Review: The Slick But Baffling Thriller GENOME HAZARD

Part of MKC's coverage of the 18th Busan International Film Festival.

By John A. Riley

Illustrator Taketo (Nishijima Hidetoshi) returns home one evening to find his wife’s dead body. The telephone rings, breaking a tense silence, and Taketo is baffled to hear his wife’s voice on the other end of the line. Before he can even properly process this tragedy, men arrive intent on killing him, and he is drawn rapidly into a conspiratorial web where the only person who he can trust is Korean reporter Ji-won (a wide-eyed, incredulous Kim Hyo-jin) who, sensing a story, is dragged into the labyrinthine plot herself.

Click to read more»

Review - FRIEND: THE GREAT LEGACY Shares Little with Original

By Pierce Conran

12 years is a long time in the film world but for Korean cinema it seems like almost an eternity. In 2001 I had yet to seen an Asian film, let alone was I aware of Korean films. Yet when I did dip my toes in two years later, Friend (2001) was among the first Korean films that I saw. With its nostalgic air and easily relatable theme of friendship, delivered through a conflation of coming of age, high school and gangster tropes, it wasn’t hard to see why it became the most successful Korean film of all time. Though its record has since been broken many times over, the film’s reputation lives on.

Click to read more»

Review: K-Horror TWO MOONS Scrapes the Bottom of the Barrel

By Pierce Conran

I’m glad that I’m not a particularly big horror buff, because if I was, Korean cinema would seem like a real letdown these days. The last few years have done little to convince anyone of the quality, and frankly necessity, of K-horror. Once a strong niche revenue driver for the industry, with a number of interesting if not always stellar entries finding their way to theaters and DVD, of late about three increasingly lackluster productions get dropped on the marketplace per annum. It’s a story of diminishing returns, as the genre seems to be on the way out. At least until something or someone can come along to save it…

2012’s third K-horror Two Moons, following the soporific Don’t Click and the frustrating Horror Stories, is definitely not the messiah that will save the struggling genre. Director Kim Dong-bin previously made the horrors Ring Virus (1999) and Red Eye (2005), both of which were warmly received by audiences or critics. With pretty much nothing going for it, his latest is one of the worst K-horrors to be released in years.

Click to read more»

Review: The Philosophical Mystery A FISH

By Pierce Conran

Independent cinema in Korea has been gaining a lot of steam over the last few years, and now, as filmmakers become bolder or seek to distinguish themselves from the pack, stories are becoming more ambitious and the technical tools used to tell them more sophisticated. Case in point is A Fish, an elliptical shaman mystery shot in 3D. Unlike what we’ve come to expect from the format, this is a far cry from big-budget spectacle. It’s a slow art film with a metaphorical and sometimes impenetrable narrative.

A bold and ambitious debut, Park Hong-min’s A Fish is a challenging work that is certain to infuriate just as many viewers as it may enchant. I won’t pretend to have understood it particularly well, but I can say that I was swept up in the strange world it conjured up on a remote Korean island, full of intrigue, spirituality and unanswered questions. Many times I found myself drawing comparisons to David Lynch, whose dream-like narratives have long fascinated and delighted me. But Park’s film is no mere copy: it is a singular work from an exciting new talent in the field.

Click to read more»

Top 10 Korean Films of 2013

The time has come once again for me to sit down and think about all the new Korean films I had the opportunity to see in 2013 and come up with my favorites. This year, I had a lot to choose from for this ritual as I've seen about 120 local films, so the task proved more difficult than usual.

With 127 million tickets sold and a remarkable nine Korean films featuring in the yearly top ten at the box office, 2013 was a huge year for Korean cinema. Prosperity does not always mean quality and the last few years have been disappointing as far as commercial Korean films have been concerned. Thankfully, in 2013 the industry succeeded in both attracting viewers to multiplexes and putting out high quality fare. That said, I still find myself more partial to the more fertile grounds of independent cinema, as seven low budget films made the list this year. While two films truly blew me away over the last 12 months today's industry still isn't putting out quite the same amount of gems as it was around ten years ago.

Click to read more»

Korean Box Office: Song Kang-ho Proves He's B.O. King with The Attorney

With the help of a homegrown offering's huge opening, business came booming back by soaring over the three million mark for the first time in months. The pre-Christmas weekend saw 61% of tickets got to local films.

Click to read more»

Review: Jeon Do-yeon Shines in WAY BACK HOME

By Pierce Conran

Following a two-year break after the disappointing Countdown, Jeon Do-yeon makes an exceedingly welcome return to the big screen in Way Back Home. With a role that suits her to a tee and under the considered direction of Pang Eun-jin, fresh off last year’s Perfect Number, Jeon is a marvel in what may well become an end-of-year hit for CJ Entertainment.

Click to read more»

Korean Box Office: Jeon Do-yeon No Match for The Hobbit

Despite a major new local release, the Korean film industry was held at bay once again as the pairing of Jeon Do-yeon and Ko Soo wasn't enough to prevent the new Hobbit from taking first place. 2.24 million tickets were sold over the frame, about 10% over last year, but the local market share, due to a soft opening and a lack of strong holdovers, was weak at 28%.

Click to read more»

Review: Time Travel Takes a Siesta at 11:00 AM

"Wait, this is a time travel film?"

By Pierce Conran

Setting aside the barnstorming success of Bong Joon-ho’s new feature Snowpiercer, an anomaly if ever there was one, Korea cinema’s relationship to the science fiction genre has been a difficult one over the years. Successful mash-ups like Save the Green Planet (2003) and The Host (2006) hinted at what the industry might achieve, but by and large, the straight sci-fis that have been produced, such as 2009: Lost Memories (2002), Yesterday (2002) and Natural City (2003), have failed to impress. However, 11:00 AM, a new Korean sci-fi which made its way into local theaters late this year, held the faintest glimmer of hope for what can at times be one of cinema’s most rewarding genres. Alas, this new effort follows previous domestic stabs that fail to grasp what makes the genre work in the first place.

Click to read more»

Review: MONTAGE is a Refreshing and Suspenseful Addition to the Thriller Genre

By Patryk Czekaj

It’s never an easy task to take on a subject that’s been worked over many times before, all the more when you’re still a novice filmmaker. Murder mysteries have long been an important part of Korean cinema and although there are many brilliant, powerful titles in the genre (i.e. Mother [2009], Memories of Murder [2003], The Chaser [2003], et. al) it’s getting harder for directors to deliver breathtaking suspense without referring to some well-known plot elements.

Click to read more»

Korean Box Office: About Time Tops Slow Weekend

Slow weekend for local releases with only 26% of the 1.62 million admissions going to domestic industry. Things were much rosier this time last year with 75% of 1.95 million admissions going to Korean films.

Click to read more»

Review: Love and Adolescence in Kim Ki-duk's The Bow (2005)

By Hieu Chau

Up until now, it would appear as though Kim Ki-duk’s films could easily be placed into one of two different categories – one for his extreme features and the other for his sensitive works. His 2005 film, The Bow most certainly fits into the latter alongside some of his best critical successes such as Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter… and Spring (2003) and 3-Iron (2004) as it too is a contemplative piece that retains much of Kim’s signature brand of wistfulness. Never one to shy away from tough subject matter, The Bow, when compared to a lot of his recent films, is a lot tamer both in terms of violence and sexual imagery. Given Kim’s track record for provoking audiences with his patented obsession with faith and morality, The Bow, while clearly peppered with religious iconography, doesn’t seem to be all that interested in using its themes as a means to frame a story. Instead, The Bow is, for the most part, a coming-of-age drama, one that tells the sexual awakening of a young girl and features aspects of teenage rebellion – a mutual ground for most coming-of-age dramas. Of course, being that this is a Kim Ki-duk film, this coming-of-age drama is skewed towards extremely artistic territory.

Click to read more»