Tuesday, July 17, 2012
KOFA Treasures: Kim Ki-young's Woman of Fire (화녀, Hanyeo) 1971
Ongoing series on classic Korean film recently made available for free and with English subtitles on Youtube courtesy of the Korean Film Archive.
Aside from a few choice selections, remakes have become something of a bane for contemporary cinephiles. They are borne out of commercial interests and, for the most part and almost by default, they are unoriginal. They are also omnipresent on today’s marquees, but this wasn’t always the case. Despite the good examples that do exist, the announcement of a remake almost never inspires much confidence, but what about when a director remakes his own work?
Surprisingly this has happened quite often, mainly when a foreign filmmaker remakes his own successful work for Hollywood. Among the oldest examples are Hitchcock’s British and US versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934 and 1956) or Yasujiro Ozu’s I Was Born But… (1932) and Good Morning (1959), both Japanese. Among the most intriguing ones are Michael Haneke’s almost identical versions of Funny Games (Austria, 1997 and US, 2007): the US version was a fascinating meta-narrative experiment that explored our species' fascination with violence, I’m just not sure it’s what the studio had in mind, despite it being a shot-for-shot copy of the original.
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Korean Box Office Update (07/13-07/15, 2012)
Deranged Infects the Charts
Title | Release Date | Market Share | Weekend | Total | Screens | |
1 | Deranged | 7/5/12 | 43.60% | 1,148,211 | 3,226,499 | 734 |
2 | The Amazing Spiderman (us) | 6/28/12 | 28.80% | 679,675 | 4,396,250 | 652 |
3 | Two Moons | 7/12/12 | 7.60% | 204,806 | 238,454 | 347 |
4 | Dangerously Excited | 7/12/12 | 4.90% | 127,816 | 157,225 | 278 |
5 | A Letter to Momo (jp) | 7/5/12 | 3.80% | 108,895 | 247,814 | 248 |
6 | Limitless (us) | 7/12/12 | 2.30% | 60,765 | 76,399 | 159 |
7 | Midnight in Paris (us) | 7/5/12 | 2.50% | 60,051 | 196,927 | 144 |
8 | Madagascar 3 (us) | 6/6/12 | 2.00% | 54,143 | 1,606,573 | 163 |
9 | The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (uk) | 7/12/12 | 0.90% | 22,967 | 31,650 | 149 |
10 | Street Dance 2 (us) | 7/12/12 | 0.80% | 20,875 | 26,179 | 133 |
Friday, July 13, 2012
Weekly Review Round-up (07/09-07/13, 2012)
Lots more NYAFF coverage this week and an early review for incoming blockbuster The Thieves. Next week PiFan gets underway so get ready for plenty of new genre release reviews!
UPCOMING FILMS
(The Korea Times, July 11, 2012)
Thursday, July 12, 2012
Pink (핑크, Pingkeu) 2011
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.
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Korean Cinema News (07/05-07/11, 2012)
Plenty of news this week so dig in! PiFan is just around the corner by the way, get started next Thursday!
Check out the following previews for this year's PiFan, written by myself and James Marsh over on Twitch:
PiFan 2012 Preview Part 3: Vision Express
PiFan 2012 Preview Part 4: Strange Homage, Forbidden Zone & More
PIFAN
Check out the following previews for this year's PiFan, written by myself and James Marsh over on Twitch:
PiFan 2012 Preview Part 3: Vision Express
PiFan 2012 Preview Part 4: Strange Homage, Forbidden Zone & More
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
NYAFF 2012: Doomsday Book (인류멸망보고서, In-lyoo-myeol-mang-bo-go-seo) 2012
Part of MKC's coverage of the 11th New York Asian Film Festival.
(by Peter Gutiérrez)
No doubt about it: it’s definitely a cliché to remark on how anthology films can be uneven – in fact, it’s probably also a cliché at this point to point out how commonplace such an observation is. Yet although this assessment applies to Doomsday Book, which gets its North American premiere Wednesday evening at NYAFF, the film is also refreshing in that I could see different viewers holding disparate ideas as to which are the stronger and weaker entries in this ambitious, three-part science-fiction extravaganza.
The opening story, “A Brave New World,” takes what seems like a well-worn zombie formula and, in the hands of Antarctic Journal’s Yim Pil-Sung, fashions one of those optimal mixtures of the audaciously dark and the goofily humorous that can make Korean genre cinema so wonderful. That’s not to say that Yim’s goals are purely pulply, its ironical tone and light intellectualism are evident from the title. Taking its cue less from Shakespeare, or Huxley, and more from the Bible, this segment looks terrific and boasts some solid storytelling, so you’ll be forgiven for not noticing its more highbrow aspirations. Like Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, which played for both more laughs and more horror, “A Brave New World” is so adept at grabbing and holding your attention that you may be a bit disappointed when it seems satisfied in leading you into romance (!) territory and leaving you there.
Sunday, July 8, 2012
Korean Box Office Update (07/06-07/08, 2012)
Deranged Beats Spidey in Massive Debut
Title | Release Date | Market Share | Weekend | Total | Screens | |
1 | Deranged | 7/5/12 | 39.20% | 1,128,335 | 1,323,523 | 755 |
2 | The Amazing Spiderman (us) | 6/28/12 | 42.90% | 1,059,076 | 3,362,773 | 896 |
3 | A Letter to Momo (jp) | 7/5/12 | 3.30% | 102,728 | 114,887 | 252 |
4 | Madascar 3 (us) | 6/6/12 | 2.80% | 83,087 | 1,545,255 | 247 |
5 | The Raven (us) | 7/5/12 | 2.40% | 65,946 | 87,472 | 264 |
6 | Midnight in Paris (us) | 7/5/12 | 2.30% | 61,735 | 80,391 | 187 |
7 | All About My Wife | 5/17/12 | 2.00% | 56,070 | 4,516,210 | 184 |
8 | The Emperor's Concubine | 6/6/12 | 1.60% | 44,226 | 2,569,270 | 252 |
9 | Haywire (us) | 7/5/12 | 0.90% | 26,675 | 34,093 | 199 |
10 | Cabin in the Woods (us) | 6/28/12 | 0.80% | 20,773 | 211,874 | 184 |
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