Miss Jiwaku and I saw the new Korean film Blind tonight (the title is the same in Korean: 블라인드), and I have to say, as long as you don’t know anything about blind people, it’s a pretty good film — a tightly plotted thriller with a shadowy bad guy and a surprisingly sympathetic pair of protagonists-in-peril. (I was especially shocked not to hate the boy-band-ish teenage food delivery scooter boy, at least after he wises up and stops being a petulant little prick.) It was a bit overly-sentimentalizing, but not bad. (Not SFnal, though the CGI in it, which is …
Category: FILMS&TV
Some Notes For Korean Film Companies Considering an SF Film Project
After the debacle that is 7광구, which I discussed here, I figured I might write up a few suggestions for Korean film companies considering undertaking an SF project. After all, I’m someone who has studied Korean SF films carefully, picked out their pitfalls and how and why they failed — either domestically, or internationally — and I have a few thoughts based on my own frustration with the way Korean SF film has gone, and is going. I think there are a few very simple things that production companies in Korea need to realize, if they want to start putting …
7광구 (Sector 7) — Setting Korean SF Back Decades
If you want the short version of my reaction: skip this movie, pretend it was never made, save yourself some money and some disappointment — that is, if you have a half a brain and actually like SF. Sector 7 is shot amateurishly, it is badly acted by almost the whole cast — and since at least some of the cast can act, I suspect it’s badly edited and badly directed; the budget was mostly used creating CG for a rather unimaginative monster; it was derivative of The Host (괴물), the Alien series (especially Aliens; it was badly written; it had …
천군 (Heaven’s Soldiers) revisited: Hanmura Ryō’s Sengoku Jieitai (戦国自衛隊), 독재자 (Dictator), and more Korean SF News
Long ago, I posted briefly about the monstrosity that is Heaven’s Soldiers (천군) a while back (and discussed it in an interview, too), but this is a point that is sure to interest those who, like me, have no access to Korean SF except through film and that small cache of English translations online linked in my sidebar (okay, here you go). As you may recall, Heaven’s Soldiers is a South Korean SF film about North and South Korean soldiers cooperating on the construction of nuclear weapons with which to apparently meet the threat of foreign hegemonic domination or invasion or …
Vampires, Confucianism, Christianity’s Latent Monarchism, and the Translation of Sociohorror
(Note: I’m filing this under Korean SF, though it only fits there if we define SF as “speculative fiction”: still, I think this post does appeal to a crucial question at the heart of the reception of SF and other fantastical genres in cultures foreign to the culture of a given work’s original production. So there.) So I’ll admit it now: I’ve been watching True Blood. Yes, yes, it’s trashy. But as someone who is not very plot-minded, I have to say, it does a particular trick with a knife that I, too, am learning to do. I’m close to …
Two Good Korean Films
I don’t watch a lot of Korean films these days, in part so few good ones are put out, but also because none of the good ones actually play in my neighborhood. No, it’s all junk in my neighborhood, and I’m busy enough that sometimes it’s hard to justify the trek out to Seoul to see something worth seeing. But the other day, Miss Jiwaku dragged me to a couple of great films that were showing in Guro. The first was the omnibus film If You Were Me 5 (시선이 너머). I never managed to see the third and fourth …
Thoughts on Dexter
Back when I was traveling around the US in the summer of 2009, a number of people were talking about the TV series Dexter, but it took me until recently to check it out. If you don’t know the series, it’s basically about a “moral” psychopath who hunts down people essentially like himself. He follows a set of rules that determine who “deserves” to die and who doesn’t, or at least that’s how he operates in the first couple of seasons. I haven’t read the books by Jeff Lindsay (upon which the series is based) but I have seen about …
The American, Tron, and the “new” Harry Potter
Well, I’ve seen a few movies in the last few weeks, went into all of them blind (because no, I still haven’t read the Harry Potter books) and there are two things I can say about those films. The first is that you can tell a lot about a movie by how badly Koreans took it. The American, a European film featuring George Clooney, has been getting some pretty negative reactions online in Korea. People are reporting things like a quarter of the audience getting up and walking out at some point in the film. Lots of people are complaining …
짜증나는 로맨스
Okay, the thing is, I knew I wasn’t going to be crazy about this film, 쩨쩨한 로맨스. It’s not because I have anything necessarily against love stories, to be honest… I don’t go for the Hollywood version of “romance,” to be sure, but look, love is the theme of the vast majority of mainstream literature, including tons of “classic” novels and even some I have liked myself. It’s bizarre to hate films that deal with love and relationships, if you like literature. That said, cinematic handling of love is usually unsatisfyingly shallow. Still, once in a while a film will …
초능력자
Tonight I saw 초능력자 (Choneungryeokja, which you could translate as “Psychic” or “Person with Supernatural Powers”1) with Miss Jiwaku, and I have to say that it actually pretty much was what one of my students described: …pretty good for the first hour or so, and then ramps up an exponential curve of silliness until it hits infinite silliness at the end. That said, the film seems to have been received rather well by the Korean public, and some people are praising it. My experience is that films that are very highly praised in Korea are sometimes good, but often don’t …