Korean cinema rules and deserves a thread.

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There's a thread for New Korean Cinema on ILF but figure we could have a catch-all thread as we do with French, Italian, Japanese cinema (without the shitty titles).

BFI doing a huge retro of 60's stuff coupled with 00's New Cinema selections:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25ViBZdRXBE

So far I've seen two films: Hong Eun-won's A Woman Judge (1962) is the second film directed by a woman in S Korea. The first is a lost film, and this was considered as such as well for many decades before a copy turned up. Said copy is in very bad shape, missing both the beginning and the ending, which gives the film a somewhat surreal feel. The story is pretty engaging, very much not progressive for the current era but pretty brave within its context. The copy was so damaged I can't say much about Eun-won as a visual storyteller, but she was def good at melodrama, getting you to root for the main character against the horrible snobbish family she gets settled with.

2008's Sisters On The Road, by Book ji-young, is about a woman returning to her childhood home after her mother's death; she then convinces her sister to go looking for her (but not the sister's) estranged father. Cue a trip to Jeju Island. The protagonist is very unlikeable but the portrayal is very psychologically astute, you get how she got there. There's also an amazing plot twist which I won't discuss. The film was a commercial failure and the director is now a film teacher. Very much worth seeking out.

Daniel_Rf, Wednesday, 6 November 2024 12:23 (one month ago) link

Bookmarked

badder living thru Kemistry (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, 6 November 2024 12:36 (one month ago) link

Need to catch some of these!

xyzzzz__, Wednesday, 6 November 2024 22:31 (one month ago) link

A Girl At My Door is one I really want to see.

omar little, Wednesday, 6 November 2024 22:36 (one month ago) link

This channel deserves way more love in general but I highly recommend the four part crash course on the Golden Age (1960's) of South Korean cinema,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MGrFzYXlD0

Daniel_Rf, Wednesday, 13 November 2024 10:32 (one month ago) link

one month passes...

Was only able to catch Die bad, which is a loosely constructed four shortish films in one.

The one with the documentary interviews cut with the really long fight scene was my favourite.

xyzzzz__, Saturday, 28 December 2024 21:18 (six days ago) link

I managed to catch two screenings in the series during a temporary London sojourn:

Barking Dogs Never Bite (Bong Joon-ho, 2000). Extremely low-stakes black comedy set in a dreary apartment complex and involving canine abuse that shouldn't be funny, but is. More of a dry run for his later work but Bae Doona's unbelievably dorky performance elevates the whole thing tenfold.

A Bloodthirsty Killer (Lee Yong-min, 1965). Utterly nuts horror flick whereby a family are very reasonably haunted by the ghost of a young woman they've all spectacularly wronged. Extremely odd left turn into religious iconography for the denouement.

it's been almost a decade and I am still enraged about this (Matt #2), Saturday, 28 December 2024 22:16 (six days ago) link

NEXT PARK CHAN WOOK IS A DONALD WESTLAKE ADAPTATION

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Other_Choice

a ZX spectrum is haunting Europe (Daniel_Rf), Tuesday, 31 December 2024 10:14 (three days ago) link

That’s a fantastic novel. So grim.

Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Wednesday, 1 January 2025 06:46 (two days ago) link


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