Revenge Week: MKC Thought Leaders' Corner (July 2013)

Part of MKC's Revenge Week (July 8-14, 2013).

Revenge Week has been a great success and though it's nearly over there are still a few voices to be heard. Read on to learn what the experts had to say about Korean cinema's most popular export.

To what would you attribute the prominence of revenge films in Korean cinema?

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Revenge Week: Hell Hath No Fury... Part I

Part of MKC's Revenge Week (July 8-14, 2013).

By Paul Quinn, founder of the excellent Hangul Celluloid.

Ask almost anyone with even a vague knowledge of Korean cinema about continually prevalent K-film genres or themes and at some point in their response they'll likely mention more than one example from a near plethora of Korean revenge thrillers and cinematic tales of bloody retribution. While any discussion of genre predominance is of course multi-faceted, the fact that a country's cinema can almost not fail to be influenced by its nation's psyche - inherently reflecting trials and tribulations faced nationally - to my mind speaks volumes about the origin of Korean cinema's regular and ongoing use of revenge narratives: By its very definition, revenge comes as a direct response to wrongs suffered, oppression and/or repression and with Korea historically having had to endure not only decades of occupation by Japan - during which time repeated efforts were made by the Japanese to completely eradicate Korea as a nationality, including the banning of Korean language films from 1942 until 1945, when Korean independence was finally secured - but also subsequent years of stringent cinematic constraints and censorship instigated by the Korean government itself, the revenge genre has since provided opportunities for filmmakers to produce searing entertainment at the same time as, perhaps subconsciously, allowing a kind of audience catharsis by way of indulgence in fictional tales of vengeance and retribution where no national revenge could or would ever be sought in reality.

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Revenge Week: Filmic Self-reflexivity and Revenge in Park Chan-wook’s Cut (2004) - Part II

Part of MKC's Revenge Week (July 8-14, 2013).

By Rowena Santos Aquino

Continuing the collapse of the boundaries between filmmaking and real life, when the director comes to, he finds his hands tied behind his back and cinched at the waist with a red band to curtail his movement and his wife gagged and her seated body woven into the piano as if condemned to play the instrument for all eternity. But as a shot reveals, what looks to be their home, where the unnamed avenger first appears, is actually the film set used at the beginning of the film. Who is the director and who is the actor now?

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Revenge Week: Recent “Women's Revenge” Films and The Curious Case of Bedevilled

Part of MKC's Revenge Week (July 8-14, 2013).

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

Revenge is a mostly human behavior (I am loath to call it “uniquely” human: who knows, maybe there really is a killer whale like Orca, who chased and eventually knocked Richard Harris' brain all over an Arctic glacier, because the latter killed his pregnant mate. No idea what movie I am referencing? Can’t say I blame ya). Animals retaliate but do not dwell on the feelings of resentment, the sense that an injustice was done to them, the way humans do. An ant colony fights back when it is invaded by other colonies. However, when they lose a territorial war, they either get exterminated or absorbed into the winning side's community: there are no “buts” about the outcome. I doubt a soldier ant goes after the queen ant of the invading colony in a suicide mission of avenging her own queen, or deaths of her sister larvae.

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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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Revenge Week: The Vengeful Ripples of Bong Joon-ho’s Mother

Part of MKC's Revenge Week (July 8-14, 2013).

Outside of a few clear candidates, pinpointing revenge films isn’t quite as easy as it seems. Case in point is Bong Joon-ho’s Mother (2009). When I first considered it, I hesitated, but after watching it again this past weekend, it became clear that this is a film teeming with revenge, yet not for the reasons that I had at first considered.

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Revenge Week: Filmic Self-reflexivity and Revenge in Park Chan-wook’s Cut (2004) - Part I

Part of MKC's Revenge Week (July 8-14, 2013).

By Rowena Santos Aquino

We all know what revenge is as an act: a self-serving system that goes beyond in the absence of, or rejects, institutional justice. In short, when one has been wronged physically and emotionally or has witnessed another experience, and acts privately and accordingly, based on one’s ethical line, to punish who has committed that wrong. As film scholar Steve Choe writes, ‘Vengeance requires the existence of a past transgression or trauma, which demands that it be met with equal compensation in the present’ (30). Even more summary still, revenge is about personally ‘getting even’ and (idealistically) bringing about a moral parity but often through immoral ways.

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Revenge Week: Trailers of Revenge! Day 6

Part of MKC's Revenge Week (July 8-14, 2013). This daily series comes courtesy of Tom Giammarco, the author of the Seen in Jeonju website, surely one of the best resources for information on classic Korean cinema on the web. Enjoy!

This will be the final entry that I have for REVENGE WEEK and I wanted to save the best for last. Yesterday’s theme of having a hitherto unknown family member exacting revenge on a victim touches a little on today’s theme of a stranger in the house.

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Revenge Week: Vengeance Trilogy DVD/Blu-ray Giveaway!

Part of MKC's Revenge Week (July 8-14, 2013).

Just a few days left in Revenge Week now and the very kind people from Palisades Tartan have reached out to us to give a few lucky readers the chance to win Park Chan-wook's entire Vengeance Trilogy on DVD or Blu-Ray!

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Revenge Week: Trailers of Revenge! Day 5

Part of MKC's Revenge Week (July 8-14, 2013). This daily series comes courtesy of Tom Giammarco, the author of the Seen in Jeonju website, surely one of the best resources for information on classic Korean cinema on the web. Enjoy!

Incest as a tool of revenge must surely be one of the most shocking methods of achieving vengeance. The role it played in the most popular of Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance Trilogy shocked audiences around the world with both its venom and its creativity. The more recent Dirty Blood features a young woman intent on getting revenge on her father and begins a sexual relationship with him without him knowing her real identity. Are these cases unique in Korean cinema? The answer, of course, is ‘No.’

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Revenge Week: THE REVENGE LIST

Part of MKC's Revenge Week (July 8-14, 2013).

If Revenge Week has achieved anything, it's confirmed beyond any doubt just how prevalent the theme of revenge is in Korean cinema. But exactly how many are there? That's a hard question to answer but here's our shot at a list covering every Korean revenge film we could think of.

This list is far from exhaustive and we encourage suggestions to improve it! Let us know what you think is missing in the comments below, on facebook or on twitter.

We also hope to create a user list of the best Korean revenge films this week so please use this a resource and tell us five of your favorites.

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Revenge Week: Exploring Themes of Vengeance in Small Town Rivals (2007)

Part of MKC's Revenge Week (July 8-14, 2013).

(By Connor McMorran)

Two childhood friends have grown up to be very different people. Choon-sam, despite being popular at high school, has amounted to very little in life and has reluctantly accepted the position of village chief. On the other hand, Dae-gyu, who was something of an outsider at school, has just been elected as the local magistrate. As these two reunite to fix aspects of Choon-sam’s village, their memories of various wrong-doings, coupled with manipulation from outside sources, causes them to become rivals. They begin a game of one-upmanship, both of them too proud to admit defeat. This all comes to a head in the third act of the film, and the two come to blows. Their battle carries a sense of tragedy, as they have both been corrupted to the point of betraying their closest childhood friend.

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