News: Record Sales & Slim Profits for Korean Film Industry in 2014

By Pierce Conran

South Korea's film industry topped the two trillion won mark for the first time in 2014, reaching 2.03 trillion won (USD 1.84 billion), which was a 7.6% improvement over the previous year. Growth was recorded overall in exhibition sales, the digital online market and overseas sales, yet within those figures Korean admissions, online streaming sales and film exports were all down. Worryingly, despite some record-breaking local hits, the return on investment rate for Korean films almost fell into negative figures.

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Review: ODE TO MY FATHER Puts Blockbuster Spin On Melodrama

By Pierce Conran

Family takes centre stage in Ode to My Father, a new Korean melodrama that is every bit as bombastic as this year's naval battle hit Roaring Currents. Directed by JK Youn (Youn Je-kyun), whose last film Haeundae sauntered over the 10 million admissions barrier in 2009, this new epic drama proves to be an expert balance of scale and intimacy that will surely find a huge audience at home.

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Busan 2014 Review: The Beauty Of THE FATAL ENCOUNTER Is Only Skin Deep

Part of MKC's coverage of the 19th Busan International Film Festival

By Pierce Conran

Following a slow few months, commercial Korean cinema returns to the spotlight with The Fatal Encounter, the first of the many period blockbusters that will inundate local theaters through to the end of summer. Following in the footsteps of the 2012 period blockbuster Masquerade (2012), The Fatal Encounter casts a major heartthrob (Hyun Bin) as a king in a tale of royal palace intrigue.

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News: SNOWPIERCER Alert! Mark Your Calendars for June 27th

By Pierce Conran

Snowpiercer is finally getting a stateside release. The internet is saying June 27th but CJ Entertainment is telling me June, with no day fixed as of yet. If it does open on the 27th it will have to contend with the new Transformers film (and my birthday). As previously reported the film will be screened uncut but rolled out in limited release. However, as The Weinstein Company will release through their label Radius-TWC it may well become available on VOD at the same time.

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Berlinale 2014 Review: Bong Joon-ho's SNOWPIERCER Delivers the Goods

Part of MKC's coverage of the 64th Berlin International Film Festival.

By Pierce Conran

Cinema is a medium of motion and if anyone understands this, it appears to be Bong Joon-ho, whose visionary new work is a demented and stunning thrillride. In his first production outside his native South Korea, Bong has delivered his most ambitious project yet, and proves more than capable of handling an international, multilingual cast and a large budget.

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Korean Box Office: Another Huge Weekend for Snowpiercer and The Terror Live

Following last weekend's record breaking 4.5 million admissions bonanza, business quelled somewhat over the past frame. However, at 3.6 million, it is still on of the biggest weekends on record and significantly above last year's 3.1 million. The local market share was a mighty 78%, in line with last year. Just like last week, business was bolstered by a pair a giant productions.

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Review: Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer Delivers the Goods

Cinema is a medium of motion and if anyone understands this, it appears to be Bong Joon-ho, whose visionary new work is a demented and stunning thrillride. In his first production outside his native South Korea, Bong has delivered his most ambitious project yet, and proves more than capable of handling an international, multilingual cast and a large budget.

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Korean Box Office: Pacific Rim Cashes in on Korea's Robot-philia

Business was a healthy 2.62 million admissions (in line with last year) over the frame as two big releases duked it out for the top spot. The local market share was down to 40%, well below last year's 60% but unsurprising given the big new release the past weekend.

	Title	Release Date	Market Share	Weekend	Total	Screens
1	Pacific Rim (us)	13/07/11	44.30%	1,160,636	1,372,731	1005
2	Cold Eyes	13/07/03	34.60%	1,003,049	3,540,435	801
3	World War Z (us)	13/06/20	11.60%	345,896	4,891,909	383
4	Killer Toon	13/06/27	3.50%	107,173	1,091,116	244
5	Lone Ranger (us)	13/07/04	1.20%	34,668	370,829	229
6	Secretly Greatly	13/06/05	1.10%	34,319	6,932,959	141
7	The Adventures of Jinbao (ch)	13/07/04	0.80%	25,199	71,029	116
8	Side Effects (us)	13/07/11	0.70%	18,697	23,441	170
9	The Croods (us)	13/05/16	0.30%	8,998	936,699	39
10	The Master (us)	13/07/11	0.20%	6,561	9,282	38

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UDINE 2013: The Thieves (도둑들, 2012)

Part of MKC's coverage of the 15th Udine Far East Film Festival.

The most anticipated Korean film of the year, with its dazzling cast and international locations, opened late last month and has since become the biggest domestic box office behemoth in years. The Thieves, Choi Dong-hoon’s fourth feature, following The Big Swindle (2004), Tazza: The High Rollers (2006), and Woochi: The Taoist Wizard (2009), is his most ambitious yet. It is a vibrant and complex heist movie with one of the most high profile casts ever assembled for a local production.

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KOFFIA 2012: War of the Arrows (최종병기 활, Choi-jong-byeong-gi Hwal) 2011

Part of MKC's coverage of the 3rd Korean Film Festival in Australia (previously published).

It’s about time I threw my hat into the ring and chimed in on War of the Arrows, the top-grossing Korean film of 2011, which has met with positive reactions from all over the globe.  Early in 2011, if you were familiar with the big films that were scheduled to come out throughout the year, you could be forgiven for expecting Sector 7 and The Front Line to dominate the charts during the summer months.  In the end the former was a cataclysmic failure, likely because it was a terrible film, and the latter fell below expectations, it was a decent film but perhaps a little thin to play well given its subject matter.  One film you may not have noticed, I know I didn’t, was War of the Arrows, a straightforward period action film with mid-level stars and no pretense about it.

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R2B: Return to Base (R2B: 리턴투베이스) 2012

Following the disastrous performance of CJ’s high profile releases last year, such as Sector 7 and My Way, the assumption was that the company was going to rethink it’s approach to blockbusters by focussing more on mid-level projects. Perhaps this is the case but I suppose R2B: Return to Base was already in production at this stage so they just grit their teeth and got on with it. It certainly feels that way as this new late summer action film feels like it was thrown together. What was initially a remake of the classic Shin Sang-ok feature Red Muffler (1964) starring Rain, the king of K-pop, wound up as a half-assed attempt at emulating an enormously popular and kitschy 80s American classic.

Earlier this week we were all shocked to hear of Tony Scott’s suicide, one of Hollywood’s most dependable directors. He made many great action films over the last 20 years but he will most likely be remembered for Top Gun (1986), the film, which among other things, made Tom Cruise a superstar. Rain may have been voted Time’s Most Influential Person of the Year three years running by his adoring fans, but his screen presence pales in comparison. Love him or hate him (I consider myself among the former) there’s no denying Cruise’s charm. This is what made Top Gun such a hit and is part of the reason why R2B is D.O.A.

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The Thieves (도둑들, Dodookdeul) 2012

The most anticipated Korean film of the year, with its dazzling cast and international locations, opened late last month and has since become the biggest domestic box office behemoth in years. The Thieves, Choi Dong-hoon’s fourth feature, following The Big Swindle (2004), Tazza: The High Rollers (2006), and Woochi: The Taoist Wizard (2009), is his most ambitious yet. It is a vibrant and complex heist movie with one of the most high profile casts ever assembled for a local production.

Popeye and his crew leave Korea to get in on some action in Macao. He brings Pepsi, who has just been paroled, along for the ride. The mastermind behind the big scheme is Macao Park, Popeye’s former partner and Pepsi’s old lover. The plan is to steal the Tear of the Sun, a valuable diamond in transit in one of the city’s casinos. With Popeye’s crew, a Hong Kong team, Park and a few more vested interests, can the plan go off without a hitch?

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NYAFF 2012: War of the Arrows (최종병기 활, Choi-jong-byeong-gi Hwal) 2011

Part of MKC's coverage of the 11th New York Asian Film Festival.

It’s about time I threw my hat into the ring and chimed in on War of the Arrows, the top-grossing Korean film of 2011, which has met with positive reactions from all over the globe.  Early in 2011, if you were familiar with the big films that were scheduled to come out throughout the year, you could be forgiven for expecting Sector 7 and The Front Line to dominate the charts during the summer months.  In the end the former was a cataclysmic failure, likely because it was a terrible film, and the latter fell below expectations, it was a decent film but perhaps a little thin to play well given its subject matter.  One film you may not have noticed, I know I didn’t, was War of the Arrows, a straightforward period action film with mid-level stars and no pretense about it.

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Sector 7 (7-gwang-goo) 2011

Straight off the bat I can say that the most anticipated Korean blockbuster of 2011, aside from Christmas’ war epic My Way from Jang Je-gyu, is easily the worst film I’ve seen all year, no matter how you look at it.  It’s very easy to see what went wrong, one bad decision was made after another, with barely any right ones in between.  What is not so easy to understand is how things went wrong.  Though I would not label Sector 7’s filmmakers as the cream of the crop, they normally seem to know what they’re doing and consistently deliver solid, if overly sentimental fare.  They are endowed with a keen ability to whet Korea’s insatiable appetite for melodrama.

Oil rig bonding

Curiously, there is little to no melodrama in Sector 7.  It hints at it a few times but seems to abandon it in favor of concocting a copycat medley of rehashed Hollywood plot devices and production techniques.  It is truly a triumph of expectation over delivery as I cannot imagine any producer seeing a cut of this expensive bomb and proclaiming “We have a hit on our hands!”  The film’s pre-release exposure was enormous, everyone (at least in Korea and on the internet) knew about it being the first Korean 3D IMAX film, numerous posters and trailers were available, and the entertainment rags were all talking up Ha Ji-won’s arduous workout regimen.  When the day came, it opened very strong before the poisonous word of mouth pulled it right back out of theaters within weeks.

Clearly it was the intent of Yoon Je-kyoon (producer/writer) and Kim Ji-hoon (director) to copy every similar film that had met with a lot of success in the hope that their synthetic product would also be a big hit.  Ha Ji-won is basically an Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver’s iconic character in the Alien franchsie) stand-in, the oil rig is from Armageddon (1998), a major character’s death and resurrection is lifted from the first Lord of the Rings, the genesis of the monster is not dissimilar to Korea’s own The Host (2006), and the list goes on.

Ha Ji-won, tough as nails... apparently

In fact, the film is a veritable cornucopia of metanarratives.  Curiously, aside from lifting all of its plot elements, characters, set-pieces, and effects from other movies, it also has a link to the popular K-Drama Secret Garden (2010) which ends with Ha Ji-won’s stuntwoman character being given the script of Sector 7.  Clever synergy?  I suppose so.  Even stranger is that her characters in both the show and the film are identical.  Women that are physically strong but emotionally weak and incapable of making decisions.  Stranger still is that her tragically deceased father is incarnated by Jeong In-gi in both.  Everything about Sector 7 is constructed, even the sets aren’t real as most of it was shot on green screen.  As a result it barely feels like a film and the chief cause of this is just how badly it is made. 

Unlike Yoon’s previous blockbuster, the tsunami-themed Haeundae (2009), Sector 7 spares little time for scene-setting and character development. A brief underwater intro features a pair of oil drillers setting in place a pipe.  A couple of little glowing creatures swim around them, suddenly they attack and one of the men falls to his death.  Fast forward to the present where we are directly introduced to the hardy (but strangely Spartan) crew of an oil rig.  They are battling with a malfunctioning pipe and being doused in brute petroleum, no doubt reinforcing the intrinsic bond between them.  Cha Hae-joon (Ha Ji-won) is pretty but tough as nails and shows grit alongside the men.  A couple of scenes explore the relationships between the rig’s crewmen (and woman), which is to say that nothing happens.  One of those glowing creatures is found and then Anh Suh-kee (Hae-joon’s mentor) comes aboard to aid the exploration of the new underwater oil fields.  Of course he knows more than he lets on and blah blah blah blah blah…

The first of many oil rig bike scenes

What is it that can make a film go oh so wrong?  B-movies, as I’ve explored in my I Am a Dad review, benefit from lowered expectations.  Conversely, when you suffocate the nation’s media outlets for a month, touting your bigger-than-anything-you’ve-ever-seen-before-it blockbuster, you suffer from heightened expectations.  When you go down the latter route but produce a film on par (or below, as is the case) with the former course, you’re left with a big problem that is pretty much irreparable.  You’ve promised something spectacular and eventful but have completely failed to deliver.  Worse than a bad filmmaker, this makes you a liar.

More than anything else, and there’s a lot, two things bothered me the most about Sector 7.  One is the incomprehensibly bad rear-projection technique used in the bike sequences, of which there are four… on an oil rig.  The quality is what you would expect from the 30s or 40s not 2011, worse still is watching Ha Ji-won madly rev the bike and swoop down to her left and right sides, she actually looks like a little 6-year-old boy pretending to ride in a Grand Prix. Yoon, who also produced this summer’s Quick, seems to have a bike fetish.

Sacrifice: LOTR style

The second, and perhaps more upsetting point, is the film’s latent mysoginy.  Hae-joon embodies both male and female traits, the problem is that the male traits are the hero ones, and the female traits are all ugly stereotypes.  Additionally, for a film that attempts to make Ha Ji-won a consummate action star by pitting her as a conquering heroine against a vicious antagonist, the heroics are mostly reserved for the men.  Throughout the film, they are repeatedly sacrificing themselves, one of the characters does so twice! Another does so to save his friend, in what I’m assuming is supposed to be an emotional scene (no such luck).  After he does so, his friend remains rooted to the spot, whimpering, not trying to escape and is then quickly impaled.  In more able hands this might have been a clever send-up but no such attempt is made here, which begs the question, what was the point?

If you decide to get on board Sector 7, here’s what you can expect: wild lapses in logic, rampant misogyny, numerous laughably atrocious rear-projection motorcycle sequences, complete disregard for the natural laws of physiques, risible dialogue and matching delivery, an ugly monster that is never hidden from view, and perpetual references to superior films that it could never hope to match.  Your choice…

Reviews and features on Korean film appear regularly on Modern Korean Cinema.  For film news, external reviews, and box office analysis, take a look at the Korean Box Office Update, Korean Cinema News and the Weekly Review Round-up, which appear weekly on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings (GMT+1).

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Typhoon (Tae-poong) 2005

Kwak Kyung-taek’s Typhoon was a major blockbuster that hit South Korean screens in the winter of 2005 and wound up with an impressive 4 million admissions. Kwak is no stranger to success, his autobiographical feature Friend (2001) was the highest-grossing film of its time when it attracted 8 million viewers across the peninsula with its tale of boyhood friends following different, and often violent, paths into adulthood. Typhoon reunites the director with Jang Dong-gum, a major star who, as well as Friend, has headlined blockbusters such as Taegugki (2004) and the forthcoming My Way (2011), he has also appeared in foreign language films such as China’s The Promise (2005) and New Zealand’s The Warrior’s Way (2010). The film also stars Lee Jung-jae another big star who has featured in Il Mare (2000) and The Housemaid (2010). Armed with a $15 million budget Kwak took his production across Asia, with various sequences of the film shot in Thailand, Singapore, Russia, and Seoul and Busan in South Korea.

The Vengeful Sin (Jang Dong-gum)

Like many Korean blockbusters that preceded it and those that would follow it, the film derives it central tension from the divide between the Koreas. In this narrative Jang portrays Sin, a North Korean defector who has become a pan-Asian outlaw seeking retribution against the whole peninsula and Lee ass Gang Se-jong, the top Navy operative enlisted to take him down. Throw in some nuclear materials, big ships, submarines, lots of explosions, and a heavy dollop of melodrama and what follows is a fairly standard and messy Korean actioneer. The results aren’t all bad though and as many other reviewers have noted, the production design and many of the set pieces are engaging, and of course the weepy sentimentality, so keenly perfected by Korean filmmakers, succeeds here even though it really shouldn’t.

It's clear that Kwak took a page or three out of Hollywood's book while he made this film. Examples like the Mission Impossible (1995) reference (magazine on the plane, like the 'recommended' movies of the MI franchise), the fancy, high-tech command center, and the general style of the mise-en-scene, are all reminiscent of America's big-budget summer movies. I mention this because what bothered me the most about the film was the lack of focus in its plot. The exposition was far from clear and at many points I found myself unsure of what was going on. I think this is a casualty of the blending of the American and Korean aesthetics and moviemaking styles.

Se-jong (Lee Jung-jae) is briefed a la Mission Impossible

After the success of Friend, Kwak has endured as one of Korea’s most successful directors. All of his films beside Mutt Boy (2003), have finished in the Top 10 for the Year, this streak is not likely to end any time soon with the imminent release the The Battle of Yellow Sea (2011), a hotly anticipated 3D action pic. At his best his films are very effective productions that combine technical skill, pathos, and action, Friend being the most popular example. My personal favorite is A Love (2007), which despite its overplayed Shakesperean dramatics, is a very well rounded piece of cinema and easily the most tightly plotted film in Kwak’s career. He seems to use the same devices and techniques in most of his work and I appreciate that he favors focusing on characters and their stories and uses these to heighten our investment in the action sequences that populate his narratives but with Typhoon this poses a problem. Sin’s sad story is well rendered and easy to understand, thus his motivations are clear but all the diplomatic and military wrangling between the Blue House, and other foreign powers, in addition to the terrorist plot that drives the film, are so haphazard and byzantine that they overwhelm what should be a fairly straightforward thriller. 

Knife fight in the belly of the ship 

Besides Sin’s backstory, Typhoon is also a film which focuses on two alpha males, both portrayed by huge stars with sculpted, masculine physiques. Just like John Woo’s old Hong Kong films, a major element is the friendship that potentially develops between them, even as they stick knives into each other (I could read into this, but I’ll leave it up to you). Se-jong is sympathetic to the plight of Sin and his sister but he cannot condone the terrorism that the outlaw plans to perpetrate, although he is also ill at ease with the dirty tactics employed by the Blue House (Korea’s White House). This potentially interesting relationship is not given enough time to develop and ends up as little more than an afterthought. During the climax, their relationship comes to a head in the belly of a cargo ship, but the subtleties have been glossed over and sidelined by the attempts to make this film a larger affair, replete with international and political overtones. 

I think that if Kwak had stuck with what he was good at, even if he can’t be very subtle about it, and had opted to tone down the political machinations that weigh down the film, Typhoon could have been an effective and engaging pan-Asian thriller. Instead the film is a bit of a mess, interspersed with some good moments and some great music but let down by a poor script and some bad decision-making. A little judicious editing wouldn’t have hurt either.