nanoomi

Each year I assemble my top 10 list out of the Korean films that have been released in theaters over the previous 12 months. The small independent films that I catch at the Busan or Jeonju film festivals may not be released by December, but they generally do get a small commercial release within a year or two, so I can include them in a later list.

This year, however, I came across a great film that may end up not getting a commercial release, so I squeezed it in where #10 would normally go. I was racking my brain over that #10 slot anyway. Read the full story

This past Monday, the 48th Daejong (which means Grand Bell) Film Festival was held in Seoul. Not really a film festival at all, it is actually an awards show akin to the Academy Awards, giving out prizes to the best domestic films.

Winning the grand prize for ‘Best Film’ was the epic war movie pictured right, Frontline. It faced some stiff competition though from Unjust, Sunny, War of the Arrows and Yellow Sea. But, although Frontline won first place, its director, Jang Hoon, did not win the title of Best Director. It went instead to the director of Sunny, Kim Hyeong-cheol.  The award for Best New Director went to Yoon Seong-hyeon for his film Bleak Night.

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One of the many aspects of South Korean Cinema that is ripe for a PhD dissertation is the portrayal of North Koreans since the 1996 Constitutional Court ruling that declared the government could no longer censor films before their release. (Yes, like so many chronological demarcations, this one is hazy. As Darcy notes in his book New Korean Cinema: Breaking the Waves, 1997 had a series of censorship struggles. But as Darcy summarizes “the 1996 decision still stands as an important legal precedent and a symbolic milestone in the development of the Korean film industry.”) Although I personally didn’t find Shiri’s portrayal of North Koreans all that sympathetic, it does advance North Korean portrayals when compared with what South Korea’s former dictators and their censors required of previous films. Soon after Shiri, films such as JSA and comedies like The Spy and Spy Girl presented North Korean characters one could actually identify with, or in the case of the feature-length fast food company ad that was Spy Girl, a character South Koreans were encouraged to desire. Read the full story

This summer, my interest was piqued by the horror film The Cat, and it inspired the post where I looked at some of the feline ghosts in Korean cinema’s past. Then I read some reviews about the film and decided to skip it in the theaters.

Yesterday, I saw that it was on Hana TV.  Hana TV has been doing an excellent job of getting films quickly after finishing their theatrical run and I can see them at half the price as I can in the theater.

Link and Beast were just released a month ago but Hana TV already has them available on demand! Anyway, this isn’t an ad for Hana TV… this is about The Cat.

My expectations going in were cautiously hopeful… maybe not as high as they were at the beginning of the summer, though.

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Two weeks ago, when I posted my article for “Officer of the Year,” published in Asiana Entertainment, I said that in September, my article for the film “Mama”could be read in that magazine and I would repost the article here.

However, while that review will still be published, I decided to write a separate one for here. That is because the editor of the airline magazine asked me to focus on “Korean motherhood from the point of view of a foreigner.”

There are so many things that irk me about that sentence…  First of all, I critique and review films. It is not my intention or desire to do the same with a culture. Secondly, I am not qualified to to make such observations and loathe making that kind of generalization. And finally, I have lived here nearly 20 years now– I have been here nearly as long as my students at the university have been alive. I hate that people think of me or my ideas as ‘foreign’.

Well, I wrote their article, minimizing the focus to more of a universal definition of motherhood, but I will write a fresh opinion for here.

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Can you spot the differences between the image on the left and the one on the right? A friend of mine couldn’t earlier this afternoon. He had come into my office, glanced at the promo material for Leafie: A Hen Into the Wild on my desk and asked, “ Didn’t you already see Sympathy for Lady Vengeance?“  The colors and images on the poster of the latter film are so instantly recognizable that he had not even noticed that Lee Yeong-ae had been replaced by a chicken.  (Don’t be embarassed Jae-hong, no one reading this knows you ㅋㅋㅋ) .  The Leafie poster above is an alternate, not the main poster, and will probably not be seen very often. Read the full story

Recently, Korean audiences have been treated to the release of a horror film called The Cat. You might not notice it, sandwiched as it is between the releases of the overblown Transformers 3 and the much-hyped Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 2. However, it did manage to squeak by and land at number two in this past weekend’s box office.

I mentioned in the post below how cats used to be more important in Korean horror films in the earlier decades, but had pretty much faded from view until this year.  I am not talking about a living cat being used as a false scare to make the audience jump, I am talking about honest-to-goodness ghost cats who come back from beyond the grave to seek revenge.

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For Other JIFF 2011 posts please click here.

I’ve been interested in the work of Park Chan-kyong ever since I heard he was Park Chan-wook’s brother and that they were working on a short film called 파란만장 (Night Fishing) together. Call me shallow, but Park Chan-wook is one of my favourite directors and I am firm believer that genius can be hereditary, so the opportunity to see Park Chan-kyong’s first feature length film could not be missed. I had already seen his short film 비행 (Flying) at the Korean Rhapsody exhibition that is still running at the Leeum Museum. It was an interesting piece of work, but I was curious to see how he would fill out two hours worth of film.

다시 태어나고 싶어요, 안양에 (Anyang, Paradise City) turned out to be an enjoyable semi-fictional, semi-documentary investigation into Anyang City’s history, focusing on a fire at the Greenhill Factory. Park Chan-kyong plays a version of himself as onscreen director, whilst two actresses Kim Yeri and Park Min-yeong play his assistants (and as it turns out did actually assist in the making of the film).

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