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The second thread is, strictly speaking, not dead yet, but since I have something new to offer and the last OP is over three years old, I figured this would be a good time to start anew. First, a primer on South Korean film. Why should I care about South Korean movies? South Korean film is at the forefromnt of Hallyu Wave. The details of Hallyu Wave are beyond the scope of this thread, but basically, South Korean movies currently enjoy a great deal of mainstream popularity internationally and are frequently imported by other countries, especially in East Asia. South Korea is the first country to accomplish this aside from the United States. Domestically, South Korean movies make up 70% of the overall box office gross and locally produced genre films have completely outmuscled every Hollywood equivalent save for the big-budget blockbuster, mainly because at present the South Korean film industry doesn't have enough money to compete on that front. How the heck did they manage that? There's plenty of complex reasons for this, but for the purpose of this thread we'll stick to a few simple ones. Government Intervention: South Korean film is propped up to a significant extent by the government, which offers explicit funding to filmmakers. Because the government's objective is promotion of Korean culture worldwide, not profit, the process is much more meritocratic than in Hollywood. This leads to- Quality: The nature of the industry is such that background in film is considered far important than marketability. For this reason, most filmmakers are given free reign to produce whatever they want. While advertising campaigns do exist in the Hollywood sense they're typically built around the projects of individual directors rather than the other way around. Which ironically leads to- Market Appeal: Korean film takes this treatment to every film, genre, including such traditional "low art" as romantic comedies or melodramas. There's plenty of demand for quality movies in these areas, but because Hollywood doesn't make them there's been a vacuum that Korean movies have easily been able to fill. Wow! What does this mean for me? Surprisingly little, actually, assuming you're an American anyway. Pretty much any non-English film is, by definition, an art house movie by American standards so outside of the occasional cult mega-hit we don't really see this stuff too often. Obviously, as the existence of two prior threads indicates, plenty of movie lovers have discovered and love Korean film, and eagerly desire to share it with others. And so here we are. Got any good recommendations? I actually live in the country and study the industry's trends from a Korean perspective. As a result, my ideas concerning Korean film are skewed toward the local and genre level, so unless I know more about what you want I can't give much good advice, although I'd say roughly half of the movies I've seen have never been mentioned in any Something Awful thread before. If you want a starting point feel free to ask. I'm sure other goons will be listing their favorites in the posts right below my own as well, and they'll probably be closer to the perspective you're looking for. Don't be a dick. Recommend something. Right, then. Some Korean film representation by genre. I'm skewing toward modern times here, so as to highlight films that have not been greatly discussed in these forums before. Action - War of the Arrows Have you ever seen an action movie and wondered why everyone spent over half the time talking and not, you know, destroying everything? This is the movie for you. We start with an action scene, get maybe fifteen minutes of exposition, and then the rest of the movie is just more non-stop action. Animation - Leafy, A Hen Into The Wild The animation is absolutely gorgeous, very visually distinct from anything you've probably ever seen before. The story is beautiful, too, albeit quite sad at points. The setting is similar to Bambi in that these are all real animals, albeit ones that can talk to each other. Documentary - No Name Stars The Gwangju Uprising in 1980 is an important event in South Korean history that deligitimized South Korea's last dictator and paved the way for democratization in 1987. This documentary covers the ordinary people who were involved in the event and witnessed what happened. Drama - Pieta Full Review Here. I refuse to call this an independent film, given how well it did at the local box office following its winning of the Golden Lion award. A brutal debt collector gets his outlook changed when a woman appears claiming to be his mother. Whatever you're expecting this to be it probably isn't, which is about what you normally get from director Kim Ki-Duk. Historical - Masquerade Full Review Here. King Gwang-Hae is loud, abrasive, unlikable, and the target of frequent assassination attempts. Enter a body double, Ha-Sun, to cover for the real king while he recuperates from poison. A strong performance by Lee Byeong-Heon underscores an intriguing political allegory that came surprisingly close to highest overall gross at the box office this year. Ripped From The Headlines - Unbowed A professor confronts a corrupt judge with a crossbow. The system then conspires to find a way to send him to jail for as long as possible. This is complicated by the fact that the professor actually knows his way around a law book, and promptly makes a public mockery around a show trial clearly designed to railroad him. Maybe it's just because of how bad judges are in the US, but I got a heck of a kick out of seeing this guy actually call them on their bullshit. Romantic Comedy - Everything About My Wife Full Review Here. A remake of an Argentinian movie about a man who's too scared of his wife to ask for a divorce, so he persuades a Casanova to seduce her into asking for it instead. Noteworthy for having a ridiculously wacky premise, yet paying off with both laughs and heart. Sports - As One A fairly traditional sports movie, but one with three tropes we seldom see alone, never mind togther. The game is ping-pong, the players are predominantly women, and there's reconciliating political undertones as this is the story of the combined North / South Korea team, which only lasted for one year's tournament. Supernatural Romance - A Werewolf Boy Full Review Here. The lycanthropy in this movie isn't supposed to be some cool superpower that makes all the ladies swoon for him. He's actually more of a feral child whose emotional instability makes for a surprisingly sweet reflection on adolescence and growing up. Thriller - A Confession Of Murder Full Review Here. A man claiming to be a famous serious killer emerges just as the statute of limitations runs out. Much tense scene plotting ensues as people try to figure out where each other stand, and the action sequences we build up to are well worth the wait. What's with those review links? I review Korean movies for a website called hancinema.net. Right now I do two a week. I try to do one that's currently running in Korean theaters and one older one. This, incidentally, is what the whole "with weekly updates" bit is about. Since I'm writing this stuff anyway, I can just give capsule paragraphs and links to full reviews like what I put above and it's no real skin off my nose. I don't know know whether this will make the thread more active than the previous incarnations, but at least it won't disappear for months at a time again. Where can I watch these? Han Cinema offers options for watching Korean movies online and has advertisements for websites that sell DVDs. Because a lot of the movies I note above are recent, as of this writing they may not yet be available. Obviously if you're reading this OP from the future, that isn't a problem, though the availability of Korean language DVDs is always at least a little problematic. Where can I find detailed database styled information about a specific Korean movie? If you're looking for IMDB level detail about a movie, https://www.hancinema.net is your best bet. Disclaimer- that's the website I work for. But for nearly every Korean movie of the last 15 years you've got a cast list, credits, picture gallery, synopsis, times it's appeared in the news, videos, and a review. Although we don't have reviews for every single Korean movie ever. Yet. Only way to know for sure is to type the movie's name into the search engine. It can recognize both the English and Korean alphabets. (some other question) Just ask it yourself. I or some other poster should be able to answer it. Anyway, here's to a New Year, and hopefully a more active thread. Some Guy TT fucked around with this message at 04:43 on Dec 2, 2013 |
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Dec 29, 2012 14:34
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Gringo Heisenberg posted:And yeah, the violence in Korean movies tends to be a lot more graphic than most, no idea why though. A couple reasons. One is overcompensation because guns aren't used that often (mirroring South Korea's tight policy on this front), and pretty much any other weapon by definition is going to be much more brutal if you're depicting the violence honestly. The second is that the Korean film you see isn't representative of the industry as a whole. Park Chan-Wook, for example, is a famous name in Korea, and most people have at least heard of him, but his movies occupy roughly the same niche as Tarantino's do in American culture. Well-known and they sound familiar, but not exactly mainstream. xzoto1 posted:Anyone else find this year to be particularly lacking in quality SK films? There's definitely a few good ones, but overall, it seemed to be a pretty weak year. Locally this has been considered an excellent year for Korean film. That 70% box office figure is based off of the strength of high quality films that did surprisingly well at the box office thanks to excellent word of mouth. Seven of the ten films in the OP are from 2012, and there's pleny of other big hits that I haven't mentioned or even seen yet. If by quality you mean "international art house level", yeah, it's a shorter list than usual. I honestly find the genre films much more interesting, because they represent a significant improvement over American equivalents even though I'm dealing with a language barrier.
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Dec 30, 2012 01:21
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RightClickSaveAs posted:Has anyone watched Howling yet? It stars the ubiquitous Kang-ho Song and looks interesting, it's up for streaming on Netflix but I haven't been taking the time to watch many movies lately so I haven't gotten to it yet. Howling is a really good baseline movie for what's typical in Korean drama films. It has an interesting high concept, strong character performances, a focus on realism, explicitly portrays people in power as out for their own self-interest rather than as a higher-calling, and unapologetically brings up social issues. It's not an outstanding film, but it will definitely scratch your itch if that's what you watch Korean movies to get a hit of. Two Hundred Pounds Beauty  An overweight woman named Hanna with a powerful passion for singing ends up having plastic surgery so that she can break into the industry. The concept sounds iffy as all heck, so I was really pleasantly surprised at how well this actually works. Unlike most stories that use a "true beauty is on the inside" moral, this one actually acknowledges the fact that no one would have ever cared about Hanna's singing talent and passion if she hadn't gotten the surgery first. In a lot of places the movie's pretty satirical about the way society will arbitrarily treat people better solely on the basis of their appearance. It's also one of the more well-known exports of Korean Wave, so worth a look on that basis too if this kind of humor's not your thing. Some Guy TT fucked around with this message at 09:03 on Jan 7, 2013 |
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Jan 7, 2013 09:00
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So, this week's Korean box office results are in. I wouldn't normally consider these noteworthy enough to post in the thread, but this was the opening weekend for Cloud Atlas, a movie that's been hyped for its presentation of neo-Seoul and inclusion of Korean actress Bae Donna (one of the leads in As One, mentioned in the OP). Take a guess what place it opened. Number 5. Above it are, in order, a comedy released the same weekend about a Gangster Shaman, a disaster movie released last Christmas by the name of Tower, Les Miserables and Life of Pi, both of which had their opening weekends before Cloud Atlas. Take from that what you will.  National Security is based on the real life story of a man who was imprisoned under South Korea's last dictatorial regime in 1985 for suspicions of connections with North Korean communists. The movie takes a grim look at torture by showing it to the audience through his perspective. There are multiple waterboarding scenes, and I don't care how much you've read about it or what kind of pictures you've seen, actually seeing it performed in person is a lot more grotesque and horrific than what you're expecting. Especially effective is the way we see the jailers. In another movie their frustrations would be sympathetic- in this one their complacency is utterly terrifying. If you ever wanted to know why Korean film is so down about the police, events like this in Korea's near past are why.
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Jan 14, 2013 08:18
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Everyone always talks about how hosed up and gruesome Pieta is but I didn't really see it as that bad. The strange part is that if I describe the events of the movie literally, yeah, I can understand why people would be creeped out, but in context it didn't seem that awful. The whole movie to me was mainly a character study of what a brutal violent man would actually be like emotionally, and this blunt unromantic portrayal just came off to me a lot better than the overly idealized version of such characters that we normally get complete with a saccharine "love redeems all" ending. It reminds me of Samaritan Girl, another Kim Ki-Duk film that does something similar with sex as character development tropes. Punch is a coming of age story about a teenager who lives on the margins of Korean society, along with several other people in his neighborhood who live on somewhat differently defined margins. The narrative makes a lot of statements about social issues in Korea- but in the very indirect way of relating them to how they interact with the lives of actual people rather than getting up on a soapbox. It grossed #4 at the year-end box office when it was released back in 2011, even though it was not predicted to do well at all due to the aforementioned issues. I consider this probably one of the best movies to watch as far as understanding mainstream Korean flm dramas, because it has a lot of the quiet strengths that are popular with Korean movie-goers. Some Guy TT fucked around with this message at 05:12 on Jan 22, 2013 |
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Jan 22, 2013 00:54
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Something worth noting about my reviews is that I try to specifically avoid mentioning actual plot details in them for exactly that reason. I think part of the reason why Korean film works so well is that there's such a huge element of surprise, and I'd hate to ruin that. On the flip side, sometimes I wonder whether anyone's actually getting any real information out of them. Like with The Crucible (or, as they call it on Netflix Silenced), the only facts I mention about this movie is that it's about a horrible crime that takes place in a school, and deals principally with the emotional conditions of despair and rationalization. In terms of broader Korean film discussion, I really enjoy how they will directly face social issues head on- and still be a huge hit at the box office. The Crucible was #3 at the 2011 overall box office, only beaten by two big-budget Hollywood movies. This is good since I firmly believe, with no exaggeration, that this is a movie that everyone everywhere needs to watch. Mostly thanks to the preponderance of To Catch A Predator bullshit.
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Jan 28, 2013 03:35
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Part of it is mistrust endemic with the police in South Korea, which has already been noted. However, your bringing up how this would not be as weird with a crime boss is more spot-on than you may expect. Before democratization some twenty five years ago corruption in the police force was rampant. Police chiefs and crime bosses were, and to some extent still are, seen as lateral positions. There's a movie that goes into this in a fair amount of (fictional) depth by the title of Nameless Gangster. It was one of the top grossing movies of 2012- but it was released at the beginning of the year and I'm sure it's available in English by now. From a social perspective it's actually really ironic- because of this reputation South Korean police are obsessive about the appearance of impropriety. Police chiefs and officers there commonly resign over scandals or mismanagement that in the United States would result in little more than a press release reading "gently caress you assholes".
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Jan 29, 2013 04:49
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So, The Berlin File is going to be receiving a limited American release soon. Check out the locations here. It starts running on February 15th. I'm in the US myself right now, so my review won't be out until a week later. Don't really know what to expect, though I feel like I should given how much it's been hyped. Ice Bar is a look at Korean sixties culture that has a lot of affectionate nostalgia appeal for this time period while also directly confronting the dangerous social problems that existed at the time. And all of this is wrapped up in the narrative format of a family film. The whole thing is fascinating to watch because I kept thinking "this is kind of grim for a kid's movie" only to remember that for kids back then this was their actual life.
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Feb 3, 2013 22:35
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 This review for 3-Iron, directed by Kim Ki-Duk, is probably my greatest achievement insofar as describing a movie without actually describing the plot. It's the kind of film where, if I tried to tell you what was literally going on on-screen, those words themselves would give impressions and implications that would unfairly shape your perception of what's happening. Even that image is cutting it a little close. Suffice to say, it's something to watch when you're in an introspective mood.
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Feb 10, 2013 18:51
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I think a miscellaneous international film thread would be good for discussing movies or industries not-quite-important enough to warrant enough discussion for a whole thread. Obviously, I think the Korean film industry has enough discussion for its own thread or I wouldn't have started it up again. Like this bit of weirdness- Even though The Berlin File was supposed to dominate the Korean box office in the first quarter this year, Miracle in Cell No. 7 has been the breakout hit. After last weekend's box office tallies came in it now sits at #8 on the all-time list and would have ranked #3 overall if it had been released last year. And it's still playing strong in theaters so it'll probably at least break ten million. So, what's it about? A mentally retarded man who's railroaded by an unsympathetic justice system and the relationship he has with his young daughter. Also how they change the people they meet in prison for the better. It's a comedy. Mostly. Sort of like Life Is Beautiful except that there aren't any villains and people actually die. I wouldn't really call it avant-garde, but the tonal mix is easily the most intriguingly bizarre I've ever seen pretty much anywhere.
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Feb 20, 2013 08:52
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 The Berlin File is playing in American theaters right now. It's an action-packed spy versus spy investigation. It doesn't do anything especially innovative with the genre, but it's everything I could reasonably want from two hours in a movie theater. I don't think it will have too much staying power in the years to come, but it's an absolute blast watched inside the movie theater environment. A lot of the movie is in spoken English, and even the spoken English is subtitled. Cool beans for the hard of hearing. As a side note, the Rotten Tomatoes page has this at 30%, and the only really consistent complaint is "too much like The Bourne Identity", I guess because they're both action movies that take place in Berlin. The actual plot has a lot more in common with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, with an emphasis on international political intrigue, double-crosses and intelligence gathering. Also, most of the action is in straight-up fights, not escape sequences. Take from that what you will.
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Feb 23, 2013 17:14
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At the Korean box office Stoker is pulling in about the same numbers that Cloud Atlas did, and has a comparable screen presence. Interesting to consider, given that in the United States Cloud Atlas was much more heavily marketed. Although in the abstract sense, I think about as many people would enjoy either movie. Unless they were being stupid and went into Cloud Atlas expecting to see explosions. I don't personally recommend Two Weddings and a Funeral because it's rather uneven, but it's worth noting here if only because it's a gay film. The gay film industry in South Korea puts out one or two movies each year that run the local art house theater circuit. They're interesting in that, relative to gay American films, they're less concerned with abstract notions of homosexuality and more with the day-to-day life of actual gays and the discrimination they face. The plot of this particular movie? It's about a gay guy and a lesbian getting married so she can adopt a kid with her lesbian partner. But most of the actual story is a romantic comedy-drama about the gay guy with this new gay in town. There's also this gay choir that they hang out with. And there's social commentary. The idea is more interesting than the execution in my opinion, but someone might find the concept to be enough, so here it is.
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Mar 8, 2013 05:49
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This week I'll be reviewing The Good, the Bad, and the Weird and Treeless Mountain. I feel disappointed in myself. They're both good movies, but they're also relatively well-known in the English speaking world. I'm kind of surprised the website didn't already have reviews for them, honestly, but this is what I'm stuck with until I'm back in Korea and have access to the more local stuff again. Oh well. Green Days: Dinosaur and I  Like this, for example. We don't hear much about Korean animated films because for the most part they don't exist. There's not much of a market for them, although the Korean voice actors are always on the promotional posters. This one's no different. Although the vocal talent is reasonably well-known, Green Days was mostly limited to the art house circuit. Which is a real shame- this is a beautiful story about a girl's emotional maturation that has surprisingly little to do with romance, or even friendship. Personally, I can't help but love a movie with a moral that can be directly applied to the real world, regardless of the viewer's personal life situation.
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Mar 15, 2013 19:26
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This week, I'd like to discuss the way box office numbers work in South Korea. This infographic is a little out of date (Miracle in Cell Number 7 is now at #3 all time), but it has useful information: Korean box office numbers are based off of admissions rather than ticket prices. So, for the sake of perspective, multiply by 8 (how much a ticket costs) and again by 6 (South Korea has about a sixth the population of the United States) and The Host's all-time gross is around 625 million dollars. On the local cultural scale, it was as big a movie event as The Avengers was in the United States. A significant difference in the Korean box office, though, is that the top-ranked films get there, not through an overpowering opening weekend followed by diminishing returns, but through word-of-mouth. The Thieves is the only movie listed here that studios were expecting to hit numbers this high, and even it only opened with 3 million admissions in its opening weekend. The other 10 were on the strength of its legs. Miracle in Cell Number 7 is a good example of a typical breakout hit, as it's a comedic melodrama with no major studio pushing or major stars as headliners. It's at the place where it is solely its popularity spread, and its performance over the past couple of months has been pretty consistent, as the chart demonstrates. As you can see, this culture has resulted in a bit more of an eclectic top 5. There's as many historical costume dramas on the list as there are summer blockbusters. Funny thing- I did not realize that Masquerade and The King and the Clown had near identical posing in their posters until I saw this graphic. Also, that The King and the Clown is on here at all is pretty weird, considering how it's about gay street performers. Some Guy TT fucked around with this message at 22:32 on Mar 22, 2013 |
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Mar 22, 2013 22:30
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Gringo Heisenberg posted:I thought they put The King and the Clown twice those posters are so similar. How is Masquerade? I enjoyed it. What makes the story interesting is that it's a pretty clear allegory for the gulf between how rich people treat leadership and what a normal person actually expects of leaders. I'm kind of surprised I've never seen a Prince and the Pauper story go this way before. Usually it's just comedy about class differences. It's not the greatest movie I've ever seen (and it was way over-represented at the Grand Bell Awards last year, but I can see how it became such a huge hit.  So, has anyone ever gone to a really famous place or city, and just been a little surprised that there wasn't really that much to do there since you don't know anybody? That's what Night and Day is about. The main character is an artist trying to wait out a drug bust by hanging out in France and he spends most his time doing pointless, boring, non-constructive stuff. It's a lot of fun to watch as a comedy because the view toward travelling is just so comically unromantic compared to the way tourist tropes are normally used.
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Mar 30, 2013 03:52
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Zwabu posted:Why is South Korea, specifically, the Asian country putting out the most interesting and well made cinema right now? What happened to the good Chinese filmmakers from 10-15 years ago, did they just fizzle out or lose government support? What of Japan, seems like you don't hear a lot about Japanese film anymore. Local Chinese and Japanese movies have also been doing increasingly well at the box office lately. The main difference is that these movies are deliberately tailored for local markets. Korean cinema is unusually broad in that big budget movies are intended for export as part of Hallyu Wave and the more independent pictures are often directed toward international film festivals. I want to say quality is a factor, but I honestly haven't seen enough recent Chinese or Japanese film to know that for sure.  The Bow is a Kim Ki-Duk film about a fisherman who lives on an isolated fishing platform in the middle of nowhere and the sixteen year old girl he's been raising for the past ten years to eventually become his wife. It's a fairy tale. Not one of those sanitized kid's fairy tales, but one where the fairy is a creepy, frightening, yet friendly entity who can't really be understood with human logic.
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Apr 5, 2013 17:04
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Fist Of Legend is supposed to be in American theaters now. In theory, anyway. I've seen press releases to that effect but there's no direct information anywhere. I'd guess that they'd be showing at the same theaters that were playing The Berlin File earlier this year, so ask your local AMC Theater, if you have one. Woman on the Beach is about some filmmaking types who try to respose themselves on a seaside beach. It's a neurotic romantic comedy, but rather than fetishizing the characters' neuroses ala Woody Allen, they're treated as genuine intimacy issues. A lot of it is sheer mockery of overly analytical romantic thinking, which really hits peak when a normal person gets involved in the story. It's intriguing stuff, but be warned that it's a little long and may go down better if seen in parts.
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Apr 14, 2013 04:06
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Does anyone think Kim Ki-Duk's films are misogynist? It's a truism I commonly seen thrown about his work in online reviews, where it's written as if it's this totally obvious fact that anybody who's seen a Kim Ki-Duk film should know, but it's never clearly elaborated on. I personally don't see it myself, though I can see how a very superficial reading of the tropes he uses could create this impression. Time, for example, is about a woman who for misguided reasons decides to undergo radical plastic surgery. To write that this is a film about body image issues is frankly an understatement. The genius here is that Kim Ki-Duk recognizes plastic surgery as being a mere manifestation of cultural insecurities and ideals. The psychological damage it does to both men and women is far more pernicious, and the statement the film makes to that idea is an incredibly powerful. This is, no exaggeration, my favorite film of all time- though I was a Women's Studies major, so take that for what it's worth.
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Apr 19, 2013 06:18
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I've been covering the Jeonju International Film Festival this week. While I've seen lots of Korean movies, I can't really describe them to you, since I have no idea when or if they'll be available in English subtitles overseas. It'd just be really mean to psych you up for something you might never be able to see. Luckily, one project showcased at the festival is available for English subtitled viewing right this minute- Youth Voice. The Youth Voice initiative is designed to empower teenagers into making their own short films. I was genuinely really impressed by most of what was showcased at the festival. The films emphasize the stuff that teenagers find really interesting while they're still teenagers. It's a very interesting departure from when adults make films on the same subject. The technique is a little crude, but very impressive considering they were made by teenagers. I very much get the feeling that they actually studied film and seriously thought about the best way to communicate their ideas through the medium. The mistakes are much more from inexperience than outright incompetence. These were my favorites: The food that lives in the refrigerator. Awkward romance talk. Teenage girls scheme. How the people teenagers know can actually be really cool. Let's just say this one lives on in my nightmares and leave it at that. There's a lot more of these here. They're in the boxes at the bottom. Not all of them have English subtitles, though. Probably only the dozen or so I saw screened.
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Apr 30, 2013 06:45
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So now I'm doing two film reviews a week of currently airing movies in Korean theaters. And my very first week, both of them turn out to be duds. Talk about a disappointment. At least there's still plenty of good Korean movies worth discussing. Love 911 is a romantic comedy-drama with a remarkably accurate poster. The woman, a doctor named Mi-Soo, aggressively pursues a chronically annoyed firefighter named Kang-Il. The humor comes mainly from the great chemistry between the actors. There are a lot of serious elements at play, but are extremely well-integrated into the story. The character flaws that end up defining most of the movie's drama are the same as the positive character traits that build up most of the comedy, so the characters come as very well-rounded, believable people. I really love the camerawork and set design here, too. The credits have a lot of excellent concept sketches that are replicated near perfectly in the equivalent scenes in-movie. I want to buy a DVD of this just on the off-chance it will contain an art book.
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May 11, 2013 03:39
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Compared to Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring, Pieta has more proactive characters, more deliberately extreme plot events, and covers a much shorter period of time. If your only problem with the former was that it was overly slow and quiet, these aren't problems you're likely to find in Pieta. Who here is in their mid-twenties feeling helpless in the face of modern pressure treating us like crap because we're not taking the world by storm with a smile? The Room Nearby is your film. Eon-Joo is a young woman attempting to become conventionally successful. Her life is miserable, but not miserable enough for complaining to feel socially acceptable. So she just ends up lashing out at whatever happens to be nearby. I would definitely describe this as a slow, quiet film, though, so don't go in expecting melodrama. fake edit: Also the title literally translates as "(plural feminine pronoun)'s room". I have no idea where the "nearby" comes from.
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May 20, 2013 03:29
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 I don't recommend My Beautiful Girl, Mari, but animated Korean films are so sparse I figured it's at least worth a mention. It's a normal coming-of-age story that involves a mystical otherworld. The animation in here is really great and I love the otherworld sequences. But the story's just a giant mess. There's exactly one character too many, and none of the magical events have clear parallels with the mundane story. It's a shame, given how great it looks when the art style really gets a chance to get rolling. Also, there's an English dub. It's terrible. Watch it in Korean if anything.
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May 27, 2013 03:43
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ulvir posted:Finally got around to watch National Security last night. I don't think I've ever seen torture scenes this brutal in a film before. I almost felt exhausted by the time the end credits rolled. I find it makes interesting comparison with Zero Dark Thirty. In both films, the torturers are worried about their jobs and vent about having a bad day. But the context makes a huge difference- in National Security their concerns come off as petty and sociopathic, while in Zero Dark Thirty they're basically sympathetic. And most of this has to do with the way the torture is presented. For all the hullabaloo about torture in Zero Dark Thirty, what they showed was really sanitized and almost always justified in context. In National Security, not only do we see full-on waterboarding, we get to see the misery of the prisoner as he has to sit and wait helplessly for them to come do it again. I really found it impossible to see Zero Dark Thirty as being an anti-torture film in any way having already seen National Security. So, anyone interested in the next Kim Ki-Duk joint, Moebius? Here's a teaser. And while we're on the subject of female protagonists hunting terrorists, here's a trailer for Cold Eyes, one of the major local releases for this summer. No English subtitles for either, but you don't really need them.  This one is for all the divorced mothers in Cinema Discusso. The Day After gives us a moment in the life of a woman who lives a stressful life. The film explores the how and why of her arrival at this point, and what ensues is a frank discussion that relates her experiences with that of other women in a similar situation. It's kind of like peeking into a consciousness-raising session, except there's no political overtones. Which makes it all the more refreshing and honest, since the film goes into a lot of material that's normally considered too trivial to merit serious discussion.
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Jun 8, 2013 00:47
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 Ever wonder why Korean gangster movies are such a big thing? It all traces back to The General's Son- the 1990 movie that was South Korea's first big successful box office picture, that in many ways set the tone for what the industry currently is. It takes place during Japanese-occupied Korea, where Korean gangsters fight the yakuza for control of the commercial districts. The main character is based on an actual historical figure, Kim Doo-Han. It had two sequels, but I've only seen the first one, since it's the most easily available. Personally, I think it's an all right gangster flick. More interesting for the historical context than the actual story.
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Jun 15, 2013 06:54
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 Members of the Funeral is an extremely dense meta-narrative about a boy who dies, and the family that comes to his wake to avoid talking about him. The title is the same as a fictional novel that the boy in the movie wrote, and it's never clear whether the scene we're watching is about the actual people or an adaptation of a scene from the book. It also screws around with audience perception by directly discussing literary technique and tropes, making it tremendously unclear how we're supposed to be interpreting scenes. Basically, this is the kind of film you could write a film studies paper about.
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Jun 22, 2013 07:32
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 And the prize for longest, weirdest title goes to The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well. This is the first feature film by Hong Sang-Soo, and deals with the barely surviving interlocking relationships between several adults in Seoul. It's an exhaustively dense metaphor- much like the title. There's a much deeper, meaner cynicism goig on here than with Hong Sang-Soo's more recent work. It's a fairly subtle blend of bleak going on- enough to be clearly noticeable, and enough that the ending makes sense, though it's still a reasonably surprising one. I recommend it, but only for the patient.
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Jun 29, 2013 11:34
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SUPERFINE CONCUBINE posted:Does anyone have any Joseon/period movies they could recommend for me? I own and love The King and the Clown, and finally got to catch Masquerade yesterday. I love looking at the costumes and architecture almost more than anything The Grand Heist will give you action and The Concubine will give you sex. I can't recommend either because I haven't seen them but those are the main recent names I'm familiar with. There's also Prince Yeonsan, which at fifty years is probably the oldest Joseon period film you could possibly watch. It's available at the Korean Film Archive's channel on Youtube.  You ever watched one of those awful reality TV shows just so you could mock the horrible people on it? The Story of Mr. Sorry is about people like you. Not them, you. It's a complex criticism of the idea that people who watch are superior to the ones being watched because we're more aware. In actuality, the film shows that we, too, have our own agendas as spectators and that we're not so different from the people who engage in this stuff unironically. So, heady stuff. And creepy animation.
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Jul 13, 2013 02:24
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 Our School E.T. is about one of those inspirational teachers who doesn't play by the books and so enriches all his students. The problem is that he doesn't improve their test scores at all so as far as most people are concerned he's just a bad, eccentric teacher. It's a bit of a weird movie because it's basically a comedy vehicle for the main actor, funnyman Kim Soo-Ro, but deliberately addresses social issues and controversial subjects while still making mainstream jokes. The contrast is an interesting one, though I wouldn't call this an exceptional film by any means.
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Jul 23, 2013 08:25
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Gozinbulx posted:I watched New World last night. I'm not too familiar with Korean cinema (only seen Oldboy and The Host), but it was pretty drat good. Try to discuss something if you've seen it. I'm the only one in this thread who watches this stuff new and I have no idea when anyone else is even going to get access to it. Even Snowpiercer doesn't have a set US release date, and most of the people in it are Americans. Anyway, The New World! This might be as good a time as any to post the Q&A session with director Park Hoon-Jeong. What I found really interesting about the movie was how the melodrama actually worked really, really well in context. I never would have expected a gangster movie could be improved by melodrama but that's exactly what happened. It's pretty weird to take stock of the movie in retrospect and realize that all those scenes that seemed like comic relief were actually important character-building.  Let Me Out is the story of a an aspiring film director who learns that making movies is harder than it looks. As much as I'd like to be gung-ho about this movie I wasn't that impressed. It was basically exactly that sentence plus zombie jokes. If that's enough for you then great, give it a look because it's coming out on August 15th.
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Aug 5, 2013 10:13
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I'm genuinely really puzzled by this whole Snowpiercer thing. I've been mentally classifying it with Stoker and The Last Stand the last several months because they've always been presented as this distinct set of American films with Korean directors because Korean film is so hip and trendy. And now Snowpiercer isn't getting a real release, even though it's by far the most mainstream film of the set. It's breaking records at the Korean box office, and it's using a print with English subtitles for the few Korean portions of the film. I don't get why the Weinstein Company even wanted the rights to this movie in the first place if they were just going sit on the distribution and cut twenty minutes from it. How could this possibly make them more money than just releasing it at the same time it came out in Korean theaters? It's the time of summer where people hate heat so much they'll watch The Smurfs and the movie's about a frozen train. You're not going to get more ideal conditions than that.
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Aug 7, 2013 01:42
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I really don't know what twenty minutes are going to be cut out of it. It's not a slow movie by any stretch of the imagination and it moves pretty briskly. Apparently Bong Joon-Ho is the one who's going to be making the cuts, though. Why he would have any idea which twenty minutes would be the most boring to American audiences I have no idea. I guess it's better than the alternative. No, the worse alternative, not the intelligent one of just screening the print they already have. I mean, good grief, it's only two hours long. So, I'd like to take a minute to discuss the Korean Film Archive. It's a complex in the Mapo district of Seoul that stores film. What's really neat about is that they have a free film library and anyone can go in and watch any movie, from anywhere, ever, for free in one of the film kiosks. If you're not picky about what movies you watch, there's also a full theater in the basement of the complex with regular bi-weekly themes. Not always Korean ones, necessarily. Right now it's a retrospective on Korean horror films. The last one was high-concept Hollywood blockbusters, and before that was Westerns, including the few period Korean Westerns. The themes can get really specific and weird sometimes, like the time they did the complete works of Michael Werner Fassbinder. Whether foreign films have English subtitles usually depends on the prints they have. Sometimes they're preloaded with English subs, sometimes not, though Korean films typically don't have them unless it's a special series. Still, if you've ever wanted to see A Tale Of Two Sisters in a full-sized surround sound movie theater for free, this is your chance. Their English website is here. I'm there pretty much every day, so if you see a young foreigner that's probably me and you should say hi. Anyway, by request-  The film is way more tasteful than that poster makes it look. How To Use Guys With Secret Tips is about a professionally frustrated woman who ends up using a set of old VHS tapes to make inroads in her career. The art design is gloriously vintage and cheesy. And there's actually no magic- everything is exactly as goofy as it sounds, which is most of the movie's charm. Very interesting use of real-life ideas and reasoning considering this is a romantic comedy, where those rules normally go out the window. It's not quite intelligent enough to make the most of its more ambitious story elements, but it's still very funny, charming, and unique.
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Aug 19, 2013 06:10
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CharlieFoxtrot posted:A friend of mine brought this question up in conversation recently: are there any films about about the world of Korean pop music or Korean celebrities? Specifically, something incisive or dark, like Perfect Blue except Korean, but anything in that realm would be helpful too. Let's Go To Rose Motel is pretty dark and incisive. However, it is not a movie you should watch under any circumstances, as it is terrible. Fortunately, it won't be available in English for several months, if ever, so you won't be able to ignore my advice unless you're reading this thread from the future. Beyond that your best bet would probably be 200 Pounds Beauty, which has a pretty healthy dose of cynicism regarding the industry even though genre-wise it's a romantic comedy. You might also get some mileage out of Born To Sing, which depicts the only cultural event in Korea considered to get people into the celebrity world out of merit. Everything else is pretty open about the fact that its an industry that involves shady wheelings and dealings.  Speaking of professions that Korean film is cynical towards, Public Enemy depicts rear end in a top hat cop Officer Kang as he beats the crap out of every annoying person he meets. And it's pretty easy to piss off Officer Kang so he mostly just beats up everyone who isn't a cop. The movie's story arc isn't about him becoming a decent human being, surprisingly enough, but about him slowly coming to realize that he should be using his powers off rear end-kickery on people who actually deserve it instead of whoever he happens to run into on a bad day. It's kind of like Lethal Weapon meets The Wire, except the closest we get to sympathetic characters are the morally neutral ones.
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Aug 26, 2013 04:58
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ladron posted:I found Time to be a huge social commentary on the ubiquity of plastic surgery in Korea. Time is legitimately my favorite movie of all time, because I saw it as going way deeper than that. The film isn't a criticism of the institution of plastic surgery, but rather of the deeper social underpinnings that cause people to want it in the first place. The two main characters are genuinely incapable of understanding what the value of their relationship in terms aside from the tangible, because their entire understanding of themselves is built on the understanding that the essential aspect of themselves is not their minds, but rather their body. And when they finally manage to figure out that the emotional stuff is what really matters, it just turns into an entirely different game of emotional one-upsmanship that still uses plastic surgery as the instrumental plot device. I think that's what makes it such a strong statement- plastic surgery is just the weak salve the characters try to use to repair the emotional balance caused by the expectations of modern culture. If plastic surgery did not exist, they would almost certainly just find a different way to test, prove, and rationalize their love that would be every bit as destructive because their entire conceptualization of the concept is based on destructive social mores. It's not even a directly Korean movie in that sense- Americans have extremely similar body image issues, and the film appealed strongly to my background in Women's Studies. It's another reason why I have trouble understanding how Kim Ki-Duk is attacked as a misogynist. Oh yeah, Moebius is coming out soon. There's a press screening today, but I'm probably not going since it's low priority for my target audience and I'm covering a retrospective on Korean horror right now. Supposedly it will be "the most controversial work of Kim Ki-duk circling a destructive family while questioning one's basic sexual desires." Some Guy TT fucked around with this message at 02:19 on Aug 30, 2013 |
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Aug 30, 2013 02:16
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For anyone who's on the fence about watching Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring, or just wants to remember how great that movie looked, here is a pretty excellent collage of the film's camerawork, divided into the five seasons. Mild spoilers inside, but nothing that really ruins any of the more important, less predictable storyline developments. Pisces is a film about the subtleties in actual human relationships that are not normally well-captured on film because they they don't conform well to traditional narrative structure. This is a deliberately super-slow movie that substitutes definite dramatic moments for very gradual building ones. The relationship between the two leads completely changes throughout the film, but it's hard to say when exactly. A lot of film and narrative conventions are challenged here in ways that will almost certainly make you feel uncomfortable. I give this one a very high personal recommendation.
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Sep 2, 2013 04:27
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So...did anybody like the previous set of pictures? Well, if you did, here's a bunch more from The King and the Clown. As an added bonus, a visual distillation of that entire film into a single image: Makes you wonder why the film suddenly turns all green, doesn't it?  Epitaph is a horror movie that takes place in a Japanese colonial era hospital. It's more of an omnibus film than anything linked by a solid framing device. There are three basic mysteries all localized within the environemnt that end up taking very weird directions. This is an actually scary movie, even while it does have some clear pretensions, it uses a lot of scare imagery than is genuinely creepy and frightening. Know what's even scarier than an angry ghost? A friendly ghost.
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Sep 16, 2013 06:54
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Yeah, pretty much. There were four horror releases this summer that come to mind off the top of my head, and none of them were super-successful. The most successful was Killer Toon, which made the American equivalent of around 60 million. My personal favorite was The Puppet, but it's not even really a horror film and I think that movie pissed a lot of people off because they were expecting a horror sex thiller and ended up getting a Satanic allegory about immaturity instead. Neither of these are available in English yet, naturally. You might have better luck finding Sorum, one of those horror movies that isn't particularly scary. It takes place in an incredibly depressed-looking housing complex as characters amble through their miserable dead-end lives while evading demons that are more metaphorical than they are literal. Most of the appeal comes from the way the film is shot, which inspires a deep sense of foreboding. The storyline is less about literal events and more character study and reaction. It's not the greatest example of this kind of filmmaking technique, but I enjoyed it.
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Sep 23, 2013 03:54
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 The Neighbor Zombie is an omnibus film of six stories dealing with those people in the zombie apocalypse who aren't main character material. Nearly everyone in this movie either is a zombie, turns into a zombie, or is killed by a zombie- but none of them are on-screen long enough for us to get much of a picture of them except for the way they choose to spend the last hours of their life, because they're screwed and they know it. There's a quality gap- some of them are just all right and some are incredible. But all of them take an interesting look at possible zombie tropes by isolating the emotional reactions into individual short pieces instead of just being a subplot of a larger story. This is the best piece of zombie fiction I've ever seen in terms of portraying the sheer hopelessness of the situation. It's implied from the very beginning that the zombie threat is eventually contained, but this makes pretty much no difference to the characters who are going to die before the cure even shows up. Or who have to live knowing the virus forced them to murder their loved ones.
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Sep 30, 2013 07:41
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I have! Posted a review just this weekend. Moebius is a story about how in some ways castration can be a life-affirming experience. Whatever bizarre mental portrait that sentence gave you of the film, I assure you, the actual product is even weirder. Kim Ki-Duk has finally hit the next natural step and just made a film that has no dialogue whatsoever, so nothing is ever actually explained. It's just a series of increasingly bizarre sexual metaphors juxtaposed with literal sexuality. This film's take on modern masculinity is really pointed and unsympathetic, and I actually found this bluntness to be a lot more shocking than the chopping off of dongs. A story worth watching- I'm optimistic about its chance for some international distribution, given that the film doesn't even have a language barrier.
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Oct 14, 2013 05:02
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ulvir posted:Just watched Secret Reunion. Are there any other movies that deals with the tension between North and South apart from this, JSA, Taegukgi and National Security? In terms of direct, realistic, military tensions, Gringo pretty much has you covered. But there was one big movie about North Korea this summer that does need to be mentioned -  Secretly and Greatly is about North Korean super-spy Ryoo-Hwan, who has been tasked with infiltrating South Korea by pretending to be a mentally retarded village idiot. It's a really weird movie- it's obvious that the story is supposed to be an action thriller with retard jokes thrown in for good measure, but the film isn't particularly negative either toward North Koreans or the mentally handicapped. The view the film takes concerning Ryoo-Hwan's mission is a cynical one, especially when the North Korean government finally sends him orders, and the emotional resonance is entirely in how Ryoo-Hwan and his superspy friends adapt to life in South Korea and the connections they make in the local community. The ending's a pretty cold gut punch, since while it makes perfect logical sense, it's really not what a typical viewer would be reasonably expecting. Fun demographic information- this movie was most popular with teenagers (who probably read the webtoon it's based off of) and old people. Young to middle-aged adults didn't like it. I'm willing to bet the reason for this is that the movie's central themes are community and reconciliation, and this stuff tends to be more important to either the young or old. But take my word with a grain of salt- I'm writing as a twenty-something who genuinely enjoyed it. Some Guy TT fucked around with this message at 01:17 on Oct 30, 2013 |
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Oct 28, 2013 08:50
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 20:44 |
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 I have not actually seen The Duelist- this review is from HanCinema's new film writer. But her description of it makes the movie sound really cool so I'm making a point to watch it in the future. It's a Joseon-era detective story, with a team of cops trying to track down a mysterious assassin. Complications ensue when one of the detectives and the assassin develop feelings for one another. Also, there are lots of swordfights, and an emphasis on visual cinematographic communication over words. Anyone else know anything about it?
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Nov 4, 2013 06:46
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