant their feet firmly in ordinary, everyday circumstances.

Nonetheless the part of this film that will be likely to stick in people's memories is the relationship between Yunwoo, played by Yu Ji-tae (Oldboy, One Fine Spring Day), and Soo-young, played by the up and coming actress Lee Yeon-hee (M). After his more adrenaline-charged work of recent years I had sort of forgotten that Yu can be an effective romantic lead. He is able to express his character's emotions in a very subtle and unaffected way, so that unlike many established actors he is able to portray an ordinary person without his star power getting in the way. As for Lee, let me just say that I think there is something completely extraordinary about this young performer. It's not that she is a consistently good actress -- in fact, some of her performances on TV have drawn ridicule. It may turn out that she has a fairly limited range as an actress. But apart from acting ability, there is also that thing called screen presence, and this just seems to be woven into her DNA. In front of the camera she is a force of nature, and it is a particular treat to see her in a film like this that so highlights her strengths. The film's second love story is, I'm afraid to say, ultimately pretty forgettable. But in this case, one out of two is still pretty satisfying. (Darcy Paquet)

Site Update: Review of Handphone (2009)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:55:34 +0900

Review by Djuna

Handphone

A warning: if you are looking for a feel-good escapist entertainment, avoid Handphone. That type of film must meet several conditions. First and foremost, we should be able to feel for its protagonist. Conversely, the piece's villain should brook no sympathy. The violence the good guy employs against the villain must be clean-cut, not messy like one we see in real life. And so on.

Handphone ignores these conditions. In fact, it gleefully violates them. Seung-min the entertainment agent, the film's alleged hero, is not someone we would voluntarily feel any sympathy toward. He is shallow, low-rent and lacking in conscience. Yi-gyu, who accidentally picks up Seung-min's cell phone and decides to blackmail him, is, on the other hand, someone easier for us to root for. Yi-gyu is slowly crumbling under the pressure of working life, unlike Seung-min, whose shallow character seems to actually enhance his ability to navigate through the treacherous waters of his profession. The film is aware of this contrast, and puts Yi-gyu through a wringer to prove its point. Naturally, the violence eventually sparked between these two disturbed characters does not help the viewers whatsoever in reducing the latter's stress.

Well, what can I say? Handphone is masochistic, cynical and ultimately misanthropic. Few characters in this film are mentally stable or morally upright. Most of them are seriously flawed in one way or another: a few are annoying on a metaphysical scale. Of course, since Handphone's hateful depiction of humanity is based on the relational dynamics of the Korean society as well as the stereotypes of its members, we might accept that the scope of its misanthropy is limited to those whom we see around us. Whatever the director originally intended with all this is rather beside the point.

How does Handphone stack up as a thriller? Its structure is rather loose. The cell phone in question can only do so much as a multi-purpose McGuffin. The filmmakers eventually resort to improbable coincidences and a bit of cheating. As in his previous film Paradise Murders, director Kim Han-min does not quite know when to end the movie. A double-entendre epilogue is frankly redundant, although we could concede that this looseness does contribute to extending the agony of the climax.

The film's biggest assets, not surprisingly, are its two stars: Uhm Tae-woong and Park Yong-woo. They are quite well cast for the respective roles of a sleazy agent and an "emotional laborer" rotting from the inside, producing a powerful synergistic effect. If I were compelled to compare the two, I must say Park seems to benefit slightly from a more three-dimensional character he is playing.

Let me finish by observing that Handphone performs an excellent public service by providing those of us living in the contemporary Korean society with three useful and important lessons: 1) Let's keep a watchful eye on any digital device that contains private information: 2) Let's pay attention to the mental health of the emotional laborers, lest they snap: 3) And most importantly, let's not be aggressively rude to total strangers. The payoff can be really ugly. (Djuna, translated by Kyu Hyun Kim)

Site Update: Private Eye (2009)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:54:29 +0900

Review by Djuna

Private Eye

I'd heard some positive things about Private Eye before actually catching the movie in the theater. A detective story set in the early 20th century under the Japanese colonial rule! With Hwang Jeong-min, Ryu Deok-hwan, Uhm Ji-won, Oh Dal-soo in the cast! And the screenplay picked up some kind of award! Well, the last bit was not so intriguing. It's not uncommon for an acclaimed screenplay to turn out to be disappointing. Still, the first two pieces of information were enough to get my expectations up.

The details of the story go like this. Hong Jin-ho, the character played by Hwang Jeong-min in this film, is a pro at things like tracking down missing people and exposing illicit love affairs. He doesn't call himself a private eye, but that's basically what he is. He usually tries to avoid tight situations but is one day pushed into a rather sticky murder case, when Jang Gwang-soo, a med student who collects abandoned bodies for dissection, asks Hong to find the murderer of his latest cadaver.

Wait. I mean, wouldn't it be obvious to a med school student that if you find a body with a knife wound in it, it was probably a victim of murder? The film begins to lose its footing this early on. The story wouldn't make sense even from the viewpoint of early 20th-century Seoulites. Any moderate reader among them would have been familiar with the ABCs of detective novels. This would have included a cadaver-hungry medical student, by the way. It could be that Jang was simply thinking that his actions were fine if the body belonged to some insignificant fellow, but less so if it turned out to be the son of a high-ranking official that spells out mortal danger for him-- but then the audience wouldn't be able to like him as much.

If it's all an excuse to bring together a private eye and a doctor-to-be as a murder investigation team, well, I can't say I don't understand. The folks who made this film were indeed aiming for a Holmes and Watson partnership, colonial Seoul-style. The names match somewhat, with a little stretch: Holmes - Hong Jin-ho, John Watson - Jang Gwang-soo, see? But there's a fatal flaw here. As you Baker Street Regulars already know, Holmes and Watson are highly distinctive characters. Just a few pages into the story and you know what kind of people they are. In Private Eye, it's much harder to figure out the two main characters. Especially Hong Jin-ho. What is he, anyway? A man of "the little gray cells" like Hercule Poirot? No, he's too dumb for that. Or an eclectic super-hero like his namesake Holmes? He doesn't have half the skills. Maybe a tough guy like Sam Spade? Not so. Hong can't hold up in a fistfight, nor does he have the guts to handle the life underground. Then why in the world is this man the hero?

Hong's plight springs from the fact that the film denies him a chance to reveal his unique features or skills. In other words, the screenplay was not very well thought out. The film doesn't have much mystery in it. There's no foreshadowing that lasts more than ten minutes, and most clues are explained away in the very next sequence. On top of that, there's just one suspect. Or were there two? In any case, there's no room for a detective to do anything, much less show himself off. Even that snazzy toy that looks like something Q might make for 007 is simply no good if the man doesn't get to use it.

And who makes these toys for Hong? It's the inventor Soon-duk, played by Uhm Ji-won. Soon-duk, although not very realistic, could have been an interesting character: a lady of noble birth that gets hooked on modern Western science and sets up a lab in an abandoned church to cook up all sorts of inventions. A personage of these dimensions might well be the heroine in a sensible screenplay, but here she remains underdeveloped and misused in a supporting role.

Another badly formulated character is the police officer Oh Young-dal. As always, Oh Dal-soo turns in a fun, top-notch comic performance, but his character really does not deserve such cutesy treatment. It's always a bad idea to put together in one character the roles of a harmless clown and an accomplice in crime. No amount of good acting on Oh Dal-soo's part can pull it off, however excellent an actor he may be.

The film attempts to cover up gaping holes in the story and characters with action scenes, but those aren't so well-crafted either. The chase scene between Hong and a mysterious pursuer is a glaring example. The city-stomping stunts on the fabulous open sets could have been "cool," or so the makers must have thought, but it did not work. The rhythm is awkward and the timing a mess. The entire sequence here is meant to end on a clear slapstick note, which might have looked good in the script. But where one second would have been enough, the film drags on for a few more seconds and the result is a boring scene. This is just one of many such unwise decisions. All in all, I don't believe that the makers of Private Eye are giving film as a medium its full workout. (Djuna, translated by ye-jung)

Notice: Djuna Reviews on the Way

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:53:08 +0900

2009.05.13: Djuna reviews on the way. We at koreanfilm.org are extremely pleased to have available for our readers, starting May 2009, reviews of notable Korean films by Djuna, noted science fiction writer and film critic. In case anyone is wondering, "Djuna" is a nom de plume derived from Djuna Barnes: the "real Djuna(s)" prefer to remain anonymous (For the sake of convenience, "she" will be referred to in female singular here). Since early 1990s, she has been active as a cutting-edge science fiction writer with a distinctive voice, publishing numerous works both on- and off-line, the majority of which are collected in The Duty-Free Zone (2000), The Trans-Pacific Express (2002) and The Proxy War (2006). Djuna has also been writing film reviews and criticisms extensively. Her film-related writings have appeared in numerous major media outlets, including The Hankyoreh and Cine 21. Her early essays on cinema have been collected as Grumbling in front of Silver Screen (2001). Djuna's reviews of Korean films to be uploaded here have been originally written in Korean and published in her popular "Djuna's Cinema Graffiti Board"

Site Update: Review of Thirst (2009)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:51:04 +0900

Review by Kyu Hyun Kim

Thirst

Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho), a tormented priest, volunteers as a human guinea pig at an African research facility, working on the vaccine for a virulent virus called EV (which only infects celibate or sexually inactive men). The virus kills him, but he is miraculously resurrected by blood transfusion. Unfortunately, the miracle comes with a serious side effect: he turns into a vampire. Only continuous supply of fresh human blood can reverse the symptoms of EV infection. While grappling with his disturbing new habit-and superpowers-Sang-hyun becomes attracted to Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin, Dasepo Girls ), unhappily married to his childhood friend Kang-woo (Sin Ha-gyun, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), a bizarrely infantile hypochondriac living under the thumb of his manic dressmaker mother Ms. Ra (Kim Hae-sook, Open City).

Thirst, which, along with Bong Joon-ho's Mother, is 2009's most anticipated Korean film, opened to good if not spectacular box office performance (0.8 million tickets sold in the first weekend for the Seoul theaters). Unlike Park Chan-wook's "revenge" trilogy, however, the movie is generating extreme reactions from both viewers and critics. Some reviews have blasted it as a pretentious bore or a poorly conceived adaptation of Emile Zola's Therese Raquin (from which this film borrows certain plot points and a love triangle central to the plot): only a few critics have hailed it as a masterpiece. Among the viewers, the chasm is even wider: internet comments freely range from "a piece of trash" to "the best movie I have seen in 10 years."

Even for someone like me, a rabid-crazy Park Chan-wook fan, the initial reaction to Thirst was that of deep unease: I literally could not name what it was that I was feeling as the end credits rolled up. All I knew for sure was that I had to see it again immediately. Only after the second viewing did I understand that the unease came from my inertial inability to acknowledge that I'd just watched a bewildering but awesome work of art, well-nigh indescribable in its insane, alchemic melding of disparate genre elements.

Thematically, Thirst is as a straightforward and relentless exploration of Catholic guilt as any Euro-American film I have ever seen--as painful as Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant, as scorching as Bunuel's Viridiana-- with its profoundly contradictory attitude toward the glamour and agony of desire. The protagonist Sang-hyun, like Graham Greene's Scobie in The Heart of the Matter, is tragically, sympathetically flawed. He has enough dedication to face certain death in the service of humanity yet cannot stop his pity toward a beautiful, unhappy young woman growing into passionate love. He is powerless to stop the faithful who regard his vampirism as a sign of being touched by God: having committed a mortal sin out of love, he figuratively and literally drowns in guilt.

Song Kang-ho gives yet another brilliant performance (I don't think he can just walk through a role even if his life depended on it), but it is not a flashy one: as was in Secret Sunshine, it's a catcher's turn that perfectly anchors the emotional content of a particular scene and at the same time generously puts the spotlight on other actors. I can only hope that Euro-American critics are not lazy (or foolish) enough to mistake the essential passivity of Sang-hyun's character for the lack of talent on Song's part.

A lot of media attention has been paid to the explicit sex scenes between Song and Kim Ok-vin, an interesting choice on Park's part. He seems to have had a young Isabelle Adjani (The Story of Adel H was allegedly one of the films Park recommended to Kim as a research material) in mind: fiery, heartbreaking, maybe a bit raw. Kim is stunningly sexy and gorgeous in both wilted-housewife and full-blown femme fatale modes, and throws all of herself into the role, but I cannot help but seeing Yeom Jeong-ah (who appeared as a fictional vampire in Park's "The Cut" from Three Extreme) or Lee Young-ae as Tae-ju. Kim strikes me as a bit too young and contemporary: she does not strike as someone who could have tolerated long years of indentured servitude in exchange for meager domestic comfort. She is blindingly beautiful, I must admit, in a blue hanbok dress.

The rest of the cast is equally superb: Oh Dal-soo, Sin Ha-gyun, Kim Hae-su, Kim Jee-woon regulars Park In-hwan (The Quiet Family), as a blind senior priest with a wry sense of humor, and Song Young-chang (the head-rocking section chief from Foul King), as a hard-nosed former cop. Their ensemble acting in the sequence where a character tries desperately to alert the presence of a vampire to other unsuspecting guests is a piece de resistance, superior to any similar scene in Lady Vengeance.

By now we expect not just high quality jobs but extraordinary aesthetic achievements from Park Chan-wook's regular staff, and Thirst certainly does not disappoint. Production designer Ryu Seong-hee is responsible for the uncommonly reined-in colors-bleached white and faded green-of the religious and medical institutions as well as ever-so-slightly off-kilter hues of Ms. Ra's domain-deranged blues and slick browns. Lenser Jeong Jeong-hoon weaves pure magic with shadows and light, culminating in the stunning vista of the ocean spreading in scarlet red, illuminated by the setting sun, as looked on by the eyes of the doomed protagonist.

Oh, is it a good vampire film, you ask? It sure as heck is- the tomato juice flows abundantly in horrendous, cringe-inducing scenes of violent exsanguinations, and there are many insanely creative twists on the familiar genre staples that will either stun you into silence or make you gape in disbelief. Have you wondered how a vampire can convince a blind person that he is one? Watch Thirst. Have you ever wondered whether becoming an immortal creature will heal calluses on the soles of your foot? Again, watch the movie. There are at least two sequences in this film that matches in sheer audacity and jaw-dropping hutzpah the notorious "long-take corridor action" set piece in Old Boy.

But Thirst is not an exhilarating showcase of directorial vision and filmmaking pizzazz that Old Boy was. Despite occasional insertions of absurdist deadpan humor, it is at its basis a tragic romance. And despite much bloodletting, the film is not interested in generating frisson of fear, but a deep sense of melancholy. In the end it returns, perhaps in a purer form than ever, to Park Chan-wook's starting point: the torturous reflection on the impossibility of salvation, the moral weight of sin and desire, and the agonizing scream of a man against God who may or may not exist, and may or may not love him. If Thirst were a book, it probably deserves a whole shelf of its own: regardless of one's likes or dislikes, it is a true work of art that calls out for the defense of its artistic honor by those who are taken with it, way beyond the question of one's taste in specific genres or stylistic choices. (Kyu Hyun Kim)

Site Update: Review of Hansel and Gretel (2007)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:50:14 +0900

Review by Kyu Hyun Kim

Hansel and Gretel

Eun-su (Cheon Jeong-myung, The Aggressives, Les Formidables), a young man with a troubled relationship, has a car accident on the way to see his ill mother. Waking up, he is guided by a strange girl dressed just like Little Red Riding Hood to a fairy-tale-like country house. It turns out to be inhabited by three children, two girls and a boy, with a nerve-wracked couple who they claim to be their parents. Eun-su discovers, however, that something is seriously wrong. The home environment is either grotesquely saccharine or kitsch-surrealistic: everyday meal, for instance, consists of cupcakes, cookies and Jell-o puddings buried in the mountains of cream and sugar (Yuckiddy yuck!). Not only are the parents appear to be in mortal fear of the kids, the house's attic and a separate cottage appear to have some inexplicable, extra-dimensional qualities, like Dr. Who's TARDIS. The situation decisively turns toward the worse when the existing couple mysteriously disappears and another middle-aged couple arrives: the new "father," a church deacon (Park Hee-soon, Boss X-File, Seven Days), may be harboring terrifying secrets of his own.

Hansel and Gretel is the sophomore effort by director Yim Phil-sung, whose Antarctic Diary was a commercial failure despite evincing considerable visual talent and mastery of genre idioms. Here, Yim turns the tables on the usual family-in-jeopardy thriller cliche and present the children as possible monsters of the piece. He has some fun with the conventions of the haunted house genre, and a few set pieces are both technically well-executed and horrifically imaginative, such as the slow calcification of a character into a living doll, complete with cracks and discolorings on the skin.

However, the central premise of Hansel and Gretel, children endowed with supernatural powers oppressing and punishing adults, is not carried to its fullest potential. This becomes clear when we compare it to the movie's one obvious model, the old Twilight Zone episode "It's A Good Life," written by Rod Serling. The show's blond kid, played by Bill Mumy, is one of the TV histories' most frightening monsters, precisely because he is so feckless and beguiling and yet is utterly, inhumanly ruthless in exercising his power. Hansel and Gretel, despite its rather high-quality special effects and efficient direction, cannot scale the height of excruciating terror found in this classic TV episode.

This may be partly due to the director's genuine desire to make a "fairy tale for adults," that has something meaningful to say about the abusive treatment of children as well as the hypocrisy of Christian institutions. But it is not easy to strike the right balance between the children's view of the harsh, destructive real world and the dream world of magic and innocence, as Guillermo Del Toro did in Pan's Labyrinth did. Yim Phil-sung instead plots a compromised, middle course. It is not helpful that the child actors in Hansel and Gretel are made to preen, chirp, scrunch their faces and otherwise overact. Some of the writing is simply awful: Eun-su's long-winded exposition of his background "in the mold of a fairy tale" (casting himself as a prince, and so on) is particularly embarrassing. The film does have spots of vitality, such as a scene where the children use their psychic power to shove an adult into a burning fireplace, but the overall impression is that Hansel and Gretel plays it too safely, turning what could have been a dark, powerful horror film into a quirky fantasy. (Kyu Hyun Kim)

Site Update: Review of Frozen Flower (2008)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:49:20 +0900

Review by Darcy Paquet

Frozen Flower

The Koryo Dynasty (918-1932), one of the most interesting eras in Korean history, is in its fin this al stages. The king is young and strong-willed, increasingly unwilling to adopt the Koryo ruler's traditionally subservient position towards China. Around him he has gathered a group of warriors, headed by the fanatically loyal and talented Hong Lim. But the king's failure to produce an heir has left him vulnerable, and Yuan Dynasty rulers in China have demanded that the king's cousin be installed as crown prince. The potential for an outbreak of violence, either from inside or outside the palace walls, appears to be high.

From inside the monarch's private quarters, however, things are even more complicated. The king, it turns out, is gay, and locked in a love affair with Hong Lim. When the lack of an heir becomes untenable, he makes a bold proposal: for Hong Lim to secretly impregnate the queen. This, however, will not work out as he envisions¢®¦

Rising director Yu Ha's first foray into period dramas is a heady mix of gaudy costumes, sharp weapons, jealous obsession, betrayal, bloodshed and lots of sex. It's a film that you experience viscerally. It is not out to reinvent the genre, or to introduce arthouse sensibilities to a medieval setting. It is simply an engaging story: a big, juicy steak of a movie.

Frozen Flower's primary strengths lie in the realm of storytelling, not only in the grand sweep of the narrative, but on a micro level as well. Director Yu seems particularly skilled at maintaining dramatic tension even in the simplest of scenes. As for the characters he creates, it's not that they are especially unique or memorable, but the gradual shift in the relationships between them are handled so smoothly that they are fascinating to watch.

The film's flaws too sometimes come into view. Although fairly high budget by Korean standards, some local viewers have criticised the art design and costumes as looking somewhat cheap and inauthentic. The plot also loses some of its momentum in the later reels, which were originally even longer before the director tightened them up just prior to its theatrical release.

Nonetheless even the film's critics have had positive words for the lead actors, who turned in some of the most solid performances of their careers to date. Zo In-sung as Hong Lim is perhaps the most crucial contributor in that it is his inner turmoil that mirrors the major developments of the plot. Until his breakout role in Yu Ha's previous film A Dirty Carnival, Zo was better known for his good looks than his acting talent, but here he manages to portray his character's emotional vulnerabilities without ever coming across as weak. His suffering eyes are one of the film's indelible images. Joo Jin-mo (200 Pound Beauty) as the King is also unexpectedly effective, capably portraying both the admirable and menacing aspects of the ruler's personality. Finally, Song Ji-hyo (Some) as the young Queen brings a quiet intensity to her role. Her developing relationship with Hong Lim is charged, but there is also a slightly detached, cold quality to their passion that suggests it is more the product of desperation than genuine affection.

One senses fairly early on in the film where all of this is headed, but it is exciting nonetheless to watch the various opposing forces play out. Although he has yet to achieve much international recognition, Yu Ha demonstrates again in this film that he is one of contemporary Korean cinema's most interesting voices. (Darcy Paquet)

Site Update: Review of Crush and blush (2008)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:48:31 +0900

Review by Darcy Paquet

Crush and Blush

One of the most interesting and original Korean films of 2008 is categorized as a screwball comedy, but in truth it's rather hard to describe. As the most unpopular teacher in her school, with an embarrassing, chronic tendency for her face to blush bright red, Yang Me-sook's life is bad enough. But then it suddenly gets much worse. First she is demoted from teaching Russian in high school to teaching English in middle school, which is a problem because she can speak barely a word of the language. Then she discovers that another teacher in the school, the married Mr. Seo for whom she has always harbored a crush, is having an extramarital affair, with none other than the pretty Russian teacher who occupies her old job. Feeling devastated and betrayed, she declares war. Her first move is to befriend Mr. Seo's daughter Jong-hee, the most unpopular student at the school. Claiming she wants to save her father's marriage, Me-sook recruits the girl on a no-holds-barred mission to break up the affair. Complications ensue.

Viewers tend to either love or hate this film, partly because the experience of being inside Me-sook's mind is so intense. She rages at the world, constructs her own fantasy demons, and then, in the course of battling them, veers between obsession and despair. If Crush and Blush has a dominant emotion, it is an only barely contained hysteria. However director Lee Kyoung-mi is never out of control; the film's emotional swings are wild but executed with precision (save, perhaps, for the final confrontation at the end which is a tad indulgent). For a first time director, it's an impressive achievement.

Director Lee Kyeong-mi had some help in making her debut. Her 30-minute short Feel Good Story (2004), which won a stunning number of festival awards inside Korea (it remains one of my own very favorite Korean shorts) caught the attention of Oldboy director Park Chan-wook. After inviting her to serve on the crew for Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, Park agreed to be her producer for Crush and Blush. He even turns in a lightning-quick cameo for those who can spot him. (A cameo by The Host director Bong Joon-ho, who once had Lee in one of his classes, is easier to catch)

No one can write about this film without at least mentioning the lead performance by Kong Hyo-jin (Family Ties). An extremely talented actress who is most often cast in supporting roles, Kong wavered at first when presented with this script, given the role's excesses. Reportedly urged on by fellow actress Jeon Do-yeon, she eventually accepted and threw herself into this role in a way that few performers can. Without the energy that she brings to portraying Me-sook, this film would surely not have worked. Quite rightly, she has won numerous acting awards in Korea for this performance.

Although its box office performance was a disappointment, this film has acquired a sort of cult status among Korean cinephiles. Screenings in Korea are met with uproarious laughter, though unfortunately some of the humor here is hard to translate. Meanwhile, director Lee has been identified as a director with real talent. Let's hope that her reputation among cinephiles and critics helps her to go on and shoot a second feature. (Darcy Paquet)

Site Update: Review of Hwang Jin-yi (2007)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:46:22 +0900

Review Kyu Hyun Kim

Hwang Jin-Yi

Hwang Jin-yi, who allegedly lived in mid-16th century Korea, is probably the most famous courtesan in Korean history, but aside from several works of (high-caliber) poetry and a few episodes involving her legendary wit, pride and glamour, nothing much is known about her life. This lacuna has allowed modern artists to creatively re-imagine her in many different ways. Not surprisingly, she has proven to be a popular subject for cinematic and TV adaptation, from Do Geum-bong's quasi-burlesque turn in the 1957 version, to Jang Mi-hee's prim and proud interpretation in Bae Chang-ho's 1986 take, and to the athletic and supermodel-like one embodied by Ha Ji-won in the 2006 TV drama. This latest cinematic incarnation, played by the popular TV actress Song Hye-gyo and directed by Jang Yoon-hyun (Tell Me Something, Some), is also noted for its collaboration with North Korean filmmakers, which included location shooting in the hitherto verboten regions.

Unfortunately, Hwang Jin-Yi, while not a hideously self-righteous train-wreck like Hanbando, is still a chore to sit through. Surprisingly, the movie's problems can be reduced to essentially two issues: its incomprehensible decision to make the sub-standard (and completely fictional) character of Nomi (Yoo Ji-tae, Old Boy) into its de facto protagonist, and its terrible miscasting of Song Hye-gyo in the eponymous role. Nomi's disastrous intrusion into what should have been Hwang Jin-yi's own narrative might owe its origin to the honored North Korean writer Hong Seok-joong's novel, on which this film adaptation is based: he is clearly conceived of as a proletarian bandit-hero in the mold of Im Kkeok-jeong (Hong was the one who completed his grandfather Hong Myeong-hee's massive, unfinished novel about the famous bandit). Even then, I find it difficult to believe that Hong's source novel might have portrayed Hwang as such a passive, boring, rescue-me-I-am-only-a-woman dullard as presented here. Aside from the very occasional flashes of literary acumen and haughty attitude, this Hwang Jin-yi demonstrates little reason for anyone, a drunken yangban clientele or not, to find her enticing, much less admirable. More seriously, by making Hwang's descent into sexual servitude, her subsequent tug-of-war with the Governor of Song-do (a Jang Jin regular Ryoo Seung-ryong) and her death all consequences of her (semi-) unrequited love with Nomi, Jang deprives her of agency as the protagonist in her own film. As it stands, the movie really should have been titled Nomi and His Courtesan Girlfriend.

Compounding the problem is Jang's second great mistake, i.e. casting Song Hye-gyo as Hwang Jin-yi. Song is a radiantly beautiful actress, captivating and attractive in her various TV drama roles, but her sensibility and looks are nearly totally mismatched to this role: it's like Mila Jovovich being cast in the role of Desdemona in Othello. To be fair to Song, the hopelessly lugubrious screenplay gives zero room for her to display wit, charm or any hint of joie de vivre. Indeed, it's even worse when she has to weep or swoon in despair, often in dreary slow motion: such antics merely emphasize the clumsy artifice of the melodramatic setups.

On the plus side, Hwang Jin-Yi is attractively filmed by DP Choe Young-taek (Volcano High, Hanbando) and carefully designed by art director Kim Jin-cheol and costume supervisor Jeong Jeong-eun (Red Eye, TV's Coma). The film's uniquely dark and subdued color scheme that eschews primary red and blue and envelopes the characters in shades of damson, dark olive and ashy-black has received some criticism for being too dour but I found it rather striking. Production quality is very high, and the climactic vista of Diamond Mountains is indeed breathtakingly majestic, some obvious CGI tweaking notwithstanding.

I am not sure why Hwang Jin-Yi's rather obvious problems had escaped the veteran Jang Yoon-hyun's notice: perhaps he let his better judgment slip, excited by an opportunity to closely collaborate with North Koreans and to show his film to the Northern viewers. My unsolicited opinion is that, if he had wanted to make a movie that North Korean viewers could truly enjoy, he should have made a comedy with an early '60s sensibility. It is too bad this particular telling of the famous courtesan's life ended up being the kind of highly intellectualized, deadly serious and ultimately soporific "literary" adaptation that the real-life Hwang Jin-yi would have had a laugh at the expense of. (Kyu Hyun Kim)

Site Update: Review of My Dear Enemy (2008)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:46:06 +0900

Review by Darcy Paquet

My Dear Enemy

Hee-soo isn't the type of person to say what's on her mind, but you can tell that something is wrong. When, at a horseracing stadium, she tracks down her ex-boyfriend Byung-woon, her voice is laced with fury. "I want my money," she says, skipping even the barest of greetings. Byung-woon, for his part, looks like a man trapped. Despite his nervous smiles and warm assurances (that seem slightly dodgy, like something Bill Clinton would say), you can guess from the outset that he doesn't have the three and a half million won ($3,000) that he borrowed from her a year earlier. "Don't worry," he tells her, "for sure I can get it for you by the end of the day." Not believing him, but not willing to let him out of her site until she gets paid, she accompanies him for the day as he visits various old friends and acquaintances (all women) and tries to sweet talk his way into a loan.

Since his debut with This Charming Girl in 2004, Lee Yoon-ki has emerged as one of Korea's leading sources of small-budgeted, intimate dramas about ordinary people. A regular invitee to Berlin's Forum Section, Lee is particulaly skilled at inhabiting the worlds of female characters, and he has worked with a range of impressive up and coming actresses including Kim Ji-soo and Han Hyo-joo. My Dear Enemy marks a step into higher profile territory, however. Based like his previous work Ad Lib Night on a story by Japanese writer Taira Azuko, the film's stellar cast includes Ha Jung-woo -(fresh off his praised turn as a serial killer in the blockbuster hit The Chaser) - and leading actress Jeon Do-yeon, who the previous year had garnered Korea's first ever acting prize at Cannes for her role in Secret Sunshine. Jeon is known for her discriminating taste in selecting projects, so expectations for this film among cinephiles were high ever since it was announced.

Apart from the long take that opens the film, Lee is generally content to avoid stylistic flourishes and to put the actor's performances at the center of the film - though the irregular rhythms of his editing help to augment a sense of tension between the two leads. This tension - fueled by angry resentment on Hee-soo's part and guilt on Byung-woon's - functions more or less as the film's story, in that it slowly transforms over the course of the day. Hee-soo's mind is being pulled in multiple directions at once, given the desperation of her current circumstances, the painful and positive memories of their old relationship, and the reluctant intimacy that develops between them throughout the day, as she learns things about Byung-woon that she never know. Needless to say, Jeon Do-yeon does not have to articulate any of this in words; you can see it all on her face.

But in some ways this film betrays a bias toward Byung-woon, giving actor Ha Jung-woo an exceptional opportunity to display all his charm. In his short but very busy career to date Ha has displayed phenomenal range, but watching him in this film is a particular pleasure. - you can't help but be seduced. Great acting, assured directing... even with its rather simple (if you were unkind, you would say "thin") plot this two-hour long film is riveting. (Darcy Paquet)

Site Update: Review of Once Upon a Time in Corea (2008)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:45:09 +0900

Review by Kyu Hyun Kim

Once Upon a Time in Corea

In 1945, Japanese military leaders discover through a secret document that the Stone Cavern Buddha in Kyungjoo, one of the most venerated national treasures of Korea, once had a baby's-head-sized diamond decorating its brow. Known as "Eastern Light," this humongous gemstone becomes the target of a Robin Hood-like jewel thief Haedanghwa (a night-time guise for the cabaret singer Chunja, played by Lee Bo-young, heroine of the TV drama Seodongyo) as well as the dapper scoundrel Bong-gu (Park Yong-woo, Beautiful Sunday), caught in a cross-fire between the independence army and the Japanese colonial authority.

Once Upon A Time in Corea comes at the mid-point of a mini-boom of the Korean cinema set in the colonial period, that started out around late 2006 with the politically smeared Blue Swallow and perhaps culminating in the October 2008 release of Modern Boy. For my money the best exploration of the agonizing ambivalence of the Korean life in this period-glamour of high modernism mixed in with the suppression of freedom and confusion of identity under the domination of the Japanese colonial regime-remains The Epitaph, but other films such as Radio Dayz and The Good, the Bad, the Weird in their own ways advanced the dialogue about the meaning of colonial modernity in Korean history. It is a huge progress from '80s or even '90s that many Korean filmmakers today freely acknowledge that the Japanese colonial period was infused with modernist glamour and far from the "dark ages" often portrayed in "official" textbook histories: indeed, films like Modern Boy and The Epitaph are directly about this glamour, tinged as it is with guilt, regret and even horror.

Unlike them, though, Once Upon A Time in Corea is content to re-cycle and re-dress moth-eaten clich?s from '60s and '70s anti-Japanese programmers and perfunctorily painting them over with glossy, magazine-cover visuals and lazily anachronistic humor. Its relationship to the real history of Korea is about as close as Dick Cheney's relationship to the principles of American constitutional government. Screenplay by Cheon Seong-il has some trouble juggling the film's "clever" plot twists and head-spinning identity-switches, and the TV-variety-show-style gags and "contemporary" dialogues uttered by the principals are mostly terrible. Personally, I was particularly annoyed by the constant use of the slang "yama is spinning:" (which means "am/are ticked off") if they were so enamored of this expression, they could have at least used it as a joke, given that yama means "mountain" in Japanese. Director Jeong Yong-gi, who previously helmed Doll Master and second and third sequels to Marrying the Mafia, is not without talent, displaying some light-hearted visual wit in a few scenes, but is done in by the aggressively loutish material he is working with.

Park Yong-woo is one of my favorite Korean actors but he just goes through the motions here, only sporadically flashing the kind of dry wit that grabbed your attention in, say, My Scary Girl. Lee Bo-young is charming enough but I wouldn't call her role a character: she's more like a walking set decoration. Worse, her Chun-ja is a token "non-nationalist figure," serving as an alibi against the potential accusations of outright racial/ethnic chauvinism: they are like those "good Arab/Asian English translators/grunts/love-interests" in mindless Hollywood action movies, who can be "cited" by the filmmakers shouting, "Hey, we are not racists! See, we have good Arabs/Asians in our movie too!" To my surprise, the film's best performance is given by Kim Soo-hyun (a perennial weasel-like baddie in a Ryoo Seung-wan film) as a Korean villain working as a Japanese military officer, whose agonizing portrayal of identity crisis becomes actually sympathetic and threatens to derail his character arc.

Once Upon A Time in Corea is the kind of movie which its makers defensively claim as "just plain good fun" during a press screening. Busy, loud, convoluted but devoid of grace or thoughtfulness, it ultimately induces boredom, if not apathy. (Kyu Hyun Kim)

Site Update: Review of Rainbow Eyes (2007)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:43:06 +0900

Review by Mikuk Yuhn

Rainbow Eyes

Darlings, it's your refulgent raconteuress (So I am mangling my French. ¢¯Que vas a hacer al respecto, amigo?) and contrarian cinema-gabber, Yuhn Mikuk again! Professor Kim has many deadlines to tackle, over which he's tripping left and right at this right moment, I am sure.

In any case, watching this slick-as-combustible-fuel thriller, called Rainbow Eyes, or simply Mask (Gamyeon, or, in tune with the film's ?ber-pretentious attitude, "Persona," as in that Ingmar Bergman movie) in Korean, was like eyeballing a two-hour, non-stop parade of automobile, cell phone and men's fragrance commercials. But really, who am I to criticize the film's indolently indulgent, insouciantly intoxicant visual style, all those under-cranked, over-cranked, extreme-contrast, fuzzy-clutzy cinematography and shuffled-card-deck editing, all-so-fashionably wrapped up in smoky lighting and cool colors, if all that fuss does serve to tell an engaging story? Well, mis amigos, you know dang well if Rainbow Eyes had succeeded in doing that, I would have brought that up right in front.

Rainbow Eyes' screenplay, penned by Han Jeung-ae and director Yang Yoon-ho, is cheesy enough to have been an enjoyable campfest had someone like Paul Verhoeven tackled it. Unfortunately, the filmmakers, headlined by Yang, an industry veteran responsible for a wide range of films, including Libera Me (Good), Fighter in the Wind (Bad) and Holiday (Bad, bad, bad, bad), give every indication that they take its insultingly laughable premise-leading to another laughable "twist ending"-seriously. The result is a lugubrious mess.

It's all related to the sexual abuse suffered by a pretty boyhood friend of Detective Jo (Kim Kang-woo, The Aggressives) during the former's military service, whose tormentors are now being carved up bloodily by an unknown assailant. Meanwhile, Detective Jo has a singularly dull romance going on with a nail artist Su-jin (Lee Soo-kyung, Tazza: High Rollers), who reminds him of somebody he used to know.

There, I just told you the movie's plot twist. Just put together the craziest, most ludicrous "surprise" scenario from the two sentences above and you most likely have nailed it.

Rainbow Eyes is one of those Korean films that claim to be addressing homophobia, and then populate themselves with the grossest and ugliest gay stereotypes. In this movie's hysterically macho portrayals, gays are not only "abnormal" but also not quite "Korean" either, peppering their preening, queen-y dialogues with snippets of broken English. I was willing to forgive the let's-reborn-as-a-hetero-couple "romantic" bullcrap of Bunjee Jumping of Their Own to a certain degree-after all, people didn't know any better then, did they?--, but not this.

Kim Kang-woo and Kim Min-sun (Memento Mori) are for all we know talented performers but Rainbow Mask really cuts them down to size. Kim's Detective Jo is a scowling idiot with an IQ of a dust mite. Kim's female detective is a total paper cutout: Olivia Benson from Law & Order: SVU or the crazy detective's former wife in Mad Detective (Mmm, now there's a real female cop!) will probably snap her like a twig with bare hands. To steamroll over a dried squid, two Kims share one truly embarrassing scene inside a closet, in which they literally act like a couple of eight-year-olds playing a doctor. I mean, hell-o? How did these two dunces ever get hired by a police department, much less Korean police?

What else have I missed? The God-awful expository dialogue? The big tear-jerking climax that's practically abusive to the poor Lee Su-kyung's integrity as an actor? How about the utterly incomprehensible coda, that seems to have been added for the sole purpose of killing off an annoying supporting character? If you get paid a dime for every "huh?!" moment in this film, you can probably buy an extra iPod with the change earned.

After everything is said and done, Rainbow Eyes is a total dud as a thriller, and is not even entertaining in a campy way. I suppose it might be enjoyed in the way glossy photo-spread magazines can, you know, the kind that consist entirely of advertisements, some fluff pieces, advertisements, photos of grinning celebrities, and more advertisements: in other words, as sheer eye candy. Some of you might be able to. I just couldn't, sorry. For the record, the technical specs are impressive, with DP Baek Dong-hyun (another No Comment alumn and responsible for Lump Sugar) and Production Designer Lee Jeong-woo (Open City) displaying their chops.

While we are at it, can I post a warning to future Korean filmmakers here? Under any circumstance, don't have your hero drive a motorbike without wearing a helmet (Jeong Woo-sung doing it once in Beat long time ago was enough already). He doesn't look cool, he doesn't look macho, and he doesn't even appear suicidal, which may have been the intent here, God knows. He just looks stupid. Very, very, very stupid. (Mikuk Yuhn)

Site Update: Review of Bunt (2007)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:41:09 +0900

Review by Darcy Paquet

Bunt

Dong-gu is an eleven-year old boy with an IQ of 60. He goes to school every day, but the only task he is able to consistently fulfill is to fetch the other kids water during break time. The other students, not surprisingly, tease him to his face and mock him behind his back. But Dong-gu simply smiles back at them, and he seems to genuinely enjoy the classroom and his daily run to the outdoor faucets to fill up the water kettle.

The school seems less enthusiastic about having him around, however. On exam days, his teacher urges him to stay at home, so that he doesn't pull down the class's average score. When another student drops a frog in the water kettle and blames it on Dong-gu, parents are outraged and the principal tries to persuade Dong-gu's single father to send him to a special school. Dong-gu's poor father, who scrapes together a living by running a fried chicken restaurant, has only one wish, and that is for Dong-gu to graduate from a regular elementary school without any trouble. He refuses to budge, but Dong-gu's hopes of graduating appear to be at risk.

Dong-gu's father, played with eccentric charm by Jeong Jin-young (King and the Clown), has other worries too, including his landlord's intention to sell the house from under his feet. But at last a bit of good news shines through: the school's struggling baseball team, which will be disbanded if it loses any more students, has accepted Dong-gu. Although he has no understanding of the rules, Dong-gu enjoys his newfound hobby, and he will be allowed to continue attending school for as long as he remains on the team.

South Korea doesn't make many movies for kids, given the composition of its audience. However in recent years, trends in theatrical attendance have been changing, and it has become much more common to see families taking a weekend trip to the multiplex. Bunt is targeted at this audience, and it managed to sell about 400,000 tickets on its release in April 2007 (not a great score, but not bad either). Thankfully, the film provides enough vivid characterization, humor and effective storytelling to make it enjoyable for older viewers too.

Before making his debut with this film, director Park Kyu-tae was best known for being the screenwriter of the 2001 gangster comedy Hi, Dharma! He wrote the script for Bunt as well, with some assistance from screenwriting phenom Choi Seok-hwan (King and the Clown, Radio Star). The end result is surprisingly effective, even if it never attempts to transcend its genre. Choi Woo-hyuk, the child actor who plays Dong-gu, is especially convincing and natural in his role. Never pandering to the camera, it is his determined face - and that of his devoted father - which sticks in the memory after the closing credits are through. (Darcy Paquet)

Site Update: Review of Our Town (2007)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:35:15 +0900

Review by Kyu Hyun Kim

Our Town

A gruesomely murdered body of a young woman is found hanging from an elementary school gym iron, in the form of a crucifix. Exhausted cop Jae-sin (Lee Sun-gyun, Sakwa, R-Point) realizes that a serial killer is lurking in his neighborhood: the victims range from an eight-year-old girl to a middle-aged businesswoman. He gets unexpected help from his game designer friend Kyung-joo (musical actor Oh Man-seok, popular from the Korean stage version of Hedwig and the Angry Inch). But nothing is what it seems: Kyung-joo drops in a stationary store run by child-like and strangely-named Hyo-yi (Ryu Deok-hwan, Like a Virgin), and receives a text message that reads: "Sir, I know you are the murderer."

Our Town was a rather risky proposition for a Korean film. Korean filmmakers tend to have trouble portraying unapologetically evil characters, always making excuses for them in their sad backgrounds (a fate that befell, to be fair, even Hannibal Lecter) or turning them into cartoonish abstractions, usually a reified Pinata calculated to draw the sticks and rocks of class resentment (A classic example is the fund-manager psycho in Kang Woo-suk's Public Enemy). There are indeed successful examples of giallo-like mysteries with a hard edge among Korean films (Tell Me Something comes to mind), but more often than not a serial killer tends to function as a handy symbolic presence for the dehumanizing forces of Korean society.

Seen in this light, Our Town's screenplay by Mo Hong-jin shows considerable hutzpah by directly delving into the social psychology of serial killing, not afraid to grapple with numerous cliches permanently associated with them (for instance, that they must always look "normal," even bland). Newcomer director Jeong Kil-young displays an assured hand in stitching together various strands of narrative and generating suspense without relying on post-production gimmicks or cheap shock tactics. Typically for a KNUA graduate, Jeong's best scenes are those not directly related to the central plot, such as an extremely natural interaction among Jae-sin and other cops filmed in a long take, or a weirdly witty third-person dream sequence about two sisters and a dude with black fingernails.

Both Oh and Lee deliver excellent, restrained performances, the former believably manipulative and conflicted when required and the latter high-strung but never histrionic. Unfortunately, Ryu, while a talented young actor, is not quite believable. Jeong does not help the matter by making him flip his eyeballs and fairly foam at the mouth in the overcooked climax, which does not quite sink the film but nonetheless brings it a notch and a half down in my estimation. As per recent Korean films, makeup effects, production design (Kim Hye-jin, Rough Cut) and cinematography/lighting (Lee Gang-min, Yellow Hair 2, and Kim Yu-sin, Beautiful Sunday) are all first-rate.

Our Town, even though it ultimately capitulates to the lugubriously Korean-style jeremiads on the decline of communal spirit and the evil effects of money on social relationships, is a rather decent mystery thriller that avoids insulting the viewer's intelligence and manages to hold its own against flashier crowd-pleasers like Seven Days. (Kyu Hyun Kim)

Darcy's Blog: Top 10 Films of 2008

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 01:08:05 +0900

2009.01.18: Darcy's top 10 Korean films of 2008. I had two major goals for the year 2008: one was to finish writing my book, and the other was to try to breathe some life back into this website. If you are strict about the dates, I suppose I failed in both resolutions, although I did manage to finally send my manuscript to the publisher in the first week of January (six months late). There is still some editing to do on it, but it should be published on schedule in this coming August or September. More about that later...

I hadn't counted on physical problems being my biggest challenge last year, with the RSI in my arms finally reaching a point where I had to stop typing altogether from September. But I've managed to train myself how to use voice recognition software, and in the meantime my arms are healing. The one thing that is especially difficult to do with voice commands is to update the site, but thankfully there are some people who have generously offered to help me.

In the Korean film industry, the general mood in 2008 reached a new low. Companies continued to struggle, and there were a lot of bad films that seemed to display the signs of cut corners or a lack of polish. However if you separate out the good films and consider them as a group, it wasn't such a bad year. Particularly encouraging was the critical and/or commercial success of a number of debut films, including The Chaser, Crush & Blush, Rough Cut, and Scandal Makers.

I rearranged the list below on several occasions before stopping at the current configuration. I have very warm feelings towards the top seven films in particular. I hope that all of them live long in people's memories.

1. The Chaser -- for the genius of its execution, rather than its originality. Director Na Hong-jin may have a long career ahead of him.

2. My Friend and His Wife -- this 2006 film by Shin Dong-il finally received a theatrical release in November. A comparatively low budget, emotionally wracking film that lurches left and right but never loses control.

3. Night and Day -- less tightly wound than many other Hong Sang-soo films, this is one of my favorites.

4. My Dear Enemy -- the directing prowess of Lee Yoon-ki is less obvious in this film than in This Charming Girl or Ad Lib Night, because he lets the amazing acting performances of Ha Jung-woo and Jeon Do-yeon dominate.

5. Crush & Blush -- it's at number five, but this is my emotional favorite because of its weird energy and bad attitude.

6. The Good, the Bad, The Weird -- exciting, funny, quirky, explosive, original, even if a bit thin.

7. Rough Cut -- somehow every part of this film worked really well, and it was hugely entertaining too.

8. Frozen Flower -- a sexy epic period drama that offers up little original, but breathes new energy into familiar settings.

9. Life Track -- a co-winner of the top prize in Pusan in 2007 that was released theatrically in 2008. Anguished and grim, this is a Chinese-Korean coproduction by an ethnic Korean director living in Yanbian.

10. Scandal Makers -- at long last, a Korean comedy that despite being thoroughly conventional, is directed with skill and flair.

I realize that there may be little information about some of these films on the site right now, but I'll try my best to get to them in the near future.

Site Update : Review of Our Town (2007)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 15:21:05 +0900

Review by Kyu Hyun Kim

Our Town

Site Update : Review of Hwang Jin-Yi (2007)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 15:19:33 +0900

Review by Kyu Hyun Kim

Hwang Jin-Yi

Site Update : Review of Like a Virgin (2006)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 15:17:52 +0900

Review by Darcy Paquet

Like A Virgin

Oh Dong-gu is a short and pudgy high school boy from a poor working class family. He is in some ways an ordinary, soft-spoken kid, except that his one dream in life is to receive a sex change operation and become a woman. He takes on various jobs to earn money to pay for the operation, however he is often forced to spend it to compensate the victims of his father's drunken outbursts. Dong-gu doesn't tell his father about his dream. A former boxer, forced to quit because of an injury, his father is not the sort of person to understand the feelings of a young transgender boy.

One day Dong-gu learns about a 5 million won prize for the winner of a high school ssireum tournament (ssireum is a traditional form of wrestling native to Korea). Although he had never taken an interest in the sport before, the promise of prize money is enough to convince him to sign up. However the school club turns out to be anything but a well run organization. The coach seems more interested in sleeping then in instructing the students, and the students themselves seem to lack any sort of talent whatsoever.

Directors Lee Hae-young and Lee Hae-jun first made a name for themselves in the Korean film industry for their creative and well crafted screenplays, including Kim Jee-woon's 30 minute short film Coming Out (2000), high school comedy Conduct Zero (2003) and Ryoo Seung-wan's Arahan (2004). From looking at their names, Koreans might assume that the two men are brothers, however they are not related. With their highly praised debut film Like a Virgin, they quickly became recognized as important filmmakers to watch in the future. As it happens, both men went on to develop separate high profile sophomore features in the years 2008-2009.

In some ways, Like a Virgin feels like many other coming of age sports movies, where likable but eccentric young protagonists struggle to succeed at an unusual sport. However the detailed characterizations and intricate humor of this film help to bolster its originality. Especially notable, perhaps, is the performance of the young actor Ryu Deok-hwan. His portrayal of Dong-gu's quiet determination to follow his own feelings even when the whole world seems to be against him ranks as an undisputed bright spot in recent Korean cinema. (Darcy Paquet)

Site Update: Review of Five Is Too Many (2005)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 11:17:47 +0900

Review by Duncan Mitchel

Five Is Too Many

I enjoy expensive, action-driven, high-tech blockbuster movies as much as the next person, but I also like cheap, leisurely, character-driven ones. Once you've become habituated to the eye candy of explosions, car wrecks and computer graphics, it may take a slight effort of will to get used to movies without them, but I think it's worth trying.

Ahn Seul-ki's Five Is Too Many is a good example of what I mean. Yoo Si-nae (Jo Si-nae), who's about 30, works in a tiny take-out restaurant; she lives in a shack and sends most of her wages to her family, helping to put her younger brother through school. Her boss is concerned because of new environmental rules that have just gone into effect to limit the use of disposable dishes. So when Si-nae sees a kid who's just bought some food from her taking a picture of the storefront, she runs after him. Unable to catch him, she throws a rock at him and catches him on the head, knocking him out. Rather than call the police, she carries him home.

The boy, Kim Dong-kyu (Yoo Hyeong-geun) claims the blow gave him amnesia, so Si-nae lets him rest while she goes back to work. He's actually a high-school dropout who's run away from home and has been staying with a surly young couple; he's been laid off from his job at a gas station, so he was hoping to scam a reward by turning in businesses that violate the environmental laws.

Which reminds me that Five Is Too Many is also about poorer working people: after a long day at the chicken shop Si-nae goes home, not to a two-story house with dishwasher and a grand piano, but to a two-room shanty that locks with a padlock. The story takes place in winter, and these folks keep on layers of clothes when they're indoors because the heated floors don't really keep them warm.

On Si-nae's day off they eat at a restaurant where the waitress is being bullied by the owner (Kim Do-gyoon). Si-nae finally figures out Dong-kyu's game and takes him back to his mother, but then she encounters Young-hee (Choi Ka-hyeon), the bullied waitress, and on discovering that her boss hasn't paid her for five months, takes her in. Dong-kyu sneaks out of his mother's house and back to Si-nae's shack. The three of them come up with a little scheme that ruins Young-hee's boss's business and puts him out on the street, but not for long. It turns out he's secretly in love with Young-hee, so the next thing you know Si-nae has four people sleeping on her floor. And then Si-nae's forgetful but kindly boss tries to play matchmaker for her, introducing a handsome sailor named Kim Jun-seok (Kwak Tae-ho) who'd like to take Si-nae away from all this.

Writer-director Ahn piles on the complications so gently that you hardly realize what's happening until you see Si-nae sitting in her room surrounded by the crowd she's gathered, wondering how she got into this. The story winds her a little tighter before she finally snaps, resolving her problems in a very un-Korean cathartic outburst. The solution to Dong-kyu's problems follows in short order, with the help and support of his new "family." Some of the plot twists involve bursts of fantasy - where did people for whom a new jacket is a luxury get those trench coats and smoked glasses, for instance? - but they don't affect the plot in any serious way.

The story is told simply, with a camera that never moves (except when it's riding a bus), but is always well placed. The cast are all perfect for their characters, inhabiting them so naturally that I almost forgot they were acting. To tell the truth, Five Is Too Many is the kind of movie I prefer, and I wish I could see more like it. A big budget too often lets filmmakers hide behind star power and special effects when ideas have run dry. Five Is Too Many has nowhere to hide, but it doesn't need to. (Duncan Mitchel)

Site Update: review of Gagman (1989)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 19:19:32 +0900

Review by Adam Hartzell

Gagman (1989)

Lee Jung-sae (Ahn Sung-ki) is "Your forever lover boy who gets bigger with your love, love, love, your lark on a sunny day, . . .". He is our funnyman, a Charlie Chaplin impersonator who is trying to impose himself as a debut director on an unwitting, actual director, because along with envisioning himself as Chaplin, Lee envisions himself as one of the last remaining true connoisseurs of cinema. On his way to realizing his fictional portrayal, he picks up the talkative, portly barber Moon Do-suk (Bae Chang-do), and the confident, assertive Oh Son-yong (Hwang Shin-hye) as actors in crime. I say 'in crime' because Lee's film morphs into an action film when handed real rifles. And as Lee's impositions upon the movie industry become tiresome, he finds he must seek alternative means towards funding and completing his film. It's then that Oh suggests they engage in a little method acting, Bonnie and Clyde (and Clyde) style, robbing banks.

Lee Jung-sae is a dreamer. He is the connecting link in a film that weaves dreams within dreams. His nightclub acts become dark recesses into the subconscious while still retaining a realism that disorientates the viewer into identifying what's real and what's but a dream. In retrospect, director Lee Myung-Se's debut introduces us to a theme mixed throughout his future oeuvre. Dreamy images are very much a part of Director Lee's later films, sometimes seemingly replacing any hint of a connecting narrative. Recall the motion and shadow play of Nowhere To Hide and the colors and choreography of Duelist. I have yet to see M, but from interviews I've read, Director Lee envisioned, enacted, and entitled the film from dreams. Although Gagman is nowhere as visually appealing as those films since production values of South Korean cinema in the 1980's weren't up to the level they are now, you can see the seeds of Lee Myung-se's later realized vision in this debut.

But director Lee's filmography is not the only one to reflect upon here. The vast career of actor Ahn Sung-ki is also important to consider. Although Ahn has done comedic roles, this role requires more than the typical comedy. The film is not that funny. (Although the intentionally obnoxious phallic symbolism from the camera angle chosen to reveal Moon's admiration for rifles should be a definitive scene for those who still psychoanalyze the screen.) I say this as a Modern viewer and as a non-South Korean viewer. As Tony Rayns noted in his Seoul Stirring: 5 Korean Directors, quite a bit of the comedy involves in-jokes for South Koreans in general, and South Koreans in the movie industry in particular. For example, Moon, the barber-turned-actor decides to get eye surgery because he believes that would make him more popular as an actor. According to Rayns' essay, this is an in-joke for South Koreans well-versed in the tabloids of the time since a real-life director turned actor did just that. And since Moon is played by real-life director Bae Chang-ho (Whale Hunting, My Heart), this in-joke gets more meta with every actor-ly turn. And this in-group comedy helps deflect some of the overly-rigid stones of globalization arguments that might be tossed onto such a film. Yes, Gagman's imitation of Chaplin and loving monologues about Western films might hint towards a Westernization of South Korea, but many of the jokes still require a local knowledge.

But regardless of the comedy caught or missed based on ones placement in space and time, all viewers will pick up on the mood of the film as not comic, but tragic. These Chaplin impersonations are tempered by discomfort. Lee Jung-sae is a man lost in his dreamworld, allowing him to be swept away towards tactics that are foolhardy when not dangerous. The use of Chaplin here is to forward the funnyman as the impotent, clumsy 'everyman' "bumping up against unsympathetic forces, bureaucratic or domestic" (see Lorraine York's book Literary Celebrity in Canada, pg48, where I learned that Canadian author Stephen Leacock was a progenitor of this funnyman-as-everyman tradition). Director Lee has admitted to Rayns that moments of character Lee's dialogue (such as the seaside monologue) are autobiographical. It's nice to see that in all that fumbling up against an industry yet to shine, Director Lee reached a brighter future than character Lee in Gagman. (Adam Hartzell)

Gagman ("Gaegeumaen"). Directed by Lee Myung-Se. Screenplay by Lee Myung-Se and Bae Chang-ho. Starring Ahn Sung-ki, Hwang Shin-hye, Bae Chang-ho, Jeon Mu-song, Jo Ju-mi. Cinematography by Yu Young-kil. Produced by Taehung Pictures. 127 min, 35mm, color. Rating received on October 13, 1988. Released on June 24, 1989. Total admissions: 33,944.

Site update: 2008 Pifan report

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 19:18:08 +0900

2008 Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival

by Kyu Hyun Kim

Let the Right One In, dir. Tomas Alfredson

This year's Puchon Fantastic Film Festival continued on last year's orientation of "playing it safe" plus "regaining its foothold as Korea's major conduit for genre cinema." In 2008, the overall selections inched forward a bit toward the past glories of the exclusive presentation of genre cinema, with slightly less emphasis on family-friendly entries (in the meantime picking up a few acclaimed modern fairy tales like Sweden's Let the Right One In). With the practical decimation of summer horror seasons in Korea, Korean horror/fantasy films remained under-represented, with the decidedly realistic (although terrific) Chaser leading the fray, followed by Hansel and Gretel, Radio Dayz and A Tale of Legendary Libido. The only new Korean horror, Death Bell, turned out to be a piece of vituperative torture porn set in the Whispering Corridors environment, leery in its depiction of high school girls and boys variously razor-sliced, drowned, hung upside down, bound and gagged. Even a goggle-eyed (but effective) performance by Lee Beom-soo could not save it. The newcomer director whose English name is simply rendered as CHANG profusely apologized for the hideous state in which the film was shown (a grainy, choppy digibeta version with hilariously bad English subs): how about an apology for a bad screenplay?

Retrospective sections were colorful if not surprising, headlined by a solid showing of old Nikkatsu classics from Japan, including Ichikawa Kon's Alone Across the Pacific (1963), Kumai Kei's Chain of Islands (1965) and Saito Buichi's "Hokkaido Western," A Rider with a Guitar (1960). More in tune with the old PiFan sensibility was Gregg Araki's queer cinema, ballsy, pissed off and surprisingly romantic, for instance, in the newly remastered Living End (1992), with its infamous end-credit "tribute" to the "Republican f*ckheads." The Korean cinema retrospect series this year focused on international espionage thrillers of the '60s and '70s, often starring the inimitable Heo Jang-gang as a North Korean villain and the burly Jang Dong-hwi and Park No-sik as (sometimes sentimental) South Korean "action heroes." Unfortunately, I had to miss out on Women Detective Mari (1975), supposedly Ryoo Seung-wan's favorite among this year's selections.

As it so happens, I ended up catching only the films starring Park No-sik, a staple in Korean action films in the '70s, whose warm Cholla Province accents and surprisingly good acting beneath an aggressively macho demeanor suggest a combination of a pre-Rambo Sylvester Stallone and Kirk Douglas. Ridiculously prolific (the Korean Film Archive Database lists 39 films starring him for the year 1971 alone), Park lent his talent to countless bottom-scraping potboilers mandated by anti-Communist campaigns of the Park Chung Hee regime, while building a reputation as an action star in a series of very popular gangster noirs, such as Count of Myeongdong (1970) and Doraon paldo sanai (The Eight-Province Guy Returns, 1969).

Operation Tokyo Expo '70 (1970) is a typical example of the former, serving as a travelogue-cum-nationalist propaganda piece showing off the Korean pavilion in the Tokyo World Expo Fair, one of the biggest tourism successes of postwar Japan. O Ji-myeong and Park No-sik are stalwart South Korean agents (volunteers?) smashing the evil plots masterminded by Heo Jang-gang (who else?). The production values are truly pathetic: at one point, the dastardly Commies execute one of their own for failing the mission by strapping him to an electric chair. The switchboard for the chair has a handwritten sign that reads "High Pressure," no doubt meant to suggest "High Voltage," as in "Go-ap jeon-ryu." An In-suk, one of the most beautiful and talented Korean actresses but perennially cast in pouting teenager roles, sticks out like a bowl of ice cream amidst blocks of aggressively fermenting cheese. Otherwise, the movie is only worthwhile as a time capsule.

The entertainingly titled Devil, Ride the Express Train to Hell (1977) is considerably more interesting. Devil is a good example of how Korean genre films of this era would copy the cliches and conventions of Japanese cinema and use a nationalist, anti-Japanese plot to cover it up. Park plays a blind jazz musician who is also a master swordsman a la Zatoichi: he teams up with a childhood sweetheart with "special powers" straight out of The Ninja Scroll (She can manipulate snakes to attack bad guys and spits out deadly needles from her mouth!) to avenge their father's deaths. Park this time takes helm and his direction is surprisingly stylish, its arch-expressionist approach compensating for the brutal lack of resources. At times, of course, the production's sheer incompetence generates unintentional laughter: when the spectacularly wooden lead actress - An Bo-young - takes a shower she carefully avoids getting her backside wet, to prevent her my-three-year-old-niece-drew-this-with-crayola snake tattoo from being erased! It also contains one of the dumbest and most threadbare "martial arts training sequences" I have ever seen. Still, risible or not, there is no denying Devil's entertainment value: even its "Japanese villains," played by Jang Dong-hwi (cast as a drug lord masquerading as a stag film director!) and Jang Hyuk, are too grotesquely leery to be taken seriously. Besides, the movie ends with a shamelessly, brazenly tear-jerking Elvira Madigan-moment, with Park No-sik displaying his melodramatic acting skills, that is unexpectedly emotional and even a little moving.

Awards

FEATURES

Best of Puchon: The Chaser (Korea) by Na Hong-jin.

Best Director: Let the Right One In (Sweden) by Tomas Alfredson.

Best Actor: Ekin Cheng and Shawn Yue, Rule Number One (Hong Kong/Singapore).

Best Actress: Seo Yeong-hee, The Chaser (Korea).

Jury's Choice: Fear(s) of the Dark (France) by various directors.

Prugio Citizen's Choice: Let the Right One In (Sweden) by Tomas Alfredson.

* Jury Members: Lee Doo-yong (chair) (film director, Korea); Miroljub Vuckovic(producer/director, Russia); Phillip Cheah (festival director, Singapre International Film Festival, Singapore); Roy Lee (producer, USA); Ron Holloway (critic/film director, USA).

SHORTS

Best Short Film: ($5,000) The Facts in the Case of Mister Hollow (Canada) by Rodrigo Gudi?o.

Jury's Choice, Shorts: ($3,000) Schausteins Final Film (Germany) by Christian Klandt.

Audience Award, Shorts: A Coffee Vending Machine and Its Sword (Korea) by Chang Hyung-yun.

Best Korean Short: ($5,000) A Coffee Vending Machine and Its Sword by Chang Hyung-yun.

* Jury Members: Joo You-shin (chair) (professor, Korea); Goran Topalovic (co-director, New York Asian Film Festival, USA); Jeon Kye-soo (director, Korea).

European Fantastic Film Festival Federation Asian Award: The Chaser (Korea) by Na Hong-jin.

* Special Mention: Hansel and Gretel (Korea) by Yim Phil-sung and Tokyo Gore Police (Japan) by Nishimura Yoshihiro.

Back to Korean Film Page

Site Update: Review of Rough Cut (2008)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:28:23 +0900

Review by Darcy Paquet

Rough Cut

Su-ta (Kang Ji-hwan) is an aggressive, arrogant star who naturally ends up playing violent gangster-like roles. His tendency to throw the occasional punch in real life too probably only bolsters his fame, but when he seriously injures another actor on the set of his new film, controversy erupts and the production is suspended. Strangely enough, none of the other available actors seem willing to fill the now-vacant role of his adversary.

Meanwhile, Gang-pae (So Ji-sub) is the real thing. Despite his young age, he has risen to the No. 2 position in an organized crime ring. Effortlessly effective as a fighter, he is often called upon to solve the gang's trickiest problems. In his free time, however, he often sneaks off alone to watch movies (Green Fish seems to be a favorite of his), and when he runs into Su-ta by chance in a room salon, he confesses to a lifelong wish to become an actor.

The conversation between Su-ta and Gang-pae (their names are a playful pun on the words "star" and "gangster") is anything but cordial: Su-ta's machismo and Gang-pae's cool mix like oil and water. But, desperate, Su-ta will eventually come back to Gang-pae and ask him to co-star in the film. Gang-pae agrees, but with one condition: instead of simulated blows, they will fight for real in front of the camera.

The simulated and the real... acting and real life... Rough Cut (the original Korean title is "A Film is a Film") returns obsessively to question the nature of this dichotomy. Are they two sides of the same coin, or do they each inhabit a completely different universe? Although perhaps not examined in an especially deep way, it makes for a playful intellectual exercise to complement what is, on the whole, a well told and engaging story.

Debut director Jang Hoon is one of an increasing number of filmmakers to have apprenticed under Kim Ki-duk (when you make 15 films in 12 years, as Kim has, you produce a lot of alumni). Kim also frontlines four names credited with writing Rough Cut's screenplay. Yet aside from a few plot points, and an obvious Bad Guy reference, this film feels very different structurally and stylistically from anything Kim Ki-duk has ever made. Jang Hoon appears to have some real talent in his own right.

Perhaps the most notable aspect of the film is the role of Gang-pae. So Ji-sub, who teamed with Lim Soo-jung in the cult TV drama Sorry, I Love You, is a real star, and this film shows off all of his charm. He looks menacing without ever having to raise his voice, and emotionally vulnerable without ever having to resort to the usual melodramatic tics. Not only that, his slightly unpredictable behavior produces genuine suspense. Kang Ji-hwan is serviceable in the role of Su-ta, though unfortunately Hong Su-hyun contributes nothing more to the blandly written role of the actress Mi-na than a pretty face. But the screenplay, which knows not to take itself too seriously, does provide moments for other supporting players to shine. Director Bong (Goh Chang-seok), charged with the unenviable task of pulling off this film-within-a-film, is a particularly amusing character.

As often happens, the progression of the story gets a bit murky three-quarters of the way through, and the film temporarily loses its momentum. I found myself not really caring about the details of the inner gang strife that provides the obligatory complications before the climax. However Rough Cut ends with a punch to the gut, and its final image will linger in the memory. (Darcy Paquet)

Darcy's blog: State of the website

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:26:09 +0900

2008.09.27: State of the website. This is turning out to be a year of trials. I've had pain in my arms (repetitive stress injury) for a couple of years now, but recently it has gone from bad to scary bad. I haven't been able to write with pencil and paper for close to a month now, and after typing even a short e-mail the pain lingers for hours. Actually the pain is not hard to deal with, but if I try to type through the pain it gets much worse in a very short time, and I have no choice but to stop. Emotionally, it's a real struggle.

So I'm dictating this now with voice recognition software, and it seems my only option it is to look for students in Seoul who can type for me in return for an hourly wage. I'm going to try keeping my hands off the computer for a month, and continue treatment for it, then maybe things will improve. In the meantime, I have found some help for the website so hopefully updates will continue. My book, meanwhile, is 80% done, but it feels like I'm running a marathon with a sprained ankle. Let me also issue a blanket apology to all the people whose emails I haven't answered in recent months.

The Korean film industry is also in dealing with its own crisis, but in the next couple months at least there are a number of very interesting films. Rough Cut, a debut film by Jang Hoon, has a lot of people buzzing this month. You can read my review of the film here. My Dear Enemy, by Lee Yoon-ki and starring Jeon Do-yeon, opens this week, and it is also worth getting excited about. Meanwhile, I must confess to being a huge fan of the film Crush and Blush, though I guess most viewers will hate it. Filled with shrieking and hysterics, it is nonetheless the most original film Korea has produced in years.

And of course, the Pusan International Film Festival opens on October 2. The past two years, I've been too busy with my duties as a journalist to write a festival report for this site. This year, I hope to make up for that, even if I have to struggle with this stupid voice recognition software! (Long delayed festival reports from Jeonju and Puchon will also be up shortly)

Site Update: Review of Death Bell (2008)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 23:50:50 +0900

Review by Kyu Hyun Kim

Death Bell

A chi-chi private high school, which actively encourages cutthroat competition among the student body by, for instance, publicly displaying their exam score rankings, selects twenty elite members and organizes a boot camp of sorts, to prepare for an international student exchange event. To their chagrin, the students, including rebellious heroine Ina (the singer Nam Gyu-ri), her timid best buddette Myong-hyo (Son Yeo-eun) and her wannabe-boyfriend Hyun (the sit-com idol Kim Beom), and the teachers, uptight English teacher So-young (Yoon Jeong-hee, TV's Happy Woman) and popular Korean instructor Chang-wook (Lee Beom-soo, City of Violence) find themselves stuck inside the school. Somebody is kidnapping students one by one, in the order of their midterm score ranks, and killing them. The gruesome ways in which they die are broadcast via the school AV system: the only way to prevent the hideous murders is to find correct solutions to the culprit's "exam questions" in time.

Death Bell is the only Korean horror film opening in the 2008 summer season. As an avid fan of horror genre, I would have loved to report to you that it handily overcomes bad word of mouth and production troubles and single-handedly restores the faith in K-horror. Not a chance. It instead partakes of what is surely the ugliest trend of North American cinema in recent years: Death Bell is, to put it succinctly, torture porn for the Whispering Corridors set. As such, it might actually develop some (unwelcome) reputation among the "Extreme Asian Cinema" constituency outside Korea: it pulls no punches in graphically displaying young high school boys and girls (mostly girls) burned and asphyxiated by candle-wax, drowning in a transparent fish bowl, and, in one girl's case, tumble-cleansed in a washing machine with dozens of razor blades embedded in her skin. Cheerful stuff, eh?

Death Bell is the brainchild of one Yoon Hong-seung, who prefers to be known as CHANG a la Charlie's Angel's McG, and had previously directed music videos for such luminaries as BoA, GOD and SG Wannabe (Am I spelling the names of these epitomes of musical sophistication and creativity correctly?). CHANG's direction is not particularly awful, but the screenplay he authored with Kim Eun-kyung (Meet Mr. Daddy) is a fetid mess. The "exam questions" the culprit comes up with will strike most viewers as either hopelessly arcane or ridiculously complex: the blase cartoon graphics inserted to illustrate the "questions" are no help. Quite a few viewers have already pointed out just how unconvincing the flick's central premise is: that twenty-some students could be so completely isolated from the outside world?even though their cell phones have been taken away in the beginning? so that the murderer could do them in one by one. On the other hand, the inevitable "surprise twist" does not, thankfully, opt for yet another variation on Tale of Two Sisters (The movie, though, opens with Ina graphically menstruating on screen, in a shameless reference to the former), so the filmmakers get some puny credit for that.

Aside from cute-puppy antics of the lead youngsters, the film's weight is carried on the shoulders of the excellent character actor Lee Beom-soo. His goggle-eyed, broad performance is nonetheless solidly anchored in the earth and he almost sells us the climactic crazy-dumb "revelation" about his character. Note the emphasis on "almost."

Death Bell annoyingly combines prettified, slick visual filmmaking (but with no real depth) and gag-inducing torture porn excesses: it's simultaneously tepid and lackluster on the one hand and gross and offensive on the other. Recommended only for the fans of Lee Beom-soo and very undiscerning fans of the horror film genre. (Kyu Hyun Kim)

Site Update: Review of Princess Aurora (2005)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 23:48:32 +0900

Review by Adam Hartzell

Princess Aurora

It is obligatory to mention the filmography of actress Pang Eun-jin before we discuss the debut of Director Pang Eun-jin. She was the bespectacled part of the adept pairing of female characters that Park Chul-soo presented in 301, 302 and Push-Push. And she has continued on to assist independent South Korean films such as Road Movie and Rewind. Actress Pang was part of the group of creatives who introduced me to South Korean cinema and she is part of what's kept me there ever since.

I was prepped to temper any hopes I might have had anticipating Director Pang's debut feature, Princess Aurora, so I wasn't disappointed when I first saw it at the 8th Women's Film Festival in Seoul, I just wasn't impressed. Any embarrassment associated with the viewing that I felt was due solely to my asking the obvious question during the post-screening Q&A, "What did she bring from her acting to directing?" to which Director Pang held nothing back, prefacing her non-answer (since her answer was "nothing at all") by lamenting how everyone asks her that question. (Ouch!) My second viewing of the film in order to write an earlier review brought no revelations. But although I don't know what life obstacles delayed my writing a review of Princess Aurora last year, a recent third viewing has resulted in my appreciating Director Pang's debut work much more than I did initially.

Detective Oh (played by Pang contemporary, Moon Sung-keun) is on the case of a serial killer who utilizes 'unusual' weapons. But the only reason they are 'unusual' is because men are categorizing them. The weapons, knitting needles, cosmetician facial plaster, etc, aren't unusual to women. And this serial killer is Jung Soon-jung, a woman, the less serialized gender in the serial killer genre. We learn that Detective Oh and killer Jung have a connection that connects all the murders. This is why Detective Oh is also a pastor-in-training; he is seeking forgiveness whereas Jung is seeking revenge.

It is difficult to talk about this film without ruining what is pleasurable about the film, figuring out where each victim fits in the larger web of vengeance and where Detective Oh fits into the puzzle as well. This leaves me to talk cautiously about what I began to find valuable about the film upon my third viewing. That is, the feminist findings in many of the twists in the delightful dialogue. (At least as I read the translations, since I can't hear the dialogue as a Korean audience would. An understanding, of course, one should apply to all my reviews until my Korean language skills improve.)

For example, when we first learn Jung is a car saleswoman, we are offered an immediate deluge of multiple reveals when a male colleague congratulates her for passing her heavy-machinery certificate. There is the political reveal. This colleague who congratulates her is traveling in a pack of male colleagues that alludes to a boys-network at the dealership off to do what boys-networks do, which is exclude women. The psycho-sexual comes in when it is noted that this certification will allow her to sell trucks, an object associated with males since the earliest days baby boys were designated with the color blue. Associating trucks with men, the economy of male scale has also associated selling trucks with higher commissions, bringing up more political issues of gender equity. Jung then tells her male colleagues she hopes to operate cranes in the future. Jung's intended humor in this joke reveals more of the psycho-sexual that Pang plays with throughout the film. But this also allows for a later plot reveal, and a revelation of Jung's intent, because Jung seeks surveillance of her actions and methods from the moment she magic-wands the surveillance camera in the shopping mall to get Detective Oh's attention, to the Princess Aurora stickers placed at each of her murders.

Princess Aurora is not the perfect serial killer thriller, but it is moments like that described above that are powerful to come back to because so much is tied up in this film beyond some of Jung's victims. (Adam Hartzell)

Site Update: Review of the TV drama Coffee Prince (2007)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 01:58:28 +0900

Review by Duncan Mitchel

Coffee Prince Number 1 (2007, MBC miniseries)

Coffee Prince Number 1 is probably the most enjoyable Korean TV drama I've watched so far. I loved Ruler of Your Own World, but it was darker, more serious, more dramatic. Coffee Prince is pure fun, and its popularity shows that many Koreans agree with me.

The premise is that Go Eun Chan (Yoon Eun-hye, Palace), by default the head of her family after her father died when she was 16, is often mistaken for a boy. She wears her hair fairly short, dresses ambiguously, knows Tae Kwon Do, does delivery work, and eats like a horse. Choi Han Gyeol (Gong Yoo, One Fine Day), handsome scion of a wealthy family, is being pressured to marry by his imperious grandmother (Kim Young-ok). He hires Eun Chan, whom he takes for male, to pretend to be his gay lover. Behaving outrageously in various hotel lobbies, the two scare off all the women his grandmother sends him.

Grandmother then raises the stakes. If Han Gyeol won't marry or go to work for the family company, he'll have to support himself; she takes away his care and gives him notice of eviction for his expensive rooftop apartment before he agrees to manage Coffee Prince, a rundown coffee shop in a student district, and increase its profits. Eun Chan wheedles him into hiring "him," and before long they find themselves powerfully drawn to each other. His interest in a cute boy understandably disturbs Han Gyeol, who reacts as if he were a closeted gay man: he alternately tries to keep Eun Chan close, and to drive "him" away.

Why is Han Gyeol so reluctant to marry? Several online articles I've seen describe him as a "playboy," but he's never shown dating women. He's in love with Han Yoo Joo (Chae Jeong-an, Emperor From the Sea), a beautiful and brilliant artist who has an on-again, off-again love with Han Gyeol's cousin Han Seong (Lee Seon-gyoon, White Tower), a musician and producer. As the series begins, Yoo Joo has just returned from a long stay in New York, where she was involved professionally and romantically with a man called DK. Now she's back and wants to start over with Han Seong, who (reasonably enough) doesn't quite trust her. But she's not in love with Han Gyeol either. By chance, Go Eun Chan delivers milk to Han Seong's house. She and Han Seong bond over Han Seong's sheepdog Ssulja, and become good friends.

As usual in a series, Coffee Prince includes a constellation of secondary characters, ranging from Eun Chan's feckless mother (Park Won-sook, Tomato) and the wacky butcher, Mr. Goo (Lee Han-wee, Love and Hate), who wants to marry her; and Eun Chan's more glamorous younger sister Eun Sae (Han Ye-in), who wants to be a star. Then there's the Coffee Prince team, assembled like disciples by Han Gyeol and Eun Chan: Han Gyeol's old friend Chin Ha Rim (Kim Dong-wook), who fancies himself a ladies' man but also seems interested in Eun Chan; the hunky but slow Hwang Min Yeop (Lee Eon, who tragically died in a motorcycle accident in 2008), who's in love with Eun Chan's sister and pursues her doggedly despite her best efforts to drive him away; the mysterious Master of Waffles No Jeon Ki (Kim Jae-wook), who keeps muttering in Japanese; and Manager Hong, the slovenly manager of the shop, whom Grandmother keeps on as co-manager to keep Han Gyeol on his toes.

Writers Lee Jeong-ah and Jang Hyeon-joo keep things steaming along entertainingly, and for the most part they keep the comedy in character, without much of the pointless slapstick or asides that disrupt some comedy-dramas. I'm also forever grateful that they never resort to a car or other accident to engender a crisis and permit tearful reconciliations and confessions, as in so many dramas. Some early plot points, like Eun Chan's supersensitive nose for smells, are introduced early on and then forgotten; on first meeting Eun Chan, Ha Rim calls "him" My Chan and exclaims over "his" cuteness, but after a few episodes he's chasing after young women and trying to give Eun Chan advice on handling the babes.

The story doesn't really come together until Han Gyeol and Eun Chan begin to fall in love. Most writers would, I think, have let Han Gyeol know that Eun Chan was a girl after no more than one episode of homosexual panic, but Lee and Jang stretch it over several episodes, and make Han Gyeol's anxiety wholly convincing. He sees a clueless old doctor, who gives him medicine to cure him of his tendencies. "You're gay, right?" he asks Eun Chan. "But I'm not. So stop seducing me."

"Who called me over in the middle of the night?" she points out.

"Let's be sworn brothers," he tells her. She refuses his evasion at first, then gives in. In voice over, each then tells us that even if it only means being a brother, he won't have to leave the other's side. But still Han Gyeol runs hot and cold, firing Eun Chan and then running to get "him" back. (One beautiful bit: Han Gyeol tells Eun Chan a major family secret. Sitting behind him, where he can't see her, she stretches out her hands and mimes embracing him, comforting him, because she doesn't dare to touch him. Yoon puts immense longing into that gesture.)

As more and more of the other characters are let in on the secret of Eun Chan's real sex, the tension builds. It's helped a lot by the wonderful chemistry between the leads, who are wholly convincing as new lovers delighted with each other. Gong Yoo resembles a younger Ju Jin-mo (Musa, Happy Ending), and he actually seems to grow up during the series, from a pretty but shallow young man to a strong but gentle adult. There's one lovely scene where Han Gyeol visits his grandmother, who's seriously ill and looks it. They bicker pleasurably, and I realized that Eun Chan is a younger version of Granny. Then Han Gyeol climbs into her bed and pillows her head on his arm, saying that no man had done that since Grandfather.

Yoon Eun-hye has a hard job. Typically in cross-dressing roles, the deception is not allowed to be too convincing: the audience is not allowed to succumb to the illusion that the actor or actress could pass for the other sex. Nor will be a performer be hired who looks the part too well. Yoon Eun-hye says she studied men's movements and body language, but maybe the director toned her down. She never quite persuaded me that women would chase her out of a women's sauna when she tried to make a good delivery, but she does have an androgynous charm and earnestness that makes her lovable. And after her femme makeover in episode 5, Go Eun Chan looks like a drag queen. She actually looks more like a boy when she's wearing a dress and full makeup than she does in trousers and t-shirt.

It doesn't really matter, though, because Coffee Prince Number One is a romantic fantasy, not a realistic story. It works very well on that level. Best of all, from my point of view, is that the story has no villain, and even the most foolish characters aren't clowns but believable people with reasons for their folly. The characters vary somewhat in their likability, but all are good at heart, even the unreliable Yoo Joo. As the literary critic Marvin Mudrick once said, nothing in life or literature is more interesting and exciting than goodness. (Review by Duncan Mitchel)

Coffee Prince Number 1 ("Keopi Peurinseu 1-hojeom"). Alternate title: "Coffee Prince's Flagship Store." 18 episodes. Written by Lee Jung Ah & Jang Hyun Joo. Produced by Lee Yoon Jung. Starring Yoon Eun-hye, Gong Yoo, Lee Sun-kyoon, Chae jung-an, Kim Chang-wan, Kim Dong-wook, Kim Jae-wook, Lee Eon. First aired on MBC in Korea from July 2 - August 28, 2007 on Monday and Tuesday nights at 9:55pm. Official website (in Korean): click here. Episodes can be downloaded for a fee here.

Site Update: Review of The Chaser (2008)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 22:41:12 +0900

Review by Kyu Hyun Kim

The Chaser

Jung-ho (Kim Yun-seok, who played Agwee, one of the contemporary Korean cinema's scariest villains, in Tazza: The High Rollers) is a former cop turned pimp for a "massage parlor." He is convinced that a young, dorky customer Young-min (Ha Jung-woo, The Unforgiven, Never Forever) has kidnapped and sold his "girls," including Mi-jin (Seo Young-hee, Shadows in the Palace). Unfortunately, what the cops discover is far worse: Young-min is a serial killer who uses a chisel and a hammer to slaughter his victims in lieu of sex. While the police investigation stumbles and takes a detour, Jung-ho increasingly suspects that Young-min's latest victim, Mi-jin, is still alive somewhere.

The Chaser was the first runaway hit of 2008, selling close to 5 million tickets. Was that success deserved?

Can Yuna Kim skate?

Suffice to say that the above synopsis by itself cannot possibly convey why The Chaser is the grittiest, snazziest and gutsiest Korean thriller in years and one of the best Korean films of 2008.

The Chaser is written and directed by Na Hong-jin (who had previously made the award-winning short A Perfect Snapper Dish), and it is truly difficult to believe that this is his feature film debut. The film exudes the aura of a piece de resistance concocted by a supremely confident genre veteran. Na's direction is peerless in orchestrating suspense by slowly and methodically disclosing to the viewers clues about what is really going on. Adding to the film's power is its intricate, sharply intelligent screenplay that always remains a half-step ahead of the viewer expectations, which generates completely unexpected moments of dark humor as well as teeth-rattling frisson. Technical credits excel as well: DP Lee Sung-je (No Comment), lighting director Lee Chol-o and production designer Lee Min-bok (Epitaph) contribute greatly to the hauntingly naturalistic re-creation of the Seoul landscape. A moody, acoustic-minimalist score by Kim Joon-seok and Choi Yong-rak is uncommonly effective.

I was also pleasantly surprised by how realistically and sympathetically The Chaser's struggling police force was depicted: it's definitely the best police procedural since Memories of Murder. I disagree with the criticism that it sides with Dirty Harry-like vigilantism over the legal protections accorded even to criminal suspects. The police in The Chaser, convincingly foul-mouthed and perpetually exhausted but struggling mightily to find an acceptable compromise between upholding civil rights and using old beat-'em-up-until-they-confess methods, are just a bunch of working stiffs, neither "the evil establishment" nor heroic public servants. Frankly, I would recommend The Chaser to any foreign viewer who has developed the view that the Korean police are baseball-bat wielding thugs, based on complete fantasies like Lee Myung-se's Nowhere to Hide. This is one of the few Korean films where situations like a white-haired, flinty-eyed psychiatrist baiting a murder suspect with taunts of sexual impotence and a female cop (Park Hyo-joo) fending off the latter's sneering advances can be appreciated without any suspension of disbelief.

But if anyone owns The Chaser, it is perhaps not director Na, despite his incredibly impressive command over the material, but Kim Yun-seok. Jung-ho, as played by Kim, has a bloated, sad-sack mien with an undercurrent of hostility and desperation. Kim never once mugs for the viewer's sympathy, and yet, as the film unfolds, he (with the terrific direction by Na) constantly demolishes our (genre-bound) expectations about how Jung-ho would behave in a given situation. His choices are amazing as much in their fidelity to the conception of his character (he begins as a truly irredeemable scumbag, and doesn't exactly become a white-winged angel by the end) as in their restraint and precision. I would venture to say that Kim's performance in The Chaser begins where Choi Min-shik's ends in Failan. Yes, it's that great.

The film's weak link, in my opinion, is Young-min, the serial killer character. It's really not Ha Jung-woo's fault at all, as he delivers a terrific performance as a genuine sociopath. It's that a serial killer, in the Korean context at that, can no longer generate enough fascination and interest. Some pretty out-there new wrinkles, as displayed in, say, Mr. Brooks, or another Korean thriller, Our Town, are needed to jolt such a character out of the annoying sex-murderer-with-the-face-of-a-saint cliches. Young-min's presence also ensures that the movie occasionally veers off into the territory of extreme gore (climaxing with a scene in which a character is bludgeoned to death in slow motion -- one both disturbingly beautiful and mind-bogglingly horrid), possibly losing a section of the audience who might have otherwise appreciated it.

Not for the faint of the heart, The Chaser goes a long way in restoring confidence not only in Korean cinema's capacity to churn out terrific crime thrillers, but also in the untapped reservoirs of filmmaking talent in Korea, still left to be discovered. (Kyu Hyun Kim)

Site Update: Review of Seven Days (2007)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 22:34:03 +0900

Review by Kyu Hyun Kim

Seven Days

A hotshot defense lawyer Yu Ji-yeon (Kim Yun-jin, TV's Lost, Shiri) learns to her horror that someone has kidnapped her daughter. Instead of a ransom, the kidnapper demands that Ji-yeon defend a vicious rapist-murderer and win an acquittal at an upcoming trial. She has only seven days to locate her daughter, or conversely, to prove that the prosecuted murderer is innocent. The only help around is a thuggish cop friend (Park Hee-soon, Boss X File, Antarctic Journal), while a corrupt prosecuting attorney (Jeong Dong-hwan) and the victim's headstrong mother (Kim Mi-suk, Marathon) stand in her way.

Seven Days was the second big hit of the 2007 fall season right after Le Grand Chef, raking in more than 2.1 million tickets in the theaters. Critical response has been mixed, most reviewers acknowledging undeniable power of the movie's adrenalin-pumping pace and command of sophisticated cinematic techniques, while taking points off for its cliched characterization and artificially flavored mystery plot.

Unlike for some Korean critics, the film's MTV-on-speed editing style and narrative rhythm did not bother me that much. I don't agree with the type of knee-jerk criticism that slams movies like Seven Days just because it allegedly emulates Hollywood blockbusters or American TV dramas or "mi-deu," as the latter are colloquially known in Korea. Should director Won Shin-yeon (The Wig, A Bloody Aria) have copied Oliver Assayas and made something like Boarding Gate or Demonlover instead? Perish the thought. Besides, Seven Days is genuinely well put-together: its technical proficiency is never in doubt, right down to the strikingly realistic makeup effects on the victim's dead body. It certainly is director Won's best film so far.

Unfortunately, the movie is riddled with illogical plot points, a few of which threaten to negate the entire premise. For one, given the "loophole" in the Korean legal system revealed in the climax, there was no real reason for the culprit to kidnap Ji-yeon's daughter, since he/she had the key evidence allowing Ji-yeon to activate that loophole in his/her possession all along. Why not simply mail the damn thing to the pro bono defender? And of course, the culprit's motivation for putting Ji-yeon through that much ordeal is, charitably put, crazy. Oh, I forgot, the culprit is insane. As the Church Lady would say, how convenient.

As a Kim Yun-jin vehicle, it presents an interesting companion piece to Bystanders, another genre-bound thriller which ended up blaming everything on the mother. Seven Days is not quite that awful but still retains at its core a conservative, androcentric message about how Sacred Motherhood should easily trump rule of law or due process.

If there ever was a God-given antidote to macho Korean directors who think they are left-wing social critics, it's Kim Yun-jin. Even though Ji-yeon's character arc is written, by director Won and the scribe Yun Je-goo, in such a way to illustrate her "re-discovery" of "motherhood" over the course of the film, Kim, through her radiant charisma and super-charged but finely tuned acting, blows all this ideological claptrap into smithereens and establishes Ji-yeon in the viewer's eyes as a warm, caring but sensible professional woman from the get-go. Even more so than in Bystanders, Kim carries the film on her shoulders like a female Atlas and makes sure that it appears a lot better than it actually is. (I do think it is about time, though, that she demands something other than these I-am-so-sorry-I-was-less-than-a-good-mother roles from Korean producers) In this she is ably assisted by an excellent supporting cast, including Kim Mi-suk, Park Hee-soon, Choi Myeong-soo (memorable in Les Formidables), as the pathetic and disgusting murderer, and Oh Kwang-rok (Spring Bears Love), as Ji-yeon's humorously genteel gangster client.

Seven Days is a slick and calculated thriller, all right, so those constitutionally unable to enjoy this kind of movie need not bother. It's really not as clever or poignant as its makers probably think it is, but it may make a surprisingly strong impression for ordinary fans of Korean cinema, and is, needless to say, a must for Kim Yun-jin fans. (Kyu Hyun Kim)

Site Update: Review of The Good, the Bad, the Weird (2008)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 15:56:47 +0900

Review by Kyu Hyun Kim

The Good, the Bad, the Weird

Chang-yi (Lee Byung-heon), a dandy hit-man with a perpetually bemused, go-ahead-call-me-a-psycho grin on his face, is hired to retrieve a certain map currently in the hands of a Japanese banker. Unbeknownst to him, meanwhile, bounty hunter Do-won (Jung Woo-sung) is sent by the Korean independence army for the same mission. To their irritation, however, the map is snatched by train robber Tae-gu (Song Kang-ho), who is convinced that it leads to the fabled treasures of the fallen Qing dynasty.

Kim Jee-woon, who has an impressive track record of having successfully tackled a wide range of genres, from sports comedy (The Foul King) to horror (A Tale of Two Sisters) and European-style film noir (A Bittersweet Life), now turns his sight on the western. As one can surmise from the title, the movie is intended as a conscious homage to Sergio Leone's Eastwood triptych. Like Bittersweet Life, which invoked the cool, nonchalant exterior and existentialist attitude of a Pierre Melville rather than the original American film noir, The Weird passes over the concerns and themes of classic westerns (individual freedom vs. commitment to community, and so on) and focuses on the stylistic vocabularies of the genre. Viewing The Weird is, in other words, a lot like watching a witty pastiche of great westerns, a la My Name is Nobody, rather than a great western itself.

Perhaps I am overly harsh with Kim, who might have never intended his film to be anything more than an affectionate send-up to the mythic grandeur and marvelous vistas writ in a Leone film. He certainly knows how to entice his viewers with visual language, staging complicated shoot-outs and tense mano-a-mano duels with the aplomb of a master stylist. From the opening credit sequence with gliding birds of prey trailing the names of the cast like I.D. Tags; to busy shootouts in a rain-drenched marketplace, in which a Robot Monster-like diving helmet finds an unconventional usage; to the final confrontation that exactly copies the Leone original's set-up but goes for a typically bloody, excessive resolution, Kim and his technical staff (cinematographer Lee Mo-gae, production designer Jo Hwa-seong, and composer Dalparan) are fully in control of the film's aesthetic and technical elements.

The Weird's main weakness is the screenplay. Granted, Leone's works don't exactly have Oscar-caliber dialogue or entirely sensible plots either (although some fine directors like Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento have been involved in writing them), but Kim Jee-woon and co-scribe Kim Min-seok fumble in throwing the three main characters in sharp relief, either as archetypal, mythic beings (this is something Leone and his writing team excelled in, even though it had very little to do with the real, historical "west") or as sympathetic flesh-and-blood characters. Their efforts to introduce lively details and narrative twists more often than not fizzle out; for example, the revelation of the ultimate reason for Chang-yi's pursuit of Tae-gu elicited a "So what?" response from me (It certainly can't compare with the famous "harmonica" scene between Charles Bronson and Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West). I have had problems with Kim Jee-woon's lack of control over the narrative flow and resolution of Tale of Two Sisters and Bittersweet Life before, but at least I was willing to defend their characters as worthy of emotional investment on the part of the viewers. I am not so sure about The Weird, even though Lee Byung-heon and Song Kang-ho still provide plenty of entertainment value, relying on their patented tools of the trade. Jung Woo-sung by default leaves the weakest impression, although it is not really his fault that he sounds like a guy from an outdoor sportswear commercial.

As for the claim that the movie marks a significant departure from Korean nationalism, sure, Song Kang-ho does mumble something about how the yangban aristocrats and Japanese colonizers are hardly different from one another as rulers, but it really has nothing interesting or worthwhile to add about Manchuria as a multicultural, potentially subversive (fictive) space. In the end, The Weird reduces the Japanese opponents (along with Chinese bandits) to straw figures to be mowed down, especially in the extended My Name is Nobody-meets-Road Warrior climax in which Jeong Woo-sung gets to play the hey-look-ma-I'm-Steve-McQueen trick reloading his rifle.

The Good, the Bad, the Weird is, all things considered, quite entertaining and Kim Jee-woon's reputation will not be sullied (if not significantly enhanced) by this latest exhibit of a "Manchurian Western," (a genre that has a checkered but surprisingly long history in Asian cinema). I must confess, though, that my (perhaps unrealistically high) expectations about it were not met, except in the gorgeous production/ cinematography department. (Kyu Hyun Kim)

Site Update: Review of Pruning the Grapevine (2007)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 15:22:46 +0900

Review by Kyu Hyun Kim

Pruning the Grapevine

Soo-hyun (Seo Jang-won, The Unforgiven), a Catholic seminary student, is going through a personal crisis. About to take the vow of life-long celibacy, he has a bad break-up with his girlfriend Soo-ah (Lee Min-jung, Someone Special). He confesses to the dean that he wishes to leave the seminary, but the latter instead assigns him to a monastery in a remote countryside, supervised by the terse but warm-hearted Father Moon (Ki Joo-bong). He adjusts well to the austere monastic life, until one day he runs into Helena, a young nun who is a dead ringer for Su-ah (Lee Min-jung again).

Pruning the Grapevine is the third film directed by the Russia-educated Min Boung-hun. His previous feature films, Flight of the Bee (1999) and Let's Not Cry (2002), were set in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, respectively, and were made with a local cast. This is the first time Min has directed a Korean cast with a screenplay written in Korean language (authored by the director and Yoo Dong-shik).

Grapevine is an overwhelmingly sincere film, well-mannered and respectful, that takes its subject, the quest for genuine faith in God, absolutely seriously. It rivals Secret Sunshine in its thorough immersion in the Christian Weltanschauung, so much so that non-Korean viewers who tend to think of, say, Spring, Summer, festooned with the signs of chicly Orientalist, mock-Buddhist "spirituality," as representative of Korean cinema may well ask in befuddlement, "What is Korean about this movie?" The truth of the matter is that Korean cinema has a long tradition of Christian-themed films, and Grapevine compares favorably with the established canons in this lineage, such as Yu Hyun-mok's Son of Man (1980) and Kim Hyun-myung's Agatha (1984). I might add, too, that Catholicism has been around in Korea for 230 years and has produced 103 officially canonized saints: if Catholicism is not "Korean" then the pork-potato stew accompanied by shots of soju is sure as heck not Korean either. (Look up since when Koreans started eating potatoes)

Viewers who cannot quite accept the theological premise of the film might still be drawn in by Min's astute and patient directorial guidance that keeps the narrative humming, albeit on a low octave. He eschews overt dramatic gestures or button-pushing tactics but all the same extracts superbly nuanced performances out of not only the young leads but also veteran Ki Joo-bong, who invests Father Moon with his customary endearing qualities as an archetypical Korean patriarch as well as a measure of contemplative wisdom. Obviously an unassuming low-budget production, Grapevine still features strikingly beautiful cinematography by a team of young camera-men (Kim Jeong-won, Kim Jae-gwang, Lee Byung-hoon and others), particularly impressive in its use of sunlight.

Without giving anything away, I can report that the mystery of Soo-ah's Doppelgänger is resolved through the display of a kind of karmic symmetry, too strange to be a coincidence, too natural to be a deliberate act. (It is allegedly inspired by a similar true incident that took place in Armenia and was witnessed first-hand by the director) Has Soo-hyun just witnessed a miracle? Maybe. Whatever his interpretation of this experience may be, the film suggests, he is now happy with the knowledge that his faith has been tested and proven to be real.

Pruning the Grapevine, completely indifferent to the thematic obsessions and consumer fads that dominate mainstream Korean cinema today, is a richly rewarding film to open-minded viewers, dramatically powerful and authentically spiritual. I can hardly wait for Min Byung-hoon's next project, supposedly a taboo-breaking love story, and only hope that we get to see it before 2011. (Kyu Hyun Kim)

Site Update: Review of Camellia Project (2005)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 15:21:14 +0900

Review by Adam Hartzell

Camellia Project

Obligations are making it difficult for me to spare two to three hours to watch a movie in one sitting. Until I can relinquish some of those responsibilities, I'm beginning to appreciate omnibus films more and more. Although arguments will be made that shorts within an omnibus film are intended to be watched in one complete sitting, I'm treating them more in the way the great short story author Alice Munro once said her collections should be read, watching each short in a single sitting, gradually pacing my way through the collection.

Such has brought me to the omnibus film The Camellia Project, three shorts about the lives of contemporary Gay South Korean couples. Each short is filmed on Bogil Island, as if standing offshore as a metaphor of the restrictions placed on Queer folk that they must separate from the main(stream)land to live their lives more freely. It's sad for those whose prejudices turn them off to such topics, because this omnibus is definitely worth a viewing in one, two or three installments.

Director Choi Jin-seong's Freak Show begins the series. In it we meet Choon-ha (Hwang Choon-ha) as he accidentally locates his former lover while masturbating to a mixed martial arts match. Turns out his ex, Wang-geun (Kim Wang-geun) is now a professional fighter. Wang-geun, now married with a young daughter, takes his daughter on a holiday to reunite with Choon-ha. When his wife calls him on the phone concerned that he hadn't mentioned meeting up with a 'friend', she asks if this friend is female or male. When she hears he is male, it's not clear whether this comforts her. The rest of the short brings clarity to us on this point. (To avoid the censorship regarding graphic sex, Choi utilizes animation to demonstrate how this couple's church-bound relationship initially dissolved.) I'm less impressed with Freak Show as I am the two shorts that follow it, perhaps because it tries to do too much with the animation disruptions, the stage-like productions, and the drag show reductions. But that's not to say it's a horrible short, just not as good as the other two in tow.

The best of the bunch is director So Joon-moon's Drifting Island, a wonderful title to underscore how we are watching this couple drift apart to the sounds of waves that pace our breaths along with the beats of the film. It's a fairly simple plot which leaves me with very little to say in this paragraph devoted to it. But the closing moments of this relationship when these two men (played by Jeong Seung-gil and Lee Eung-jae) reach their climax as a couple is presented perfectly with tender restraint. If you are one to have problems with what is called identity-politics', this is the queer film for you. Its theme of love lost and let go shows the universal found in the particular.

Director Leesong Hee-il (of future No Regret fame) finishes this triptych with La Triavata, a short with a cryptic opening that gives way to an equally cryptic ending. A woman is in search of a man, but we are not sure exactly why. To tell you the relationship between the female seeker and male sought would be to ruin much of the power of the film, but let me say that it's not the relationship you think. (But I can't resist telling you that one of the men featured in this film is played by none other than Kim Tae-yong, the co-director of Memento Mori and director of Family Ties.) Leesong's choice not to resolve the film at the end is equally powerful because the smirk on her face reveals the possibility of condemnable reactions that daily South Korean society, as well as my own, sadly condones. (Interestingly, director Leesong will later cast two actors in his debut feature from this omnibus, but from the two shorts he did not direct, actors Hwang Choon-ha and Jeong Seung-gil, respectively.)

And if we are to eventually suppress and deactivate the condemnable reactions our societies encourage towards adults loving each other outside the demands of unhealthy gender paradigms, we need more films like The Camellia Project. (Adam Hartzell)

Site Update: Review of The Evil Twin (2007)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Mon, 19 May 2008 18:42:44 +0900

Review by Kyu Hyun Kim

The Evil Twin

The film is set in the Joseon Dynasty period. So-yeon (Park Shin-hye, Love Phobia), a teenage daughter of a moderately powerful yangban family, awakens from a ten-year coma, following a drowning accident that took the life of her twin sister Hyo-jin. So-yeon's mother (veteran TV actress Yang Geum-seok) is ecstatic, and aggressively orchestrates a marriage with Hyun-shik (Jae Hyuk, 3-Iron), the twin's childhood friend and So-yeon's betrothed. The village community, however, is soon plagued by mysterious deaths: So-yeon also seems to suffer from strange memory lapses and mismatched recollections of the drowning. Her childhood rival Seon-young (Han Yeo-woon) is convinced that So-yeon not only killed her own sister but is behind the recent murders as well. It is up to Hyun-shik to uncover the shocking truth about the twins' relationship...

Hoo boy, did I just write "shocking truth?" Let me speculate: I venture to guess that at one point The Evil Twin was supposed to be a straightforward retelling of a traditional ghost story, usually a young virgin wronged by the Confucian family system and blamed for sins she did not commit. Alas, the only carryover from that type of classic Korean ghost story is the long-haired, white-clad visage of the vengeful spirit. Nearly everything else has been updated disastrously. The film borrows its Korean title from the extremely popular TV program, Jeonseor-eui Gohyang ("The Heartland of Myths"), virtually the only anthology horror show in '70s and '80s Korea (and recently revived with better special effects but not necessarily better teleplays), but do not expect any purposefully retro look or gently satiric take on old things-that-go-bump-in-the-night cliches.

Instead, Evil Twin is yet another lugubrious, preachy genre film that takes itself way too seriously and loses sight of its primary objective: to scare and entertain its viewers. Director-writer Kim Ji-hwan seems to think that his film has some serious moral lessons about motherly love and sibling jealousy to impart. Sorry, but no dice. The dialogue is atrocious, sub-TV drama-level stuff, the pace is as slow as a cart pulled by a grazing mule, and the occasional outbreak of para-MTV editing hustle-bustle miserably fails to camouflage the fact that the story sucks like a leech lying in a flooded rice paddy. There is zero creativity in the way the ghost is presented, too: despite her traditional Korean imprimatur, she is just another PSC (Pointless Sadako Clone), complete with the awkward, in-need-of-a-chiropractor choreography.

The young actors and TV veterans work rather well together (one of the film's few pleasures is to spot recognizable veteran faces among the cast, such as Yang and Hong Seong-min, who has a brief cameo as So-yeon's physician) but they are mostly defeated by catatonia-inducing dialogue and characterization. And what's with the verbal catfight between So-yeon and Seon-young? They talk like 8th-graders enrolled in a chi-chi South-of-River junior high arguing over who's got the cooler-looking cell phone. Park and Han are reasonably cute, and the latter has at least a chance to run around fetchingly dressed as a young man: on the other hand, Han also has to suffer the humiliation of having to act enraged while covered with open sores and black sesame seeds Eeew, don't even ask what I am talking about. To cap it all off, the film rips off the finale of the dorky Macaulay Culkin (remember him?) vehicle The Good Son (1993) and splashes it all over the audience as if it were a big, original plot twist.

Given such enervating examples as Evil Twin, even a die-hard horror film fan like me must take the news that the 2008 summer season will be devoid of the usual glut of K-horror as a positive development. This movie is a particularly galling experience, since a simple, no-bullcrap retelling of a Tale of Two Sisters-like classic ghost story would have been many times superior to it. Why give a film a Korean title like Heartland of Myths, if you are not going to live up to the expectations it brings? (Kyu Hyun Kim)

Darcy's Blog: May, the month of classic films

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Mon, 12 May 2008 00:21:51 +0900

2008.05.11: May, the month of classic films The most exciting Korean films scheduled to appear in theaters this May all happen to be made decades ago. This is because the Korean Film Archive (KOFA) is holding a festival to commemorate the official opening of their new cinematheque and film museum. It is also because the lineup of new contemporary films this month looks like the crumbs left at the bottom of the cookie jar. Not to denigrate those few low-budget films that have secured a release -- I haven't seen them yet, and they may turn out to be OK -- but as a measure of the current state of the Korean film industry, it's pretty depressing. (June and July, at least, should be better)

But the classic movies are indeed big news. The festival's opening film, which screened on Friday and again on Saturday, was the recently re-discovered 1934 silent feature Turning Point of the Youngsters. An original nitrate negative of the film was discovered in Korea last year by the son of a former theater owner. It was then handed over to the Archive, which arranged for restoration work to be done in Japan. Eight of the film's nine reels were salvaged, making for a 73-minute feature.

Most notably, Turning Point of the Youngsters (it seems like a more natural translation would be Crossroads of Youth) is now the oldest Korean film in possession, and the first film from Korea's silent era which is available for viewing. (There is another Korean silent film, The Prosecutor and the Woman Teacher, from 1948, but this is an odd exception because it was only shot in silent format because some older film stock happened to be available. At that point, it had been over a decade since Korea had switched over exclusively to sound)

As in Japan, Korean silent films feature no intertitles but are instead screened to the commentary of a live narrator (called a "byeonsa" in Korean, or "benshi" in Japanese). To fully revive the experience, KOFA staged a show with live music, onstage singing, and the narration of a byeonsa dressed up in 1930s-style clothing and speaking in a period dialect. The byeonsa was film and theater actor Jo Hee-bong (Midnight Ballad for Ghost Theater), the narration was written by Oh Ryu-mi, and overall direction of the screening/performance was done by Family Ties director Kim Tae-yong.

It was quite an impressive experience, actually. I once read a fascinating article about how, in the West, pianists who accompanied the screening of silent features in the 1910s and 1920s could drastically affect the viewing experience based on the tone of their music -- and would sometimes, if they sensed the crowd to be bored, even mock the film with sarcastic music. (For anyone who might want to track the article down, it's by Tim Anderson, in the fall 1997 volume of Cinema Journal) For a byeonsa, who not only describes what happens onscreen but throws in all manner of comments, the effect is vastly multiplied. A KOFA employee told me that at first, when planning this screening, they intended to do it "straight", and maintain a respectful, serious attitude towards the film. But later -- and I feel this was absolutely the right decision -- they decided to let the byeonsa throw himself into the melodramatic narrative and insert comedy when appropriate. The end result was very involving and funny, and it never felt disrespectful.

The film itself, about a brother and sister who come from the country into Seoul and encounter modern life (and heartless playboys) for the first time, would never be mistaken for a masterpiece. It is directed by An Jong-hwa, who made 12 features between 1930 and 1960. It also features Shin Il-seon, who starred in the lost classic Arirang (1926). Its biggest charm for modern viewers is probably the way in which it presents upper-class 1930s Seoul as if to the eyes of a first-time viewer. Many viewers of that time period would probably never have seen a golf course, an elevator, or the interior of an upscale restaurant. And we too, of course, take a similar perspective watching it today.

There is only one more screening scheduled, this one without the performance/narration, on May 21 at 5:30pm (seeing it in this way will be infinitely drier and more confusing, I'm sure). But the Saturday screening I saw was completely sold out and the young audience went crazy over it, so I think that KOFA will have to plan to do this again sometime.

In the meantime, they have the rest of the festival to finish. And in addition to a selection of overlooked Korean classics, restored films from around the world, a screening of early-twentieth century footage of Seoul, and more, they have another surprise for the closing film: Korea's very first animated feature, Hong Gil-dong (1967). Tom Giammarco wrote a great introduction to the film in his Brief History of Korean Animation, Part II. It was believed to be lost, but recently the film was discovered in Japan and returned to Korea. There is one (unsubtitled) screening only, on May 25 at 7pm. If you plan to be there, buy your tickets early.

Site Update: Review of A College Woman's Confession (1958)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 01:46:54 +0900

Review by Darcy Paquet

A College Woman's Confession (1958)

Choi So-young is a university student majoring in law whose studies are supported by her grandmother. However after her grandmother dies, and with no parents or other relatives to support her, she is faced with the prospect of abandoning her career dreams and dropping out of school. With her rent overdue, So-young looks for a job, but finds that the only men willing to hire her are interested in favors that extend beyond the workplace.

Meanwhile So-young has a friend, the aspiring novelist Hee-sook, who has stumbled across a rather unusual diary written by a young woman who has since died. The diary reveals that a powerful politician named Choi Rim has a lost biological daughter, born to a woman he knew in the years before his marriage. But Assemblyman Choi has no knowledge of his daughter's identity or whereabouts.

Hee-sook, with a novelist's appreciation for dramatic plot twists, suggests something that So-young would never consider on her own: posing as the daughter of Assemblyman Choi in order to put herself through college. So-young rejects it out of hand, but as time passes and she becomes more desperate, it starts to look like a more attractive option.

A College Woman's Confession is Shin Sang-ok's big hit of the 1950s, and indeed the film that established his commercial career. Reportedly based on a French feature which in Korea was translated as Betrayal (I haven't been able to identify it), the film is notable for the star-making performance of Choi Eun-hee as So-young, and for its focus on the challenges faced by women in the post-war era. It's not hard to see why the film was so popular with female audiences of its time, given its dramatic strengths and the highly unusual portrait of a talented female lawyer who devotes herself to defending disenfranchised women, even as she herself is in danger of losing everything.

Aesthetically, Confession contains accomplished acting, an effective use of suspense (despite the slow manner in which it unfolds), and a keen feel for image and sound during an era when technical challenges dominated the filmmaking process. (Less effective is the film's musical soundtrack, with its sudden bursts of dramatic music that may seem comical to contemporary audiences) I found myself especially taken with the performance of Kim Seung-ho as Assemblyman Choi, whose measured, soft-spoken dialogue and deliberate manner overlay a passionate devotion to his newfound daughter.

There is also an interesting extended flashback that occurs in the latter part of the film, about a woman defended by So-young who has been accused of murder. The defendant is played by well-known actress Hwang Jeong-soon, who together with Choi won an acting award at the first edition of the short-lived Domestic Film Awards in 1959. (The photo that accompanies this review is of Choi receiving an acting award, since I have not been able to locate any image from the film itself.) We see in the defendant's story parallels to So-young's own experience, despite the vast divergence in their ultimate fates. The film's sudden return to the grim realities of poverty in the midst of So-young's professional advancement serves to place an asterisk next to her story and function as a reminder of what most people of that era were experiencing. (Darcy Paquet)

A College Woman's Confession ("Eoneu yeodaesaeng-ui gobaek"). Directed by Shin Sang-ok. Screenplay by Shin Sang-ok and Jo Nam-sa. Starring Choi Eun-hee (So-young), Kim Seung-ho (Assemblyman Choi), Yu Gye-seon (Choi's wife), Choi Hyun (Choi's assistant), Kim Sook-il (Hee-sook), Hwang Jeong-soon (defendant). Cinematography by Kang Beom-gu. Produced by Seoul Film Company. 120 min, b&w. Released on July 12, 1958.

Site Update: Review of Lump of Sugar (2006)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 01:45:41 +0900

Review by Adam Hartzell

Lump of Sugar

Esteemed producer Tcha Sung-jai, as Moon Seok writes in the 2007 Cannes Edition of Korean Film Observatory, "has aesthetically contributed to debuting the directors who now represent the Korean film industry such as Kim Sung-su, Im Sang-soo, Bong Joon-ho, Hur Jin-ho, and Jang Joon-hwan and accomplished the large capitalization of the Korean film industry." And although Lump of Sugar director Lee Hwan-kyung is not up to par yet with his predecessors, Tcha's participation further solidifies his importance to South Korean cinema in that with Lump of Sugar he helped secure financing for a vehicle in which a young actress as exemplary as Lim Soo-jeong can further hone her craft. And it is Lim who is very much responsible for my tempered appreciation of this little coming-of-age drama.

In Lump of Sugar, Lim plays Si-eun, a young girl who lives alone with her father on his farm along with his stable-hand, a friend from his obligatory military service. Si-eun's mother dies when Si-eun is very young. Visiting her mother's grave she collapses and is carried home by her mother's favorite horse, General. This brings the stable-hand to comment that General was sent to rescue Si-eun by her mother from beyond the grave. General will be shown caring for little Si-eun in more scenes, solidifying this emotional and cosmic connection. When General dies while birthing a foal to be named Thunder, Si-eun feels indebted to her new 'brother'. While all this character loyalty is being developed, we are also provided glimpses of Si-eun's interest in becoming a jockey. Her father, who still fears that Si-eun will fall off a horse to her death like her mother, attempts to stifle this pursuit by selling Thunder. Instead of encouraging Si-eun to pursue a college education through this passive-aggressive action, Si-eun instead is encouraged to ride away in pursuit of her dream.

I have yet to stumble across a survey by a scholar verifying (or contradicting) my impression regarding films centered on the trials of young women. But my recollections of such films leave me feeling that the majority of them demand a male love interest for the young lady lead. In this way, her actions are not her own but based on what is required for the male object of her affection to acknowledge her desire and validate her womanly existence. The saving grace is that some of these films have the young women realize they were mistaken in assessing what they desired. Still, the genre seems to require the male love interest.

This brings me to the other major reason I find Lump of Sugar film momentarily endearing - Si-eun's trials have nothing whatsoever to do with pursuing a boyfriend. It has everything to do with realizing her agency, specifically jockeying for her position within this male enclave while retaining her ethical tenets of fair play and mutual respect. Fellow jockey Cheol is misunderstood as a love interest by Si-eun's roommate, but Cheol is clearly a rival (therefore her equal) in the vein of any other male sports genre film. Yes, the set-ups of Si-eun and Thunder reuniting after a long absence present them looking longingly at each other as if torn straight out of a romantic comedy, so it can be argued that the genre demands of a male love interest have been displaced onto a horse. (And this is an area where many could make fun of the film, since these classic Hollywood "meet cutes" are overdone and regurgitated often.) But this love interest is that of the type of love felt between family members, including the family pet, not of the erotic kind. I may not relate to the feelings some have for their animal companions, but I don't doubt that love is felt between them, and felt intensely, especially amongst young people, who are the primary target of a film like Lump of Sugar. (The film almost broke even in its attempt to reach that audience.)

We know from genre conventions that Thunder will return and that certain sports genre tropes will intrude. Even nationalism, a common motif in sports genre films, rears its horse's rear end since much is made of the fact that Thunder's ability is doubted since he is a Korean-bred horse. The occasional cliched feel of these requisite moments, particularly the meet-cutes, keep this film from being a great film. But the fact that the genre-demanded male love interest is jettisoned and Si-eun's character exhibits several shining moments of nicely flowing, feminist agency the most powerful being her intrusion into the privileged male space of the locker room to confront a colleague whose (lack of) sporting ethics put another colleague in danger make this a film that expands the genre enough to placate both those who insist on genre demands and those who insist on something original. Although I can't say the film is a stellar piece of work, I resolve to let the film be what it is, a decent film within the young adult, coming-of-age genre. (Adam Hartzell)

Site Update: Review of The Happy Life (2007)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 09:00:11 +0900

Review by Darcy Paquet

The Happy Life

The combination of director Lee Joon-ik and screenwriter Choi Seok-hwan has been golden, not only with their record-breaking smash hit King and the Clown but also with mid-sized hits like like Once Upon a Time in a Battlefield (2003) and Radio Star (2006). Their films are sometimes clever, but never flashy or trend-chasing. More than anything else, it is storytelling skill that drives their works. They create believable, real-life characters and make us care about them.

The Happy Life is their latest release, a smaller-budget project made before taking on the Vietnam War-era Sunny (scheduled for release in summer 2008). The film's story first picks up at a funeral, where three middle aged friends sit down together and start to reminisce about the past. Twenty years earlier, the deceased had been the lead singer in a university rock band called "Active Volcano", and the other three men had played lead guitar, bass and drums. Currently, the three are plodding through life without much enthusiasm or sense of meaning. Then Ki-young, the guitarist, bursts out with a crazy idea: "Let's re-form the band!"

As a basis for a film, this setup seems neither particularly unique or commercially appealing, but Lee and Choi are able to turn this into an unusually fun movie, thanks in part to vivid characterization. Ki-young (played by Jung Ji-young from King and the Clown) has accepted early retirement and has grown used to life as an unemployed father. His wife Seon-mi (the supremely talented Kim Ho-jeong, Nabi) works as a teacher and so the family is able to scrape by. But she and their daughter Ju-hee (Ko Ah-sung, the little girl from The Host) pay him hardly any attention as they go about their daily lives.

Seong-wook (the bassist, played by Kim Yun-seok who has been catapulted to fame by The Chaser) has recently been laid off. With a smart son, and a wife eager to give him the best schooling and private lessons possible (which in Korea will cost a small fortune), he has taken to working several menial jobs at a delivery service and designated driver program. Meanwhile Hyuk-soo (the drummer, played by character actor Kim Sang-ho) runs a car dealership in Seoul in order to support his wife and two kids who live in Canada -- a not uncommon situation in contemporary Korea.

In truth, it's insane for any of these three to be actively entertaining the idea of starting a band. Urgent real-life problems beckon, and their families are unlikely to be very understanding. But crazy ideas sometimes gather momentum and lead us in unexpected directions.

The Happy Life manages to be both entertaining and uplifting without papering over any of the economic issues that ground the film in reality. Although the broad plot of the film remains fairly predictable, the meat of the story lies in the many smaller dramas and twists that take place along the way. Hyuk-soo the drummer in particular becomes a fascinating character as the story progresses, and sure enough he won a best supporting actor award at Korea's Blue Dragon awards ceremony for his engaging performance. But all of the extended cast is great, giving an even greater boost to this modest story that surpasses expectations. (Darcy Paquet)

Site Update: Review of Desert Dream (2007)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 08:58:58 +0900

Review by Adam Hartzell

Desert Dream

As we creep towards the opening credits, Desert Dream fades to dusty yellow before it fades to black. If you are ever in East Asia in the spring/summer and notice the people wearing surgical masks, don't be worried about a returning SARS outbreak. Be worried about yellow dust. Yellow dust storms originate primarily from the deserts of Mongolia, northern China, and Kazakhstan thanks to an erosion of barren land similar to that of the Dust Bowl that occurred in the U.S. in the 1930's. These storms end up carrying pollutants in their wake to cities halfway around the world, exposing neighboring countries to lung-damaging particles, hence the surgical masks. In China, as Patrick Alleyn notes in his article "The Chinese Dust Bowl" in the October 2007 issue of the Canadian monthly The Walrus, besides government 'ecological refugee' relocation programs, efforts are being taken to renew the land to a fertile state to hold off further erosion, such as planting a Great Green Wall of China to protect the land from wind, or fining shepherds who allow their flocks to graze indiscriminately. But Zhang Lu's film is void of such collective political action in Mongolia. In Desert Dream (Mongolian title - Hyazgar), one man is the Johnny Appleseed of stories that make up the Mongolian section of The Steppes. That man is Hungai (Osor Bat-Ulzii).

When Hungai's daughter's illness demands his wife take her to the capital of Mongolia, Ulan Batar, he is left with just his saplings and the few familiar faces that pass through his little nook of The Steppes. But soon some new faces appear at his door, two North Korean refugees, pre-teen Chong-no (Shin Dong-ho) and his mother (Suh Jung). Slowly these two get to know each other and trust each other as they assist Hungai in his tree-planting, cow-milking, dung-gathering, and goat-birthing. Although the dialogue explicates some themes, the majority of the plot is supported by silent actions since only two of the three in this triad can verbally communicate with one another. (But such linguistic limitations do not stop Chong-no's mother from clearly informing Hungai to keep his grimy hands off her body.) Such persistent silence enhances the effect of the stories told in the folk songs sung in Desert Dream.

Each Zhang film I've seen depicts lost characters seeking something and someone to hold on to, only to be disappointed by eventual betrayal. Desert Dream follows a similar path as it spins us around as we seek an elusive holding place, which presents the viewer with a tiny fraction of the disorientation experienced by many of the refugees of the world. The film is slow-paced, taking time out to appreciate the vast expanse of space making this film perfect for the cinema, and leaving me disappointed that my only option for viewing it was my computer screen.

As my friend Brian Darr has noted over at his blog Hell on Frisco Bay, the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival is lately staying loyal to particular directors and I'm happy they found fidelity with director Zhang Lu, or otherwise who knows when I might have had a chance to check out Desert Dream after its screening in official competition at the 57th Berlin International Film Festival, even if that chance is only on my computer via the privileges of a reviewer's copy. Zhang's decision to focus on the displaced, be it North Koreans in China (Grain In Ear) or in Mongolia, is a welcomed and refreshing presence on the world cinema stage. Much is made about the money lost in South Korean cinema in 2007, but not enough is made about the other losses, those films deserving of greater exposure that stay in the film festival ghetto. But in this case, the marginalization of Zhang's films in theaters parallels the lives of his characters. Perhaps the fact that Zhang is a third-generation Korean-Chinese explains why he empathizes so much with the status of his characters. Thankfully, as Tom Giammarco informs me, he has two more films set for release in South Korea. It appears Zhang will continue on with his work like that of the characters of Desert Dream. In spite of the obstacles, each continues to walk onward in the face of all the dust in the wind that seeks to impede their progress. Occasionally each finds oases of beauty along the way. (Adam Hartzell)

Site Update: Review of Going by the Book (2007)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 04:44:31 +0900

Review by Darcy Paquet

Going by the Book

Do-man is a low-ranking traffic cop with an unusual personality. Soft-spoken and seemingly a bit shy, he is nonetheless unbending when it comes to rules and the law. His quiet stubbornness makes him the butt of other officers' jokes. Occasionally it also gets him into trouble, as when he pulls over his new boss, the newly instated police chief Lee Seung-woo, and issues him a ticket.

The police chief, played here by the dependable character actor Son Byeong-ho, is surprised and a bit annoyed at the unexpected fine. But he has other things to worry about at the moment. The town of Sampo is in a panic over a string of bank robberies, and as a means of reassuring them, he decides to carry out a highly realistic drill to demonstrate the police force's professionalism and resolve. Officers will be stationed throughout the city, and without warning, someone pretending to be a bank robber will stage a holdup, taking hostages if necessary. The chief announces the plan, and then later in secret, he tells Do-man that he is to act as the bank robber.

The chief may have been chuckling to himself at the irony of having a man so committed to obeying the law play the part of a criminal. But for Do-man, this is no laughing matter. Devoting himself to the task at hand with his usual fastidious attention to detail, he prepares to commit the perfect crime.

Filmmaker/playwright Jang Jin has carved out a niche all his own in the film industry these past several years, and although he participates on Going By the Book as a screenwriter and producer -- not a director -- his contribution is unmistakable. His comedy is both character-based and situational at the same time, or in this case, it is the clash between Do-man's endearingly subdued character and the outrageous situation that he finds himself in that gives the film its biggest laughs.

Director Ra Hee-chan, like Welcome to Dongmakgol director Park Kwang-hyun before him, worked as an assistant director under Jang before making his debut with one of his mentor's scripts. Ra displays less of a personal style than Park, and Korean critics have questioned his sense of comic pacing (sadly, the film's biggest weakness), but he still managed to turn the film into a solid commercial hit of 2.2 million admissions. Indeed, the film considerably outperformed Jang's own feature My Son, released earlier in the year (which is admittedly one of his lesser works).

Any review of this film would be incomplete without mentioning the performance of longtime Jang collaborator Jung Jae-young in the role of Do-man. Although he was best known earlier in his career for playing slightly unhinged, violent characters as in No Blood No Tears or Silmido, he has since proven himself in films like the wonderful Someone Special (2004) to have a much wider emotional range. Do-man is a man who does not express his emotions very clearly (if at all). Jung is able, with mumbled sentences and a deer-in-the-headlights stare, to make him appealing and memorable, and in that sense he is a major contributor to this film's success. (Darcy Paquet)

Darcy's Blog: A Summer Without Horror?

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 18:00:17 +0900

2008.04.09: A summer without horror? This week's issue of Cine21 asks a scary question: could it be that not a single Korean horror film is released this summer? Usually producers of horror films aim specifically for the summer season, given that a tradition of sorts has emerged over the last decade. As the weather heats up, viewers seem to look forward to something to scare their socks off. But this year they may have to do with imported horror, because production companies have apparently decided that the genre needs a rest.

No less than six were released between May and August last year (in order: The Evil Twin, which was actually produced in 2005, Black House, Cadaver (aka The Cut), Muoi, Epitaph, and Someone Behind You). However none of them really met box-office expectations. Black House, the highest grossing of the group, sold 1.4 million tickets, but given the high profile cast and its big marketing push CJ Entertainment was hoping for a bit more. The Evil Twin, Muoi and Someone Behind You qualify as major flops. At the same time, Asian horror doesn't sell as well on the international market as it used to.

Given the much-discussed crisis in the film industry, and the scarcity of investment these days, it seems that (probably without intending to) all the major distributors have ended up bypassing the tradition this year. There is actually one lower-profile project that went into production in February that the Cine21 article didn't mention. With a Korean title of Oetori ("Loner"?), it is directed by Park Jae-sik and stars Jeong Yu-seok, Chae Min-seo and Goh Eun-a (pictures of the cast here). But we'll have to wait and see if it actually secures a release in the summer.

Meanwhile, The Guard Post (which mixes genres, but is probably closest to horror) was released last week, and though it opened at #1, ticket sales were still pretty low. Other companies are supposedly developing horror films for the future, but they won't be ready for the summer season.

Site Update: Review of Hellcats (2008)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:54:15 +0900

Review by Darcy Paquet

Hellcats

Relationship drama Hellcats centers around three women who live together in an old neighborhood of Seoul. Ami (Kim Min-hee, below) is a 29-year old screenwriter who has been holed up in a motel trying to finish a screenplay, but like most people involved in the film industry, her career is not progressing smoothly. Frustrated with life as it is, she receives a further shock when her boyfriend Won-seok double-crosses her. Furious and disoriented, she ends up channeling her energies into two things that look likely to get her into further trouble: alcohol and a hot-looking accountant named Seung-won.

Meanwhile Ami is getting little sympathy from her older sister Young-mi (Lee Mi-sook of Untold Scandal fame), who rents out a room to her. A successful 41-year old interior designer working on a new theatrical production, Young-mi has an active love life, and has lately gotten entangled with the much younger Gyeong-su. However an unexpected surprise is awaiting her on her next visit to the doctor's office.

Young-mi also has a daughter in high school named Kang-ae (An So-hee from the phenom teen pop group Wondergirls). A bright, optimistic sort of kid, Kang-ae enjoys a strong friendship with Mi-ran who grew up in Brazil, but she worries about her boyfriend of three years Ho-jae. In short, Ho-jae seems more interested in computer games than in getting naughty with her. Kang-ae and Mi-ran draw up a plan to push the relationship along, but this leads in unexpected directions.

Director Kwon Chil-in stumbled upon a hit in 2003 with Singles, a film that relied on good casting and a somewhat more honest take on modern relationships to catch viewers' attention. Five years later, Hellcats (the Korean title is "Some Like It Hot", just like the Billy Wilder classic) sticks to much the same formula, and though it failed to draw as much interest at the box office, the film still has its charms. The story of Ami in particular is engaging, as we follow her through wild swings in her resolve and emotional state. Actress/model Kim Min-hee (Surprise Party, Asako in Ruby Shoes) was once thought of as a pretty face with no talent, but in recent years she has surprised the public with nuanced performances in several high-profile TV dramas. Here too, the emotional tone she strikes is just right -- she doesn't come across as weak or immature, but her confusion feels genuine. The fact that her character shines the brightest in a film that also stars the legendary Lee Mi-sook is quite an accomplishment.

Unfortunately the film's other two stories are less developed; Young-mi and Kang-ae are interesting enough characters, but we never really get inside their heads as we do with Ami. Perhaps there just wasn't time in two hours to simultaneously develop these three separate stories, or (more likely?) it's a screenplay problem. Still, the film projects a breezy energy that makes it stand out from the average Korean rom-com. Not prudish, if not particularly racy either, Hellcats is a tasty two-hour diversion. (Darcy Paquet)

New Book: Seoul Searching (2007)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 13:56:22 +0900

SEOUL SEARCHING: CULTURE AND IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY KOREAN CINEMA (2007) Edited by Frances Gateward. SUNY Press: paperback (ISBN: 978-0-7914-7226-2), 314 pp / hardcover (ISBN: 978-0-7914-7225-5), 336 pp.

From the back cover: "Seoul Searching is a collection of fourteen provocative essays about contemporary South Korean cinema, the most productive and dynamic cinema in Asia. Examining the three dominant genres that have led Korean film to international acclaim - melodramas, big-budget action blockbusters, and youth films - the contributors look at Korean cinema as industry, art form, and cultural product, and engage cinema's role in the formation of Korean indentities.

Committed to approaching Korean cinema within its cultural contexts, the contributors analyze feature-length films and documentaries as well as industry structures and governmental policies in relation to transnational reception, marketing, modes of production, aesthetics, and other forms of popular culture. An interdisciplinary text, Seoul Searching provides an original contribution to film studies and expands the developing area of Korean studies"

Contents:
1. Korean Cinema after Liberation: Production, Industry, and Regulatory Trends (Seung Hyun Park)
2. Christmas in August and Korean Melodrama (Darcy Paquet)
3. Storming the Big Screen: The Shiri Syndrome (Chi-Yun Shin and Julian Stringer)
4. Timeless, Bottomless, Bad Movies: Or, Consuming Youth in the New Korean Cinema (David Desser)
5. Scream and Scream Again: Korean Modernity as a House of Horrors in the Films of Kim Ki-young (Chris Berry)
6. Forgetting to Remember, Remembering to Forget: The Politics of Memory and Modernity in the Fractured Films of Lee Chang-dong and Hong Sang-soo (Hye Seung Chung and David Scott Diffrient)
7. Reflexivity and Identity Crisis in Park Chul-soo's Farewell, My Darling (Hyangsoon Yi)
8. Nowhere to Hide: The Tumultuous Materialism of Lee Myung-se (Anne Rutherford)
9. Closing the Circle: Why Has Bodhidharma Left for the East? (Linda C. Ehrlich)
10. Waiting to Exhale: The Colonial Experience and the Trouble with My Own Breathing (Frances Gateward)
11. Crossing the Border to the "Other" Side: Dynamics of Interaction between North and South Koreans in Spy Li Cheol-jin and Joint Security Area (Suk-Young Kim)
12. Race, Gender, and Postcolonial Identity in Kim Ki-duk's Address Unknown (Myung Ja Kim)
13. Transgressing Boundaries: From Sexual Abuse to Eating Disorders in 301/302 (Diane Carson)
14. Taking the Plunge: Representing Queer Desire in Contemporary South Korean Cinema (Robert L. Cagle)

SOURCES: Amazon (paperback), Amazon (hardcover), Amazon.co.uk (paperback).

Site Update: Review of The Wonder Years (2007)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 13:55:18 +0900

Review by Kyu Hyun Kim

The Wonder Years

The Wonder Years (another misguided English titlethis movie's about as remindful of the popular-in-Korea, Fred-Savage-starring '80s TV series as Twyla Tharp is of Michael Flaherty in Lord of the Dance) is a debut feature from director Kim Hee-jung, an alumna of the Lodz Film School and winner of the Wide Angle Prize at PIFF for the short Once, Someday (2001). Thirteen-year-old Soo-ah (the original Korean title), played by Lee Se-young (the childhood Geum-young from Daejanggeum), is a shy, borderline-autistic girl living in a small Cholla Province town. Deeply unhappy, she believes that a popular singer Yoon Seor-yeong (Kim Yoon-ah, a real-life vocal artist) is her real mother, to the bafflement of her working Mom, Young-joo (Choo Sang-mi, A Smile, Turning Gate). When her junior high school life turns out to be more of the same, i.e. peer abuse and indifference, Soo-ah resolves to travel to Seoul and confront her real mother.

One thing Korean cinema has done rather well in the last fifteen years is its continued support for, and introduction of, female directors with strong personal visions, beginning with Lim Soon-rye (whose Forever the Moment is shaping out to be 2008's first big Korean hit), Jeong Jae-eun (The Aggressives) and Byun Young-joo (Flying Boys). Kim Hee-jung is the latest in this roster of talented Korean female directors. Her Wonder Years is a gentle, composed character study that will probably bore viewers expecting either a well-heeled, cliche-bound melodrama wherein copious amounts of tears are shed, or an adolescent phantasmagoria with surrealistic flights of fancy. The movie truly excels when director-writer Kim observes the seemingly mundane details of Soo-ah's life with a compassionate gaze, letting the girl's slouched, awkward walk or her disappointed expression at a broken VCR player -- rather than spurious narration or distracting mise en scene -- speak for the character's feelings.

It would surprise no one that Lee and Choo are two principal reasons for anyone to check out The Wonder Years. Lee Se-young's portrayal of Soo-ah is remarkable in its subtlety and restraint. It is to her (and director Kim's) credit that the latter's terse (but often amusing) responses to the efforts by the adults to "make conversation" with her never once strike us as "precocious." Choo Sang-mi, one of the most skilled and naturally talented actresses working in Korea today, is brilliant as usual, conveying, for instance, Young-joo's lifetime of remorse and pain, but also the spiritual courage mustered by her to overcome them, in the brief moment of hesitation regarding where to hang a mirror. Truth to be told, both actresses are so ridiculously beautiful that we at times have trouble seeing Soo-ah and Young-joo with the contemptuous eyes of other characters in the movie. Indeed, Lee's face positively glows whenever the camera focuses on it: she is like a Winona Ryder going on 18 trying to play Ugly Betty. When one of the characters grumbles, "Boy, not only is she ugly but," my only possible reaction is "You need an eye exam, kid."

The Wonder Years is not without serious weaknesses. The story arc is rather predictable and ends in a disappointingly conventional resolution regarding the identity of Soo-ah's real mom. More seriously, director Kim's interpretations of Soo-ah's imaginary universe are surprisingly lackadaisical. In particular, the musical interludes, featuring Kim Yoon-ah belting out torch songs amid confetti and amber floodlights, look rather cheap and poorly choreographed. (I wish director Kim had employed some other tactic, like, say, Persepolis-like minimalist animation) While not an exciting and powerful debut feature comparable to, say, This Charming Girl or Take Care of My Cat, The Wonder Years is a solid character study with its own sense of integrity, as well as an excellent vehicle for the young actress Lee Se-young to showcase her considerable talent. (Kyu Hyun Kim)

Site Update: Review of Happiness (2007)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 14:11:52 +0900

Review by Adam Hartzell

Happiness

Looks like in the case of my experience with the films of Hur Jin-ho, the fourth time's a charm. Rather than rehash what has kept me from fully embracing Hur Jin-ho's films, I'll just refer you to my review of his third film, the Yonsama vehicle April Snow, where I summarize my ethical battles with his narratives. I am happy to say Happiness has appeared to have tossed that tarnishing trope aside and I can now relinquish the ethical axe that too many narratives force me to grind. Whether or not this excision was conscious on Hur's part, I thank him anyway, because now I can join hands with the joy and despair that is a walk in Hur's characters' shoes rather than part ways along irreconcilable political paths.

Young-su (Hwang Jeong-min) works in a nightclub. Exactly what he does is never clear, but he is obviously dissatisfied with his work and relationships. We witness him lie to a woman who appears to be his girlfriend with a story about going abroad. He gives the same story to his mother. (Bringing up another major change in a Hur film, this is his first main male character with a present mother. In this case, the son's the absent one.) Yet Young-su doesn't head abroad, but to a health community of some kind nestled somewhere in a South Korean village where those with terminal illnesses go in hopes to diet, stretch and laugh their illnesses away. Taking his nightclub work home with him, Young-su's drinking has resulted in his acquiring cirrhosis of the liver. (One of the nice subtle beats of humor is struck by Hur having one of Young-su's fellow stricken campers refer to Young-su not by his given name, but by his given illness, "Good Morning, Cirrhosis!")

It is at this recuperation center that Young-su meets and loves and . . . (well, you'll see) the lung-disease-stricken Eun-hee (Lim Soo-jung) in the go-away, come-here, rinse and repeat way that we have come to expect of Hur's characters. Although not at the expert levels of Christmas in August and One Fine Spring Day, the romance is still patiently developed and you will find yourself resonating with the film's title and dissonating just as strongly as Hur's ironic, yet not, title reveals itself. Hur's films are refreshing in how he executes the relationships between his two characters. As film critic Kim Ji-mi puts it in Korean Film Observatory magazine (No. 23), Hur "shows the outstanding talent of being able to grasp the sensitive moments of the beginning and ending of a love between a man and a woman" (p. 22). Think of what you hate about the overly melodramatic and reflect on what it would be like to see a director get ever so closed to the too cute but to turn away just at its palatable peak and that's Hur. Think of the histrionics you don't like about Korean TV serials and imagine a director who holds the sorrow tenderly enough to make the cries cleansing rather than cringing and you have the baby bear porridge of Hur's emotional competency.

Particularly lovely here are Young-su's tears and the comforting words (at least in translation) of Eun-hee. She lets him know that she didn't show her hurt before because nobody cared about her. She promises to show her hurt now and she expects him to care. In this wonderful mix of dialogue and soft action, Eun-hee says this not as she breaks down but just as Young-su does. She gives him what he's asking for by asking for what he wants to give her. (Eun-hee's is a strong voice in Hur's oeuvre, speaking confidently and maintaining self-respect despite the brief lapses of self-pity.) And his tears do the same for her. Both Young-su and Eun-hee are guarded individuals who eventually let their mutual armor down in order to receive each other completely. This means they will get hurt, but we can only hurt when we lose something that matters to us. I'd rather hurt than never care about something so much that pain never comes into the picture. It is in this way that Hur's ironic titles always circle back again to erase the irony we placed upon them. Happiness is what a Hur film can be when realized in all its ethical splendor. (Adam Hartzell)

Site Update: Review of The Guard Post (2008)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 01:47:23 +0900

Review by Darcy Paquet

The Guard Post

South Korea's meandering border with the North is one of the world's most surreal places, a heavily armed space still trapped in the Cold War. Park Chan-wook's JSA depicted the tension and close proximity of Southern and Northern soldiers at Panmunjeom, a former truce village that is now divided cleanly in half. But elsewhere along the DMZ, the most prominent structures are guard posts (GP for short): large, heavily armored self-contained forts that are strung along the border like pearls on a necklace. North Korea also maintains its own guard posts, which form pairs with those on the South.

The atmosphere in the DMZ (the term "de-militarized zone" is a bit of a joke) is tense. The military sends its strongest soldiers to this area, and imposes the harshest degree of discipline on them. Shots are occasionally exchanged across the border. Suicides or mysterious deaths have been known to occur among the men stationed there, and there was a recent case of a solider in a guard post who became mentally unhinged and slaughtered many of his fellow recruits.

What better place to set a supernatural gore fest? GP506 is a guard post that has fallen strangely silent (each GP is required to send a signal to headquarters every half hour; if the signal is not received, troops are sent in). A neighboring contingent of soldiers enters the post and finds blood on the walls and grossly dismembered bodies strewn in every direction. A military inspector arrives to investigate, and at first the deaths seem to be the result of some inner conflict within the group. The one surviving soldier is severely traumatized and seems unwilling to talk. Eventually, however, more disturbing clues emerge.

Kong Su-chang received both critical praise and commercial success with his debut R-Point (2004), about a company of Korean soldiers serving in Vietnam who are sent to a remote location to investigate a vanished squadron. The Guard Post would appear at first glance to be a virtual redux, with only the setting changed, but it's surprising how different the two films feel. R-Point was a slow-moving, chilling mystery with a slightly arty feel to it. The Guard Post is a roller coaster that wears its genre credentials more prominently on its sleeve, and despite its setting, offers a less developed political subtext. Unfortunately R-Point's greatest strengths -- its pitch-perfect ensemble acting and narrative coherence -- are reproduced far less successfully in the latter film.

The making of The Guard Post turned out to be more of an adventure than the filmmakers hoped. Midway through production, a spreading sense of crisis in the Korean film industry, together with unrelated trouble at the film's production company, caused the film's main investors to back out and shooting to ground to a halt. It appeared for some time that the film would never be finished, but eventually distributor Showbox stepped in and re-started the project.

Viewers beware: The Guard Post is gory! Brains, rotting flesh, self-mutilation -- this movie goes the extra mile (the poor woman sitting next to me at the press screening seemed to only barely make it through the film). Whereas R-Point had sort of a crossover appeal for people who don't like horror films, The Guard Post seems intended more explicitly for fans of the genre.

At two hours in length, the film is not short, and unfortunately the middle section is somewhat flaccid and confusing (some viewers may be annoyed by the constant jumping back and forth between past and present). I also found it frustrating that for all the care taken to build a highly authentic guard post set, the film never takes the time to properly "introduce" it to the viewer. JSA, by contrast, was much better at finding ways to orient and inform the viewer about Panmunjeom. However as its mysteries are sorted out, The Guard Post does finally find its rhythm in the last 30 minutes, and from then on out it's an engaging enough genre splatterfest. (Darcy Paquet)

Darcy's Blog: Jeonju, and a note to readers

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 02:16:13 +0900

2008.04.02: Jeonju, and a note to readers First let me start this blog post with some personal news, since it is likely to affect the site. My work life is going to be changing this spring: first of all, I have decided to stop writing for Variety. I enjoyed the time I spent as the magazine's Korea correspondent, but I've been feeling overwhelmed recently, and just need to simplify my life a bit. I also need to spend less time on the computer, because the arm pain (RSI) I have is sometimes quite severe. So I'm hoping to concentrate most of my film writing on this website, and maybe get back to doing some teaching to replace the lost income. (Or, with luck, I may finally get a proper sponsor for the site).

I'm also in the process of writing a book. It won't be officially announced until the manuscript is in, but it's an entry into the Short Cuts series published by Wallflower Press in the U.K. It will examine the revival and boom of Korean cinema from the 1980s until the present, while also giving a basic overview of the political and social changes that transformed Korea in that time period. My deadline for the initial draft is the end of June, so perhaps sometime next year we can see it in print.

Those are my two goals this spring: finish the book, and put the mojo back into this website. Wish me luck.

In the meantime, I thought I would comment a bit on this year's Jeonju International Film Festival, scheduled for May 1-9. The full program was revealed yesterday at press conferences in Jeonju and Seoul. The opening film is from Japan, Manda Kunitoshi's The Kiss ("Seppun"), and the closing film will be the fourth installment of If You Were Me, the omnibus films sponsored by the Korean Human Rights Commission. Whereas If You Were Me 1, 2, and 3 were mostly focused on the issue of discrimination, this time around the focus will be on the challenges facing young people in today's Korea. The five directors chosen are Kim Tae-yong (Family Ties), Pang Eun-jin (Princess Aurora), Lee Hyeon-seung (Il Mare), Yoon Seung-ho (Milky Way Liberation Front), and Jeon Gye-su (Midnight Ballad for Ghost Theater). It strikes me as a more difficult subject to portray well than issues related to discrimination, but we'll see...

I'm also excited about a new documentary by Kim Dong-won, whose Repatriation (2004) was maybe the best Korean documentary ever. The new film, a 60-minute documentary titled 63 Years On, tracks down former comfort women (i.e., women forced into sexual slavery during WWII by the Japanese military) living in Korea, China, the Philippines and the Netherlands. This topic has been covered before in Korean documentaries, most famously by Byun Young-joo's The Murmuring (1995), Habitual Sadness (1997) and My Own Breathing (1999), but Kim's take on this subject is sure to be interesting.

There will also be around 10 brand new Korean independent features, mostly by debut directors. These days, so many low-budget HD works are being made that it's a real challenge to keep up with them. I'm not complaining, mind you -- though some are inevitably very bad, others are well made, so that talent spotting at festivals like Jeonju is becoming a more engaging sport. As for films from other countries, there will be retrospectives on Bela Tarr, Alexander Kluge, cinema of the former Soviet central Asian republics, and Vietnamese cinema.

If any of you readers are living in Korea and have never been to this festival, I strongly urge you to take some time and go. There's something about the small city, the festival's focus on the films, and the great food that makes it feel completely different from Pusan or Puchon. My head is clearer when I am in Jeonju, and I feel more like a cinephile. This year I'll be able to stay longer than usual at the festival, thanks to its dates being pushed a little later (in the past it always conflicted with the Udine Far East Film Festival). So I hope to discuss more about the films and issues at this year's JIFF in a festival report.

Site Update: Review of Forever the Moment (2008)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 00:05:27 +0900

Review by Darcy Paquet

Forever the Moment

Handball is not the most glamorous of sports, which may explain why Forever the Moment ranks as the world's first handball movie. But like any sport, it can offer up moments of drama, as when the South Korean women's handball team competed at the 2004 Athens Olympics. The efforts of the players made them briefly famous to the multitudes of South Korean viewers who were following the match on TV. The fact that four years later, a film has been made from this story, and that it has emerged as the first smash hit of 2008, is not in itself surprising. Yet this is in some ways a surprising movie.

The director, for example. Lim Soon-rye made an acclaimed debut in 1996 with Three Friends, the story of three high school graduates hesitating at the threshold of adulthood. In 2001 she followed this up with another story about men, the musical drama Waikiki Brothers. Like her debut, it earned her strong praise from local critics, but both films flopped at the box office and they never really caught on with international film festivals, either. In general, her work displays a strong interest in everyday frustrations and injustices, and a clear-eyed vision that never romanticizes her subjects -- though as viewers we share in the compassion she feels. She's not blockbuster material, in other words. Which is why it's such a surprise that she made a low-budget sports film that expresses so much of her personal style, and that it became a blockbuster.

If there are thrilling sports movies, and emotional sports movies, then Forever the Moment definitely fits in the latter category. The long prelude to the Olympics involves (for us viewers) very little handball. Lim is more interested in the characters, and how they all relate to each other. Mi-sook (Moon So-ri) is a veteran player who was a key member on two unsuccessful Olympic teams. With a young son and a husband who can't pay his debts, she gets a job at a discount mart and takes her son along to handball practice. Hye-kyung (Kim Jung-eun) has retired from playing but has been successful as the coach of a pro team in Japan. When the coach of Korea's national squad suddenly quits, she is asked to fill in -- but she is faced with an undisciplined team filled with older and younger players, and hardly anyone in their prime.

Much of the dramatic action of the first three-quarters of the film involves the changing relationships between the extended cast of characters. Some of the standard developments we expect in any sports move pass by unacknowledged, and some patience is required of us -- in a sense, we are obliged to relate to the team members as ordinary people rather than heroes in the making. When the games do start, however, our patience is rewarded with a truly gripping final reel. Director Lim is not one to exaggerate emotions, but there is no need here. Although not what you would think of as exceptional, the unfolding of the final match is dramatic and suspenseful enough as it is.

Great, climactic moments in the movies are often transformational: they vanquish tragedy and usher in Happily Ever After. But this film is too honest to suggest that that is what is at stake here. The Korean title translates as "The Best Moment in Our Lives," and while a bit sappy, it does more or less capture the point of the story. The moment is important because the players have decided to invest so much into it, even if all they will ultimately take away from it is the memory. We know that everything will return to normal soon after the game ends, and we are already familiar with the rather dull backdrop to their lives back in Korea. This juxtaposition of the thrilling sports finale and the film's stubborn realist point of view is perhaps its greatest strength. The dreams of the women are in themselves bittersweet, which is something you can't say of the average sports movie. (Darcy Paquet)

Site Update: Review of Wide Awake (2007)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 15:17:17 +0900

Review by Kyu Hyun Kim

Wide Awake

Wide Awake takes one of the real-life medical mysteries -- patients who remain fully conscious (and responsive to pain) but paralyzed during operations, called "intraoperative awareness" -- and weaves a revenge-motivated mystery plot around it. (According to experts this happens shockingly more often than we think -- approximately 20,000 to 40,000 surgery patients in North America every year suffer through this experience, among whom about 30% can feel acute pain) The film opens with a young boy completely traumatized by his heart operation, the experience of feeling a scalpel cutting into his chest, a bone saw whine-grinding into his sternum (ick!), and doctor's fingers rummaging through the insides of his body. Adding insult to injury no one believes his story: it's 1980s Korea, after all. 25 years later, the doctors and nurses who had operated on him begin to die mysteriously. Ryu Jae-woo (Kim Myung-min, Sorum, Into the Mirror), a conscientious surgeon happily married to the beautiful Hee-jin (Kim Yu-mi), begins to suspect the operation-traumatized boy from his childhood is behind these deaths. The prime suspects are Lee Myeong-suk (Kim Roe-ha, Memories of Murder), stalking Dr. Ryu for failing to save his wife, and the seemingly unhinged Uk-hwan (Yu Jun-sang, Tell Me Something's second victim). The hypnosis specialist Oh Chi-hoon (Kim Tae-hoo, Epitaph) also seems to be on to some information about the culprit.

Even though a similar-themed Hollywood film (Awake, with Jessica Alba) was released a few months after it, the long shadow cast on Wide Awake is in fact that of the ultra-popular, Japanese-novel-based medical drama White Tower, through which Kim Myung-min was finally launched into the stardom that he had so far found elusive. It is not accidental, therefore, that the "medical drama" aspect of the movie is many times more fascinating than the murder mystery.

The filmmakers, including newcomer director Lee Gyu-man and co-screenwriter Lee Hyun-jin, spin their yarn as a straightforward whodunit: a crime has been committed, we are given clues to the possible motive, a load of technically complicated but authentic-sounding information regarding the exotic methods of murder are provided, and all this is nicely resolved at the end with the minimum of "what the heck?" confusion. Unfortunately, pacing is rather slack and the mystery is not as well thought-out as it should have been: the climactic big revelation especially is not handled well, relying on the considerable talents of the film's stars to get by (I must say, too, that hypnotism is definitely being over-used by Korean thrillers as a plot device). It should be said in the film's defense that, like Black House's gutsy Grand Guignol finale, the film does feature one act of revenge, which, like the more famous one in Old Boy, makes instinctive logical sense and is truly devastating in its supreme cruelty.

But all this would have been for naught had director Lee chosen the wrong actors. None of the leads are asked to do anything extraordinary but they inhabit their frankly two-dimensional roles with admirable professionalism and requisite conviction. In particular, few people will doubt Kim Myung-min's ability to carry a whole picture after Wide Awake: he does a superb job of conveying the self-doubt of a doctor whose faith in his medical skills is being eroded, and makes us believe in the soul-shattering agony of a decent Hippocratite who learned that his surgical prowess was deviously manipulated as a tool for evil.

Wide Awake is not as powerful as it could have been, (I kept thinking while watching it how a straightforward medical drama in the mold of White Tower could have been so superior to all this whodunit stuff) but it is certainly a step in the right direction, in that it doesn't pretend to be smarter or more important than it is. The film is definitely recommended to fans of White Tower, which probably would be its biggest constituency in East Asia, at least for the time being. (Kyu Hyun Kim)

Site Update: Interview with Bong Joon-ho

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 21:50:33 +0900

An Interview with Bong Joon-ho

by Giuseppe Sedia

Born in 1969 in Daegu, Bong studied sociology at Yonsei University in Seoul. In 1994-1995 he attended the Korean Academy of Fine Arts, where he produced his first short films. His first feature-length movie, Barking Dogs Never Bite ("Flanders-ui gae") won the Fipresci Prize at the Hong Kong Film Festival in 2001. Two years later he directed the serial killer movie Memories of Murder ("Salinui Chueok"), considered by many critics to be his best feature. In 2004 he produced a digital short for the Jeonju International Film Festival along with Asian directors Ishii Sogo and Yu Lik Wai for the collective feature Digital Short Films by Three Directors. His third film, The Host ("Gwoemul"), won Best Picture at the inaugural Asian Film Awards in Hong Kong, and established a national box office record in Korea with over 13 million tickets sold. Currently, he is working on a segment of an omnibus film focusing on the city of Tokyo involving also the French cineastes Leo Carax and Michel Gondry. This interview is extracted from a conversation with Bong Joon-ho during the Dongfang Film Festival in Naples (Italy).

How did you start approaching cinema?

I used to watch plenty of movies as a child. Television had a vital importance to my formation, because VHS tapes were not circulating yet in South Korea at that time. In the late 1980s, together with other sociology students, I created "Cineclick" -- a local organization devoted to discussion of Mass Communication and Media Arts.

Could you tell me more about Cineclick's activities?

We promoted screenings of Japanese and European films still unfamiliar to South Korean students. Cineclick attempted to encourage debate on audiovisual culture, and this experience helped to expand my vision of cinema. My gaze on moving images eventually became more reflexive and conscious. In 1993 we also shot a 16mm collective documentary, before I completed a short film vaguely based on the surrealistic atmosphere contained in David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986).

What about your relationship with South Korean producers?

To date, I have been able to take advantage of a certain protege status. I have been both lucky and sharp to create durable relations with local producers. Tcha Seung-jae who produced my first two feature films has always trusted me. He defended the artistic choices I made, even when my debut film failed miserably at the box office.

Do you think that the theatrical flop of Flandersui gae (2000, pictured left) drove you towards film genres that were on the outside more conventional?

The screenplay of Flandersui gae is mainly based on my personal experiences, compared to the following features which were taken from news stories occurring in my country. The interiors for that film were shot at my former flat in Seoul. It can be considered as an autobiographical comedy, which follows the developmental pattern of a thriller. Who kidnapped the dog? Some settings like the hot-water heating room in the building may seem to evoke a dark ambiance that is far from comedic.

Your second film Salinui Cheok (2003) deals with a mass murder. Japanese cineaste Kiyoshi Kurosawa revealed that Se7en (1996), directed by David Fincher, had an influence on the direction of Cure ("Kyua", 1997). Did you take any inspiration from Hollywood serial killer movies such as The Silence of Lambs?

Both American movies you mentioned have become milestones in nineties cinema. They continue to exert a transversal influence worldwide on the new generation of film-makers. Besides I've always been an enthusiast of Japanese directors such as Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Shohei Imamura. Nevertheless, I don't consider them to have had a great influence on Salinui Cheok, which is based on a true story that really occurred in Gyeonggi Province between 1986 and 1991.

"Memories of Murder is made up of an unrelenting series of failures, frustrating the proper political vision of a country", argued Antoine Thirion in Cahiers du Cinèma. The story seems to implode, being adverse to any turning point. How did you come up to this narrative structure?

I attempted to focus on the characters' visceral feeling of ineffectiveness. The police detectives are doomed to fail in their investigations. This mysterious serial killer who truly haunted South Korean people twenty years ago still stays unpunished in our country.

This moving picture displays once more Song Kang-ho's actorial talent. How did you come to collaborate with him?

Despite the convincing performance of Lee Sung-jae, Flandersui gae was definitely a "floppola" in Seoul theaters. Therefore I decided to work with Song Kang-ho. His popularity was constantly growing, even among Western audiences since Park Chan-wok picked him for Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002). Yet we should not forget that Song Kang-ho was already showing his talent on the stage until he left his theatrical career behind in 1997.

Could you tell us more about your contribution to the project Digital Short Films by Three Directors 2004?

The three of us each worked on our own. I have to admit that I didn't even view the episodes directed by Ishii Sogo and Yu Lik Wai. Apart from the aesthetic results, this cinematic experience personally gave me the opportunity to check the possibilities offered by digital production.

Loss of control over reality is a topic that remains under the skin throughout your filmography. Panic attacks usually erode the relationships of the characters you invented. Even Gwoemul, despite the happy ending, gives evidence to this feature

The concept of chaos has always fascinated me from a philosophical perspective. Moreover I would mention also a peculiar form of chaos reflecting the social and cultural context in South Korea. Anyhow, the positive epilogue in Gwoemul is deliberately pretentious. Just consider that the Park family is slaughtered before the final victory against the monster.

The Gwoemul monster iconography is very different from the classical appearance of bipedal monsters such as Godzilla and King Kong. How did you come up with its final look?

The monster's appearance is not based on a pre-existing model. The starting idea was taken again from a true story. I read in the newspapers about a deformed fish with an S-shaped spine caught in the Han River. The monster design came mainly from this strange discovery.

Do you consider that monstrous creatures on screen, such as the North Korean Pulgasari, could convey ideological and moral values?

The role of the monster in Gwoemul is progressively reduced throughout the film. The initial scene set in the military laboratory reveals an attraction-repulsion dynamic towards Americans that is also responsible for the fake virus invention that will disband Park family. However familiar relationships are most assuredly a dominant topic in the movie.

Gwoemul won funding from the Pusan International Film Festival's Pusan Promotion Plan, and attracted more than 13 million people in South Korean theaters. How does it change your approach to direction when you work on high-budgeted features?

The remake rights to this film have already been sold to a major movie company. I should confess that I am growing weary of writing screenplays. Sometimes I question myself about the future with the same concern that thrills horror film movie-goers. However that may be, my next movie is a low-medium budget feature which is currently in development.

Giuseppe Sedia, NAPLES October 2007

Translation by Kim Oen Joung
Additional translation by the author

Site Update: Review of The Salaryman (1962)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 20:37:19 +0900

Review by Adam Hartzell

The Salaryman (1962)

Early on in Lee Bong-rae's The Salaryman, our patriarch (Kim Seung-ho) is placed in an ethical dilemma enable the boss in his plan to embezzle money from the company, or get fired. Within these limited choices imposed by those in power over his well-being, he chooses the latter. Having given his last month's wages to a writer friend extremely down on his luck, our patriarch's economic position becomes dire in its own way, with bill collectors as reliable and punctual as he is coming by his house. Following his firing, he soon finds his options for work are limited due to age discrimination in the job market. Eventually he finds hope in a position that explicitly states age is not a negative mark. All he has to do is excel at the exam, which he's convinced is sure to be a shoe-in considering his experience. Unfortunately, he soon discovers the exam for the position is merely a formality. The promising position has already been promised to his daughter, (who had to quit school to help the family), by the man she's courting at the same firm.

The Salaryman is a variation on the oft-told morality tale of why bad things happen to good people. Our patriarch is a sensible, upstanding member of the community. He teaches his children about ethical matters as minor as punctuality and as major as democracy. (Although when his father stops his son from urinating in the street, our patriarch finds his words used against him. "It's a free country" the small, smart-ass says.) Our patriarch is a man beloved in his neighborhood. The neighborhood boys form a fan club of sorts, parading around and praising his ethics after he sees to it that a missing ball is returned to the rightful owner. Even though he doesn't make the unethical choice at the beginning, he does stray a few times, lying about dying to avoid paying a bill and asking his daughter to help him cheat on the job exam. Still, overall we have a lovable father for whom you feel pity that he's in the precarious position he is after making the just choice. We feel for the man's troubles when he proclaims "I'm utterly useless" late in the film. We all know how this will end. Just as a film in the United States under the Hays Code promoted the punishment of the 'uppity' woman or the Lesbian or Gay man, the South Korean film of this time expects a sentimental resolution that reinforces 'traditional' family roles. Acknowledging that, I was able to hold back my circa-cynic quite well. I allowed the film to be a product of its time.

And The Salaryman further underscores how enjoyable the films of this time, the 1960's, are. Even in spite of the ten minutes or so of muted visuals in the only extant print, I was engaged throughout and found the relationship of this father with the rest of his family endearing in its construction. There is even a lovely flicker of a feminist fissure in the text. The father laments how his daughter "took" his job, but we all saw him in that classroom cheating, whispering assistance with the answers. So although the 1960's needed the patriarch re-pedestaled as pillar of the family, The Salaryman isn't as heavy-handed about it as other films I've seen. Plus, there's enough rumbling from South Korea's rapid modernization requiring re-thinking of 'traditional roles' that I was left with a smile on my face at the end just like the characters from South Korea's past reflecting back at my present. (Adam Hartzell)

The Salaryman ("Wolgeup-jaengi"). Directed by Lee Bong-rae. Screenplay by Yang Yun-shik. Starring Kim Seung-ho, Joo Jeung-nyeo, Eom Aeng-ran, Lee Su-ryeon, Bang Seong-ja, Ahn Sung-ki, Choi Nam-hyun, Park Am, Kim Hee-gap. Cinematography by Lee Byeong-sam. Produced by Yeona Film Company. 98 min, 35mm, b&w.

Site Update: Review of Someone Behind You (2007)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 00:23:20 +0900

Someone Behind You

Ka-in (Yun Jin-seo, Old Boy) is a high school student, adept at fencing, with loving parents, a pretty younger sister and a hunky med-student boyfriend (Yi Ki-woo, Tale of Cinema). Everything seems to be perfect, until one day her aunt suffers a terrible accident on her wedding day. She is then graphically stabbed to death by another aunt while hospitalized. Reeling from shock, Ka-in soon finds herself the target of the inexplicable murderous rage of her friends and even family members. To figure out what is going on, she enlists the help of a creepy classmate Seok-min (Park Ki-woong, The Art of Fighting).

Someone Behind Me is based on a comic book by Kang Kyung-ok, which apparently is a straightforward supernatural thriller, attributing the cause of Ka-in's horrendous situation to a family curse (naturally, the curse descends down through the agnatic lineage, this being a Korean one). The movie version dabbles with that premise, then abandons it altogether and turns itself into a far-fetched murder mystery, finally resolving into a yet another rip-off of Tale of Two Sisters, with a chunk bitten off from Death Note thrown in for a good measure.

To put it charitably, Someone's screenplay is a mess. Penned by five scribes including the director, Lee Shin-ae, who previously wrote Fox Stairs, and Lee Hyo-chul, responsible for Hanbando (?!), it is a dreadful mishmash of different agendas and styles, without any coherent sense of what it's groping for. Adding insult to injury is Oh Ki-hwan's (Last Present, shudder) lugubrious direction, which tiredly follows one set-up after another. Particularly harebrained is the character of Min-seok: the last-minute revelation regarding him is totally predictable but is nonetheless a hoot. I can easily imagine Korean moviegoers rolling their eyes and hurling insults at the close-up of him grinning sinisterly in that eyebrow-obscuring gappa hairstyle.

Nearly wasted are two excellent actresses, Yun Jin-seo as Ka-in and Kim So-eun (The Show Must Go On) as her sister. Yun is basically given an impossible role to play, a young girl against whom the whole world has turned murderous, but she pulls it off without ever relying on histrionics, even under the overtly melodramatic direction given by director Oh. Kim is ridiculously cute but shows a lot of potential. The interactions between these two actresses are frankly the only believable part of the movie. While Someone gets a few goodwill points by staying away from long-haired Sadako clones, as a thriller or horror film it is simply lame, not even unintentionally funny to qualify as camp entertainment. Should be of interest only for those fans of Yun Jin-seo and Kim So-eun who don't mind their favorite actresses put through the wringer in almost sadistically unimaginative ways. (Kyu Hyun Kim)

Darcy's Blog: Top News Stories of 2007

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 11:56:44 +0900

2008.01.03: Top news stories of 2007 Since these days I haven't been able to keep up with the old news pages or newsletter, I thought I would take this chance to look back at the top news stories of 2007 (from my perspective, at least). It's been an eventful year, as always!

#1. Crisis, Crisis, Crisis. The never-ending news story this year has been the recent troubles of Korean film companies. Admissions are going down, exports are crashing, the cost of making movies continues to rise, and audiences seem to be re-kindling their interest in Hollywood films. It's still too early to tell where all of this is going, and part of it may just be a case of overly inflated expectations, but certainly the mood this year has been grim.

#2. Jeon Do-yeon wins Best Actress at Cannes for her role in Secret Sunshine. Korea's highest profile acting award since Kang Su-yeon won in Venice in 1987 for Surrogate Woman couldn't have happened to a more deserving person. Here's hoping that her next film, a low budget art film by Lee Yoon-ki, boosts her growing international profile.

#3. The uproar over D-War. Korea had a taste of its own culture wars in August, when Shim Hyung-rae's mega-budget monster D-War hit the screens. Independent director Leesong Hee-il ridiculed the film and the hype surrounding it, comparing it to 1970's-era excitement over the export of toasters to the U.S. Furious fanboys responded with a massive, homophobic-tinged attack on his blog. Critics sparred on TV talk shows, viewer rating boards on the internet turned into angry battlegrounds, and Shim himself publicly sulked about how nobody in the Korean film industry respected him. Even I got called some rather choice names on the internet after I slammed it on Cine21's critics board, though nobody ended up attacking this site. All this over an infantile and rather incompetent monster flick that ultimately bombed in U.S. theaters... was it really worth it?

#4. Korean actors go international. The Korean Wave seems to be fading in many respects, but a string of top Korean stars were cast in international projects in 2007. Jun Ji-hyun (aka Gianna Jun) will take the lead in Blood: The Last Vampire. Actor/singer Rain will take a small role in Speed Racer. Jang Dong-gun stars in Laundry Warrior, which is being shot in New Zealand. Song Hye-gyo will headline a small New York-set U.S. independent film. Lee Byung-heon will get a small role opposite Josh Hartnett in I Come With the Rain. Jang Hyuk took an English-speaking role in a Singapore film. And there continues to be interest in other actors as well. In the coming year, we'll get to actually see all of these films, and find out if they're any good...

#5. Telecoms companies move into the film industry. In terms of business news, one of the biggest new trends is the newly active role being taken by Korea's biggest telecoms companies. SK Telecom will launch its own film division in 2008. KTH is funding expansion by its subsidiary, Sidus FNH, into distribution. Both companies will also likely become active in IPTV (internet protocol TV), which many hope will become an important future source of revenue for local films. Is this the start of a new era?

#6. US-Korea FTA deal concluded (but not ratified). This free trade deal, which still may not happen if either legislature rejects it, will have a greater effect on the TV industry than on the film industry. Nonetheless, one clause of the treaty "locks in" the recent reduction of the Screen Quota, and there will also be an extention of copyright from 50 to 70 years -- which will affect classic films.

#7. First film labor deal concluded. Lower ranking Korean crewmembers have struggled through with miniscule pay and virtually no benefits or insurance for years, while actors and other top talent have seen their salaries skyrocket in recent years. This labor deal is intended to improve things for people on the lower rungs, though unfortunately the timing is not great -- it came into effect just as the industry was embarking on a widespread effort to lower budgets. Only a few films have complied with the new labor rules so far, but in time it may become the new industry standard.

#8. IndieSpace opens. Seoul and other major cities have a number of arthouse theaters, but the newly-opened IndieSpace is the first theater devoted entirely to Korean low-budget independent films. Each film that debuts at the theater will play for two weeks, and through this venue we should be able to watch a lot of films that weren't available before. Great news!

#9. Megabox sold to foreign investors. Megabox ranks as Korea's third or fourth biggest theater chain, and this year it was sold to a consortium of investors headed by an Australian bank. There may be less to this than meets the eye, as Megabox's sister company Showbox has signed a long term deal to continue operating the company. But personally, I wish all of the big theater chains would be sold off. It's not healthy or fair to have the biggest distributors owning and operating so many movie theaters across Korea.

#10. CHIFFS holds a successful first edition. There is certainly no shortage of film festivals in Korea -- a recent Film 2.0 article says there are more than 40 of them registered with KOFIC -- but the successful launch of the Chungmuro International Film Festival in Seoul (CHIFFS) was good news. Unlike most festivals, CHIFFS features almost no new films, and instead places its focus on great movies of the past. There were large numbers of old Korean films screened, as well as Hollywood classics, Asian musicals, director retrospectives, and more. Also, though some other festivals have troubled to attract viewers, CHIFFS had close to 70% of its seats filled. I'm looking forward to the second edition, scheduled for the end of August.

Site Update: Review of Resurrection of the Butterfly (2007)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 13:43:57 +0900

Review by Adam Hartzell

Resurrection of the Butterfly

I don't require a film to be completely inspiring and profound. I prefer it to be, but when a film provides a lackluster or non-existent impact, I encourage myself to see what significance might remain for the film in the course of a review rather than focus exclusively on the critical slam. That prefaced, Resurrection of the Butterfly requires that I look for something flickering on the screen outside of entertainment and/or enlightenment value.

Competing in competition at the 11th PiFan, Resurrection of the Butterfly (the Korean title translates as "Shadow") was a project coupling a student director (Kim Min-sook) with a more experienced director (Lee Jung-gook). This is something to salvage from the film. I would encourage more such projects regardless of the less than succulent fruits born of this particular seedling.

The film connects the three primary actors through roles across two stories of similar love triangles, one taking place well in the past and the other taking place in the present. Director Kim's story works off the historical character of Non-gae, a kisaeng known for remaining loyal to the Joseon dynasty by killing the Japanese commander who conquers her village rather than transferring her services as a prostitute/performer to the Japanese. (There is a shrine to her near Chokseongnu called "Uiam" or "the rock of righteousness.") Liberties are taken with this historical character's story that might upset the purists in the audience, but no claim is made by director Kim to be revisioning the history, in that she doesn't seek to claim her vision as truth. This is merely speculative history, a what if' scenario to play out the possibilities if Non-gae had failed to kill the Japanese commander. In this version, Non-gae still remains within the spirit of her legend by becoming a spirit, one that haunts the Japanese commander.

The second story, overseen by director Lee, finds a man whose head injury limits his recall into the events that preceded his appearance deep into the mountains, where a mountain ranger has found him. Only a diary leads to clues about who this man is and what he's done. We discover from the diary that he was brought to the mountains with his girlfriend, a botany enthusiast, in search of a rare plant. On this journey they stumbled along the path of a young guide. As the story unfolds, we begin to question this man's position in this story relayed in the diary.

Ironically, it is the student's first half that shows greater promise than the veteran's second half. Veteran director Lee happens to have directed what is perhaps my least favorite of all South Korean films, The Letter. What I found unpalatable about The Letter was the excruciatingly drawn out, and falsely felt, melodramatic emotions. I understand that Korean culture allows for a greater expression of sadness, loss, and grief. (And I understand my opinion about The Letter is at odds with the audience that made it the most popular South Korean film in 1997.) What in the West we might determine overzealous might be more acceptable emoting in South Korea. But several South Korean directors and actresses/actors are still able to take this excess' of express and allow even the most cynical of viewers to find such expressions believable. Director Lee demonstrates in his half of this project that he still can't handle the truth of these extended emotions in the incredibly poor way the wounded hiker's terror is presented in the second half of this film under his control.

My impression of Resurrection of the Butterfly may have been affected by the poor audio and visuals of the screening I attended at PiFan that was noted by, if I recall correctly, producer Byun Jang-wan. But I don't think even better sound and clearer and more vibrant colors could have saved this film. I commend the idea of coupling a neophyte with a veteran and don't find myself turning away from hope for better things from student director Kim Min-sook just yet. (I hear she directed a very compelling short called "Apple" of which others speak highly.) But director Lee Jung-gook's half further demonstrates that his cinematic letters are ones I'd best leave unopened, if not have returned to sender. (Hey, I didn't say I don't submit critical slams, I only said I don't like to center on them exclusively.) (Adam Hartzell)

Site Update: Review of Shadows in the Palace (2007)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 13:43:00 +0900

Review by Darcy Paquet

Shadows in the Palace

The Joseon Dynasty palace is divided into parts, like the chambers of a heart. One part belongs to the women -- or more accurately, the women of the palace belong to this space (Gungnyeo, meaning "palace woman," is the Korean title of the film). Sworn into secrecy, submission, and celibacy, the women of the palace officially exist only for the sake of the king and his young heir. Behind closed doors, of course, the dynamics are much more complicated.

Shadows in the Palace is the debut work of writer/director Kim Mee-jeung, who served on the production team of King and the Clown and Once Upon a Time in a Battlefield. Shooting on a comparatively low budget using pre-existing sets from King and the Clown and other productions (not that you can tell: the imagery is dazzling), the film can be considered a fusion of genres: part costume drama, part mystery, part J-Horror.

Aside from its almost completely female cast, Shadows was also crafted primarily by women, including the director, producer, and executive producer. (The film was shot apparently with none of the late-night drinking that characterizes the sets of many male-directed Korean films) However viewers expecting a kinder, gentler movie are due for an awakening -- Shadows contains medieval cruelty to rival any of its genre contemporaries (pulled fingernails, needles in flesh, severed hands). The violence underlines the cruelty of a system where the women and their bodies are mere cogs in a wheel. The psychological toll can be seen on the women's faces -- even for those few who manage to claw their way to the top.

Keeping track of all the names and plot twists is a challenge, but here is a plot summary: the king (who rarely appears onscreen) has no heir by his queen, however a royal concubine Heebin has given birth to a son. The queen mother is pushing to have the child officially adopted by the queen, but Heebin resists, correctly sensing that she could be easily disposed of after the adoption. Amidst this tense standoff, Heebin's most trusted maid is found dead, a suicide. Or was it? Chun-ryung, a royal medic, discovers that she was actually strangled. What's more, there are signs that the maid had given birth at some time in the past, which would have been absolutely forbidden under palace rules. Ignoring orders to wrap up the case quickly, Chun-ryung sets off in search of answers.

The wide cast of characters, most of whom are well-known but not stars in Korea, contain an equally wide spectrum of performances. Most prominent is Park Jin-hee (Love Talk) in the lead role of Chun-ryung. I'm a fan of Park's straightforward, accessible style, though here I wonder if she may have been miscast. Chun-ryung's internal drive -- her need to know the truth, even if it puts her in danger -- is the film's key narrative engine, but here I found it not quite convincing. Still, many of the other performances are quite effective, especially Kim Seong-ryeong (pictured above) as a fearsome supervisor who has adopted completely the ruthless strictures of palace discipline.

As the film moves towards its conclusion, the fantasy/horror elements that were merely hinted at earlier begin to creep out of the closet (and yes, there is long black hair). At the same time, though, the film's broader themes regarding oppression and power begin to come into focus. I'm particularly fond of the last scene, with the palace women all dressed in white mourning robes, witnessing power being taken up by a new set of hands. We've been led to believe that the strict set of rules which govern the palace are an insurmountable force, but events may tell us otherwise.

It may not be possible to ever completely understand what life was like for people who lived in centuries past, given the lack of records and the vast cultural gap between us and them. Films set in the past usually end up telling us more about contemporary society than about the era on the screen. But is there anything wrong with that? Cinema is an act of imagination, and setting a film in a little-understood historical setting allows room for the imagination to extend itself. More than anything, it's the conceptual energy and narrative momentum of Shadows in the Palace that makes it an exciting discovery among this year's Korean films. (Darcy Paquet)

Site Update: Review of Paradise Murdered (2007)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 13:29:24 +0900

Review by Kyu Hyun Kim

Paradise Murdered

1986. A group of men are fishing while listening to a live broadcast of the Asian Games. One of their poles snags on a big clamper, and the owner pulls on it delightedly. Splat! The decomposed head of a guy lands in the kettle where ramen noodles are boiling. The men scream their heads off. So begins the murder mystery Paradise Murdered, which was one of the surprise hits of the early summer season, selling more than 2.2 million tickets before being decimated by Spider-Man 3 and other summer blockbusters. Frankly this "funny" intro led me to expect nothing other than a usual high-concept mock-Hollywood "thriller" with bumbling cops, a lumbering sub-Michael Myers serial killer and gore galore. While clunky in certain respects, however, Paradise Murdered turns out to be a decent mystery, a rare Korean whodunit (in this case, also a whodunwhat) with the plot that actually makes sense, and good clues available for sharp viewers to put it all together before the curtain comes down.

Essentially a variation on Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians" with a handful of supernatural red herrings thrown in, the film does a good job of playing with audience expectations. Writer-director Kim Han-min places various institutional activities of the tiny Paradise Island in the larger context of military dictatorship and political corruption, through subtle signs such as Sang-gu's arrogant behavior as a local "New Village Movement" leader, and provides the characters with realistic, non-over-the-top dialogue. The film's success owes much to the fine ensemble cast, most of whom do their best not to push their acting into the realms of exaggerated comedy or overt heroism, thus retaining the viewer's suspicion about their true motives.

The veteran Choi Joo-bong (Please Teach Me English), the always reliable Park Won-sang (R-Point, The Big Swindle) and the currently ubiquitous An Nae-sang (Marathon, Someone Behind Me, Desire) all provide solid supports as the village notables. Seong Ji-roo (unforgettable in A Good Lawyer's Wife) is appropriately menacing and pathetic in turns, although director Kim seems to largely leave him to his own devices by the slightly overcooked climax. Park Hae-il (The Host) was also an inspired choice for the ostensible protagonist, projecting fatigued compassion and cold calculation in equal measure, his obsidian pupils glistening with streaks of chilling obsession. On the other hand, the schoolteacher character played by Park Sol-mi (TV's Winter Sonata and All-in) is poorly conceived, and Park is simply awful in the role. Whenever she mouths her dialogue in that over-emphatic, strenuously earnest "I am in love with you, dammit" Hallyu-drama-beachfront-confessional style, the movie's fragile wall of believability comes crashing down. I must also say Kim Han-min is a much better writer than a director. Perhaps out of insecurities, he tries to lure the viewers in by adding some totally unnecessary John Landis-like buffoonery and comic "recreations" of the crimes in the early part.

Taken as a whole, however, Paradise Murdered is one of the best thrillers to come out of Korea in 2007, supported by solid performances by mostly talented actors and endowed with a real mystery plot and a satisfactory resolution. In these times of dreadful mutual cannibalization of ideas on a global scale, with endless remakes, retoolings, copycats, rip-offs and spin-offs colonizing not only movies but all creative media, even a little originality goes long way. (Kyu Hyun Kim)

Darcy's Blog: Thoughts as the year nears its end

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 18:35:18 +0900

2007.12.01: Thoughts as the year nears its end There's a very interesting, wide-ranging debate going on over at the Korean Film Discussion Board about where Korean cinema stands now after ten years of growth and commercial development. Have commercial pressures overwhelmed the industry? Creatively, does Korean cinema provide any meaningful alternative to Hollywood at this point? What can we expect going forward?

I'll contribute my thoughts about those specific issues on the board, but now also seemed a good time to consider the "numbers" for 2007 (not pretty) to see what we can make of them. First, perhaps we can consider a couple predictions I made a year ago about industry trends, namely (a) There will be about 80 Korean films released in 2007, down from 107 in 2006; and (b) Total annual admissions will drop for the first time in a decade. It seems, first of all, that I was wrong about (a) and right about (b).

There will total about 108 Korean films released this year, including everything from low-budget independent films to D-War. This large number makes me suspect that the talk we hear about a crisis in Korean film finance needs to be put into context. Certainly on an individual level, many producers are struggling mightily to find funding for their projects. But it seems to me that the number of people trying to make films these days is much, much higher than it was a couple years ago. If everyone who wanted to make films was able to find investors, I bet we'd have 200-300 movies made each year. It's true that a certain kind of investor (venture capitalists, partial investors) seems to be dropping out, but at the same time a couple big companies like SK Telecom and KT are now moving aggressively into the film industry, so I don't expect a crash in production next year either.

(I argued in another column for Cine21 that because of the structure of the Korean film industry, a crash will not mean that the number Korean films made will suddenly drop, it will mean that we see an unending stream of boring, $3 million films that try to imitate the successes of the past. Is that what is happening now?)

Regarding (b), the final numbers won't be in for a month or two, but I'm guessing we can expect a drop from 2006's all time high to about 2005 levels. This in itself is not a disaster -- the last ten years of uninterrupted growth were a very special situation that will not be repeated. Normal film industries do slightly better one year, slightly worse the next, depending on the quality of films released. Korea has now become a normal, developed film industry. However looking only at admissions for Korean films, it's a bigger drop, because local movies accounted for over 60% of tickets sold in 2006, and a little over 50% this year.

This points to maybe the bigger issue, which is that Korean audiences just don't seem as excited about local films anymore. It's still not clear to me whether this is a cyclical thing, due to a lack of interesting movies this year, or the first sign of a longer decline. After all, 2004 was a pretty bad year (the numbers for March to December were ugly), but 2005 and 2006 were much better. And the second half of this year has been an improvement over the first.

I'll post a top ten list and my thoughts about the year in a creative sense later, but still, from a commercial standpoint, there was very little to get excited about. Maybe this can be linked back to the pessimism that hangs over the industry these days -- maybe it's more difficult to make exciting commercial films than it used to be. But none of the top ten grossing Korean films of 2007 were unusually fun to watch.

Site Update: Review of D-War (2007)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 13:04:18 +0900

Review by Adam Hartzell

D-War

I could talk about the long delay of D-War's eventual release, increasing its ledger to the point of becoming the most expensive South Korean film. I could focus on director Shim Hyung-rae's intent to conquer the U.S. market with a primarily English-language film with primarily U.S. actors and how he obtained the over 2,000 screens he desired to practically guarantee a significant box office take. But ever counter-narrative, I'll focus on how D-War supports Martin Kevorkian's thesis put forth in Color Monitors: The Black Face of Technology in America.

But first, the plot. "Imoogi" is not the Korean word for 'dragon' as the title might suggest, but refers to a mythical large snake. There are good and bad Imoogi. Apparently every 500 hundred years there's a woman, the most recent incarnation being LA resident Sarah (Amanda Brooks - Flightplan), who has a spirit (called Yuh Ui Joo) that helps an Imoogi become celestial'. The bad Imoogi spends way more time hunting this woman than the good Imoogi and the woman has a companion, recent manifestation being Ethan (Jason Behr - TV show "Roswell"), who's supposed to protect her long enough to die instead for the good of the good Imoogi. If you don't get it, don't worry, early on it's explained to you twice and believability doesn't really matter because the film is really just a vehicle for computer animation prowess.

Some of the computer imagery is decent, such as the King Kong moment or the speedy, street-slithering. And such is partly responsible for the first weekend gross that put D-War at #5 in the U.S., staying in the top ten for one more week. But as for lasting impact, intriguing dialogue and well-orchestrated acting and editing would have helped, but like Sarah, such was sacrificed in order for the dragons to slide on screen. Those with whom I shared witness to the spectacle vocally cringed at much of the forced dialogue and plot propulsion. Poor pacing is the main problem. Many scenes are so quick they end up dampening the impact of the images. What should generate awe, say, when the Imoogi or the massive Atrox Army is introduced, end up uneventful. In a past life, Director Shim was a comedian, and although there are bits that could work, this same poor pacing, following a storyboard like it was a power point presentation, hinders the impact of much of the humor as well.

I'm left to look around for something in which to engage. What I found was further evidence for Kevorkian's argument about how black characters are being placed behind the computer screens of our movie screens and what this says about technology and race.

This cinematic practice has reached cliched proportions in Hollywood. It's one of those things you don't notice, but once someone like Kevorkian points it out to you, you no longer can not notice it, like the negative space generating an arrow in the FedEx logo. Die Hard, Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, Mission Impossible 2, Transformers etc., and now D-War, all cast black actors as computer operators. Although this partly represents a well-meaning effort to replace past stereotypical portrayals of blacks as ignorant with portrayals of them as highly intelligent, Kevorkian finds evidence that the black body is being placed in front of these machines to protect the white body from the contamination of technology, from the fears and anxieties spawned by technophobia.

In D-War we call him Bruce (Craig Robinson - Knocked Up). He searches for the information touching the data), while the processing of the information (exploiting the data) is Ethan's domain. Heightening Kevorkian's argument further, Bruce's other job is driving Ms. Yuh Yi Joo and Ethan around the streets of LA. And the only time that Bruce actually freely acts on technology outside of Ethan's instruction is when he gives Ethan a gun. This is contextualized within the film as a bad choice, implying that Bruce doesn't have the capacity to exploit technology like our hero Ethan. (This questioned gift is then dropped from the plot like it's hot.)

Let me state explicitly that I am not implying here that Shim's Bruce is a consciously racist portrayal. (At least Shim doesn't have Bruce die first like Michael Bay smashes the black voice in Transformers.) The placement of the black body as a technological interface seems to me more evidence of structurally racist industry practices, audience genre demands, and a problematic genre trope than conscious politics. However, now that Kevorkian has pointed out the invisible arrow resonating in the negative space, we can't ignore it. It's up to us to change direction.

In the end, D-War is more valuable as pedagogy for globalization than as entertainment, demonstrating how the new Hollywood stereotype of the black body in the black box has returned to LA in the form of a monster movie from South Korea. Globalization is a thing of the past that is here to stay. The considerable success of D-War in South Korea, where it reached the all-time top ten of ticket sales, and its reasonable success in the U.S should have us looking at what we want, and don't want, to keep traveling to and fro our respective lands. (Adam Hartzell)

Site Update: Review of Chang (1997)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 13:03:10 +0900

Review by Duncan Mitchel

Chang

I have a confession to make: I don't much like Im Kwon-taek's films. Oh, I respect them: the old man learned his trade doing hackwork, and worked his way up to arthouse fare and international fame. He knows how to make a movie, and I'm never bored when I watch one. Between his expertise and that of his longtime cinematographer Jung Il-sung, Im delivers a product that panders both to my movie-fan's craving for visual impact (with gritty sex for seasoning), and to my pointy-headed intellectual's craving for pretension (with gritty sex to show his, um, artistic integrity).

But I feel a coldness in Im's work that puts me off in the end, and I also feel him trying to prove that he's an auteur of world-class cinema like Ingmar Bergman at his worst, though on the whole I like Im better than Bergman. (No, I haven't seen all 100 of Im's movies has anyone? but I've seen enough of those that put him on the map to have formed a working opinion.) He takes an oddly detached view of Korean life, as if he were an anthropologist describing Han exotica to titillate outsiders except that the outsiders are mostly Koreans themselves.

Chang (aka Downfall) isn't one of Im's best-known films, but it's a good example of his virtues and his limitations. It's the story of an orphan girl (Shin Eun-kyung, My Wife Is A Gangster) who's abducted into prostitution in the 1970s. Her career is a microcosm of life in South Korea's bars and brothels, as she goes from house to house and city to city. For a while she runs a place of her own before tumbling back down to the bottom; by that time she's given up hope of ever getting out of the Life. She meets a studly guy who gives her pleasure for the first time (in the film, anyway), but he turns out to be just another pimp, living off her earnings to make sure she never saves enough to buy herself out. She marries a rich older man, but he treats her as his own private whore for the use of guests and business associates, and when his college-age son discovers her background, she's back where she started. (She mentions that her husband even lent her to foreigners, which is a reminder that we see no foreigners onscreen. There's more to prostitution in Korea than the women who service American soldiers.)

Of course there's a shy, odd-looking country boy (Han Jong-hyeon) from Cholla Province, with lank shoulder-length hair, denim jacket, khaki pants, and clodhopper shoes. His name is Gil-yeong. He lets her sleep because she seems so tired, then looks at her body by matchlight; at dawn he slips out after the friend who brought him there. But later, when she's moved to a new house, she passes a machine shop where he's working, and they start seeing each other. "Are you okay?" she asks him, "Did you get a disease?" "It's almost cured now," he reassures her. They love each other, but they never seem to consider becoming a couple themselves. Gil-yeong always tracks her down, and keeps trying to find the town of Young-eun's early memories, a rural Eden that is gone forever because of the modernization and urbanization of Korea. (Gil-yeong is pulled over by the police three times in the movie for not wearing a helmet while riding his motorcycle; it's almost a running joke, maybe a tiny act of recurring resistance.)

There are other indications that Im intended Chang as an allegory of recent Korean history. Chae Young-eun's career spans two rather turbulent decades, and TVs are always on in the background. When President Park Chung-hee is assassinated, the women are blase. "Sure," comments one as Park's funeral plays on TV, "he made it easy for us to be whores." We're also told later in the film that it's hardly necessary to kidnap orphans into sex slavery anymore, with all sorts of women even respectable middle-aged ajummas voluntarily turning tricks for pin money and diversion from their boring middle-class lives.

Young-eun moves again, to a seaside town, and as Gil-yeong arrives on a rainy day, the accession of Chun Du-hwan to the Presidency is announced on TV. Young-eun is living with a taxi driver who's helping to pay off her debt. They plan to marry, and she invites Gil-yeong to come. He congratulates her; no jealousy. But her marriage fails, as does Gil-yeong's engagement to a yangban girl And so it goes, through the opening of the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, with archival footage of President Roh Tae-woo kicking off the festivities. (Once again I was struck by Roh's resemblance to George W. Bush, only with Buddha earlobes.) I enjoyed the appearance of various Korean character actors and stars to be, especially Park Sang-myeon, who would appear again with Shin Eun-kyeong in My Wife Is A Gangster. Here he's a heavy who runs a bar where Young-eun works, without the charm and humor he'd later display.

Probably the most striking aspect of Chang is Im's use of a cutaway set for the brothel, allowing him to track from room to room and peek at one john after another, their quirks and weaknesses. (It's a common feature in films about prostitution, from Lizzie Borden's Working Girls to Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho, to show the humorous fetishes of the customers, so very unlike the wholesome voyeurism of the filmmaker and audience.)

Im's next film after Chang was his version of the Korean evergreen Chunhyang, which won lots of awards and established him definitively on the international scene. Chunhyang fits with and comments on its predecessor, contrasting the photogenic and refined kisaeng of the good old days with the degraded bar girls nowadays. But kisaeng were at the top of the sex trade in their day; there were also lower-class, cut-rate working women (and men) who weren't as glamorous. Chunhyang's Cinderella-style happy ending contrasts with the unhappy one of Young-eun, who if she's not Everywoman is much more typical of her trade. (Duncan Mitchel)

Site Update: Review of M (2007)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 01:40:07 +0900

Review by Darcy Paquet

Midway through M, the novelist Min-woo types a repeated phrase on his computer, not unlike Jack Torrance in The Shining: "more specific, less poetic. more specific, less poetic..." I'm not sure what Min-woo thinks of this advice (he does subsequently press the delete button), but if the completed film is any indication, director Lee Myung-Se seems not to hold it in very high regard. M is a film filled with gorgeous imagery, flights of fancy, and bursts of color. However it makes very little effort to tie these images down into the world of people and things.

I wonder: are the "specific" and the "poetic" mutually exclusive? Many poets seem to go out of their way to immerse themselves in the specific and the concrete, and to my ears at least, it makes their work more poetic. Min-woo mentions James Joyce at one point in the film: perhaps the labyrinthine, complex architecture of a novel like Ulysses (or Finnegan's Wake) is what Lee Myung-Se is after. Still, M feels to me like a sad contradiction: the imagery beckons with sensual force, but the film throws up so many riddles and mind games that you're too preoccupied to feel its beauty.

There's none of Fritz Lang in M -- this is not an homage to the 1931 classic. Lee claims instead that the film's genesis came when Alfred Hitchcock visited him in a dream, presenting him with a book marked "M" on the cover. But I don't think even Hitchcock ever indulged himself so fabulously as Lee does here. M feels like the dream sequences that you sometimes see in other movies, except that it lasts for the entire film.

It's customary in a film review to introduce the plot, though even after watching M I'm still a bit in the dark. Let me offer up some observations instead: there is a novelist named Min-woo, who is feeling pressure to write his next book, though the words seem slow in coming. There is a young woman named Mimi, who may or may not exist, who pursues, and then is pursued by, Min-woo (is she his muse?). There is also a woman named Eun-hye who is engaged to Min-woo. They live together in a gorgeous apartment.

Gong Hyo-jin (Family Ties, Conduct Zero) plays the role of Min-woo's fiancee Eun-hye. Gong is a truly exciting actress -- her strength lies in the knife's edge to her voice, her "don't give me any bullshit" attitude, and the way that her characters always sound so grounded in reality. Yet in M her fiance, and indeed the film itself, seems to resent her for these qualities. If so, it's a particularly cruel bit of casting -- to choose an actress for her strengths, and then to make them seem like faults. Lee Yeon-hee's Mimi, by contrast, is the "poetic" to Gong's "specific". I'm a big fan of Lee as well -- her strength is her natural charm and screen presence, rather than her acting per se. Some actors just need to put themselves in front of the camera in order to make an impression. While watching this film, unable to make sense of what I was seeing, I spent most of the time simply waiting for Mimi to show up again in her purple dress.

But perhaps I'm being unfair to Gang Dong-won, who plays Min-woo. At the start of his career, I had a hard time understanding why many Koreans considered him so attractive (especially in his debut film, Too Beautiful To Lie). But he's looking pretty fabulous here, in his small, dark glasses and black jacket. It can't have been an easy role to play, either, with his character often flitting back and forth between dreamy romanticism and absurdist outbursts. Whatever you think of his performance here, Gang is establishing himself as a key actor of his generation.

With this film, I find myself on the unfamiliar side of a common debate. I'm generally not the kind of person who fixates on plot or tight narrative, in fact I often find it refreshing when filmmakers -- such as Lee Eung-su in Desire or Lee Myung-Se himself in First Love or Nowhere to Hide -- toss the plot aside for a while to focus on the image, all by itself. Still, despite the best efforts of its actors, much of M feels like an inside joke. In the films I mention above, the images pull emotions from the viewer, but here it's like I'm watching someone else's feelings on the screen.

M has not gone over particularly well in Korea. Walking out of the theater, I overheard a middle school student in front of me saying, "I tried to get some sleep, but the music kept waking me up." Viewers posting on the internet have called Lee a "swindler" for disguising a very personal, idiosyncratic film in such commercial trappings. That's perhaps unfair -- I think that Lee did genuinely hope to connect with his audience this time. But sadly, due to runaway ambition, miscalculation, or perhaps some other reason, M took a wrong turn and never made it home. (Darcy Paquet)

Site Update: Review of A World Without Mom (1977)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 02:12:28 +0900

Review by Duncan Mitchel

A World Without Mom (1977)

When I was a kid, I was a fan of Gertrude Chandler Warner's books about the Boxcar Children, four orphaned siblings who run away and live in an abandoned boxcar to keep from being separated. It's a popular premise to this day: think of Lemony Snicket, or the two brothers in The Host. Children expect to be taken care of, but dislike being dependent, so fantasies of being on one's own have a perennial appeal. Of course, in Korea as in many other countries, children have sometimes had to be independent. But fantasies, which can be stopped at will, are not reality. Kids can experience the heady, scary rush of being independent for a while, then go back to their ordinary, and hopefully safer, lives. (Note: some spoilers in the plot synopses to follow)

Young-chul (Kim Jae-seong), age 12, and his brother Young-mun (Lee Gyeong-tae), six, live with their father and mother in company housing at a salt farm where Father works. Young-chul's Mother (Jeong Yeong-suk, Maundy Thursday) is pregnant, and earns money by digging for oysters in the low-tide mud. Father (Park Geun-hyeong, Marrying the Mafia) suffered a head injury in an accident a year or so back, and has spells of terror and violence whenever a jet flies overhead. The newly completed Busan airport is nearby, so this happens too often. After Mother gives birth to yet another brother, Cheol-ho (Kim Hyeon-seong), she takes on Father's job at the salt farm so the family can stay in the company housing, but one day she collapses and dies. Honoring her dying command, Young-chul takes charge of the family. Carrying Cheol-ho on his back, he digs for oysters, tries to keep up with school, and works at the salt farm. Father gets progressively worse, and finally is sent to a mental hospital. The neighbors help out at first, but soon convince themselves that the boys would be better off sent away. Determined to stay together, the boys resist successfully. Just as the movie ends, Young-chul tells us that his diary was published; President Park Jeong-hee read it and decreed that the boys should be helped.

What makes A World Without Mom interesting is its generally low-key, almost social-realist tone. It dwells more on the experiences and pastimes of Korean children in the early 1970s and downplays the great melodramatic crises. Young-chul feels the weight of his responsibilities, but Young-mun is a cheerful and aggressive ringleader, playing Doctor with a neighbor girl and leading battles with other boys. Except for Father, who must scream and rave and generally behave like a Korean Renfield, director Lee Won-se (A Small Ball Shot by a Dwarf) got natural, appealing performances from the actors. The only problem is that, as was normal in those days, the characters' voices were dubbed by different actors, and the boys were voiced by adult women, not very convincingly. Young-chul especially sounds like a cartoon character, not a twelve-year-old of either sex.

A World Without Mom was popular enough to spawn two sequels and numerous imitations; the first sequel has been released on DVD along with the original. In A World Without Mom 2 (1978), Young-chul takes care of his brothers while letters pour in from fans of his published diary. Suddenly Father is released from the hospital, and the neighbors find a miraculously suitable woman for him to marry. The new Mother (Yun Mi-ra) is kind, patient, and undemanding, but Young-mun resents her arrival, and runs away from home. In the end everything turns out okay. The most interesting thing here is the handfuls of letters that Young-chul receives from other Korean children, but the filmmakers weren't interested in exploring how this fame affected Young-chul's life. Instead they made a conventional family melodrama, with puppy love, lost children on stormy nights and tearful reconciliations.

The filmmakers wrung out one more sequel, subtitled Festival of Chicks, in 1978. According to a plot summary on IMDB.com, in the third film Young-mun takes up baseball, but loses interest, so Young-chul must use all his big-brother powers to persuade him not to quit. No wonder it was the final film! But the original is well worth watching. (Duncan Mitchel)

A World Without Mom ("Eomma eomneun haneul arae"). Directed by Lee Won-se. Screenplay by Kim Mun-yeop. Starring Kim Jae-seong, Lee Gyeong-tae, Kim Hyeon-seong, Park Geun-hyeong, Jeong Yeong-suk, Ko Young-gap, Park Ju-hui. Cinematography by Park Seung-bae. Produced by Han Jin Enterprises. 120 min, 35mm, color. Released on June 23, 1977.

Site Update: Review of Beautiful Sunday (2007)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 11:05:59 +0900

Review by Adam Hartzell

Beautiful Sunday

Jin Kwang-kyo's debut Beautiful Sunday tells two stories to tell one story. First we meet our police detective Kang (Park Yong-woo) an obviously troubled man, who has found himself in the predicament of sacrificing ethics in order to finagle the extra cash he needs to pay for his wife's rising medical bills. He reduces charges and siphons off evidence in collusion with crime syndicates for a price, financial and moral. We meet him at a time when he seems to have become aware that the excruciatingly existential price is no longer worth the financial gain. Reassigned to the case of a serial rapist, we learn that his base moral crisis has taken a toll on his body in the forms of alcoholism and insomnia.

The other story nestled in is the possible subject in the serial rape case. A young, handsome law student named Min-woo (Namgung Min who played the film director in A Dirty Carnival) appears to suffer from a debilitating awkwardness around people. We discover that he is obsessed with a woman named Su-yeon (Min Ji-hye) in his neighborhood, a woman he eventually rapes. A few years following that incident, he meets up with her again. Able to hide his identity as the perpetrator of his horrible violation of her, he eventually schemes -- even though his character might be oblivious to this fact, he is in fact conniving -- her into trusting him to the point where she agrees to marry him.

This is not an easy film to watch due to its content. But as a debut, Beautiful Sunday shows tremendous promise, particularly demonstrated in Min-woos storyline. Jin maneuvers the camera around Min-woo and his victim to stimulate disturbance in the audience. This is not a 'love at first sight' point of view. There is clearly something wrong with Min-woo's interest. His surveillance is not innocent in a late-bloomer-at-love kind of way, where such ineptness would be endearing. His tactics hint early on as those of a stalker. And it is Jin's choice to hint as opposed to bludgeon, that is so powerful here. When Min-woo finally announces himself to Su-yeon, we are as frightened as she is. Equally adept at arousing discomfort is the dialogue, at least as it is translated into English, demonstrating Min-woo's asocial leanings. One visit to the bookstore at which his former-victim/future-wife works is to make copies because his "office is down", that is, the copier at his office is down. An earlier visit had him telling Su-yeon 'telling' in that Min-woo revealed a great deal about the unstable mind steeped inside, 'If you havent done it yet, we can do it'. When asked for clarification, he claims the ambiguous antecedent is 'dinner'. All this leads up to the horrifying reveal we experience later. And continuing with this subtlety, Director Jin reveals his skills as a director by making this plot reveal truly terrifying without the assistance of violent graphics. Director Jin merely works from the violent memories he's placed in his audience and the unsuspecting character.

There's a 'twist' involved in the plot that I won't go into, but most will be able to pick up on it early within the film. Emotions of guilt and responsibility abound in our characters and our sympathies are clearly complicated by the narrative. Detective Kang and Min-woo are not likeable characters, but they are not cliched in their unlike-ability. I cant quite place why Beautiful Sunday is titled as it is. (And the Korean title provides no illumination since it's merely a Hangul phoneticization, or as I like to say, the Hangulification, of the English title.) And Im sure once Ive finally gotten a chance to see more 2007 films, I wont be able to place it amongst the best. But Beautiful Sunday has encouraged me to watch out for Jin Kwang-kyo in the future. (Adam Hartzell)

Site Update: Review of Muoi (2007)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 01:21:29 +0900

Review by Kyu Hyun Kim

Muoi: Legend of a Portrait

Yun-hee (Jo An, Wishing Stairs), a writer who got her big break with a viciously gossipy "novel" about her party crowd, has run out of ideas. She is contacted by Seo-yeon (Cha Ye-ryun, Bloody Aria, Voice), her old friend now living in Viet Nam, and is told of a local piece of folklore involving a cursed portrait of a woman named Muoi (Anh Thu). Intrigued and more than a little desperate, Yoon-hee decides to stay with Seo-yeon to further research the story. What she does not realize is that there are creepy parallels between Muoi's tragic life and that of a certain friend of hers. Vengeance is best served cold, like a spring roll wrapped around mint leaves and fresh shrimp, no?

Finally Koreans, now comfortably ensconced in one of the most consumerist nations in the world, not to mention Asia, are getting themselves into making the kind of "exotic" horror-fantasy films that the British used to make about their old colonies: in this case, the exotic foreign land of choice is Viet Nam, presented as a luscious tropical paradise, overflowing with beautiful young women dressed in the magnificently figure-flattering ao dai, where a barely-out-of-her-teens Korean heiress can keep a spacious, majestic villa all to herself. Director Kim Tae-kyung, responsible for Ryung aka Ghost (2004), one of the lamest Korean horror films in recent memory, is thankfully not so all-thumbs with Muoi, which is not to say that the latter does not display that unrefined, beat-the-audience's-head with-a-blunt-object sensibility of his. Some of the gags in the movie are so artlessly done they become unintentionally hilarious or simply just annoying (How about the wallpaper that peels off with a noisome bubbling sound? When the Coen Brothers used the trick in Barton Fink, it was at least intentionally funny. Or the strangling-by-silk-scarf-caught-in-a-bike-wheel death that may or may not be a reference to Isadora Duncan?). The best part of the movie is actually the substantial flashback sequences involving Muoi's back-story, which provides the necessary frisson as well as a sense of emotional involvement, missing in the sections set in present day.

Jo An and Cha Ye-ryeon try gamely to muddle through the crudely concocted screenplay by the director and Ji Jak (Soo). Jo An is very attractive in a tomboy-ish get-up and as usual emotes with great enthusiasm and conviction. Unfortunately, her character is obviously engineered to placate internet-obsessed young girls among the viewing demographic and is about as intelligent or perceptive as a plastic bottle of Corn Whisker Tea. You certainly don't buy that she is a professional writer who gets paid for her scribbles, but then again, would you buy that from any among Korea's "internet novelists?" Ah, it must be a cultural thing: let's leave it at that. Cha Ye-ryeon comes off much better, looking decidedly otherworldly, with her cat-who-ate-your-canary-and-goldfish-too smile and preternaturally thin limbs swathed in the white ao dai, even though she is saddled with reams and reams of utterly boring expository dialogue. The Viet Namese actress Anh Thu and newcomer Hong So-hee (My Friend & His Wife) also leave strong impressions in their generally underdeveloped roles.

Muoi is a serviceable horror film with two or three effective jolts, but the real reason for any viewer to watch it to the finish is to gawk at its two incredibly beautiful lead actresses. Don't expect anything like a thoughtful, self-reflexive take on the (potentially ironic) position of Koreans now exploiting Viet Nam as an exotic land of the ghosts with unrequited love. (Kyu Hyun Kim)

Darcy's Blog: This and That

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 21:15:47 +0900

2007.10.03: This and that First of all, I think I owe readers some sort of apology or explanation for the glacial pace at which the site has been updated this year. (Alas, I think the glaciers are moving faster than I am these days) I've always tended to make progress on this site in spurts, whenever some free time appears, but this has been a particularly unforgiving year, work-wise (despite the fact I'm no longer doing subtitles). I've also been dealing with serious carpal tunnel issues in my arm for over a year now, which has affected the site in particular because I've had to cut down on the amount of typing I do. It's somewhat better now, but dealing with this has been an extremely frustrating experience... Anyway, I don't want to turn this into a litany of excuses, but I wanted to say please bear with me, and I hope to turn things around soon. In the meantime, some random comments:

* I'm writing this on the train, on my way down to the 12th Pusan International Film Festival. As more and more film festivals appear in Korea these days, it's becoming increasingly difficult for these events to draw large crowds. In the past couple months I've attended both the 1st Cinema Digital Seoul (CinDi) festival and the 8th Seoul International Film Festival, but the organizers of both events were really disheartened by the low turnout. PIFF, however, seems to have avoided that fate: even before the start of the event, more than 118,000 tickets have been sold, compared to 84,000 at the same time last year. This is really encouraging, though I'm not sure the reason for this sudden jump. In fact, most people I've talked to have seemed unimpressed with the program compared to previous years. A new, much more convenient ticket system has been put in place this year -- could this explain it? As for the Korean films screening at the festival, it looks like very small-scale, independent films will be in the spotlight this year. Most of these directors will be completely unknown to the international critics and programmers flying in to Busan, for example An Seul-ki who directed Five is Too Many a couple years ago, or Kim Dong-hyun who made A Shark. We'll see how it turns out -- I'm not expecting there to be as many outstanding new Korean films as there were last year, but if there are two or three discoveries, then PIFF can probably count it as a success. Unfortunately, a lot of the more interesting recent commercial films such as Epitaph, Wide Awake and Shadows in the Palace are missing from the program, even though they found room for movies like Hwang Jin Yi (yawn) and Paradise Murdered (shrug). As for me, Variety will once again be publishing PIFF festival dailies, so I'll be hard at work and probably won't get the chance to watch more than two or three films (sob).

* I've just recently returned from a trip abroad, first to my sister's wedding in Kentucky and then to the San Sebastian International Film Festival in Spain for a few days. From this year I've been working as a delegate (advisor) for San Sebastian, and I have to say it is really a beautiful city and a great event. There were three Korean films there this year: Shadows in the Palace (pictured) in the main competition, Epitaph in a new directors sidebar, and The Show Must Go On in a section for works that have screened at other festivals. All three films were received fairly well, though some gruesome scenes of fingernail-ripping in Shadows in the Palace sent numerous viewers heading for the exits. It also sort of confirmed for me that well-made, creative mainstream Korean films occupy an unusual place in the established Western festivals that traditionally celebrate arthouse cinema. Some critics, especially younger ones, are very enthusiastic about them, while others are turned off by the genre elements. The films are certainly viewed in a different manner than they are in Korea...

* No major hit films at this year's Chuseok holiday in September, although Kwak Kyung-taek's Love seems to be doing pretty well. (I haven't seen it yet, but will be watching it soon) My personal favorite among the bunch was Lee Joon-ik's The Happy Life (pictured). I admit that at first I viewed the success of King and the Clown as sort of a fluke, but after watching Radio Star and then this film, I've become sold on director Lee. His strong storytelling skills allow him to turn completely ordinary, predictable material into really engaging films. The Happy Life centers around three middle aged men who decide to revive the rock band of their youth. Sound unappealing? -- Give the film a chance. His next project will star the highly appealing actress Soo Ae in a story about a young woman who travels to Vietnam during the war in the 1970s as a singer, in an effort to meet up with her husband. The producer tells me this will be something unique, "war seen through a woman's eyes". Shooting will start later this year.

* Lastly, I don't think I've mentioned this here yet, but my second child is due to be born later this month. The doctor says it's another boy -- oh my! Jamie's looking forward to having a younger brother.

Site Update: Review of Hers (2007)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 21:14:25 +0900

Review by Tom Giammarco

HERs

Some films just lend themselves to hours of discussion after watching them. Films like David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, Vera Chytilova's Sedmikrasky or David Lynch's Eraserhead can continue to captivate you for hours or days after viewing while you try to sort through what you just saw. To this list, I would like to add HERs.

That is not to say that HERs is in any way as surreal as the above-mentioned films, but it will lead to long conversations with friends about the most basic of questions... "Who was this story about?" The enjoyable confusion regarding the answer to this question was exactly what director Kim Jeong-joong was hoping to achieve as reflected in the title of this movie. Is this story about one woman named 'Gina' at various decades in her life, or is this the story of four different women with similar destinies and unfulfilled dreams?

The film is divided into three distinct chapters taking place in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and a remote village in Alaska with an opening and closing scene in the countryside of Korea. The Gina(s) that we meet are each filled with hopes of impossible dreams and with a quirky love of ice cream. The first Gina that we spend any amount of time with is Gina Los Angeles (Kim Hye-na) whose naivety and lack of English have led her into a hard life of abuse and sex, but still continues to have great expectations in this new land of opportunity she finds herself in. The fact that her dreams are unrealistic is represented by her hope to witness coconuts growing on the palm trees of LA--even after she is told that they are the wrong kind of trees. When we first meet her, she seems to be wandering aimlessly and innocently around the dark city streets and we get the impression that she has just arrived in the country. That impression is destroyed when her ex-boyfriend, an LA gang boss (Tyler Tuione), puts a hit on her for running away from him. He contracts a shady Korean-American man named Lucas (Will Yun Lee) to locate her. Lucas does so with relative ease, but he finds himself strangely attracted to this unusual young woman whose experiences have not destroyed her hope in finding true love.

Gina Las Vegas, or a thirty-something year old Gina (Elizabeth Weisbaum), is much more hardened but still holds onto some impossible dreams. The fantasy element of her dreams is shown in how she waters her long-dead roses with the most unusual liquids in the hope of restoring them to life. She also, supposedly, longs to be a fashion designer but we never see her working towards that end. Instead, she earns her money as a prostitute. She is hostile to anyone and everyone she encounters but this seems only to be a defense mechanism against her own shame and self-loathing. We know she is ashamed of herself when she refuses to meet a man, called only 'K' (Karl Yune), who professes to have fallen in love with her. He, however, knows her only as a student of fashion and not for what she really is.

It would be equally fascinating to watch a movie about the character of K as it is to watch Gina struggle through her life. K is seemed to be full of dreams but in his case he is clearly on the verge of abandoning them and the torment of his life is causing his character to change in a direction he does not want. K wanted to be an artist but has nearly given that dream up due to a lack of confidence in his old work. He is a romantic, but disappointment in love has been turning him bitter and his encounter with Gina may have been the final straw. What is most interesting is that he professes to be in love with Gina, waiting hours for her to show up, but when they finally meet he does not know who she is, simply assuming that she is one of the many prostitutes that work in Las Vegas.

Gina Alaska (Susie Park) is a woman in her forties who has traveled as far north as she could in the hopes of seeing the Aurora Borealis. She seems to be doing this for self-validation as she claims the aurora will only appear to those who are pure. We know for a fact that the alcoholic woman staggering through the snow is anything but pure as she posts her business card depicting a beautiful, half-naked woman all over town--including on the door of the church. She comes to the bitter conclusion that the days of selling her body are over when one client asks where the hot, Asian woman is upon meeting her. However, what she also fails to realize is that her would-be client (Chris Devlin) appears to really care about her and wants to be her friend and viewers will quickly come to the see that what he is offering could be more as the tattoo he on has on his arm is exactly the same as one Gina Los Angeles saw on a man she expected to be her soulmate.

HERs may not be for everyone. It is intentionally full of stereotypes and some of the most non-politically correct statements come out of the most surprising places. However, it is also a movie of lost souls and broken dreams that will leave you with a lasting impression. (Tom Giammarco)

Review of Cadaver (2007)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 21:14:02 +0900

Review by Kyu Hyun Kim. (Note that this film has been retitled from "The Cut" to "Cadaver")

Cadaver

Seon-hwa (Ha Ji-min, Swallow, Daejanggeum) is a new student at an elite medical school. Along with a typical bunch of slasher-flick's-potential-victim cast members, including Ki-beom the Boyfriend (O Tae-gyung), the Nerd (Soy), the Fatso (Moon Won-ju), the Slut (Chae Yun-seo) and the Weirdo (On Joo-wan), she is initiated into a harrowing dissection class, overseen by arrogant hard-butt Dr. Han (Jo Min-ki), nicknamed the Engineer. She notices an attractive cadaver with a rose tattoo on her breast, but thinks little of it, until her classmates begin to be murdered one by one. Apparently the perp is highly skilled in surgical techniques (the victims are discovered with hearts removed). Soon it is uncovered that Seon-hwa's friends are sharing a nightmare involving a really ticked-off-looking one-eyed surgeon. Convinced that the dead woman with the rose tattoo has something to do with supernatural goings-on, Seon-hwa and Ki-beom start an investigation to uncover her identity.

Cadaver, scripted by Jeon Sun-wook (Vampire Cop Ricky), and adapted and directed by Son Tae-woong (best known as the co-screenwriter for Bong Joon-ho's Barking Dogs Never Bite), is a fairly ambitious horror film that traverses several sub-genres: medical thriller, slasher film, ghostly horror and even a bit of Cabinet of Dr. Caligari-like psychological creep-out. Son demonstrates directorial sensibilities attuned to visual flair and economical presentation of character traits via sharp dialogue. As per recent Korean genre films, technical aspects are pretty impressive. Special makeup on the actors playing cadavers are not grossly overdone, and meticulous replicas of dissected bodies are sufficiently realistic, although not as graphic as in, say, Anatomie (2000). There are a few nimble and imaginative sequences, including the long take with swishing camera movement that captures the outbreak of psychological panic in the med school dorm, capped by an explosive fit suffered by one character, and Seon-hwa facing a dream-vision of the mysterious cadaver in broad daylight.

Unfortunately, Cadaver crashes and burns in the last third, never recovering from a "plot twist" revelation that establishes a blood relation between two seemingly antagonistic characters. The story performs several gymnastic feats of bodily contortion, until it shakes the audience's emotional investment loose like a medicated mutt would do with fleas. Yeah, we do find out what the ghost's slow gesticulations are supposed to mean, or who the heck that one-eyed surgeon is, if we are patient enough: I seriously doubt anybody would care by that point. The film's thin narrative simply cannot sustain all the things-go-bump-in-the-night stuff that also must double as clues for the viewers to piece together the "mystery" plot, which does not make any sense anyway, except on a literary-symbolic level. (To claim Cadaver has plot holes is like saying a velociraptor has really big toenails) The result is a movie that succeeds neither as a brainless spook show nor as a brain-teasing thriller. (It might have worked frankly better as a remake-slash-variant of Dr. Caligari, completely dispensing with any attempt to "rationally" explain why certain things happen to whom)

Like Antarctic Journal, (2005) another misfire with a clearly talented director at the helm, Cadaver leaves the viewers in the dust, so busy trying to spin its yarn that wrapping itself up into an inert cocoon by the last reel. (Kyu Hyun Kim)

Site Update: Review of Driving With My Wife's Lover (2007)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 23:34:55 +0900

Review by Darcy Paquet

Driving With My Wife's Lover

What do you do when you suspect that your wife is having an affair? Tae-han, a shy, middle-aged man who makes a living engraving seals, decides to confront the issue as directly as he can. He leaves his seaside town and travels to Seoul where his wife's presumed lover, a taxi driver named Joong-shik, lives. Waiting for the right moment, he flags down Joong-shik's taxi and asks him for a long distance drive back to his hometown. Joong-shik agrees, and their journey begins.

The pair are about as different as two personalities can be. Joong-shik chatters without pause, flirts with all the women he meets and believes that life is basically what you make of it. Tae-han feels disturbed and threatened by this youthful energy, particularly when it starts to get him entangled in various awkward and ridiculous situations. Soon enough, though, it sets him to thinking about his own life and marriage. Could this man and his wife really be in love? Not that such thoughts distract him from his goal of revenge -- after all, Joong-shik has a wife too.

Kim Tai-shik's debut film premiered at the 2006 Pusan International Film Festival before going on to screen at Sundance, Rotterdam, Buenos Aires, and other festivals. The creative energy of Driving With My Wife's Lover is most apparent in the first half, powered along by the lead characters' idiosyncratic quirks and various unexpected turns in the narrative. When the road trip ends and the film moves into its second half, a darker mood settles in and the film takes on a more realistic turn.

Great casting goes a long way towards making up for what is a fairly thin premise for a film. Park Kwang-jung, so memorable in his role as the poet Rimbaud in Song Neung-han's No. 3 (1997), expresses as much with his thin, lanky body as with his voice, and manages to make Tae-han sympathetic without being admirable. Jeong Bo-seok of Virgin Stripped Bare by her Bachelors hits just the right balance of charisma and deviousness in his portrayal of Joong-shik. However the brightest light in the film is Jo Eun-ji (The President's Last Bang), who plays Joong-shik's wife. Jo has an unusually lively screen presence, and we end up seeing much of the film's second half through her eyes. When she begins to tire of life and grow weary of her husband's antics, we feel ourselves being pulled down with her.

It's hard to say if Driving With My Wife's Lover achieves what it set out to do. Was I supposed to feel claustrophobic and grounded in the second half, after cruising along with the film's easy creativity in the first? If so, then I guess the film can be termed a success, but I'm not sure that will make me any more fond of it. (Darcy Paquet)

Site Update: Review of Our School (2007)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 23:33:49 +0900

Review by Darcy Paquet

Our School (2007)

Our School may not seem at first glance to be a particularly eye-catching documentary. Centered on a K-12 school for Korean students in Hokkaido, Japan, the film contains few dramatic twists and for the most part just observes the students at school interacting with each other and expressing their thoughts. Nonetheless the film achieved remarkable popular success within the realm of independent cinema, attracting more than 70,000 viewers over four months, partly by promoting community screenings in provincial cities throughout Korea. At the time of this writing it is the most succussful Korean documentary of all time.

What made this film so popular? South Koreans will obviously view it differently from people of other nationalities, in that it touches so much on issues of Korean identity. Set in a country where discrimination against Koreans exists on both a personal and an institutional level, the film shows how Korean culture and language serve to create a unique, close-knit community for these strikingly idealistic kids. As one student puts it, "It's a different matter to maintain your national identity in South Korea, your homeland, compared to Japan. In South Korea, you can keep it passively, you don't need to exhibit it, but for Korean residents in Japan, if you don't demonstrate it, it will fade away."

There is also the issue of language. Non-Koreans watching this film will in one sense be experiencing it in black-and-white, in not being able to hear the distinctive Korean dialect that is a product of the students' upbringing. In this and other respects, I imagine that Korean viewers find in this film a fascinating mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar.

Director Kim Myung-jun narrates Our School with simple, straightforward observations, and as viewers we can sense the personal warmth he feels for the students. However he is somewhat coy, at least initially, in presenting the political dimensions to his story. Only after a thorough introduction to the school, the teachers, the students, and various school programs does he mention that the school was founded with support from North Korea. Most of the students also seem to feel a stronger bond with the North than the South, though they are in no way hostile to the latter. Later on, the oldest students in the school take a trip to the North, which they find tremendously inspiring, even as it further alienates them in Japan, where anti-North Korean feeling is rising.

Perhaps the most surpising aspect of this documentary is the sincerity, values and passion that you find in the words of these teenagers. They represent perhaps a unusual case of being schooled in socialist ideals while growing up within a capitalist system. The contrast with teenagers from contemporary South Korea could not be more striking.

Yet in many ways the students' lifestyle is in danger of disappearing. The school faces declining enrollment, both due to the shrinking population of Hokkaido and to the fact that many parents are nervous about depriving their children of an education in Japanese schools. Institutional discrimination doesn't help: the government has designated it a vocational school, making it more difficult for the students to attend university. Parents had to fight even to get the street in front of the building declared a school zone.

In some ways director Kim avoids asking the hard questions in this documentary. Issued related to North Korea, for example, or the even more blasphemous question: would it really matter if these students were to lose their Korean identity, and fully assimilate into Japanese society? Though I suppose to a certain extent these questions can be found within the documentary itself, in the students' passion and the conviction of their beliefs.

For me personally, Our School was intriguing, but not nearly as involving and thought-provoking as Kim Dong-won's Repatriation, to name another local documentary that became a theatrical hit. I also found myself being more drawn in by another recent documentary that examined the relationship between Japan and Korea: Kim Deok-cheol's People Crossing the River (despite that film's structural faults). Maybe it was Our School's fascination with Korean collective identity that left me, as a non-Korean, feeling left on the outside. Nonetheless, I learned a lot over the film's 131 minute running time, and anyone with a special interest in this area will find it a worthwhile viewing. (Darcy Paquet)

Our School ("Uri-hakkyo"). 131 min., DV, color. Directed and narrated by Kim Myeong-jun. Produced by Studio Nurinbo. Edited by Kim Myeong-jun and Park So-hyun. Distributed by Jinjin Pictures. Co-winner of Woonpa Fund Award for Best Documentary at 2006 Pusan International Film Festival. Released in Korea on March 29, 2007. Seoul admissions: 19,202. Seoul admissions: 32,154. Nationwide admissions: 55,815 (70,000+ including group screenings).

Site Update: More PiFan reports

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 14:03:22 +0900

A report from Adam, and a final report from Kyu Hyun...

Adam's Report

My time at PiFan was brief, but well spent. Juggling friends and film, I began with something new for me at a South Korean film festival - music. I met three of my ex-pat-ing friends at Bucheon's Citizen Hall because one of my friends is a huge fan of the Korean band Deercloud and they were playing, along with two other bands, after the international premiere of the Japanese film Nana 2 (dir. Otani Kentaro, pictured). The female lead singer of Deercloud has a nice, husky voice that I've found myself drawn to as well. I anxiously await their CD as my friend has, since they've been delayed in its production having to hone a new drummer after their original drummer was called in for his obligatory military service, complications one would think quite a few young Korean bands run into. Deercloud shared billing with two other woman-fronted bands, including a lite-riot-grrrl band called something like Scary Cat, but I'm not sure if that's correct. One of the gimmicks of that band's lead singer was to occasionally make a piercing scream that caused me to face up to how old I've become, wanting to say after the second scream, 'Please don't'.

The films didn't come for me until the next day. During that day, I was able to meet all but one of the film friends/colleagues I'd hoped of meeting, plus made the acquaintance of some new ones, in the nicely random ways that festival chaos allow - Paolo Bertolin in line at the PiFan chartered bus stop, Tom Giammarco in a park outside the CGV theatre, Darcy on our way to E-Mart to look for the plug adaptor we never found, and Kyu at a chocolate cafe outside the CGV. Traveling to films, processing after films, reconnecting after months of seeing each other, these moments are always too brief, but they are still, nonetheless, greatly appreciated and add as much to festivals as the films themselves.

Speaking of the films, I wanted to focus on South Korean films, but the overlap between my schedule and the festival's only enabled me to catch two recent ones - Resurrection of the Butterfly and Beautiful Sunday. The former is salvaged in my mind for the journey it was more so than the finished product. The idea was to couple a student director with a more experienced director, so student Kim Min-sook was coupled with veteran Lee Jung-gook. The film connects the three primary actors through two stories of love triangles. Director Kim's story works off the historical character of Non-gae from the Chosun Dynasty, a kisaeng known for remaining loyal to the Chosun dynasty by killing the Japanese commander who conquers her village rather than transferring her services as a prostitute/performer to the Japanese. Liberties are taken with this historical character's story that might upset the purists in the audience, but no claim is made that this represents what happened. This is merely speculative history, a 'what if' scenario pondering different trajectories from different outcomes, hence part of the reason for its presence in the line-up for this Fantastic Film Festival. The second story finds a man whose head injury limits his recall into the events that preceded his appearance deep into the mountains, where a mountain ranger finds him. Only a diary leads to clues about who this man is and what he's done. Ironically, it is the student's first half that shows greater promise than the veteran's second half. But when I was informed that veteran Director Lee directed the excruciating The Letter (1997), it made sense that the student would surpass the veteran here.

Jin Kwang-kyo's Beautiful Sunday also works with essentially two stories of past and present, but weaves them in and out of each other. Aware of narrative conventions, you know these stories will turn out to be connected, but how they are connected is nuanced enough that many might find the conclusion unexpected. A police detective has been pushed to taking bribes to cover his wife's medical bills and all this stress has also pushed him into various states of insomnia and alcohol abuse. The other story follows a young man whom we soon discover is a rapist. Where this film excels is in some well directed dialogue (at least considering the English translation) in the rapist's story, along with a horrifying revelation of his identity to his wife later on in his story.

I attempted to catch another South Korean film, Kim Sam-ryeok's Aseurai, but a volunteer guided me into the wrong theatre, where my (falsely) assigned seat constrained me too greatly to leave when I finally realized I was about to see the Japanese film Fuckin' Runaway (pictured) instead. Kyu notes above how he had apprehensions about this film directed by Motohashi Keita and initially I thought I was going to agree with him, having an aversion as of late for films that romanticize mental illness. However, the film slowly grew on me as I traveled alongside our main characters, escapees from a mental health facility, for this road trip through Japan, their psyches, and the intersubjective therapies of their friendship and their eventual courtship. What probably most warmed me to the film were its subtle droppings of dialect and the stereotypes Japanese hold about those who possess said vocal signatures. Such are the kinds of cultural nuances I will not fully apprehend, but would like to know more about and hear about from others who have seen this film.

The only other non-Korean film I saw was the Australian gross-fest Feed. Part of the nightly "Forbidden Zone" at PiFan, director Brett Leonard takes us into the life of an Interpol internet sex crime detective as he investigates a feeder/gainer relationship. The text at the beginning of the film claims this film is based on real events between consenting adults. I'll leave verification of that statement to others, but Feed informs us that feeder/gainer relationship is an S/M variation where one person (the feeder) feeds someone else (the gainer) with the goal of reaching Herculean poundage in the gainer to the point of immobility and complete dependency on the feeder. Our detective has found himself a feeder whose goal appears to be more than that, feeding his gainers to death. (And this leads him from Sydney to, of all places, the Toledo, Ohio suburb of Sylvania, furthering the stereotype of the girth possessed by those of my home state.) This film allows me to utilize one of the newly anointed words by the Mirriam-Webster dictionary - This is a ginormously sick film. Sickness, of course is part of the point of films like this and the type of films festivals like PiFan celebrate. The film suffers from a poor use of actor Jack Thompson and the occasionally heavy-handed dialogue, even heavy-handed for a film of this genre, but otherwise it entertains within its own genre-determined parameters, making you intentionally disgusted and disturbed.

The highlight of the festival for me was the 4-film retrospective of director Lee Bong-rae (pictured). According to the PiFan program, Lee was born in 1922 and studied in Japan where he worked as a journalist. Coming back to the Korean peninsula after the Korean War, he began work as a critic and scriptwriter. Of the four films screened, I caught three - The Petty Middle Manager (1961), New Wife (1962), and A Salaryman (1962), only missing the one given the poor English title of The Door of the Body (1965). Each one I caught left me truly delighted.

Apparently, Lee's best known film is The Petty Middle Manager which follows the troubles of a patriarch as his daughter joins his firm just as his boss demands he open up a dance school in the free room on the floor of his division for his boss's mistress. This said boss will return, as will his treacherous ways, in A Salaryman where our ethical patriarch refuses to enable his boss's embezzling of money from the company and finds himself fired and competing for a position at another company with none other than his eldest daughter. Each of these films works its plot tension around the predicament of the rapid modernization of South Korea and its effects on family roles, particularly changing courtship rituals. The changing views of marriage dominate in New Wife where the matriarch attempts to sabotage a son's marriage to a farm girl in hopes of arranging his marriage to a woman of a higher social standing.

Lee's films are engaging and humorous. (Check out the lobby fight scene in New Wife or the awkward scolding of father in front of daughter by father's boss in The Petty Middle Manager.) Each provides wonderful swatches of the wider shifting social tapestry of modernization that South Korea was experiencing in the 60's. (Interestingly, two of the films have a character make disparaging comments about movie-goers. Ironic when you think of it, since such ridicule implicates everyone watching the particular films.) They are also films that are slightly damaged. The first ten minutes of the surviving print of New Wife contains no visuals, only dialogue. (Since New Wife was originally a radio drama, it makes me curious if the dialogue used was from the radio drama rather than the film.) The reverse happens in the middle of A Salaryman, ten minutes of visuals without audio. The quality of the prints is what led the volunteers to apologize to me and other western patrons profusely, almost to the point of appearing to discourage ones attendance. Thankfully, I didn't heed these apologies. (And so as not to give a false impression, the volunteers do a tremendous job at PiFan, as at all South Korean festivals I've attended. In the example I gave above of being guided into the wrong theatre, it was as much my fault as theirs. I should have checked the signage as we were going in.) Although not appropriate for a Fantastic Film Festival, I was glad to have the opportunity to catch this director about whom I was ignorant. Regardless of the presence of such films being an aberration, I have now gone from ignoramus to acolyte concerning Director Lee Bong-rae and will preach his praises from here on out.

Kyu Hyun: Report #2

The future identity of PiFan, as Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival is affectionately known, was one of the topics floating around in the moist, rain-drenched air among the guests, panelists and journalists. Festival Director Han Sang-joon, himself a former journalist and a well-known cinephile/film critic who recently translated a French-language study of Francois Truffaut into Korean, is known to be oriented toward intellectually challenging and aesthetically sophisticated films, but is well-versed enough in the traditions and future directions of fantastic cinema worldwide to avoid making strange choices like putting Breakfast at Tiffany's in the "Family" section of the festival. It seems pretty obvious to me, though, that Han and quite a few others involved with the PiFan want it to be something more than a holy site for the fans of Asian cult horror films. I wouldn't be too surprised if PiFan eventually loses "Fantastic" in "Fantastic Film Festival" and be reborn as "PiFF"--wait, isn't that already taken by Busan? Oh, Busan is now spelled with "B," per the We-don't-want-to-use-McCune-Reischauer-'cause-Chinese-use-Pinyin alphabetization system.

The aforementioned "cult horror film" fans have always had a convenient way of celebrating their tastes, i.e. midnight screenings, but the always-well-attended all-nighters in Puchon, for two years in a row, have been overwhelmed by the Masters of Horror TV series. I mean, yes, MOH have presented really great horror shorts in the rate of maybe one per every four episodes, and in South Korea, where the DVD market is barely showing signs of life, it makes sense that both fans of classic horror (recognizing name-value directors like Tobe Hooper, Joe Dante and Dario Argento) and casual fantasy fans would descend on Puchon to watch the episodes projected on big screens. I managed to catch three episodes (Tobe Hooper's The Damned Thing [pictured], Stuart Gordon's Black Cat and John Landis's Family), all enthusiastically received by the overwhelmingly young Korean audience.

By sheer chance, I also caught Kaw, a direct-to-DVD quality update of Hitchcock's Bird with ravens instead of seagulls, and it was a mighty confusing experience because Sean Patrick Flannery (most famous for playing the arch-villain Greg Stillson in the TV drama Dead Zone) plays a dour and depressed sheriff in that movie and also plays a dour and depressed sheriff in The Damned Thing. What the heck? Anyway, Kaw is simply a generic nature-runs-amok film in which, of all things, Mad Cow Disease is given as an explanation for the raven's strange behavior, including banding together as packs and apparently developing military strategies against hapless humans. It had never occurred to me that Mad Cow Disease actually could make the infected animals smarter before killing them off. The Damned Thing was a trifle better, mostly more energetic, with blood and guts flying off with greater enthusiasm, but even though penned by an ace screenwriter (Richard Christian Matheson), it really didn't do a good job of adapting Ambrose Bierce's short story, which by the way keeps the monster truly invisible until the very end. The episode's version of the monster is disappointingly similar to the oil-slick beastie in Dean Koontz's Phantom, and its bleak ending was telegraphed well ahead. John Landis's Family was a notch above the ultimately pointless Damned Thing, turning out to be a well-scripted if predictable horror comedy, reminiscent of Bob Balaban's underrated Parents. George Wendt is well-cast as the psychotic protagonist and gives a good performance but I think it would have been more fun if Landis had cast someone like Bruce Willis in the role. Nah, maybe not.

In any case, it was Stuart Gordon's Black Cat (pictured) that stole everyone's thunder--or tongue. Jeffrey Combs of Re-Animator fame gives perhaps the performance of his career as Edgar Alan Poe, whose writer's block may or may not be resolved by the presence of an evil black cat Pluto, beloved by his tuberculosis-stricken teenage wife Veronica. The bulk of the episode, other than a few wink-wink homages to Roger Corman's Poe adaptations, is a completely faithful retelling of Poe's classic story. There are no gimmicks, no CGI, no synth noodledy-doodle score: it's simply Poe in his own voice, as the tortured alcoholic genius re-fashions his pathological obsessions and propensity for petty cruelty into a fictional descent into hell that has lost none of its power to grab and squeeze a viewer's heart after more than a century. A loving tribute to Poe, the Black Cat episode drew a spontaneous applause from the young audience and may well be the best film I have seen in the entire festival. So there is good reason why TV is trumping theatrical cinema in the US now, after all.

This year's Korean classics retrospective at Pucheon was an inspired choice, a triptych of comedies and one melodrama directed by Lee Bong-rae. Samdeung gwajang, (The Third-Rate Section Chief, 1961) given an awful English title A Petty Middle Manager, is not only a rare glimpse into the milieu of the post-April 19 "revolution" Korea, after students and citizens had toppled Syngman Rhee's dictatorship in 1960, but also a showcase for the amazing acting prowess of Kim Seung-ho. Kim plays a decent, soft-spoken salaryman patriarch critically lacking in self-confidence, and forced to take responsibility for the improper use of company resources by his villainous superior (Kim Hee-gap). Nearly all of Section Chief's characters are smart, capable of witty repartee, and optimistic to the point that they seem to hail from some alternative history of Korea. At the center is Kim Seung-ho, whose subtle performance, full of pathos yet with twinkles in his eyes, makes even the patriarchal I-am-the-bus-driver sermon he delivers at the end wholly endearing and believable. The film's only glaring problem is that Do Geum-bong, who plays the protagonist's vivacious and ambitious daughter, looks only four or five younger than Hwang Jeong-soon, playing her mother. While not exactly an undiscovered gem, The Third-Rate Section Chief nonetheless confirms my view that there are many more worthwhile '60s Korean films to be discovered.

Site Update: Review of Epitaph (2007)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 00:54:10 +0900

Review by Kyu Hyun Kim

Epitaph

An old doctor, circa 1979 (the year President Park Chung-hee was assassinated: Park's Japanese moniker, Takaki Masao, is the same as that of the doctor), discovers that the Ansaeng (Safe Life) Hospital, one of the most modern medical facilities in the colonial period, is about to be demolished. This sets off reminiscences of his internship days at the hospital in 1942, when he got caught up in a number of supernatural episodes. Epitaph, the debut film of the Jeong Brothers (Jeong Beom-sik and Jeong Sik -- "Jeong Brothers" is how they prefer to be listed in the credits), is a refined, intelligent and surprisingly effective Gothic horror. Well cast and acted, Epitaph is particularly notable for its close family resemblance to the slightly pale and artificial exquisiteness of certain Japanese genre films: it in fact can be favorably compared to the high-end Japanese adaptations of the willfully perverse but sparingly beautiful Edogawa Rampo mysteries (Tsukamoto Shinya's Gemini, Kawashima Toru's The Man Who Travels with Picture Relief).

Epitaph has a convoluted (but currently fashionable) multiple flashbacks-and-time lag structure, but does not devolve into a confusing mess, which is a huge relief. The story is roughly divided into three segments. In the first, the young Jeong-nam/Masao (Jin Ku, who played Jo In-sung's young punk lieutenant in Dirty Carnival) finds himself attracted to a stunning-looking young girl's dead body, allegedly a victim of a failed double suicide. The second segment, flagrantly influenced by Old Boy (it even repeats a key line of dialogue, "I love you, Ajjeossi" -- a generic Korean word for a man some years older), is a tale of Asako (Ko Joo-yeon, Blue Swallow), the only survivor of a fatal car crash. Asako is haunted by the awful ghost of her mother, and Doctor Lee (Lee Dong-gyu, Desire, To Sir with Love/Bloody Reunion), convinced that this is the working of her survivor's guilt, attempts to cure her. Finally, the hospital's surgeons Dr. Kaneda (Kim Bo-gyeong, Friend) and Dr. Kim Dong-won (Kim Tae-woo, Hypnotized, Woman on the Beach) find themselves wrapped up in some serial murders of Japanese soldiers.

In my opinion the second episode, while expertly directed and most effective as a horror film, seems to play at a different emotional pitch, and interferes with the integration of all the other elements into a coherent whole. The key to the Jeong Brothers' success is that they do not overreach: they are ambitious--aesthetically and dramaturgically--but only within the confines of a world carefully molded to retain its artifice. Unlike Black House or The Cut, there is little here that reminds one of a Hollywood blockbuster or a mainstream action thriller. In contrast, quite a few scenes evoke the milieu of an old RKO studio production or a modern Japanese theater, dressed with the state-of-the-art visual effects only when needed. Production design by Lee Min-bok, Kim Yoo-jung, Hae Jae-min and others, in its quasi-minimalist way, is impressively detailed and textured. The sound design by Lee Sang-wook also deserves mention. Yoon Nam-ju's cinematography carefully maintains the faded-photograph tone, while playing with the viewer's vision via deliberately out-of-focus visuals and other techniques.

The cast, including reliable supporting players like Kim Eung-su (a super-veteran somehow typecast as a Japanese these days) and Ye Soo-jeong (the mother in Save the Green Planet), deliver good to terrific performances for the most part. Jin Ku as the young protagonist is perhaps a little too subdued to carry the film, but Kim Tae-woo has little problem conveying the happiness, anxiety and eventual terror of a mild-mannered neurosurgeon married to a talented and devoted wife. Nonetheless their acting thunder is stolen by the ridiculously pretty Ko Joo-yeon, another Korean child actress who we dearly hope continues her film career.

While Epitaph does engage in the requisite Tale of Two Sisters-like "plot twist," it is at least done in a way that makes some sense in terms of the characters in question. Most important of all, unlike most Korean horror films of recent years, Epitaph is genuinely scary, without resorting to the usual PSC (Pointless Sadako Clones) tactics: one sequence in particular, in which Asako's dead mother, looking like a Barbie squished by a steamroller, gargles and screeches what may have been intended as a lullaby to her frightened-out-of-her-mind daughter, made me want to hide under the seat.

Epitaph, while not quite as grandiloquently entertaining as Black House, nonetheless will make a significant contribution to rehabilitating K-horror's international reputation. With this fastidious, refined yet emotionally satisfying Gothic horror piece, the Jeong Brothers have successfully proven that they are talents to watch out for in the future, their debt to Park Chan-wook notwithstanding. (Kyu Hyun Kim)

Darcy's Blog: A Film From North Korea

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 00:52:57 +0900

2007.07.31: A film from North Korea: The Schoolgirl's Diary (2006) I don't usually get the opportunity to write about North Korean films on this site, which is an unfortunate omission. I'm told that (in contrast to the past) there are now ways to access films from the North in Seoul, but I'm having such a hard time keeping up with South Korean cinema that so far I haven't pursued it. A couple weeks ago, however, I had the opportunity to watch Jang In-hak's The Schoolgirl's Diary ("Han nyeohaksaeng-ui ilgi", 2006), which was an eye-opening viewing in several respects.

North Korea made only two feature films in 2006. This one was by far the more successful, supposedly selling 8 million tickets across the country. I'm not sure to what extent box-office figures in North Korea can be trusted, but scholar Leonid Petrov, who gave a short talk before the screening, says that on a recent trip to North Korea nearly everyone he met had seen it and was happy to give an opinion on it.

Indeed, while it may strike Western viewers as a bit bland, its portrayal of young North Koreans is comparatively provocative at home -- assessments of the film were often split by age, Petrov said, with older viewers being more critical. Perhaps the most notable example is the unexpected opening shot, which is a close-up on a Mickey Mouse backpack. As the camera pulls back, we see a crowd of schoolchildren, all wearing Mickey Mouse backpacks (imported via China, we can probably assume). We are then introduced to our heroine, Su-ryeon, whose biggest goal in life appears to be to live in a modern apartment complex. A rather materialist dream, one might say.

In truth, though, Su-ryeon (played by rising star Pak Mi-hyang, pictured above) seems most upset by the lack of attention she receives from her scientist father. And understandably so -- he is so devoted to his work in the city that he barely even sees his family at all. On the rare occasions he is home, he acts in ways that frustrate or embarrass his daughter. Su-ryeon finds herself growing bitter towards her family, and unsure what to do with her own life.

This ultimately redemptive tale has received unusual attention outside of North Korea, with a Paris-based company (Pretty Pictures) buying French language rights last year after its screening at the Pyongyang Film Festival. This spring Pretty Pictures was screening the film to potential buyers at the Cannes Film Festival's market.

For me The Schoolgirl's Diary is strongly reminiscent of mainstream 1970s South Korean cinema, in its look and production values, and also in its style of storytelling. I can't say the film drew me to the edge of my seat, but it did provide a few interesting contrasts with films from the South. For one thing, I can't think of any South Korean film that contains a character quite like Su-ryeon's younger sister, a dorky tomboy soccer player who was played by a real athlete. The film's emphasis on athletics was rather interesting (in one scene, for example, Su-ryeon wins an argument with a classmate by beating her in a footrace).

One of the other people at the screening was professor Stephen Epstein of the Victoria University of Wellington. He told me that the film was consistent with something that he found in an overview of recent North Korean literature. In virtually all of the short stories he read, the main character expressed some form of doubt about life, work or society. Although they come around in the end, realizing the value of devoting their lives to the state and to the general welfare, the implication is that the public easily identifies with doubting characters of this type. You might consider it an indirect admission about the morale of ordinary North Koreans that could not be stated in direct terms.

Site Update: PiFan Festival Report #1

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 15:14:21 +0900

2007 Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival

by Kyu Hyun Kim

For Eternal Hearts, dir. Hwang Qu-dok (Opening Film)

Our last festival report from the Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival came in 2004, which in retrospect was the end of an era. Sixth months after the conclusion of the event, popular festival director Kim Hong-joon was relieved of his position and two years of political infighting, boycotts, and turmoil followed. Only in this year's edition did PiFan start to feel like a "normal" festival again: attendance was up, and the focus had returned to the films and the guests. The third new festival director in three years, Han Sang-jun, is well-liked and appears to have the support of the Korean film community.

One of the benefits of stability is that PiFan can now re-focus its efforts on establishing its own identity. In calling itself a "fantastic" film festival, Puchon follows a tradition started by a group of festivals in Europe (including Sitges, Fantasporto, Brussels, etc) that concentrate on horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and other related genres. At the same time, PiFan tries to cater to the local community, which for the most part seems to be interested in family-centered fare. Japanese films of all genres also tend to be highly popular among younger viewers who ride the subway out from Seoul. The result? Programming at this event can sometimes seem a bit contradictory and uneven, but most often everyone finds something in the program that they are interested in watching.

* Note that in addition to the reports below, some more comments about this year's edition can be found at Tom Giammarco's blog, Seen in Jeonju.

Kyu Hyun: Report #1

Puchon Film Festival has successfully rebounded from its conflict with the city government last year, with then-Festival Director Lee Jang-ho managing to perform a difficult balancing act between the demands and expectations of the vocal fans of the extreme fantasy/SF/horror genre and those who prefer mainstream, family-friendly fare. The general impression of the PiFan 2007, in its 11th year and put together under the supervision of FD Han Sang-joon and programmers Kwon Yong-min and Jin Park, is one of moderation. The number of films has been scaled down to approximately 215 from last year's 230 plus, but the creature-building workshops, guest talks, and most importantly the careful balancing act between the aggressive, the gory and the outrageous on the one hand and the cute, the genteel and the acceptable-for-elementary-school-children on the other have been retained, exemplified by this year's special program showcasing so-offensive-it's-funny antics of Herman Yau's Hong Kong opuses (Ebola Syndrome, Gong Tau and, of course, The Untold Story) and the Richard Fleischer retrospective starring the square-jawed (could any living human being be possibly more square-jawed than a young Kirk Douglas?) Kirk Douglas (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Vikings: what, no Conan the Destroyer?). Ah, of course, there is the PiFan regular Dario Argento, (Phantom of the Opera? Oh dear) but other favorites Miike Takashi and Kurosawa Kiyoshi are MIA this year. Perhaps for the Korean cinephiles the most surprising and highly-anticipated retrospective might be the hybrid genre films of Monte Hellman: Cockfighter, Two Lane Backdrop, Back Door to Hell, Ride in the Whirlwind, and The Shooting (pictured), one of those mysterious and unnerving Westerns, like Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter, pregnant with hints of the supernatural.

Korean cinema is not doing so well in comparison. Jang Jin's My Son and For Eternal Hearts, the older-generation hitmaker Hwang Gyu-duk (who now spells his name Hwang Qu Dok)'s newest film in thirteen years, lead a slew of independent films, some of which barely qualify as fantasy, let alone horror or science fiction. I am definitely not the only guest who is wondering why PiFan refuses to (or is unable to, as the case may be) provide showcases for the Korean horror/fantasy films of the late summer and early Fall seasons. I mean, why is Cinderella, already released in Region 1 DVD stateside by Tartan USA, the only Korean horror film shown in this year's PiFan? Something's definitely not right.

For two years in the row PiFan suffered from the absolutely crummy quality of low-budget Japanese selections (last year's atrocity entitled Mail, starring Kuriyama Chiaki, may well be the very worst film I have ever seen in a film festival), so I avoided much of the Japanese selections. Sorry, I am not really psyched to watch a Japanese movie entitled "F*ckin' Runaway" starring a suicidal 21-year-old boy (seeing the word "f*ck" in the titles of Japanese cultural products is always embarrassing, like a nerd wearing a huge cod-piece in his pants to impress girls in a party) or "Ghost vs. Alien." Hey, for all I know, these films might be earth-shaking masterpieces, and some scenes from them might be quoted in the next Quentin Tarantino film, but please, let you be the person to discover that. Thank God the great Nagai Go is around to introduce Cutie Honey, sadly one of very few truly successful non-anime films adapted from Japan's classic comics. Chotto-sa, nantoka naranai?

Rounding out the selections are strong representations from Iberian, Scandinavian and Southeast Asian regions: again, little surprise there. And lest we forget, just to remind us that not only Hollywood cinema but American TV dramas are out to conquer the universe, Masters of Horror Season 2 is here to throw its weight around, with the red carpet rolled out to the series creator Mick Garris, who, along with the Variety reviewer Derek Elley and Japanese director Sono Sion, will serve as judges for the feature film competition.

Having missed the opening ceremony and screening of For Eternal Hearts, (I freely confess that I was badly burned by last year's interminable ceremony that went over the schedule by two hours) I attended the screening of In the Mood for Doyle (a free-form video essay on Hong Kong-based cinematographer Christopher Doyle) and The Angry Men of Korean Cinema, directed by Yves Montmayeur on July 13. Following the screening was a panel with Montmayeur, Korean directors Park Chan-wook, Ryu Seung-wan and Min Gyu-dong, moderated by Film 2.0's Kim Young-jin.

In the Mood for Doyle is by far the more interesting of the two. Beginning with Gus Van Sant's observation that Chris Doyle is a "beatnik," a Jack Kerouac who made his home in East Asia, Montmayeur follows Doyle around as the latter wanders around back streets of Hong Kong, usually slightly inebriated yet displaying sharp faculties of observation, enthusiastically blurting out "Wow, wow" at anything that strikes his fancy. Doyle himself is such a charming subject, the seemingly focus-less format of the docu works pretty well. Disappointingly, Wong Kar-wai, Fruit Chan, Peter Ho-san Chan and other Hong Kong filmmakers don't give us a whole lot of insight about what they get out of their collaborations with the cinematographer, although the docu accurately captures the absolutely cramped, claustrophobic environment these filmmakers work in (sort of going against the obvious intention behind the docu's official supporters to portray the city as enchanting). We also see Doyle in the set of M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water, glaringly ill-fitted, with the tightly coiled director and his crew patiently tolerating his "eccentricities" and "loose" working style. Doyle, on his part, offers an interesting observation, "In Hollywood, it's 'Give me what I want or I will sue the f*ck out of you."

The Angry Men does a good job of introducing well-known contemporary Korean film directors to the uninitiated. Despite the director's obvious fascination with genre cinema, the docu includes not only usual suspects Ryu, Park, Bong Joon-ho and Kim Jee-woon but also Im Sang-soo (along with a generous clip from The President's Last Bang), Kim Ki-duk and Lee Chang-dong (Hong Sang-soo is the only big shot missing, surprising given his popularity in France). Some viewers might question the explicitly Hong Kong-centered view of Asian cinema permeating it (Tony Rayns, whose comments are by and large well thought-out -- maybe except for his statement that Park Chan-wook's later works constitute an homage to Tarantino's Kill Bill -- is put on the pedestal as the expert on Korean films), and the rather mannered way extreme close-ups of the Korean directors are deployed.

The follow-up discussion began with Kim reminding the audience that the situation has changed, mostly for the worse, for Korean cinema since the docu was filmed. The Korean directors generally concurred. Kim Jee-woon's comparison of his cohorts with the creative force behind the American New Cinema was also a source of debate. (By this comparison director Kim probably did not mean to point to Arthur Penn or Don Siegel) The single most important insight one could learn from the discussion was, despite their cinephilic sensibilities and common love of genre cinema, just how different these directors were from one another. This was made even more evident when a young audience member asked the panel whether any of them would be interested in making a film like Transformers. Ryu Seung-wan flatly stated that he likes neither wu xia novels nor video games and has become even more partial toward the old movies as he gets older. Min Gyu-dong, in an exceedingly gentle and thoughtful manner typical of him, nonetheless clearly indicated that he was bored out of his skull by Transformers. Park Chan-wook claimed that he would rather design something like Metallic Gear Solid 4 than doing a "cutting-edge work" within the confines of a narrative film like Transformers.

The interpretation for the panel was done in three languages (English, French and Korean), and, considering the potential for confusion, was expertly managed. The only problem was that the interpreters knew precious little about motion pictures, contemporary or classical, so the participants had to wade through misinterpretations like "A production company known as 'JohnnyTo' is engaged in precisely that type of experiment..."

Awards

FEATURES

Best of Puchon: 13 (Thailand) by Chookiet Sakveerakul.

Best Director: Grimm Love (Germany) by Martin Weisz.

Best Actor: Thomas Kretschmann and Thomas Huber, Grimm Love (Germany).

Best Actress: Charlene Choi, Diary (Hong Kong).

Jury's Choice: Special (USA) by Hal Haberman and Jeremy Passmore.

Audience Award: The Matsugane Potshot Affair (Japan) by Yamashita Nobuhiro.

* Jury Members: Chung Chang-hwa (chair) (film director, Korea); Mick Garris (producer/director, USA); Sabrina Baracetti (festival director, Udine Far East Film Festival, Italy); Derek Elley (critic, Variety, UK); Sono Sion (film director, Japan).

SHORTS

Best Short Film: ($5,000) Juanito Under the Orange Tree (Colombia) by Juan Carlos Villamizar.

Jury's Choice, Shorts: ($5,000) Sweat (Korea) by Na Hong-jin.

Audience Award, Shorts: The Eyes of Edward James (Canada) by Rodrigo Gudino.

Best Korean Short: (5 million won) The Villains by Chang Hoon.

* Jury Members: Xei Fei (director, China); Nagai Go (manga artist/director, Japan); Lee Sung-gang (animator/director, Korea).

European Fantastic Film Festival Federation Asian Award: 13 (Thailand) by Chookiet Sakveerakul.

Site Update: Review of Aachi & Ssipak (2006)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 15:12:54 +0900

Review by Adam Hartzell

Aachi & Ssipak

Shit is the future; the future is shit. (And if you haven't realized it yet, reviewing this film requires more of this shit-talking.)

That sentence can be taken towards various interpretations because the word "shit" has developed contradictory meanings. It can note shoddy construction ("Aachi and Ssipak is shit!"); whereas, the simple placement of a definite article shifts the meaning 180 degrees to mean something exemplary ("Aachi and Ssipak is the shit!"). To some, such a contradiction in meaning might signify that the word means nothing. But language signifies meaning through its use, and it is the words surrounding words, and the inflection with which they are spoken, that more often designates their meaning. Just like shit can be in its essence, the meaning of the word "shit" is loose. "Shit" finds its form from its linguistic use. And in the future world of the film Aachi and Ssipak, shit is not only mined for its linguistic use, but for its use as a valuable material resource.

In this animated sci-fi world, shit is the premiere energy resource and the government seeks to control the bowel movements of the populace. (And the media is awash with constipation cures.) In order to keep track of who's shitting for big brother, every newborn has an ID ring shoved up his or her anus before release from hospital. An infrastructure of outhouses enables the government to capture everyone's bowel movements. Their ID rings confirm each bowel movement, and after pulling on the flush cord of the outhouse, the citizen crapper is allotted one juicybar for their contribution.

In order to satisfy the world's need for more and more shit, the juicybars are made purposely addictive. So addictive that an underground illegal economy has emerged to supply those who can't get enough of this juicybar shit. Here enters our titular characters. Aachi (voiced perfectly by Ryu Seong-bum) is the runt of the brains of the juicybar-running outfit he's concocted with Ssipak (voiced by Im Chang-jung), the heavy of the two-man troupe, but not always heavy enough to handle competitors such as the "Diaper Gang", the blue, mutant, constantly-constipated, baby-ish spawn of relations between two juicybar addicts. Aachi and Ssipak are a small-time racket of big time dreams. And they find their dreams attainable when they meet "Beautiful" (voiced by Hyeon Yeong who also happens to be the voice of Koreanfilm.org's own Tom Giammarco's car navigation system). Beautiful's anus has been violated by the Diaper Gang's accomplice, Jimmy the Freak, with an intentionally malfunctioning ID ring that enables Beautiful to receive a shitload of juicybar blue gold whenever she has a movement. The trio soon becomes much sought after by more competitive groups than I can summarize here. But basically, there are a lot of subplots and the presentation of each isn't too disjointed to be distracting.

The crowd I watched this with at the San Francisco Indie Film Fest's 4th Annual "Another Hole in the Head" festival enthusiastically cheered the obscene levels of gratuitous violence that animation permits one to display. (What animation allows concerning violence is best illuminated when we consider the levels of violence "The Itchy and Scratchy Show" is capable of wielding when compared to that which we find portrayed in the wider cartoon of The Simpsons in which the cat and mouse are contained.) Sure, there might be people present about whom we might be concerned, but I'd wager the majority in attendance cheering on Director Jo Beom-jin were innocuously appreciative of the creativity of it all, not for their desire for such violence to occur in the real. As Catherine Yu argues in her contribution to the wonderful South Park and Philosophy: You Know I Learned Something Today, there is a nuance missing from Ronald de Sousa's argument that to appreciate phthonic humor (humor that endorses malice directed towards another object) one must endorse the attitudes and assumptions that make the humor possible. And that nuance is that humans are capable of imagination, and imagining a malicious act is very different from approving of it. "Imagining doesn't have to do with what a person actually believes, thinks, wants, endorses, or even secretly wishes" (p.. 28, emphasis Yu's). In fact, the often heard exclamation while laughing at South Park episodes and screenings of films like Aachi & Ssipak is something like 'Dude, that is soooo wrong!' which underscore Yu's argument that the watcher does not endorse the phthonic humor on display. This does not mean that certain portrayals here aren't problematic, and my fellow audience's silence during Beautiful's anal violation by Jimmy The Freak demonstrates that some imaginings are indeed not appreciated, but we cannot assume the reasons for laughter without further delving into what is behind the minds of those laughing (and those not laughing).

Aachi and Ssipak works because it has taken a taboo and run with it spectacularly. Aachi and Ssipak have fun with the mess we make in the world without an environmental critique of the mess we're making of the world. It's a dystopic future with no redemption except that of having fun with what remains are left. (Adam Hartzell)

New Blog: Seen in Jeonju

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 16:25:12 +0900

Tom Giammarco, a regular contributor to the site who lives outside of Jeonju, has now launched his own personal blog. It's got a number of posts already, so be sure to check it out at http://www.koreanfilm.org/tom/

Site Update: Review of Black House (2007)

darcy@koreanfilm.org — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 20:08:02 +0900

Review by Kyu Hyun Kim

Black House

A Kadokawa-CJ Entertainment co-production, Black House is based on the Japanese writer Kishi Yusuke's award-winning early hit, concerning an insurance claim adjuster who gets sucked into a terrifying web of deceit, mutilation and murder spun by a psychopath who makes Norman Bates look like Sponge Bob Squarepants. The novel has already been filmed once in 1999 by the star director Morita Yoshimitsu (Family Game, Lost Paradise), a not-bad adaptation with a rather strange, serio-comic tone featuring a bravura performance by Otake Shinobu and unusual tools of bodily harm such as a yellow bowling ball covered with glass shards. Overall, it was not a bad thriller, but apparently neither the original author nor Kadokawa honchos liked it. Realizing that they had good source material that could be exploited further, Kadokawa decided to hand the tale over to CJ and producer Yu Il-han (himself a horror writer) for a Korean take.

Let me get this out of the way first: as an adaptation of Kishi Yusuke, whom I am a big fan of, the Korean version Black House leaves much to be desired. Especially in its first half, the movie tastes too much like processed cheese: indeed, in some aspects it has the outlook of a Hollywood remake of an Asian genre film, with the level of gore and violence cranked up but much of the appeal of the original's characters and twisted narrative turns compromised. Lee Jong-young's screenplay invents a rather hackneyed childhood trauma for the protagonist Jun-o (which predictably gets resolved in a cliffhanger finale), while reducing one of the novel's most fascinating and complex characters, the company "enforcer" Miyoshi, into a crude thug with fondness for dental floss. Director Shin Terra, previously responsible for the ultra-low-budget sci-fi Brainwave (2006), is clearly an inventive filmmaker but has some way to go before mastering storytelling skills. Those who have not read the novel might be befuddled by sequences that are in turn confusingly presented, inadequately explained, or simply illogical (Why does the dead boy's father bite his thumb off in one scene but is shown to have chopped it off in another?). Others, such as a major scene where the protagonist discovers the hanged body of a young boy, lack both the shock value as well as the kind of phlegmatic, deliberately paced terror that we see in high-end Japanese genre literature or film.

Despite these weaknesses, however, Black House works as an effective psychological horror film, miles ahead of the usual PSC (Pointless Sadako Clone)-infected summer season drudgery. Like, say, Blood Rain, the movie's power is greatly enhanced by its superb production design (supervised by Jo Hwa-sung and others) and competent cinematography/lighting (Choe Joo-young, Fly Daddy Fly, and Lee Sung-jae, The World of Silence). The psychopath's lair, with its makeshift abattoir-operating room ambience, smeared with blood and filth, is impressively frightening and gives the actors ample room to realistically portray their ordeals at the hands of the villain. Hwang Jeong-min, one of the most reliable character actors working in Korea today, makes for a thoroughly believable and sympathetic hero, even when he seems to function as a mouthpiece for (again) a Hollywood-style liberal faith in the essential humanity of the monster. Yoo Sun, who previously starred in the interesting misfire The Wig, was a surprise choice for the handicapped mother of the dead boy, but is very convincing as a woman with an eerie emptiness in her gaze that men mistake for numbness induced by grief or emotional exhaustion.

The film culminates in a series of rather preposterous but extremely suspenseful Grand Guignol confrontations, which, to my surprise and sigh of relief, do not lead to surreptitious "rehabilitation" of the main villain through the intrusion of melodramatic conventions. The monster remains the monster to the bitter end, and there is no sexual abuse, Freudian complex or the "unrequited desire to be loved" to explain away why it became the way it did. By honoring Kishi's pitch-dark conclusion and putting the utterly conscienceless (but not unattractive) monster at the center of the movie, Black House ultimately manages to recover much of the good will initially lost by the rather slapdash way it chose to adapt his novel. (Kyu Hyun Kim)