Tag: FILMS & TV

Deadwood and Order

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As our baby has grown a bit, his needs and demands have shifted, so I’m trying to ease off watching TV and focus on him more, but for the first couple of months I found myself casting about for something to do while burping and feeding him, since he didn’t really engage much and “Aww, cute!” is less effective when you’re dead tired. Since reading was tough with both hands full, I set about catching up on TV series I’d missed over the years. More recently, I finished Mad Men, which… well, I’ll save that for another post, but before that it was Deadwood. After …

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사이코메트리 [Psychometry] — The Gifted Hands (2013)

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This entry is part 58 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

There is now a stereotype for psychics in Korean cinema. (Assuming there wasn’t already one, that is.) Psychics are tall and pale as Snow White. They are skinny and their eyes do weird, sparkly blue things. Even if they’re from a poor background or living in poverty, they are obviously plastic-surgeried, and they look as if they belong in the back line of the photographs of a Korean boy band. Also, when they do something psychic, they look kind of crazy, and their eyes get really big too. To be fair, it’s probably as much the investors pressuring the director …

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Tinker Tailor / Nameless Gangster

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Miss Jiwaku and I have lately seen two movies worth the price of admission: one that is #1 in Korea (범죄와의 전쟁 / Nameless Gangster — yeah, the English title is really unfortunate), and one that I’m pretty sure won’t be playing here for long: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I won’t say much about the latter beyond the observation that I learned something watching it: there’s no point in trying to watch an actually good, actually challenging movie in a CGV cinema. While I’ve gotten used to the audiences at anyplace except Cinematheque behaving like idiots, I hadn’t yet tried …

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Ruler of the Your Own World (네 멋대로 해라) — The Halfway Point

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During my first few years in Korea, I asked Koreans I knew what was the best South Korean-made TV show they’d ever seen. I would hear different answers from different people, but one consistent answer I got from people who cared about and consumed a lot of movies, films, and books, was the recommendation that I check out 네 멋대로 해라, a TV program that aired back in summer/fall 2002 (and which, in English, got titled Ruler of Your Own World.) Somehow, though, my other (very brief) experiences with Korean TV dramas kept me skeptical. I don’t care for the kind …

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Invasion of Alien Bikini, or, I Feel Sick

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This entry is part 50 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

So, I mentioned the Korean SF film Invasion of Alien Bikini a few weeks ago. Miss Jiwaku and I saw it tonight, and, well, to say it ruined out evening would be an understatement. I am going to tell you the whole plot here, so that you don’t have to see it, and know why you should not, in fact, spend a single won on it. The thing is, the film really didn’t have to suck. The opening section was actually really interesting: I felt like I was seeing Seoul represented in a film in a way I’d never seen …

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Persepolis (the film)

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Miss Jiwaku and I just watched the animated version of Persepolis last night, and I have to say, it was really very impressed. I’ve read only the first book — my friend Jean-Louis recommended it to me, and I enjoyed it quite a bit, even reading it in French. (Which was not so hard.) I haven’t managed to read the other volumes, but I am curious. I have Volume 2, and figure I can check out Volume 3 next time I’m in Canada. But the way the film was put together — using Satrapi’s characteristic style, but with a wonderful audio …

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블라인드 Blind, Part 2: Some Notes on Depicting the Physically Challenged

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The other day, I posted my thoughts on the newly-released Korean film 블라인드 (Blind). I thought I’d follow up with some thoughts on the depiction of physically handicapped people, for anyone who’d like to be reminded of the lessons of which I was reminded by the films missteps. A lot of this is not just applicable to depicting people with physical disabilities, but also to depicting people of any group about which one does not know intimately, or which experiences the world in a way different from oneself (through the lens of another gender or sexual orientation, a different race or …

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블라인드 Blind, Part 1: A Review

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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 …

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