Ongoing series on classic Korean film recently made available for free and with English subtitles on Youtube courtesy of the Korean Film Archive.
I can find something to like in just about any Korean film, even some that are frankly terrible, such as last year’s Marrying the Mafia IV, but there are some that I simply can’t abide. For the most part, the culprits tend to originate from the same genre: the family melodrama. Granted, there are numerous exceptional Korean melodramas but by force of there being so many, the ones that scrape the bottom of the barrel are remarkably turgid and torpid, judging by any standard. A recent example is The Last Blossom (2011), which I patiently suffered through despite almost boiling over with rage as a result of its manipulative machinations.
While these films generally aren’t big revenue drivers, many of them still go into production and are brought to us by the hands of hackneyed talent. Sometimes, as I watch these films, I ask myself: why do they exist? What led us to this point? While melodrama is typically the main form of entertainment in Korea, it seemed to me that these particular films are leftovers from a derelict sector of production, which ambles on, quietly churning out these hollow and shallow features. Naturally, the next piece of the puzzle was to identify and seek out what had come before.
