Busan 2015 Review: VETERAN, Who's Gonna Protect Gotham When Bruce Wayne Grew Up to Be an Evil Super-Rich Punk?

Part of MKC's coverage of the 20th Busan International Film Festival.

By Kyu Hyun Kim, Associate Professor at UC Davis and koreanfilm.org contributor.

Seo Do-chul (Hwang Jeong-min), a veteran of the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency, busts a ring of foreign car smugglers with his teammates, the muscle-bound Detective Wang (Oh Dae-hwan), ass-kicking Miss Bong (Jang Yoon-joo) and the cute rookie Detective Yoon (Kim Si-hoo), under the leadership of the perennially frustrated but bizarrely eloquent Chief Oh (Oh Dal-soo).  Do-chul, a pit bull of a cop, in the process of investigating the smugglers, befriends a trucker, Mr. Bae (Jeong Woong-in). Later, he is invited to a private party as a "consultant" to a hit TV series and witnesses the sponsor corporation's young heir Jo Tae-oh (teen heartthrob Yoo Ah-in) behaving cruelly to one of the partygoers. When Mr. Bae is found to be unconscious and critically wounded from an alleged suicide attempt, after directly confronting Tae-oh's corporation about his unfair firing, the cop smells a rat and starts an investigation, despite pressure from the higher-ups to look the other way. 

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KOFFIA 2012: Metamorpheses (변신이야기, 2011) and the Impact of Film Schools on Korean Cinema

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

One of the aspects of Korean cinema which strikes people the most once they become acquainted with it, is the highly sophisticated level of the production values.  From a technical standpoint, Korean films are often on par or even above their Hollywood counterparts:  cinematography, sound, production design, editing, and even special effects are deftly handled with skill and care.  Wondering how this is the case for a national industry that had been until relatively recently a marginal one is a worthwhile question.  The answer therein lies in examining how a cultural and economic climate fostered this type of change.

During the intense state-driven globalization of a newly democratized Korea in the 1990s, which was known as seghewha, the cultural sector was heavily promoted.  With the creation of a few different motion picture laws that, among other things, provided tax breaks for investment in the film industry, the chaebol, which were large corporations such as Daewoo and Samsung, got involved in film production.  Just as you would modernize any other industry, the film industry’s production standards had to be quickly brought up to speed due in large part to the chaebol’s injection of significant amounts of capital.  However, it wasn’t just money that led to today’s technical proficiency.  I would argue that perhaps more than anything, it was the education of a skilled below-the-line workforce that contributed to the phenomenon.

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