Tag: Korean film

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

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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

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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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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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천군 (Heaven’s Soldiers) revisited: Hanmura Ryō’s Sengoku Jieitai (戦国自衛隊), 독재자 (Dictator), and more Korean SF News

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This entry is part 45 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

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 …

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짜증나는 로맨스

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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 …

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이끼 (Moss)

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Well, it’s been a while since I saw a Korean film that I couldn’t quite understand with my limited Korean. (Of course some lines go over my head, but I usually get the gist.) This film, on the other hand, frustrated me like mad. I think part of the reason–probably because it’s based on a comic book–is that there is a lot of non-action action. What I mean by that is, there are a lot of sequences that serve the same function as action sequences, but which actually feature characters either standing still or movingly only a little. Frankly, the …

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