BIFF 2012: Park Chul-soo's B·E·D (2012)

Part of MKC's coverage of the 17th Busan International Film Festival.

A small and sensual chamber piece, Park Chul-soo’s new feature B·E·D (his 27^th) brings to mind Green Chair (2005), his most significant work of the last decade. However, whereas that erotic film was a fascinating study of an unconventional relationship, Park’s new film can’t seem to move beyond its bedroom antics. Granted, as intimated by the title, a bed is the chief component of the film: It is the principal location and also serves as a heavy metaphor for a man’s lifelong obsession with sex, and, by extension, all men’s carnal fixation.

Based on a short story by Kwon Ji-ye of the same name, B·E·D features a man, presented to us as ‘B’, whose life ‘begins on the bed and ends on the bed’. He has an affair with married woman ‘E’ and later, after she breaks up with him, he marries ‘D’, a single mother and career woman.

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BIFF 2012: Behind the Camera (뒷담화, 감독이 미쳤어요, Dwitdamhwa, Gamdokyi Micheotseoyo) 2012

Part of MKC's coverage of the 17th Busan International Film Festival.

E J-yong’s new feature Behind the Camera is a follow-up to his popular mockumentary Actresses (2009), which featured famous stars playing themselves as they took part in a Vogue shoot. That film poked fun at Korea’s entertainment industry and its willing participants were not scared to send themselves up on screen. Many of the same stars return here and are joined by numerous others, but this time E takes his game one step further as he includes himself as the main protagonist.

The conceit is simple: E J-yong is making a short film but there’s a catch, he’s directing it from Los Angeles via Skype. Things get more complicated as the film he is shooting concerns a filmmaker directing a film from overseas via skype.

There’s really no better word to describe this film than ‘meta’, a term that frequently made me cast my eyes up to the heavens back in my film studies days. Behind the Camera features a narrative that is consciously seeking to replicate itself. However, while the A plotline (featuring E as the director) is presented as a documentary it is almost impossible to trust the filmmaker. His intentions are very playful and most of the protagonists in the film don’t trust him, so why should we? Fact and fiction become blurred to the point where we are prompted to ask ourselves what we find acceptable as a narrative. E’s point (if he is indeed trying to make any) may be that very little justification is required when seeking to tell a story.

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BIFF 2012: Mai Ratima (마이 라티마) 2012

Part of MKC's coverage of the 17th Busan International Film Festival.

Debut features arrive with a weight of expectation but especially if they come from a major thespian making his first foray behind the camera. Yoo Ji-tae is one of Korea’s most well-known actors, he is a celebrity whose marriage last December was one of 2011’s top entertainment stories. To western audiences he will forever be known as the ageless and dapper antagonist from Oldboy (2003) but he has also impressed in dozens of other features throughout his 15-year career. A handsome and very tall performer, Yoo is perhaps a surprising directorial candidate, especially as few Korean performers transition into that role (the boundaries between Korean film industry professions are starker than Hollywood’s more fluid models). However, Yoo has steadily been earning credibility for himself as a short filmmaker over the past few years.

Mai Ratima, which takes its name from its Thai protagonist, is a film that takes a look at the fate of low-class immigrants in Korea. Hard-hitting and at times whimsical, it is a compelling feature that is thoughtfully constructed and deftly executed if overlong and a little too on-the-nose with its social agenda. Most impressive is Yoo’s engaging mise-en-scene. Saturated in heady hues, beautifully lensed and exquisitely edited, Mai Ratima feels like it is the product of a much more experienced hand, certainly not a rookie offering from a paparazzi magnet.

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WKR: Busan Reviews Pour In (09/29-10/05, 2012)

Little late in posting this as I got caught in covering my first Busan Film Fest, starting my new job at the Korean Film Council and moving into a new apartment! That said, plenty of great content from BIFF and will have caught up on all of the Weekly Korean Review updates by weekend's end!

Thanks for your patience!

UPCOMING FILMS

Fire in Hell

(Next Projection, October 1, 2012)

Mai Ratima

(Screen Daily, October 5, 2012)

National Security

(The Hollywood Reporter, October 4, 2012)

Sleepless Night

(Variety, October 29, 2012)

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Yeonghwa: Korean Cinema Today 2012 - Pink (핑크, Pingkeu) 2011

Part of MKC's coverage of the 3rd Yeonghwa: Korean Cinema Today event at NY's Museum of Modern Art. (previously published).

The passage of time affects us all in certain ways, our experiences and our memories all take on different forms after we’ve lived them and they leave behind a trace.  This imprint can be faint and slip through our conscious memory just as it can leave an indelible mark, a scar that bears the weight of its genesis.  Most things change with the passage of time but some do not and Jeon Soo-il’s new feature Pink is a dirge to the intransigence of the roots of our defining characteristics.

Jeon, who hails from Korea’s vibrant port city Busan, is a fiercely artistic filmmaker who has quietly been making films for the past 15 years.  While respected within the filmmaking community, Jeon has never attracted anywhere near the same level of international reputation as his arthouse contemporaries, such as Hong Sang-soo (The Day He Arrives, 2011), Kim Ki-duk (Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter… and Spring, 2003) and Lee Chang-dong (Poetry, 2010).  His films are slow, deliberate and difficult and though they are successful on the festival circuit (he has won awards at Fribourg, Busan and Venice), a larger audience may never gravitate towards his oeuvre.

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Yeonghwa: Korean Cinema Today 2012 - Ideological Barriers and Invisible Borders in Poongsan (풍산개, Poongsangae) 2011

Part of MKC's coverage of the 3rd Yeonghwa: Korean Cinema Today event at NY's Museum of Modern Art. (previously published).

Kim Ki-duk is one of the filmmakers who initially drew me to Korean cinema.  The first film of his I saw was The Isle (2000), which was, in a French DVD edition, packaged together with Lee Chang-dong’s Peppermint Candy (1999).  While the films may have been very different they were also a fantastic double bill that complemented each other in many ways.  I wasn’t as shocked by the violence as I may have been because I had already seen Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) and before dipping into Korean cinema, had more or less exhausted Takashi Miike’s catalogue up until that point (around 2003).

Park’s film, while harrowing, was a pure piece of cinema brimming with adrenaline and the pure pleasure of filmmaking.  Lee’s poignant drama was elegant, realistic, literary, and propelled by social issues and recent Korean history.  Kim’s effort was slow and laconic, it was violent while at the same time elegiac.  The Isle had an artist’s touch and was unlike anything I’d seen before, just as the previous two films were.  Indeed I was very lucky to have selected the three Korean films that I did as my introduction to the nation’s cinema, the hooks were in deep from the start.

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Yeonghwa: Korean Cinema Today 2012 - Blind (블라인드, Beulraindeu) 2011

Part of MKC's coverage of the 3rd Yeonghwa: Korean Cinema Today event at NY's Museum of Modern Art. (previously published).

First impressions are important and as film viewers we are particularly prone to making rash decisions based upon the opening moments of anything we watch.  This is perhaps even more important in this day and age as multimedia is so readily accessible.  Our already short attention spans are dwindling ever further as we can easily switch between TV channels, on demand, stored digital, and portable media.  Those first few minutes of a film can dispense a large volume of information but even so, they cannot always prepare you for what you are going to see.  Opening scenes are important but not every kind of film can benefit from a flashy beginning.

One of this year’s most successful Korean films, Blind does not get off to the greatest start and blunders on through the first act with heavy feet, trampling through the early stages of the plot.  Subtlety is not the film’s strong suit and the quicker this is accepted, the better.  Once I got used to the heavy-handedness of the proceedings I was able to enjoy myself but the film walks a dangerous line from the start.  It doesn’t really announce itself properly and seems like a relatively sober affair at first, it is only as it continues in unsubtle fashion and when things become even more ridiculous that you begin to understand the intent of the film, which is to be a trashy and entertaining potboiler.  It does succeed on that last count, but it takes a while to get there and is not without its fair share of problems.

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Howling (하울링, Hawoolling) 2012

In Korea, genre is a dish almost never served by itself. Rather than use tried and tested formulas, local cineastes tend to concoct more bizarre and seemingly unworkable combinations. One of the enduring appeals of Korean cinema is that they are often (but not always) able to make them work. Director Yu Ha is an interesting figure: he used to be a poet but for the last ten years he has been one of the country’s most reliable genre filmmakers. First impressing audiences with his successful foray into romance (though I use the term loosely) with Marriage Is a Crazy Thing (2002), next with one of the peninsula’s best high school films (Once Upon a Time in High School, 2004), following that he made, for my money’s worth, the best Korean gangster (or ‘jopok’) film (A Dirty Carnival, 2006) and most recently he produced a gay period epic (A Frozen Flower, 2008).

Following a slightly longer break than usual, Yu is back with his fifth feature and I was excited the moment I heard about the project. Not least for his involvement but also due to the participation of Korean thesps Song Kang-ho and Lee Na-young and the premise which was initially loglined as a procedural about spontaneous combustion. Though not an outright failure, the film did not find an enormous audience in Korea when it opened in February and has since picked up a number of detractors but as far as I’m concerned, though a flawed film, it is one of the best genre efforts of the year to date.

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WKR: Masquerade and Bounty of Recent Releases (09/15-09/21, 2012)

Lee Byung-Hyun's smash hit period pic Masquerade gets a number of reviews this week while a wide selection of recent Korean films gets covered all around the world, from DVD and cinema releases to TIFF, Zipangu and Yeonghwa: Korean Cinema Today coverage.

CURRENT FILMS

Masquerade

(Modern Korean Cinema, September 17, 2012)

(Seongyong's Private Place, September 14, 2012)

(The Los Angeles Times, September 20, 2012)

Pieta

(Film School Rejects, September 20, 2012)

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Yeonghwa: Korean Cinema Today 2012 - In Another Country (다른 나라에서, Dareun Naraeseo) 2012

Part of MKC's coverage of the 3rd Yeonghwa: Korean Cinema Today event at NY's Museum of Modern Art. (previously published).

Quick disclaimer before barreling on with my discussion of Hong Sang-soo’s latest: This is the first film I’ve seen in a theater since my move to Korea and I saw it without subtitles and it must be said that my knowledge of Korean is fairly limited.  That said, over two thirds of In Another Country is in English and I was able to more or less follow the rest as well.  Undoubtedly there were some things I didn’t pick up on, so in the interest of full disclosure I thought I’d mention it.

Clearly, the most remarkable thing about Hong’s 13^th feature is the presence of French screen legend Isabelle Huppert in the lead role.  This fact was picked up on by many global news outlets and gave the film some more recognition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, versus last year when Hong’s previous feature The Day He Arrives was screened.  It may also have been what landed it in the main competition.  However, while it was well received, it was left out during the closing night’s awards ceremony.

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U.F.O. (2011)

One of the recurring motifs in Korean cinema is the representation of repressed trauma. Whether as a lazy deus ex machina in a rote romcom or the underlying social agenda of an auteurist prestige pic, it never seems to be far from the surface. It’s prevalence in the country’s film industry is in itself an indication of just how important it is. Having been subjected to numerous colonizations and following decades of inequity at the hands of local autocratic governments, Korea is no stranger to psychological wounds and dark memories. However, as the country finally moved into the light, slowly but surely, following the end of Chung Doo-hwan’s administration in 1988, this trauma has been relegated to the basement. But then, why shouldn’t this be the case?

We all have memories we would rather forget but rather than a few isolated instances, Koreans have had whole generations that still haunt them. The need to forget is potent and has almost become a collective requirement of Korean society. Of course none of it can truly be forgotten and the past is constantly alluded to, if rarely overtly. Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder (2003), as a heavily cited example, was a breathtakingly complex work that encompassed the collective repression of a nation’s trauma, but it did so in the guise a serial killer genre piece. The fact that five million people saw it is also a testament to the need for these subtle acts of mnemonic cleansing.

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CinDi 2012: Egg and Stone (Jidan he Shitou, China) 2012

Part of MKC's Coverage of the 6th Cinema Digital Seoul Film Festival.

By Rex Baylon

The Chinese film Egg and Stone tackles an issue that has been circulating around the news lately: rape. To be more precise, the rape and exploitation of young teenage girls by couples with no way to conceive. The tragic irony is that China, a nation on the up-and-up as it takes over the world’s manufacturing burden is, outside of a few densely packed metropolises, still a very poor and impoverished country. Progress is paid for by the blood of the poor and the cogs of that machine need it on a daily basis to keep the gears moving.

For Honggui, the female protagonist of Egg and Stone, any illusions that her future could hold anything other then the drudgery of housework or the boredom of a village life has long eroded with the crippling realization of her second-class status mainly as a result of the sexual organs she was born with. Although China may need more and more bodies to fill its factories and skyscrapers, a woman’s value is still gauged by her ability to conceive and rear a healthy baby boy. Sadly, anything less than that and women are pushed farther down the totem pole. The fate of many infant girls involve either abandonment, adoption by overseas families, or being sent away to childless families in the countryside to be worked like cattle.

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CinDi 2012: Lilou's Adventure (Lilou No Boken, Japan) 2012

Part of MKC's Coverage of the 6th Cinema Digital Seoul Film Festival.

The world of cinema is one we often use to reflect upon ourselves, one where our deepest desires and our darkest impulses are laid bare. Filmmakers habitually use the medium to explore the different facets of our personality but also to ask questions. Good cinema is almost always inquisitive and the further we delve inwards the less concrete our footing becomes. The land of dreams and of the subconscious has been a domain of choice for artists since time immemorial. Through paintings, poetry, books, performance art and more, our unknowable mental projections have maddened and gladdened artistic minds.

Cinema, perhaps more than any other medium, is an ideal canvas for exploring the nebulous impressions we constitute around our internal and uncontrollable visions. From an aesthetic standpoint it is both visual and auditory and yet much is still arrived at through interpretation. However, dreams, which are non-linear by design, are oftentimes difficult to narrativize and their depiction on screen, when not handled carefully, can sound the death bell of a production. Sometimes, these representations of our inner thoughts are best appreciated as sensory experiences, gleaning meaning from them is often a fool’s errand. Yet in rare circumstances, a filmmaker has been able to apply dream logic to a workable plot structure. The most clear example of this, though a divisive one, is David Lynch’s Mullholland Drive (2001). It’s a classic Hollywood narrative that has been broken down and reassembled through dream logic, though it took at least four tries for me to come to that conclusion.

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CinDi 2012: The Boxes of Death, The Live (죽엄의 상자, 더 라이브) 2012

Part of MKC's Coverage of the 6th Cinema Digital Seoul Film Festival.

A number of bizarre and interesting works were presented at this year’s CinDi but none fit the tag ‘meta’ better than this curious Korean cinema-centric documentary. The Boxes of Death, The Live is about a live musical staging of the debut work of a titan of classic Korean cinema which was actually a showcase at last year’s CinDi. I didn’t see it in the exact same theater but it was certainly strange witnessing the proceedings unfold at the same event.

The Boxes of Death (1955) was the first film of Kim Ki-young, a masterful Korean cineaste who is slowly, and rightly, being recognized as one of the greats of world cinema. Most famous for his incendiary work The Housemaid (1960), Kim’s oeuvre stretched over a few decades and always pushed the medium to its limits. Films like Woman of Fire (1971), The Insect Woman (1972) and Iodo (1977), explored our darkest desires and shed an often unflattering light on Korea, in stark contrast with the image that the then-authoritarian government wished to promulgate. The Boxes of Death is perhaps more interesting as an historical artifact but the truth is that it is difficult to make a proper judgment on the film as the only existing print is lacking its soundtrack.

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PiFan 2012: The Heineken Kidnapping (De Heineken ontvoering, Holland) 2011

Part of MKC's coverage of the 16th Puchon International Film Festival.

Rutger Hauer’s heyday may have come before my time but as a film lover it still feels as though I grew up with him. My teenage years were spent awash in the dream of cinema and amidst the blur of it all, some films stood out. Among them was Blade Runner (1982) which, I must admit, was a film that I did not immediately warm to but the villain of the piece has stayed with me for the decade since I first I saw it. Horror may not have featured prominently in my cinema diet but I’ll never forget The Hitcher (1986), a film that could easily have been unremarkable were it not for the terrifying presence of its antagonist.

With his pellucid blue eyes, wavy blond hair and harsh features, Hauer has always been a formidable presence on screen. However, more than his physiognomy, it is of course his talent and intensity as a performer that has made him so memorable. He seems to lose himself in his best roles. I hesitate to say that he was a method actor, a term that is ill-suited to genre cinema, but he throws himself so fully into his marginalized characters that he often seems to be in a trance.

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Romance Joe (로맨스 조, Lo-maen-seu Joe) 2012

By Rex Baylon

Fractured storylines, unreliable narration and meta-narratives have all become the requisite tools of the trade for films with a postmodernist slant. The realization by filmmakers as far back as the 1960s, when the enfants terribles of France’s Nouvelle Vague tore down the barrier between good "taste" and good "cinema", have not only prompted experimentation in plot and genre, but also, on occasion, led to genuine masterpieces. Of course, there have also been a plethora of over-inflated and pretentious works that have been released to varying degrees of fanfare since then.

In writer-director Kwang-kuk Lee’s debut film Romance Joe (2011) the eponymously named Romance Joe is both an actual character in the movie, played by Kim Young-pil and Lee Da-wit, and an invention: a plot device, utilized by several characters in the film when telling their own personal/invented stories about the pain of love and the ways that fiction and fact can bleed together.

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WKR: Neighbors, R2B and Ample KOFFIA Coverage

Lots of current films reviewed in this week's WKR and a wide selection of recent releases, largely stemming for the ample KOFFIA coverage.

CURRENT FILMS

577 Project

(The Korea Times, August 30, 2012)

Grape Candy

(Joong Ang Daily, August 24, 2012)

Neighbours

(Seongyong's Private Place, August 26, 2012)

R2B: Return to Base

(allkpop August 25, 2012)

(The LA Times, August 23, 2012)

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JIMFF 2012: Punk's Not Dead (Pankot ne e mrtov, Macedonia) 2011

Part of MKC's coverage of the Jecheon Intl. Music & Film Festival.

Each of us loves different styles of music. Our tastes are informed by many factors: style, geography, language, instrumentation, tempo, etc. We fill our computers and smartphones with these (more ardent enthusiasts may still curate record collections). However, some people will go to extra lengths to associate themselves to a certain style. They may customize their appearance or ascribe to particular ideologies. Politics and social issues can come into it but other times the music might be a gateway to something else entirely: community. The need to belong is strong and for those of us that cannot or do not want to follow the status quo, there is always a danger of being marginalized. Luckily, in this day and age, we are fortunate enough to have the opportunity to pick and choose from many different lifestyles. Non-conformity no longer comes with the same stigma as it once did.

As the title suggests, Punk’s Not Dead is a film about one of the most abrasive genres of music to emerge in the modern era. However, very luck little punk music is actually featured in the film and that’s because the focus thing here is on the sense of community that is created around the music. The protagonists are lost: wandering aimlessly in the decrepit landscape of modern Macedonia. Pushing 40, they are looking a little rough around the edges: leather jackets cover their wearied shoulders; piercings and tattoos adorn their wrinkled skin. They have lived life but time has passed them by and new circumstances have rendered them redundant and mute: their protests are now a whimper of what they once were. Rather than living the punk lifestyle and reveling in anarchy, they merely cling to the scene as a pretext for their existence. It is a social outlet in a world where few are available to them, the booze and drugs are a respite from the bleak landscape there are immersed in.

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JIMFF 2012: Abba (阿爸, Taiwan) 2011

Part of MKC's coverage of the Jecheon Intl. Music & Film Festival.

Though not always convinced by the films, the Jecheon Intl. Music & Film Festival was definitely a period of musical discovery for me. It reawakened my love for Tropicalia and Serge Gainsbourg, made me wish I had more time to play my guitar (Jason Becker: I’m Not Dead Yet) and introduced me to flamenco singing (Morente). On the flipside I also discovered that I am not too keen on Thai country music (The Moon). The Taiwanese documentary Abba (which features a number of flashback scenes) led me to more uncharted territory as it immersed me in Taiwan's pop music scene.

This doc’s subject is Hong Yi-feng, the late King of Taiwanese Pop. Much of the proceedings involve the staging of a tribute concert being put on by his three sons (themselves successful artists) following his death. It’s a tribute film that commemorates his achievements as a pioneering musician in Taiwan but it is also a portrait of a deeply flawed man who was a strict father, an adulterer and ultimately an absentee family man. Most of the film is told from the viewpoint of his sons, all of whom are grown up with their own families.

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KOFFIA 2012: Disney, Nostalgia, and Politics in Sunny (써니, Sseo-ni) 2011

Part of MKC's coverage of the 3rd Korean Film Festival in Australia (previously published).

Delve into any well-balanced childhood and you’re sure to find a candy store: our ephemeral youth’s source of confectionary delights and perpetual euphoria. During my childhood I had a particularly aggressive sweet tooth and the easiest way to motivate my obedience or to inspire my eternal adoration was to drag me into a store full of sweets. I grew older and these gave way to popcorn as I found myself gazing up at the silver screen, the candy store of my adulthood. Between these two worlds lies a transition and at the forefront of it, an enduring symbol that came both before and will likely remain long after. I speak of Disney, the dream factory that is also the world’s most powerful media conglomerate. It is a kaleidoscopic candy store that titillates our senses beyond our sweet-craving taste buds. It is also calculating, cloying and devious but I seek not to denigrate its brilliant success, merely to point out what makes it so infectious: formula.

Just like the chemicals that bind together to delight our youthful, undeveloped palates in the candy store, the Walt Disney Company applies a rigid, time-tested formula to all of its products. The formula has many permutations and its application is effectuated, for film and animation, through themes, morals and standards, but also by way of a carefully constructed mise-en-scene. When done right, as it often is by Disney and even more frequently by its subsidiary Pixar, the result is clear: a good film that is guaranteed a solid ROI.

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