Some cinephiles argue that certain countries produced the best movies of
certain decades. You might hear about America or Germany dominating the
seventies, the former with its rich, gritty stories of urban decay,
sinister conspiracy, and post-sixties malaise, the latter with
early-career powerhouse auteurs like Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner
Fassbinder. I would argue that, despite or because of its economic
disintegration, Japan owned the nineties by dint of only Takeshi
Kitano's Hana-bi and Hirokazu Kore-eda's Maborosi — maybe
my two favorite films of all time. France and Italy, the twin cradles of
so many modern film sensibilities, certainly dominated the fifties and
sixties. (Alas, flames so bright burn out quickly and decisively.) I
don't know which country ruled the cinematic eighties. Poland?
It's too early to say from which land hailed the best filmmakers of the 2000s, but forced to gamble, I'd put my money on Korea. If you're a casual filmgoer, you might suspect something's going on there, cinematically speaking, but you might not realize how much. Chan-wook Park's disturb-'em-up "Vengeance Trilogy" of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, and the very well-known Oldboy seems to have made a resonant worldwide impact. Such freak-centric projects as Joon-ho Bong's Memories of Murder and The Host have also picked up currency outside Cinéastistan.
Those movies are all pretty solid — I've left aside the competent but essentially Hollywood-imitative stuff, like Je-gyu Kang's Shiri — but if they make up 100 percent of what you know about Korean cinema, you might think it's all about the shock, the spectacle, and the transgression. That so many of the Korean films an Anglophone might easily come by are filtered through Tartan's "Asia Extreme" DVD series doesn't help. I myself discovered that Korea wasn't just a land of bravado (but often artful) unsubtlety more or less by accident.
UCSB's library, for some reason, maintains an outsized stock of Korean movies on DVD. Many of these are sent in yearly shipments by the Korean Film Council, in an evident effort to get the word out about what they call "the varied colors of Korean cinema." The word's reached me, anyway. Through these releases, I've found some new favorite films and filmmakers, most notably Sangsoo Hong, who makes what I can only sort of describe as "experimental romantic dark comedies." My favorites of his are Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Turning Gate, and Night and Day. They exemplify what I've only slowly realized I like about Korean movies: they don't care what filmmaking traditions dictate. They especially don't care about how they dictate that individual pictures can't contain every possible human emotion.
Hong's and other choice selections of Korean film — Ki-young Kim's complex, haunting, and slightly self-parodic Iodo (now available on YouTube!) being a particular standout — tell me there must be a wealth of inspiration and enjoyment to be found in that country's cinema, whether of the 21st century or before. So I'll go about it systematically, progressing physically across the library's stacks — right-to-left and then down, specifically — and watching it all.
*
* *
Il-gon
Song's Magicians is one unbroken eighty-ish-minute shot. To
be more precise, it's one unbroken eighty-ish-minute shot preceded by
another, (probably) separate shot that introduces the ghost of the title
rock band's dead guitarist. You now have an idea of the risks this
movie takes. Song takes it even further by not telling the story
in an unbroken eighty-ish-minute time frame: it hops around to various
times and places within a three-year span, all without one cut.
In so doing, the film uses a variety of devices that aren't quite
cinematic nor quite theatrical. The camera roves around from "set" to
"set," but through tricks of framing pulls off illusions that would look
stupid attempted on a stage. Flashing back to said guitarist's suicide,
for instance, the camera closes in on her "balcony," which at first is
clearly built on the ground. But then you can't see the ground, and the
lights and sounds of what's meant to be the street below fire up. When
she falls, she falls right out of frame; in an actual play, the actress
would've then had to crawl off the stage or something.
The premise could have given disastrously free reign to Korea's double-edged penchant for melodrama, but it just avoids that. When the three surviving Magicians meet at the bassist's remote mountain tavern on the anniversary of the guitarist's fatal spill, they get to reminiscing about the good old days. (My favorite sub-sequence has two of the guys popping in a demo tape they recorded in the high school in the 1980s: "That was with the first recordable Walkman, the red one?" "Yeah, my dad brought it over from Japan!") An apostate monk turns up to retrieve the snowboarding gear he'd stashed at the bar three years ago, giving the Magicians both a semi-religious official to perform their friend's memorial and an audience to listen to their new song. The song itself, recorded by the band Loveholic and a little reminiscent of Sarah MacLachlan's "Adia", gets catchier the more I hear it. The film it caps is the same: the more I think about what it does — and, more importantly, how it does it — the more I admire it.
As impressed as I was with Myung-se Lee's M in
the moment, I now find that most of it hasn't stuck. I've read that
Lee's aim is to do things with cinema that only cinema can do.
I'd say that's the best possible goal in the medium, but this time it
seems to have resulted in an experience that only really exists while
you're watching it. I remain unsure what went on in the movie — not that
I consider that a bad thing — but it has something to do with a
bestselling novelist ashamed of his hackitude, alienated from his
fiancée, and pursued by one of those fans who just doesn't give up. Lee
throws so much striking imagery, unconventional turns, and funny
exchanges — borderline hilarious ones, in come cases — up on the canvas
that his film strikes me as too personal to dislike. I'd certainly watch
and enjoy it again. I just suspect contents so loopy and a veneer so
slick don't quite go together. (Is this also what people are saying
about Christopher Nolan these days? I've kind of lost track of him.)
The laziest way to frame Heung-shik Park's My Mother, the Mermaid is as a Korean Back to the Future, since both movies' young protagonists pay a supernatural visit to their own parents' youth. Except it's got no Delorean. Strike one. And no Crispin Glover. Strike two. But it doesn't waste time (as it were) dicking around with the usual suite of chronological paradoxes, so all is forgiven. In search of her terminally ill dad who suddenly goes missing, the lead girl visits the island village where he and her mom first met. I guess she stumbles through a rip in the space-time continuum on route, because when she gets there she happens almost immediately on her mom as a teenager.
What's
kind of neat and not obvious at first is that the same actress plays
both daughter and young mother. The contrast between the exuberant,
tight-braided, illiterate diver of the past and the coarse,
ever-spitting middle-aged woman of the present is so stark that it's
hard to believe. Surely the time-traveling daughter's eyes are open to
whatever information she can get about how one could possibly have
turned into the other. The movie doesn't fully explain the
transformation, no doubt for the best, since the process by with
cheerful girls become bossy, blockish women must be a closely guarded
Korean state secret.
This particular mom, who's wound up working at a spa as a "rubber," is what's sometimes called an ajuma. Let's turn to Mike's Epic Adventure in Korea for clarification:
It's too early to say from which land hailed the best filmmakers of the 2000s, but forced to gamble, I'd put my money on Korea. If you're a casual filmgoer, you might suspect something's going on there, cinematically speaking, but you might not realize how much. Chan-wook Park's disturb-'em-up "Vengeance Trilogy" of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, and the very well-known Oldboy seems to have made a resonant worldwide impact. Such freak-centric projects as Joon-ho Bong's Memories of Murder and The Host have also picked up currency outside Cinéastistan.
Those movies are all pretty solid — I've left aside the competent but essentially Hollywood-imitative stuff, like Je-gyu Kang's Shiri — but if they make up 100 percent of what you know about Korean cinema, you might think it's all about the shock, the spectacle, and the transgression. That so many of the Korean films an Anglophone might easily come by are filtered through Tartan's "Asia Extreme" DVD series doesn't help. I myself discovered that Korea wasn't just a land of bravado (but often artful) unsubtlety more or less by accident.
UCSB's library, for some reason, maintains an outsized stock of Korean movies on DVD. Many of these are sent in yearly shipments by the Korean Film Council, in an evident effort to get the word out about what they call "the varied colors of Korean cinema." The word's reached me, anyway. Through these releases, I've found some new favorite films and filmmakers, most notably Sangsoo Hong, who makes what I can only sort of describe as "experimental romantic dark comedies." My favorites of his are Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Turning Gate, and Night and Day. They exemplify what I've only slowly realized I like about Korean movies: they don't care what filmmaking traditions dictate. They especially don't care about how they dictate that individual pictures can't contain every possible human emotion.
Hong's and other choice selections of Korean film — Ki-young Kim's complex, haunting, and slightly self-parodic Iodo (now available on YouTube!) being a particular standout — tell me there must be a wealth of inspiration and enjoyment to be found in that country's cinema, whether of the 21st century or before. So I'll go about it systematically, progressing physically across the library's stacks — right-to-left and then down, specifically — and watching it all.
Il-gon
Song's Magicians is one unbroken eighty-ish-minute shot. To
be more precise, it's one unbroken eighty-ish-minute shot preceded by
another, (probably) separate shot that introduces the ghost of the title
rock band's dead guitarist. You now have an idea of the risks this
movie takes. Song takes it even further by not telling the story
in an unbroken eighty-ish-minute time frame: it hops around to various
times and places within a three-year span, all without one cut.
In so doing, the film uses a variety of devices that aren't quite
cinematic nor quite theatrical. The camera roves around from "set" to
"set," but through tricks of framing pulls off illusions that would look
stupid attempted on a stage. Flashing back to said guitarist's suicide,
for instance, the camera closes in on her "balcony," which at first is
clearly built on the ground. But then you can't see the ground, and the
lights and sounds of what's meant to be the street below fire up. When
she falls, she falls right out of frame; in an actual play, the actress
would've then had to crawl off the stage or something.The premise could have given disastrously free reign to Korea's double-edged penchant for melodrama, but it just avoids that. When the three surviving Magicians meet at the bassist's remote mountain tavern on the anniversary of the guitarist's fatal spill, they get to reminiscing about the good old days. (My favorite sub-sequence has two of the guys popping in a demo tape they recorded in the high school in the 1980s: "That was with the first recordable Walkman, the red one?" "Yeah, my dad brought it over from Japan!") An apostate monk turns up to retrieve the snowboarding gear he'd stashed at the bar three years ago, giving the Magicians both a semi-religious official to perform their friend's memorial and an audience to listen to their new song. The song itself, recorded by the band Loveholic and a little reminiscent of Sarah MacLachlan's "Adia", gets catchier the more I hear it. The film it caps is the same: the more I think about what it does — and, more importantly, how it does it — the more I admire it.
As impressed as I was with Myung-se Lee's M in
the moment, I now find that most of it hasn't stuck. I've read that
Lee's aim is to do things with cinema that only cinema can do.
I'd say that's the best possible goal in the medium, but this time it
seems to have resulted in an experience that only really exists while
you're watching it. I remain unsure what went on in the movie — not that
I consider that a bad thing — but it has something to do with a
bestselling novelist ashamed of his hackitude, alienated from his
fiancée, and pursued by one of those fans who just doesn't give up. Lee
throws so much striking imagery, unconventional turns, and funny
exchanges — borderline hilarious ones, in come cases — up on the canvas
that his film strikes me as too personal to dislike. I'd certainly watch
and enjoy it again. I just suspect contents so loopy and a veneer so
slick don't quite go together. (Is this also what people are saying
about Christopher Nolan these days? I've kind of lost track of him.)The laziest way to frame Heung-shik Park's My Mother, the Mermaid is as a Korean Back to the Future, since both movies' young protagonists pay a supernatural visit to their own parents' youth. Except it's got no Delorean. Strike one. And no Crispin Glover. Strike two. But it doesn't waste time (as it were) dicking around with the usual suite of chronological paradoxes, so all is forgiven. In search of her terminally ill dad who suddenly goes missing, the lead girl visits the island village where he and her mom first met. I guess she stumbles through a rip in the space-time continuum on route, because when she gets there she happens almost immediately on her mom as a teenager.
What's
kind of neat and not obvious at first is that the same actress plays
both daughter and young mother. The contrast between the exuberant,
tight-braided, illiterate diver of the past and the coarse,
ever-spitting middle-aged woman of the present is so stark that it's
hard to believe. Surely the time-traveling daughter's eyes are open to
whatever information she can get about how one could possibly have
turned into the other. The movie doesn't fully explain the
transformation, no doubt for the best, since the process by with
cheerful girls become bossy, blockish women must be a closely guarded
Korean state secret.This particular mom, who's wound up working at a spa as a "rubber," is what's sometimes called an ajuma. Let's turn to Mike's Epic Adventure in Korea for clarification:
They are easy to spot since 95% of them sport short permed hair and visors. The unfunny fact is that many of them have horrendous public transportation manners. You may be the most polite boy ever and would certainly hand over your sitting rights for an elderly lady, but ajumas do not consider this. They scuttle at high velocity, with a low centre of gravity, and an immutable tenacity. Plus, given Confucian priority of respect to age, they exercise all of their privileges while shoving you with both hands out of their way. All the while without so much as a hint of regret. Even if you're not vying for the same seat as them, they have been known to body check you if you're along their beeline. And they can be quite strong. Do not be surprised if you spot an ajuma wheeling a GIGANTIC pull-cart brimming with it's startling load.I'd forgive anyone unfamiliar with works of Korean culture for finding this former mermaid, now an uncouth, ultra-boisterous carton of hair-trigger rage and resentment armed with a carved-in frown and a wardrobe seemingly out of the Wal-Mart clearance bin, to be an implausible caricature. The more I hear about her type, the more faithfully I realize she's drawn from life. Korean cinema shows me that at least Koreans have a sense of humor about these unpleasant real-life characters they harbor. I'd like to make a compilation of the recurring awful people found in these movies: blowhard dad, whiny track-suited kid, drunken braggart, obnoxious buddy, hyper-impulsive emotion-controlled girl, ajuma. I would call it Koreans at Their Finest.
The career management has the vital significance to individual, the enterprise and even the society.
Posted by: Retro Jordans | August 05, 2010 at 07:09 PM
Must have the man of genius, and humans shall independently profound grasp a truth that human to have the genius of man becomes the torch, but don't let them give up real mission.Do you think so?
Posted by: Nike Shox Navina | September 15, 2010 at 11:32 PM
humans shall independently profound grasp a truth that human to have the genius of man becomes the torch, but don't let them give up real mission.Do you think so?
Posted by: Tiffany sale | October 19, 2010 at 06:45 PM
Hi Colin - I really enjoy the updates on Korean cinema. I live in Seoul at the moment, and watch Korean movies regularly. Like you, I am a "Honghead". The DVD market over here is a bit patchy though, and consequently a lot of gems fall out of print, or worse, don't even get a dvd release. Apparently, Song Il-Gon's "The Magicians" hasn't been released on DVD in Korea yet. So I've been looking into acquiring a non-domestic copy. The only one I've been able to find is a Japanese import without English subtitles (my Korean isn't yet good enough to watch films without them). So I was wondering, could you by any chance give me the details of the version that you watched?
Regards
Colin (yes, we share the same given name).
Posted by: Colin | November 14, 2010 at 02:29 AM
The Antarctic penguins are dying, we will go to save it
Posted by: air jordans | November 16, 2010 at 01:28 AM