Here are the next ten films of the 203 movies produced in Korea in 1971. Click and then enlarge to see the full sized images.

The National Human Rights Commission of Korea has been sponsering the production of the ‘If You Were Me’ series for quite a few years now and the collection now includes a total of six sets of movies–4 live action and two animated.  If You Were Me 4 is the latest, screening last night as the closing film of the 9th Jeonju International Film Festival. Five directors contributed their talents towards creating films faced by middle school and high school students. The numbers listed in the Korean title on the image above represent the ages of the characters featured in the films.  All the films are good but there are two in particular that stand far above the other works: The Theory and Practice of Teenage Drama and Girl on the Run.

The Theory and Practice of Teenage Drama is directed by Yoon Seong-ho who had directed The Milky Way Liberation Front in 2007.  Yoon does an excellent job in capturing teenage dialogue and emotions and gives examples of each under several sub-headings as though we were analyzing the actions of the students for a thesis.  Unlike the other comedy that is part of this omnibus, Yoon’s work offers subtle humor that we are able to laugh at in part because we can recognize the feelings of each speaker despite culture differences. Adding to the subtext is the vision of an urban legend.  Each conversation we overhear makes reference to a girl who supposedly died in a rice field outside of town. Each group of speakers describes the manner of her death in a different manner while the ’spirit’ herself goes through some scene stealing action behind them. This is one film that you should really look forward to seeing for yourself.

Equally appreciated by the audience at JIFF was Kim Tae-yong’s Girl on the Run.  Of all the films, this perhaps best represted what the Human Rights Commission stands for. It touches on several issues and problems that seem insurmountable yet does not dwell on any of them. Rather, Kim chooses to deal with the problem of a young girl whose dreams of being a runner have been smashed. The girl and her family live in a small rural community along the West Sea. As with most rural areas, they are having trouble attracting and keeping students and staff. The P.E. teacher gets a job in Seoul and the students in his programs are offered the chance to transfer to Seoul as well. All of them accept save for Cha-eun whose father will not allow her to go.  Her father is struggling as well as his livelihood, harvesting the mudflats, will soon disappear due to the unsound, enormous land reclaimation project currently underway that will fill in the salt flats to create golf courses and hotels.  Cha-eun’s only ally is her step-mother who happens to be from the Philippines. The step-mother speaks fluent Korean and obviously loves her family, but people look at her and see just a foreigner and this causes unbearable pain for the confused teen who both loves and hates her mother.  Kim’s film is the hardest to watch because of the emotional punch it packs but is truely an excellent film.

Not so successful is the film that starts the omnibus, Blue Birds on the Desk. The plot revolves around two girls in a middle school class–one with the best scores in the school but who is miserable and fears failing, and one who is the worst student but is happy and carefree. It is a story that Korean audiences would be very familiar with as it has been done a number of times on tv and in movies during the 90s.  The twist here is that it is done as a musical comedy but this just seems to cheapen it and makes it very childish. Blue Birds on the Desk was directed by Bang Eun-jin.

Relay by Lee Hyeon-seung suffers from a similar problem–being more concerned about creating comic sequences then the message that was trying to be portrayed about teenage mothers. The redeeming part of this film however, is how the teachers are dealt with. Lee makes them to be generalizations of their subjects with the biology teacher taking a very scientific approach to things and the ethics teacher shooting down all her ideas for moral reasons. 

U and Me, directed by Jeon Gye-su, is quite good and provides clear insight into how students may feel when their futures are completely out of their control. Cheol-gu is a shy young boy whose overbearing mother is sending him to Australia for at least a year to improve his English. He was never asked to give his opinion about the situation, just to do what is best for him. His classmate, So-young, is facing a similar problem in a different way.  She has been practicing weight-lifting for many years and is known as one of the strongest people in school–if she continues to follow this path, she will be on the road towards being a champion. However, she has realized that it is not what she wants–she doesn’t feel particularly feminine and realizes that if she continues on this route, her potential is limited. However, the scholarship she won hinges on her being an athlete and her grades are not good enough to keep her in school. Both students in their own ways are trapped and cannot do anything but ride out this time until they can make their own decisions.

It will probably be awhile before this sees a dvd release–if this omnibus takes the same route as the earlier If You Were Me’s then it will receive a general release this summer before becoming available on dvd. However, when it does, snatch it up. Yoon and Kim’s films should not be missed and will be well worth the wait.

Ironman completely dominated the box office last weekend and is it any wonder.  It opened on 679 screens!  Its closest cometition for the shear number of screens was Horton Hears a Who which was on 439 screens.  Moonlight in Seoul-the major domestic contender was only give 376 screens on its opening weekend while in its second week, the US film Forbidden Kingdom was give 398.  Part of the reason may have been that it was Children’s Day so the comic book movie Ironman and the animated Horton were given a larger release to attract families to the theaters.  But whatever the reason, it’s got me a little nervous and wondering a the screen quota was not such a bad thing…

———-Coming This Week to Korean Theaters———-

Betrayed (us)–d. Valerie Landsburg;  starring: Stephen Baldwin, Kristy Swanson 

Our Teacher (kr)–d. Song Dong-yoon;  starring: Yoon Seung-ho, Oh Soo-ah  www.unforget2008.co.kr

Persepolis (fr)–d. Vincent Paronnaud; starring:  Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve http://blog.naver.com/perse2008

Priceless (fr)–d. Pierre Salvadori;  starring: Audrey Tautou, Gad Elmaleh  http://priceless2008.co.kr

Shocking Family (kr)–d. Kyeong Soon; starring: Kyeong Soon (documentary) http://cafe.naver.com/shockingfamily

Speed Racer (us)–d. Larry & Andy Wachowski; starring: Emile Hirsch, Matthew Fox www.speedracermovie.co.kr

I was finally able to sit down and watch the late EBS movie this week. I hadn’t been able to see that program in a while because the time had been pushed back and I have a lot of classes on Monday.  But with holidays falling on Monday this week and next week, I have a chance to see what is being shown.  Yesterday it was Catching Tigers which was directed by Lee Hyeong-pyo in 1969.  It is a comedy which follows a formula set more than a decade earlier in which three men are introduced to three women in a confrontational situation and eventually they all fall in love.  Kim Soo-yong was famous for this comic formula in the late 1950s with his films. In fact, three of his first four films followed this formula–Three Brides (1959),  A Band For Proposal (1959), and Youth Delivery (1959) –while his debut film A Henpecked Husband (1958)–was later adapted by Yoo Hyeon-mok to fit the formula in Three Henpecked Generations (1967).  There were many other directors and films that followed this style and the director of today’s film, Lee Hyeong-pyo, would use this 3-for-3 formula several times himself such as in The Car That Runs On Water (1974)which I had reviewed earlier on this site and Mi-In (1975).  However, Catching Tigers is less predictable than all of those other movies as mid-way through the film we are introduced to yet another set of three women and it becomes unclear who will wind up with whom.

The movie starts with three men pulling carts loaded with their belongings looking for a place to stay.  These men are not related but are closer than brothers because of how they met which is relayed to us in a flashback.  It is revealed that the youngest of the three, Hwang Am-so (Jang Wook-je), had tried to kill himself. He is rescued from a watery death by Ku Du-goon (Seo Yeong-choon) and Ko Ru-do although they nearly die themselves in the process.  They vow to stick together and take care of each other in the future.

These three find themselves standing outside the large home of the widow Ms Cha (Kim Ji-mi) who is seeking to take in boarders.  However as there are only women in the house–herself, her daughter Eun-ju (Nam Jeong-im) and her maid Boon-yi (Sa Mi-ja)–Ms Cha only wants to take in female tenants. The three men quickly win over Eun-joo and the maid, but find Ms Cha to be firm in her decision.  To get a foot in the door, they have to rely on trickery and finally their personal charms and Cha proves herself not to be so hard-hearted when she secretly smiles and laughs at their antics behind her fan.

One romantic pair because apparent quickly. Eun-ju and Am-so are attending the same university and they come and go to school together every day.  The other couplings are not quite so clear.  Ko and Cha seems like a match for each other, but Ko gives up any hopes (sobbing unconsolably when he does so) to allow his boss at the make-up company, Mr. Song (Kim Hee-gab) a chance to find happiness.  Ku and the maid also seem destined for each other but it is soon revealed that Ku has been keeping several penpals and is interested in meeting them.

Unfortunately for Ku, his three penpals all schedule their arrivals in Seoul on the same day forcing Ku to take drastic measures.  He begs his friends to pretend to be him so each one can meet a different woman. His friends reluctantly agree. Am-so informs Eun-ju of what he must do for his friend in an effort to show honesty and to nuture their developing romance–but Eun-ju decides that she is going to have a little fun with the situation.

All-in-all it is not a bad movie with some good comic performances for those who like slapstick.  There was one scene that was shot extremely well and looked very impressive–an upshot of a drunken Am-so standing atop a bridge with the intensely blue sky in the background. It would have been great as a still shot–before the scene dissolved into a comic rescue mission.  Production quality was not very good which I found unusual for Lee Hyeong-pyo.  Editing was especially a problem as in one scene when all the characters have walked out of the room. As the door is closing, someone yells ‘Cut’ but the camera continues shooting until the door has closed all the way.  In another scene where the penpal who is now dating Ko Ru-do is walking down the street, we see a man with a megaphone and another man beside him with some equipment sitting squarely in the middle of a side street.  They had obviously thought they were blocked from view by the corner of a building–then responding to some unseen order, the two dash over to the side–it was then that I noticed them–I probably would not have paid any attention to them at all if they had just stayed put but their hurried actions ended up stealing the scene away from whoever that young actress was.

Catching Tigers is a good example of a typical romantic comedy of the past and could very well be used as a representative film of that category.

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Note: Because of the holiday–the weekend box office tallies will include Monday and will not be available until tomorrow. So the box office report and coming attractions will be posted on Tuesday this week.

Some amazing news–Two films that were thought to have been lost have been discovered and will receive a special screening this month at the Korean Film Archives.

Korea’a first feature-length animated movie, Hong Gil-dong, was recently discovered in Japan and has been returned to Korea.  When news broke, local media reported that in its way, this is as important to Korean film history as if Arirang were ever retrieved.  Hong Gil-dong was made in 1967 and had several theatrical re-releases in the early 70s before disappearing and it was believed to be gone forever.  Now it is home and will be screened at KOFA in Seoul at 7pm, May 25.  Can’t see it? Don’t worry–I’m sure that it is just a matter of time before this classic is out on DVD

The other big discovery was that of a silent movie entitled The Turning Point Of Youth. It was directed by the legendary Ahn Jong-hwa back in 1934 and is now Korea’s earliest extant film.  Apparently, it was found laying around the projection booth decades ago by a theater employee who decided to just take it home.  Although his actions–which were definitely NOT legal–saved this film from destruction during the Korean War which claimed so many other movies, he did not reveal what he had done to anyone.  The man recently died and his grandson discovered the movie among his belongings.  It has been returned to the Korean Film Archives and will be screened several times this month. These dates are: May 9–7:00, May 10–8:30 and May 21–5:30. 

The other recent find

As many people know, the Jeonju International Film Festival opened this week.  I have been looking forward to this annual event all year and I have been busily watching as many movies as I can.  I am sitting in the press room set up at the corner near the Jeonju Cinematown Theater and typing this on their computers so I will keep this posting brief as I don’t want to hog the internet.

 I will be writing a general festival report for Darcy’s Koreanfilm page and I will review some films individually in more detail here–but I thought I would give some tips of what to see if you are going to be in or around Jeonu this week.

Today (Saturday) , I will be watching Action Boys which is a documentary following the lives of graduates from the Seoul Action School as they try to break into the entertainment industry as stuntmen.  This film is expected to be quite popular so it will screen several times throughout so if you can’t see it today at 2, you can try to catch it on the 5th at 8pm or on the 9th at 11am. 

Today’s 5 o’clock films all look good—I have chosen the Jeonju Digital Project to watch at this time.  This is the project, sponsered by JIFF, that funded 3 African directors to three shorts especially for screening at JIFF.  This screening will go long because the directors will be in attendance and they will discuss their works after the show.  If I hadn’t been able to get into this screening I would have another chance Monday at 5pm.  And then I would have gone to see Stranger Than Cinema:Shorts 1 &2–both are playing at the same time and feature experimental shorts from the USA, Canada, UK, China, Korea and others.  Like most films at JIFF, these will also be repeated later in the week.

Looking to show your endurance and prove your love of films?  Why not give Death in the Land of Encantos a try?  It is a 540-minute documentary from the Philippines.  This film will screen daily from May 2 to 8th so you will have plenty of chances to see it. 

Other movies that may be of interest are Cleopatra–a drama about the Egyptian queen made in Brazil–and the Irani movie Hafez.  Before I Forget may also be something to see if you are interested in queer films. This French movie follows the aging, HIV-positive man played by director Jacques Nolot who is brooding his past and longing to meet his first love one more time.

I have to give up this computer soon–so I will finish up here.  You can head downtown to JIFF and pick up a catalague at many locations set up throughout the theater district.  Hope to see you here!

—–Coming This Week to Korean Theaters——-

Moonlight of Seoul (kr)–d. Yoon Jong-bin  starring: Yoon Gye-sang, Ha Jeong-woo  www.beastieboys.co.kr

Detective Conan: Phantom of Baker Street (jp)–d. Kenji Kodama  starring: Kappei Yamaguchi, Wakana Yamazaki  www.ontooniverse.com/conan

Tale of Legendary Libido (kr)–d. Shin Han-sol starring: Bong Tae-gyu, Kim Shin-ah  www.garoojigi.com

Horton Hears a Who (us)–d. Steve Martino, Jimmy Hayward  starring: Jim Carey, Steve Carell  www.foxkorea.co.kr/horton/

I Served the King of England (cz)–d. Jiri Menzel  starring: Ivan Barneu, Julie Jeontsch  www.anglickykral.cz

Ironman (us)–d. Jon Favreau starring: Robert Downey Jr, Terrence Howard  www.ironman2008.c0.kr

Mister Foe (uk)–d. David Mackenzie  starring: Jamie Bell, Sophia Myles  www.getyourpeople.com

Talk To Me (us)–d. Kasi Lemmons  starring: Don Chealdlo, Chiwetel Ejiofor (no website)

All that plus the opening of the Jeonju International Film Festival this Thursday! Hope to see you there!

Here are the next ten Korean films produced in 1971.  Click the image and then enlarge to see a legible plate. 

The man who would become known as director Kim Moon-ok was born Kim Byeong-yeol on October 28, 1945 in the city of Nonsan in South Chungcheong Province.  He entered and graduated from Jungang University with a major in Korean Literature.

He started working in the film industry in 1972 as an assistant director and continued in that role, often uncredited, for the next six years.  However in 1979 he debuted as a director in his own right with a movie based on the writing of Choi In-ho called The Other Room.  It was the story of Se-yeong whose wedding day is ruined when it is revealed at the altar she has a secret past. Se-yeong becomes unhinged after being dumped publically by her betrothed and wanders the streets in her wedding dress and eventually starting a relationship with a man who paints theater billboards but whom has no intention of making a long-term commitment.

His second feature was The Woman Outside The Window (1980) <image above> in which wannabee model Seong-min spies an elegant woman shoplifting from the window of his friend’s house. He watches as she gets into a luxury car and drives off. Curious as to why such an obviously wealthy woman would want to steal, he follows her to her home and becomes acquainted with her. It turns out that she is terrorized by her domineering husband and suffers from memory blackouts and is often unaware of her actions.  The two begin an affair but must soon contend with the murderous rage of her spouse.  This movie, like his other thirteen films, did not get much of a response from audiences.

Among the most recent films he made were a trilogy of films based on the popular sex comedy Byeon Kang-swe (1986).  The original 3 Byeon Kang-swe movies were directed by Im Jong-seon but Kim took over the rains with Emma And The Hoodlum, Emma and Byeon Kang-swe and Hello Byeon Kang-swe all in 1995.  This received a chilly reception from viewers and earned Kim the reputation of being director of erotica.  This repuations stuck around for years resulting in his teen film Resistance Without Reason (English title on original poster–the KMDb calls it Rebel Without a Cause) was sent direct-to-video with an age 18+ rating.

Starting in the late 1980s, Kim Moon-ok began directing programs for television such as MBC’s weekly series ‘Best Seller Theater’.  In 1993, he started working for EBS tv. After taking a break from tv to work on the erotic films listed above, Kim returned to the small screen and has been working with MBC or KBS ever since.

2007 gave us a number of horror films that ranged the scale from well-done (Epitaph) to dreadful (The Evil Twin—though truthfully Evil Twin is certainly memorable, how many times have you ever seen Watermelon Seed Touch before?)  I would say that Muoi falls somewhere in the middle and a little bit on the ‘good’ side.  One of the good points in this film is the acting.  All the young actresses throw themselves into their roles with gusto.  Jo An, who I will forever remember as the overweight girl from The Wishing Stairs despite all her other work, plays a novelist desperate to find a new story. She jumps at the chance to go to Vietnam to investigate a supposedly haunted portrait and soon finds herself well over her head in the realm of the supernatural. 

The acting of the Jo An and Cha Ye-ryeon who plays her friend Suh Yeon is surpased by the efforts of the Vietnamese actors portraying characters set in the past who led to the creation of the vengeful spirit. Art Thu, Hong An, Binh Minh deserve praise for taking the backstory and breathing such life in to it that I was left wanting to know more.  It was amazing how much emotion they brought to their roles–it’s the most interesting and tension filled part of the film but it was also quite short.

Besides the acting, the ghost herself is another one of the good points of the movie. I like atmospheric horror films and I have to admit that Muoi is hardly atmospheric or subtle–so director Kim Tae-ryeong did the next best thing.  He succeeded in making the ghost particularly horrible. We do not see much of her clearly through much of the film, but when her face is finally revealed it is chillingly satisfying.

So, Muoi does have some good things going for it. Its weak point is the writing.  A lot of the dialogue seemed extremely unnatural. Not only the dialogue, but the actions of the characters as well. Honestly, would anyone stay in that dank, dark villa after the first night after experiencing the haunting Yoon-hee does? No! You would be out of there and checked into a modern, well-lit hotel before catching the next plane back home. But I guess if people acted realistically in movies, we wouldn’t have very many horror films…

I also hated the tacked on ending.  It would have been better for the film to have finished in Vietnam rather than returning to the characters in Korea. In fact, the whole ghost’s backstory/Suh Yeon connection should have been deleted somewhere along the line. I felt it was completely unnecessary that only served to serve up more supernatural vengence hoping the audience would think ‘They deserved it.’

However, if you are looking for a scare some dark, rainy night you could do worse than rent Muoi.  It does provide some scares and, on the whole, is entertaining. Worth a look for horror fans.