KCN: Oscar Shortlist, Festival News and Trailers (08/23-08/29, 2012)

Oscar news this week and a number of festival items, not to mention posters and trailers.

KOREAN CINEMA NEWS

KOFIC Announces Shortlist for 2013 Oscars
A team is being assembled by the Korean Film Council to deliberate over the merits of five recent Korean features hoping to become to next selection to represent the nation in the Foreign-Language Oscar race. This year's contenders include Im Sang-soo's Taste of Money, Hong Sang-soo's In Another Country, Kim Ki-duk's Pieta (which is having its world premiere next month at Venice, the gangster pic Nameless Gangster and Lee Byung-hyun period drama Masquerade, which opens next month in Korea.

Over the past few years there has been some consternation regarding the eventual picks, which have included Crossing (2008), A Barefoot Dream (2010) and The Front Line (2011). Films that seemed to have far better potential have been passed over, such as Lee Chang-dong's Poetry or the popular hit Sunny. This year's crop does not inspire a great deal of confidence (though few have seen the latter two yet) and imagine that 2013 will be another year without a Korean Oscar nominee. To date not a single Korean film has ever been selected. (Modern Korean Cinema, August 29, 2012)

Click to read more»

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.

Click to read more»

JIMFF 2012 - Gainsbourg By Gainsbourg: An Intimate Self-Portrait (Je suis venu vous dire..., France) 2012

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

When I noticed this documentary among the many titles on offer at this year’s JIMFF, I quickly saved a spot for it in my schedule. It was my first time hearing of it but as I count myself one of Serge Gainsbourg’s many fans it was out of the question that I should miss it. However, following the thrill of seeing it in the schedule and my rising excitement as I recalled this great artist’s legacy, my initial enthusiasm soon turned to trepidation. Gainsbourg, of course, is no mere pop star (not that I mean to denigrate anyone associated with that label). He is one of the most complicated mainstream artists of the 20^th century. Following his death, the president of his native France declared him a national treasure, placing him in the same pantheon as Apollinaire and Baudelaire, two of the finest poets to ever put pen to paper.

My fear was that he is a towering figure, a versatile musician with an enigmatic persona: how does one adumbrate his life and work in a mere 100 minutes? There was no doubt in my mind that the music would be up to par (as it would be his) and that I could expect a number of interesting anecdotes coupled with footage and audio of the great man himself outside of his recorded oeuvre. What did nag at me was that I could scarcely imagine how the film could live up to the man.

Click to read more»

PiFan 2012: Interview with Young Gun in the Time's Oh Young-doo

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

Oh Young-doo has been working in the Korean film industry for 15 years and for the last couple of those he has transitioned to making his own low-budget features. He and some of his friends worked together to make the zombie omnibus feature The Neighbor Zombie in 2010 and following that Oh made his feature directorial debut with the ultra low-budget Invasion of Alien Bikini (2011) which had a very successful festival run.

Now he's back with a new feature called Young Gun in the Time, which will hit Korean screens later this month. I had the chance to catch up with him following its Korean premiere at this year's Pucheon International Fantastic Film Festival.

Click to read more»

JIMFF 2012: The Moon (พุ่มพวง, Pumpuang, Thailand) 2011

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

Generally speaking I’m not a huge fan of music biopics. As the Jecheon film festival has proven (or not in some instances), musicians tend to make better documentary subjects. With the latter format you can improvise and approach their life and work from a variety of angles. By staging a full blown narrative feature, you’re assuming that the musician has a life that is worth the film treatment. Very often this is not the case. While musicians lead very interesting lives, these rarely amount to a good feature-length narrative.

The Moon is about Pumpuang Duangjang, the queen of Thai country (luktung) music. Born in poverty, Pumpuang worked hard to get herself taken in as an apprentice by an established musician in Bangkok and quickly made a name for herself with her powerful voice among a male-dominated scene. The film chronicles her steady rise and later her battle with illness, all the while exploring her marriage as she grows more famous and distant.

Click to read more»

KOFFIA 2012: The Front Line (고지전, Gojijeon) 2011

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

Before getting into a discussion about Jang Hoon’s much-ballyhooed new feature The Front Line, I feel that I should mention that over the years I have had a troubled relationship with war films.  I have seen all kinds, from different eras, different countries, detailing different fights, and espousing all sorts of different points of view.  On a cold Sunday afternoon, there isn’t a whole lot that can beat a repeat viewing of seminal classics like David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1956), John Sturges’ The Great Escape (1963), or Billy Wilder’s Stalag 17 (1953).  Those are actually all POW (Prisoner of War) films but there is a great wealth of others that I can always return to, including: Masaki Kobayashi’s The Human Condition trilogy (1959-1961), Kon Ichikawa’s The Burmese Harp (1956) and Fires on the Plain (1959), Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) or HBO’s 10-part mini-series Band of Brothers (2001).

When the elements fall into place, a good war film is one of the most engaging types of entertainment across any medium but that correct balance is a difficult thing to achieve.  War films differ from other genres as they are naturally rooted in spectacle, feature little to no romance or indeed female protagonists, and must frequently sacrifice characters on the battlefield.  What’s more, rather than following a personal trajectory, the main thrust of the narrative is often consumed by a story far greater than the leads that we are to bond with on screen.

Click to read more»

KBO: Neighbors Tops Korea-Heavy Chart (08/24-08/26, 2012)

Neighbors Tops Korea-Heavy Chart

	Title	Release Date	Market Share	Weekend	Total	Screens
1	Neighbors	8/22/12	31.10%	780,556	1,094,081	600
2	The Grand Heist	8/8/12	20.10%	537,099	4,106,828	515
3	The Thieves	7/25/12	19.80%	513,409	12,094,680	544
4	R2B: Return to Base	8/15/12	6.80%	182,718	1,059,543	331
5	Total Recall (us)	8/15/12	6.60%	172,453	1,111,574	321
6	Step Up 4 (us)	8/15/12	6.50%	164,872	672,959	269
7	Sammy's Adventures 2 (be)	8/1/12	2.60%	71,952	1,401,327	244
8	Animals United (ge)	8/8/12	1.10%	33,674	275,373	115
9	The Dark Knight Rises (us)	7/19/12	1.30%	29,475	6,359,420	81
10	Red Lights (us)	8/23/12	1.10%	29,341	38,204	197

Click to read more»

KOFFIA 2012: The Client (의뢰인, Eui-roi-in) 2011

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

There are few things more satisfying than a well-performed and thoughtfully structured courtroom drama. I for one have pleasantly idled away many a Sunday afternoon whisked away into the heady wood-paneled halls of justice. The beauty of legal dramas or thrillers is that by way of their conceit they are already confined, for the most part, to one location and as viewers we accept this fact. More than most genres, with courtroom films we largely know what we’re getting ourselves into.

So what makes these films so popular when they are so constrained by their design? Their narratives typically do not require the presence of too many characters and often eschew subplots which may otherwise seem contrived. This makes them quite lean and generally pretty easy to follow and be drawn in by. For the most part the stories will be determined by the answer to one question: will the case be won or lost? But the most engaging thing about courtroom dramas is the bitter contest of right vs. wrong. We are compelled to deliberate over the evidence and arguments presented by both sides (though we are often led by the filmmaker’s guiding hand) which in effect means that our viewing experience sees us living vicariously through the jury represented on screen. Some of the genre’s best examples are fully aware of this fact and use it to their advantage, such as the slippery and claustrophobic moralizing of Twelve Angry Men (1956).

Click to read more»

KOFFIA 2012: The Day He Arrives (북촌 방향, Book-chon Bang-hyang) 2011

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

As far as the critical discourse of Korean cinema goes, few filmmakers have a more commanding presence than Hong Sang-soo, whose flowing narratives often feel like chapters in the same grand story.  In a sense, his body of work reminds me of some of the 19th century’s most prolific French writers, such as Honoré de Balzac and Émile Zola whose main outputs consisted of The Human Comedy and the Rougon-Macquart cycles, which consisted of 91 and 20 volumes respectively.  In these exceedingly rich opuses, the French wordsmiths crafted dense worlds, which mirrored the societies they lived in and repeated the same themes and concerns through similar stories and with large casts of revolving characters.

Hong’s output is much less concerned with the high-flown dramatics of the far-reaching stories of these previously mentioned collections.  Indeed his films, especially for an uninitiated viewer, offer a vague semblance of banality and rarely fall into the trap of narrative twists or plot contrivances, choosing to focus on the everyday rather than the extremes of life.  What he shares with Balzac and Zola is a keen interest in realism.  For the French writers this style was labeled naturalism and often explored social injustice and the inescapable force of heredity in the shaping of human characters.  While Hong’s films do not share those specific traits, they do exhibit a similarly acute infatuation with repetition.  People make the same choices and mistakes over and over again.  It’s a funny thing about reviews of Hong’s work but more than most other filmmakers, his whole career tends to be put under the microscope, likely because his films so resemble one another. 

Click to read more»

KOFFIA 2012: Bleak Night (파수꾼, Pa-soo-ggoon) 2011

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

It’s amazing to witness what can be done with little resources and in 2011, a year filled with high-falutin, hollow, and very disappointing blockbusters, there were many films that did just that. One in particular managed to do the most with the least. The Korean Academy of Film Arts (KAFA) has been training some of the peninsula’s best talent since the 1980s, including Bong Joon-ho, Im Sang-soo, and Kim Tae-gyun, and these days, as it produces four feature-length projects per year, it looks set to develop an even larger pool of talent. Not long ago I discussed the importance of Korean film schools in a piece on the Korean National University of Arts (K’Arts) short Metamorpheses. The technical competence of Korean films is due in no small part to the high quality film academies in the country and this becomes only more evident now that the student-produced shorts and features from these institutions gain wider exposure.

Bleak Night is one of KAFA’s student features and going into the film it’s hard to say that knowing this didn’t completely change the way I looked at it. I’m generally not a fan of student films and not just because of low production values and a lack of experience.  Oftentimes they are pretentious, lazy, and/or cocky and rather than being diamonds in the rough, they are frequently vanity projects from people who either don’t have what it takes or have no intention of trying to make a career out of filmmaking. Let me be clear, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, this is the purpose that film societies at college universities serve and the world is all the better for it, however I would rather not subject myself to these less than enticing offerings. I also speak from experience, as I too was one of these cocky student filmmakers in my Dublin salad days.

Click to read more»

KOFFIA 2012: Late Blossom (그대를 사랑합니다, Geu-dae-leul Sa-rang-hab-ni-da) 2011

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

It’s easy to forget sometimes how rigid the rules can be concerning the technical aspects behind the making of a film.  When done right, everything you see on screen (or hear) is exactly so for a reason.  The rich tapestry of mise-en-scene (basically everything but the dialogue) captures our attention by cleverly drawing us to certain pieces of information.  Through cinematography, sound, production design, costumes, and editing it seeks to tell us a story.  It is the difference between a novel, in which we must imagine all these details, and a film, which seeks to show us a world conceived by its filmmakers.

If you take the time to consider what shots are used in a film, you can see (most of the time) a reason behind their selection.  These little parcels of visual information tell part of the narrative.  There are many choices a director or cinematographer can make when framing a shot and each of these decisions will affect how the story is told.  An example of this is from what angle to frame a character: you can shoot from above, from below, or straight on.  In Late Blossom, which features some exceptional photography, this choice is an important one.  It says a lot about how the film views its characters, the majority of which are senior citizens. 

Click to read more»

The 6th Cinema Digital Seoul Film Festival (CinDi) Preview

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

This weekend I will have the opportunity to attend the Cinema Digital Seoul Film Festival for the first time. It may not be one of the biggest Korean film festivals but it has a stellar reputation and is very well-attended. Many industry folk make the trip as it takes place in their backyard, in Apgujeong, Seoul.

The festival focuses on the new era of digital filmmaking and while its scope is international, the premiere lineup is the Asian Competition section. Young filmmakers, who are trailblazers in the new digital arts, are favored at this particular event.

Click to read more»