To continue on from my entry on how
I discovered Korean cinema, I've decided to talk about another film
that really changed the way I looked at Korean film and the different
ideas in cinema. My previous entry highlighted my first Kim Ki-duk experience, and it was the beginning of what I am today.
I raved about 3-Iron
(2004) and how much I loved it to Kieran not long after that. I had
already, by then, heard about a few big names in the Korean film world.
Bong Joon-ho, Kim something or rather, another Kim this and that, and
then - Park Chan-wook. I heard much about Old Boy (2003)
throughout film school, here and there in pockets throughout the
interwebs and still did not rush to see it. It was kind of like the hype
around Kill Bill (2003). It's awesome, It's epic, It's amazing.
Or so I had heard. Kieran had a couple of Park's films in his gargantuam
of a DVD collection, one of which was J.S.A.: Joing Security Area
(2000), a film I had not heard about and had little interest to see at
the time. The title alone was uninteresting - that and I had little
concrete knowledge of the DMZ and the current situation between the
North and South. I looked past all of this and decided to give it a go.
I'll
be absolutely honest with you: I could not and did not get through the
first 20 minutes of the film in my first viewing. It was all talk, no
substance to me. I wasn't paying attention to the lengthy discussions
between Lee Young-ae's character and Mr Tall Swiss man, who to me seemed
like an excuse of a 'white' man in an Asian film. I fell asleep, and
looked no further past the beginning. Kieran had told me what a great
film it was, and I simply could not see it. And that was that.
Stumbled across this fantastic, crazy Japanese commercial for a clothing store directed by the one and only Michel Gondry. It features his signature giant body parts which featured in many of his music videos including Foo Fighters' Everlong and in his film The Science of Sleep (see below).
It's slightly maniacal, but also great fun and true to Gondry's hugely imaginative style. Whatever medium he chooses to work with, from feature films to short minute-long commercials, he's still able to bring to us a piece of his insanely colourful world with amazing style. See below for this wacky new Japanese commercial.
I decided to take part in the Korean Blogathon, in which a week is dedicated to blogs about Korean film, hosted by cineAWESOME. I wrote about the crossing of genres in contemporary Korean cinema.
You'll also find the article here on the Korean Film Festival in Australia's official blog.
Leave a comment!
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It’s late on a Friday night, and I’m feeling up for a movie. I visit my try-hard of a DVD collection for something to keep me company. A couple of giggles to start the weekend? How about a fast-paced action flick to keep me on my toes? Perhaps a deep drama for me to sink my head in for days to come?
It's late on a Friday night, and I can't decide. There are so many feelings I want to fulfill in the next two hours that I begin analysing my emotive preferences. I finally fall on something borrowed - Park Chan-wook's Joint Security Area. Admittedly, the last time I sat down to watch this, I couldn't get past the first 15 minutes of what I felt was a tense, political drama. This time, I manage to get through to the flashbacks present in the film, and I decide within 30 minutes that I love this film.
After searching hard for something to entertain me, I had finally found my answer. What seemed like a dense, political drama eventually turned out to be a heart-warming story of an unlikely friendship between the border guards of the Northern and Southern halves of Korea. The film begins in the present where neutral government officials have come together to investigate a murder that occurred in the demilitarised zone. We soon join Sergeant Lee in a flashback of where it all began - a secret and playful friendship between him and a soldier from the North Korean border guard force, through letters, which later turns into fun, friendly meetings in the North Korean guard post. While the majority of the film feels like a drama especially as it covers the themes of war, political tension and the human condition, the film eventually crosses into the genre of comedy through sarcasm, and playful action as presented through the scenes where the guards are together in harmony.
Here is what is interesting about this. At one end of the spectrum where the 'darker' genres of action, thriller, drama and even horror are present, one would expect little to no presence of the 'lighter' genres such as comedy, which stays on the opposite end of this line.
When you look at Hollywood films, conventionally speaking, a film of the horror genre will stick as closely to the word 'horror' as to not confuse your judgment of the film's genre. While there might be a character in this horror film that makes an ironic statement to reassure us that he will die within the next second (and so it happens), the film remains a horror film and will not cross over to the 'lighter' side. It is the same with anything that is primarily of a genre from the 'lighter' side - a comedy about a group of friends who go to Las Vegas on a 'bachelor's party' cum 'the last night out' never shows any signs of an attempt at crossing the deeper genres of drama, for example. If there were an attempt, it would be the most clichéd and shortest dramatic arc simply to give the film 'an edge'.
Korean Cinema on the other hand, crosses these genres freely and almost excessively. I find this an interesting observation - by crossing genres, a viewer can leave a film feeling confused as to what they have just seen. Upon viewing Kim Yong-hwa's 200 Pound Beauty for the first time, I didn't quite know how to feel about what I had seen. While I had laughed throughout most of the film, I would often stop and wonder, what am I laughing at?
The story is about an unattractively large girl who undergoes intensive plastic surgery so that she can confidently be who she is, and to achieve her dreams of being a pop-singer. The notion of using plastic surgery in order to change one's complete image is often looked down on, and is never encouraged, yet 200 Pound Beauty seems to support this idea to some extent. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the film's comedy and hilarious, colourful characters so much that I had forgotten about the slight encouragement of plastic surgery.
Crossing genres can make a film 200x more engaging and entertaining than a single genre film. A cross-genre film opens up to a much wider audience too - for example, Bong Joon-ho's The Host is clearly a monster film with the thriller and action elements it carries, yet the story centralises on the charming, comedic brilliance of Song Kang-ho's character and his slightly kooky, alternative family who must save their youngest sister from the slimy, slithery clutches of the sewer monster.
While some might not like monster films (let's use Cloverfield as an English title) for example due to the content of how a monster is portrayed (or in other words, those who can't stomach the above), centralising the story around a viewer-friendly, weird family makes it easier for some to sit through such horror... Such 'horror'.
At last year's Korean Film Festival in Australia, I got a chance to see Rough Cut, an action film about a gangster who wants to be an actor, and an actor with the ideals of a gangster. Written by Kim Ki-duk and directed by Hun Jang, this is primarily a film of the action genre, with many fast-paced action scenes during a film shoot within the film, and otherwise. The film predominantly covers the themes of gang culture, ultra-violence and corruption in Korean society, which I find quite common in contemporary Korean cinema. However, although the film focuses on these serious themes, to the average viewer there is a surprising amount of comedy present all throughout. The best thing about the use of comedy throughout the film is that it does not distract you from the essence of the story, and that the film really is a violent, action film with a 15 minute bloody, fist battle in mud to an extreme, suggestive rape scene.
I never liked the excessive crossing of genres when I was first introduced to Korean films, but I feel that it has finally grown on me. No longer do I have to worry over two vastly different films in genre. No longer will I have to waste (close to) hours on deciding on whether I feel like a depressing, art-house drama film or a romantic, black comedy - or whether I feel like a laugh or a cry over a movie. Contemporary Korean cinema has proven to us that the crossing of genres is possible, and plausible. And that including comedy in a violent, gangster film is not a clichéd or a lame attempt at 'great entertainment'. It is an experience worthwhile, and although it may seem strange with such an oppositional mixture of genres at times, it ultimately fulfills the requirements of an entertaining film.
Raelene Loong is a Marketing Assistant for KOFFIA, as well as a Video-On-Demand scheduler and independent filmmaker. Her personal film blog is Cutting Squares. Follow her on Twitter @suupatrout.
I found this neat photograph of Blue Valentine director Derek Cianfrance and lead Michelle Williams on set during the production. It was this room where Dean, played by Ryan Gosling brings his wife Cindy (Michelle Williams) to rekindle their relationship, after it is clear that it's breaking apart at the very seams.
They enter a love hotel, and Dean picks the 'Future Room', a neon-lit, tight space with no windows, including your average tacky rotating bed and faux fur pillows. Nothing is true for the couple any more, and nothing can be reversed. Their relationship is in shambles, as they crawl and beg for freedom - of each other, and freedom of the present. The 'Future Room' does nothing, but take them deeper into the land of no return. Time travel does not exist, and if it did, everything would be right. What destroys us, and where do relationships go to perish? Where does it hurt?
Here's what I found on the video (some details from Win Butler, Arcade Fire's lead):
“It’s not a video. It’s a short film; we’re still working on it. It’s like a science-fiction B-movie companion piece for the record. Basically, we played Spike some music from the album and the first images that came to his mind had the same feeling as this idea for a science fiction film I had when I was younger. My brother and I and Spike wrote it together, which was really fun– it was like total amateur hour. We shot it in Austin and a lot of kids are in the film, and it was great just hanging out with these 15-year-olds for a week and writing down all the funny things they said. It was cool to revert to being a 15-year-old for a little while."
Although it is set in Austin and seemingly reflects the suburban life for American youth, I think the themes are universal. The video reminds me of when I used to ride bicycles around my suburb with neighbours who lived nearby and not so nearby. We would race each other to the vandalised park, play rubberband wars, chase each other up to the shops where we would buy shandy beer (it was all so exhilarating). We'd pick up a couple of cap guns and have fights in our front lawns. This video brings me back to these feelings of being alive and free - my suburb was my turf, and nothing could stop me.
"Tonight, I'll show you how dreams are prepared. People think it's a very simple and easy process but it's a bit more complicated than that. As you can see, a very delicate combination of complex ingredients is the key. First, we put in some random thoughts. And then, we add a little bit of reminiscences of the day, mixed with some memories from the past. That's for two people. Love, friendships, relationships and all those 'ships', together with songs you heard during the day, things you saw, and also, uh... personal... Okay, I think it's one"
"The goodbye scene of the would-be lovers is over-the-top romantic. Nevertheless, or maybe because of that, it, too works. In the slightest of slow-motion, Mo-wan lets go of Li-zhen's hand (her wedding ring, ironically, in full view), and the camera stays on her face in extreme close-up as he remains far away in the background, out of focus. Then we discover, once again, that they are only rehearsing a separation that has not yet taken place and that, in fact, we never see. They playact through their emotional crisis, as if trying to manage it theatrically, and thus never reach their innermost selves, if such a place can be said to exist. They live within quotation markers and pre-written lines of dialogue. They put on an act because reality itself is too hard to bear. She sobs, and the strings reach a crescendo."
- Peter Brunette on "In The Mood For Love", Wong Kar-Wai
"Coming to its emotional climax at the Angkor War temple in Cambodia in 1966, the film plays out through a series of missed opportunities and bad decisions, as one of the most powerful renditions of mutually unrequited love in cinema history."
This is the latest and first trailer for Sofia Coppola's latest film titled Somewhere. It's about an A-list Hollywood actor who begins to re-examine his life when his 11-year-old daughter visits him.
As I have been sitting infront of my computer all day, TweetDeck was going off the hooks in regards to the new trailer. People were claiming that it was very reminiscent of Lost In Translation and that the film was 'nothing new' for Coppola, who previously directed Marie Antoinette as well as Lost In Translation. That argument is invalid to me. To me, a filmmaker makes films that reflect who they are, and their experiences, emotions and stories. I saw this trailer and thought this looked great - sure it is reminiscent of Lost In Translation, but hey - who didn't love Lost In Translation?
I think what makes a filmmaker great is when they write from the heart, and from their own stories and experiences. It's true, and honest, and I feel that's what makes a great film. Her new film Somewhere looks great, and promising. Subject matter aside, I love her work and if it is as close to Lost In Translation, I will probably love it just as much.
So stop hatin'.
(I know I promised an entry about the thesis film production, but I've been sitting infront of this computer for the last 6 hours syncing the sound to picture of the edit, so I must go before my corneas burn into themselves. Later)
