The Terror Live (2013) and Killer Toon (2013)

I’ve seen a couple of Korean movies lately worth commenting on. Those in Korea are probably too late to see this on the big screen, and those outside Korea may not get a chance, but anyway, Mrs. Jiwaku and I saw the 2013 Korean film The Terror Live this evening. My general thoughts on The Terror Live were very positive, despite having to make do with my iffy (and waning) Korean-language listening skills. (Probably seeing it at the cinema where we saw it–the Lotte Cinema at Lotte Mart–was the mistake; when I watched another Korean blockbuster a week ago at a …

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Tinker Tailor / Nameless Gangster

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

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

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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