Dancing Queen (댄싱퀸, Daensingkwin) 2012

Just when it seemed like star power was starting to fade in Korea, a new vehicle for two of the nation’s most popular performers danced its way into the spotlight, enchanting four million local viewers in the process.  Late last year and earlier this year a host of others (I among them), were calling out Korean stars for their failure to attract audiences to domestic cineplexes.  Song Kang-ho, normally the country’s most reliable star, misfired with Hindsight (2011), the first film in over a decade from Lee Hyeon-sun (Il Mare, 2000) and a short while after Countdown drew even less receipts despite starring what should have been a potent combo with Jeon Do-yeon (Secret Sunshine, 2007; The Housemaid, 2010) and Jeong Jae-yeong (Castaway on the Moon, 2009).  Since the star system has been powerful for so long, arguably too long a time, this shift in what drives a spectator to a theater has been seen as audience’s rejection of the less than-stellar features that the studios marched into the multiplexes, especially hollow blockbusters and these empty star vehicles (though personally I thought the above two films were a little better than what most people made them out to be).

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Settling Into the Fast-Paced Seoul Lifestyle

View from 삼성산  (Samseungsan)

Part of an ongoing series about my trip to and discovery of Seoul...

It's nearly been two weeks since I've arrived and I'm amazed at how much I've done despite my hectic schedule, I guess it just comes down to the city's notorious work hard/play hard culture. I only have a little over 20hrs of teaching hours from Monday to Friday but throw in my writing duties for MKC, Twitch and VCinema, as well as exercise and learning Korea and my day goes from 7am to 11pm, with meals kept very short. After 11 I can finally take some time for myself, which usually means watching a Korean film (or part of one), but that almost falls into the work category as well. Sleep comes over me at around 1am and after 6hrs rest it starts all over again.

Now I am certainly not complaining, I'm busy but I am also focussed and glad that I know exactly what I'm doing. For the first time in a while I feel like the master of my own destiny and the fact that most of my workload is voluntary is a testament to that fact. That said, while I did some work over the weekend, I also took the opportunity to discover Seoul some more, catch my first new Korean film in theaters and, best of all, to meet friends old and new!

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Korean Box Office Update (06/15-06/17, 2012)

Concubine Seduces the Box Office For Second Straight Week

	Title	Release Date	Market Share	Weekend	Total	Screens
1	The Emperor's Concubine	6/6/12	21.60%	379,354	1,720,595	536
2	Madascar 3 (us)	6/6/12	18.00%	311,454	1,000,913	557
3	All About My Wife	5/17/12	13.60%	238,402	3,820,013	370
4	Lockout (us)	6/14/12	11.10%	201,263	237,522	373
5	Runway Cop	5/30/12	7.90%	145,036	1,098,518	282
6	Men in Black 3 (us)	5/24/12	7.50%	135,452	3,231,814	332
7	Prometheus (us)	6/6/12	8.80%	129,265	801,391	322
8	Sadako 3D (jp)	6/14/12	4.90%	71,346	87,953	261
9	Don't Click	5/30/12	3.00%	57,234	837,617	254
10	The Thing (us)	6/14/12	1.50%	27,886	33,462	173

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Weekly Review Round-up (06/09-06/15, 2012)

Lots of reviews for new releases this week, including As One and Arirang which are currently screening in various English-language territories.  Sector 7 was also just released in the US on Blu-ray.

CURRENT FILMS

All About My Wife

(Between Wor(L)ds, June 10, 2012)

(The Korea Times, June 6, 2012)

As One

(allkpop, June 9, 2012)

(Film Smash, June 14, 2012)

(k-pop girl, June 9, 2012)

(The Los Angeles Times, June 8, 2012)

Talking Architect

(The Korea Blog, June 8, 2012)

The Emperor's Concubine

(Seongyong's Private Place, June 14, 2012)

The Taste of Money

(Reuters, June 13, 2012)

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KOFA Treasures: Lee Doo-yong's The Oldest Son (장남, Jangnam) 1984

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.

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Korean Cinema News (06/07-06/13, 2012)

Some festival news this week, including for PiFan which I am happy to announce that MKC will be covering on site this year!  Also some big summer trailers and a pair of great interviews this week.

KOREAN CINEMA NEWS

PiFan's Network of Asian Fantastic Films Selects Indonesia for Spotlight

Well this is a pretty neat and interesting development, the Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival's (PiFan) Network of Asian Fantastic Films (NAFF) has selected Indonesia as for its spotlight this year.  Following Taiwan, China, Singapore and Japan, this is a major boon for Indonesian cinema and likely has something to do with the added exposure afforded by the phenomenal success of last year's The Raid.  NAFF seeks to promote genre film in Asian cinema and they selected the country based on their belief that it is "a rising Mecca of Asian genre films", hearty praise from the continent's biggest fantastic film festival.  Here is a little more info on the 5 projects that have been chosen from NAFF's own press release:

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Pacemaker (페이스메이커, Peiseumeikeo) 2012

The marathon, the pinnacle of athletic achievement, that most glorious sporting edifice to the strength, tenacity and persistence of mankind, of all popular sports, it is viewed as the grandest testament of endurance and it is only fitting that, following in its subject’s footsteps, Pacemaker should proudly take on that mantle by becoming the year-to-date’s greatest cinematic endurance test.

Sports movies are rarely too fixated on the physical activities they depict, they are merely gateways into their characters, sometimes they can be metaphors and they always hope to add some entertainment value.  Korean cinema is particularly astute in its appropriation of generic tropes and it should come as no surprise that the sports film has become prevalent in the local industry.  Rather than exploit a sport for it aesthetic or escapist potential however, Korean hitmakers have long seized on their melodramatic potential.  So thoroughly has this line been pursued that any sport is fair game, local popularity doesn’t really factor into it.  The results speak for themselves: how else could the country’s most successful sports movie be about South Korea’s ski-jumping team (Take Off, 2008)?

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First Week in Seoul

Downtown Gwangmyeong

Part of an ongoing series about my trip to and discovery of Seoul...

Well it's been nearly a week since I touched down in Seoul and while it is a little strange, I'm thrilled to finally be here.  I don't have much time so I'll give you the basics, I live in Gwangmyeong which is technically in Gyeonggi-do (the neighboring province that encircles metropolitan Seoul, but I am connected to the urban sprawl.  It's an okay neighbourhood, if a little rundown, and I have everything I need.  Job is going well and the school is very nice, food and phone were provided (though I will be upgrading to a better device when I get my Alien Registration Card).  I also get a free apartment but this I don't have too many great things to say about, it's functional and of course a little small but it's not very nice and I look forward to upgrading in the not too distant future but it'll do for the moment.

So what have I done since I've been here?  Quite a bit considering I've worked for 4 days and updated MKC a lot in that time.  On Saturday I had the pleasure of taking my first trip to the Korean Film Archive (KOFA), where I saw Kim Soo-young's wonderful Mist (1967) which was presented by Darcy Paquet (@darcypaquet), who gave a fascinating talk following the screening.  KOFA treated us to dinner afterwards and I also finally got to meet Jason Bechervaise (@koreanjase) who I've been in touch with for some time.  Was a great afternoon/evening and I look forward to more of the same!

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Korean Box Office Update (06/08, 06/10, 2012)

The Emperor's Concubine Beats Aliens and Animals

	Title	Release Date	Market Share	Weekend	Total	Screens
1	The Emperor's Concubine	6/6/12	23.60%	511,462	976,696	613
2	Madagascar 3 (us)	6/6/12	16.60%	354,516	635,636	561
3	All About My Wife	5/17/12	13.70%	298,564	3,424,239	393
4	Prometheus (us)	6/6/12	14.80%	272,774	549,092	515
5	Men in Black 3 (us)	5/24/12	11.40%	254,952	3,016,581	396
6	Runway Cop	5/30/12	8.50%	194,779	860,995	351
7	Don't Click	5/30/12	7.20%	175,819	744,844	343
8	Snow White and the Huntsmen (us)	5/30/12	2.50%	57,104	605,619	235
9	The Avengers (us)	4/26/12	0.70%	16,148	7,040,163	71
10	The Taste of Money	5/17/12	0.30%	5,493	1,156,868	91

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The Shower (소나기, Sonagi) 1979

One thing that I’ve noticed time and again in Korean cinema, especially when I began to discover it many years ago, was the use of rain.  What struck me about it was its prevalence but most of all its impressive depiction on screen.  The first point is mostly due to the climate in Korea, which shares more with the wet climes of my native Ireland than Hollywood’s perpetually clear and balmy days.  The latter comes down to a keen appreciation on my part of the aesthetic and technical brilliance of the nation’s film industry.  Of course there’s also more to it than the above points, which are merely practical.

‘Pathetic fallacy’ is a term used to denote the attribution of human emotions to inanimate objects.  In poetry and literature, as well as in film, it typically references the metaphorical use of nature.  Rain is one of the most frequently used devices for pathetic fallacy used in art or media and in cinema it works particularly well due to its heavy physical presence and its potential to heighten the mise-en-scene through visual and aural means.  But in Korean films it has been brought to a new level as just about every important Korean work of the last 15 years has featured an important scene whose staging and emotional impact have been amplified by rainfall.

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June 2012 Korean Releases

This monthly features previews the coming month's attractions in Korean cinema.  All of these monthly posts are available in an archive on the Upcoming Releases page.

June 6


The Emperor's Concubine

June 7

Superstar

June 21

2 Doors
Miss Conspirator
The Heaven Is Only Open to the Single
The King of XXX-Kissing
Two Weddings and a Funeral

June TBC

A Company Man
Boys, Dreams and Sansevieria

I Am

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Weekly Review Round-up (06/02-06/08, 2012)

First Weekly Review Round-up live from Seoul!  A few write-ups on As One and Kim Ki-duk's Arirang this week as they are release in Australia and the UK respectively.

CURRENT FILMS

As One

(Film Journal, June 1, 2012)

(SBS, June 2, 2012)

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