Recent Films

I've seen a few more new films over the past two weeks, bringing my total of 2009 films up to 13, a very high number for this time of year. Usually there are few films of interest until later in the year, but the new films at the Jeonju film festival, the release of new films by Korean auteurs, and a few interesting genre exercises have made this first half of the year relatively strong.

The most recent three films I have seen in the theatre are all explorations of familiar genres: Bong Joon-ho's Mother, Rian Johnson's The Brothers Bloom, and Sam Raimi's Drag Me To Hell. The best of the group is the later, a great, fun, low-budget horror homage by the now very mainstream director Sam Raimie. Of course, this isn't actually "low-budget", but rather, like Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse (2007), a tribute to those films, the difference being Raimi was once an actual director of these types of movies with his Evil Dead trilogy. Any fan of horror films will be familiar with what Raimi is up to and there are plenty of great and inventive sequences on display here. But, for the student of horror films this one works on an ideological level as well, with a pretty clear critique of capitalism and the "values" it embodies. This is another way in which it is a throwback, recalling the great cycle of horror films from the 1970s. The Brothers Bloom is the most self-conscious and self-reflexive of the bunch, a con film that uses the genre as a metaphor for myths and storytelling in general. It is too heavy-handed and the ending is not successful, but it is very well-written and acted and I quite enjoyed it on that level. Mother, Bong's deconstruction of the maternal melodrama, is not a very "fun" film, especially over the first half. But, after Bong has set up his plot, the concluding act works very well. It also is dark and unusual enough to stick in the mind.

All three films are still in theatres here and I think they are all worth seeing, and Raimi's in particular is really one that works great in the theatre with an audience. But, just a warning, it's a loud one.

Puchon Fantastic Film Festival (July 16-26)

Next month represents the high point of the year on the Korean cinema scene for fans of horror films. The Puchon Fantastic Film Festival has announced its schedule and there are a vast number of horror features both old and new. Puchon is just southwest of Seoul and is accessible by subway. The schedule is available here.

...no lies at the Film of the Month club

Over at the Film of the Month club, Mitchell W. Block's 1974 film ...no lies is currently available in streaming format. It is a 16 minute short and very much worth watching. Try to watch it "cold", without looking up comments or reviews first. It will only be available for a short time so check it out if you get the chance. There should also be some discussion of the film as the month goes by.

http://filmofthemonthclub.blogspot.com/

1950s Korean Cinema at the Cinematheque

Upcoming at the Seoul Cinematheque, June 9th-18th, is a program of Korean films from the 1950s. So far, six of the thirteen films are listed as having English sub-titles. The films are:

Yangsan-do (Yangsan Island) (Kim Ki-young, 1955) (90 minutes)
Piagol (Pia Village) (Lee Kang Cheon, 1955) (106 minutes)
Chongchun Ssanggogseon (Han Hyeong-mo, 1956) (100 minutes)
Jayu Buin (Madame Freedom) (Han Hyeong-mo, 1956) (124 minutes)
Muyeong-tab (Pagoda of No Shadows) (Shin Sang-ok, 1957) (117 minutes)
Jiokhwa (Flower in Hell) (Shin Sang-ok, 1958) (86 minutes)

Probably the most well-known of these films are Madame Freedom and Flower in Hell, both of which are discussed at length in the Korean Film Archive's A History of Korean Cinema. As can be guessed by the titles, both are melodramas. Yi Hyo-In devotes a section of his overview of 1950s Korean cinema on Madame Freedom with the title, "Madame Freedom, the Application of the Modern Thinking into a Film and the Repulsion Against It." Flower in Hell is of interest in both its subject matter (one of the lead characters is a prostitute servicing American GIs) and its apparent mixture of genres and styles. And Yangsan Island is the second film of the acclaimed Kim Ki-young. I know little else about the other films, although all appear to be from the melodrama era except for Pia Village, which I think is part of the war cycle and deals with a group of communist guerillas.

The cinemathque website has the times and listings, but not the translation of the titles, so go by the year and running time. I've also linked each film to its imdb page.