Man on the Edge (박수건달, Baksoogeondal) 2012

The gangster comedy, once one the biggest money-spinners in the Korean film industry, has fallen out of favor recently. Truth is, most high concept comedies struggle in the Korean marketplace these days. Yet for many years they were the king of the charts. In 2001, the gangster comedies Kick the Moon, My Wife Is a Gangster, Hi Dharma and My Boss My Hero, as well as Jang Jin’s hitman comedy Guns & Talk, all featured among the year’s top seven films. A year later, the first entry in the Marrying the Mafia franchise (which would spawn five installments) rode its way to the top of the chart.

What is it about the mix between gangsters and comedy (frequently romantic comedy) that has so enticed Korean viewers? Narratives featuring organized crime have always been popular the world-over and things are certainly no different here. However, in a male-driven country dominated by social hierarchy, it could be that the infantilization of these hoodlums was a welcome source of respite within the safe confines of the country’s multiplexes. In any case this clever piece of genre hybridity burned bright for a number of years before suffering increasingly diminishing returns. A few months ago, the final installment in the Marrying the Mafia franchise failed to attract over a million viewers, demonstrating that the format was running on empty.

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New Korean Films: One Against All (2013 Week 6)

(by Fabien Schneider)

Small week for Korean film releases, since there is only one new film that will land in theaters. But it's not slouch as this is another movie widely anticipated by the public, and it will bravely attempt to overthrow the established order in the box office. I can easily understand why no other distributor has dared to release a film at the moment, as the market is now completely saturated by three Korean films, that together attracted three million viewers last weekend. Thus the film Fool has been postponed until next week to afford him a better chance.

Southbound  (남쪽 으로 튀어)

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A Taste for Blood and Money: Traffickers (공모자들, Kongmojadeul) 2012

As a young cinephile and crime fiction fanatic there was a smorgasbord of noir-tinged goodies for a kid growing up in the Nineties to watch, rewatch, and obsessively pore over. Vice, scandal and pulp theatrics were alive and well during an era when Tarantino’s jigsaw narratives, John Dahl’s nihilistic seductresses, Scorsese’s late-era gangster sagas, and the budding humanist crime dramas of Paul Thomas Anderson were playing on the big-screen while paranoid Grand Guignol dramas like the X-Files were simultaneously playing on network television. Of course, no film embodied all the tropes and failures of the crime thriller in that decade quite like Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects (1995).

Billed as a post-modern crime caper, the popularity of Singer’s film rode on the back of Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction which was released a year earlier and also employed an atypical plot structure. Of course, what has kept the film from being forgotten is its iconic twist ending. A double whammy revealing to the police detective interrogating the film’s narrator and our guide that the entire story we were just fed was a lie, an unoriginal trope in foreign and arthouse cinema but a relatively enervating gimmick to a young cine-educated audience raised on cable television and VHS tapes. A few years later another director, M. Night Shyamalan, would utilize the twist ending as a personal signature to all his films starting with the supernatural thriller The Sixth Sense (1999) and by the mid-aughts the trope became a well-worn and overused cliché.

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The Berlin File (베를린, Bereullin) 2013

From North By Northwest (1959) all the way to Tinker Sailor Soldier Spy (2011), spy thrillers have long captured the imagination of filmgoers. Over time they have become more elaborate and their appeal has led to a number of blockbuster franchises. James Bond recently celebrated his most successful outing with the chart-topping Skyfall while both the Mission Impossible and Bourne series have also stirred up some serious business.

Korea is no stranger to the genre. Shiri was the country’s first blockbuster hit in 1999 and the country’s contentious relationship with its Northern neighbor has yielded many a spy narrative since then. Ryoo Seung-wan previously dabbled in spies with his deliriously playful and inventive (but financially poisonous) spoof Dachimawa Lee (2008). He found greater success with his next work, the tense thriller The Unjust (2010), through which he channeled New Hollywood works of the 1970s. Now he’s returned to the spy genre for his most ambitious and commercial work yet.

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KBO: Miracle in Berlin, Record 1-2 Finish at Korean BO (02/01-02/03, 2013)

Miracle in Berlin, Record 1-2 Finish at Korean BO

	Title	Release Date	Market Share	Weekend	Total	Screens
1	The Berlin File	13/01/30	43.40%	1,532,210	2,245,404	897
2	Miracle in Cell No.7	13/01/29	37.50%	1,360,776	4,191,854	869
3	Man on the Edge	13/01/23	6.20%	223,531	659,045	388
4	Pororo: the Racing Adventure	13/01/09	3.80%	137,896	3,826,738	367
5	Hotel Transylvania (us)	13/01/17	2.40%	93,290	868,382	297
6	Les Miserables (uk/us)	12/12/19	1.70%	62,422	5,785,971	208
7	Detective Conan (jp)	13/01/24	1.00%	39,576	165,382	127
8	Life of Pie (us)	13/01/01	1.40%	34,584	1,550,725	89
9	The Impossible (sp/us)	13/01/17	0.70%	25,772	617,916	118
10	The Life of Guskou of Budori (jp)	13/01/30	0.30%	12,778	16,251	113

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A Gothic Fantasy: A Werewolf Boy (늑대소년, Neukdae Sonyeon) 2012

(by Rex Baylon)

Of all the film cultures in the world that embrace the ideals of romantic love it is only in South Korea where the connection between the ghosts of the past, the shifting of the seasons, and the tragic melodramatic love story can exist and thrive. While the French may have their amour fou, the Italians and Spanish their unbridled passion, and the Americans their once witty rom-coms South Korea has, for over a decade now, been cornering the market on never-can-be romances. If one were to retrace the genesis of this popular genre you wouldn’t need to go further back than 2002 with the broadcast of Winter Sonata on television screens all over the peninsula. Part of the Endless Love quadrilogy of stories that charted the ups and downs of a couple who meet in adolescence, were separated by some uncontrollable force, reunited later in adulthood, and then depending on the whims of nature and the show’s producer would either come back together again or be painfully ripped apart from one another.

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New Korean Films: Big Blockbuster In Sight (2013 Week 5)

(by Fabien Schneider)

This week finally offers a little more variety in the cinematic landscape, with no less than four films: a romance, an animated movie for children, an action thriller and a mystery drama.

The Berlin File (베를린)

North Korean secret agent Pyo Jong-seong is on a mission to Berlin to conclude a deal on the sale of weapons when he a price is out on his head and that of his wife by their own government for treason. Jung Jin-soo, a South Korean agent, is also on site to investigate the contract, but faces off with Pyo Jong-seong, an unknown enemy.

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