FEATURES
INTERVIEW: DIRECTOR KIM HAN-MIN
Part I: “It’s technically very difficult getting a tiger into a film”
Within the month, War of the Arrows will pass the 7.4 million admissions mark, moving it out of the commercial blockbusters zone but still short of the sort of numbers racked up by the disaster phenomenon Haeundae (aka., Tidal Wave, 2009) and the 2008 sleeper comedy Scandal Makers (aka., Speed Scandal, Gwasokseukaendeul).
INTERVIEW: DIRECTOR KIM HAN-MIN
Part II: “It’s technically very difficult getting a tiger into a film”
Though little of this makes it into the final film, it is worth recalling the devastating impact of the Japanese invasions in the late sixteenth century. Intended to bring about the destabilisation of Ming China, this bitter war exposed the complacency of Chosŏn Korea, shocking the military leadership from its general malaise and arousing the ire of the elite classes (Confucianists and bureaucrats all) who demanded absolute immediate reform.
BONG JOON-HO’S MOTHER
Mother (2009) and the Cultural Remasculinisation of South Korea
I want to discuss a few things highlighted in Bong Joon-ho’s new film Mother and if possible draw them back to a broader dialogue on nation, national victimisation and infantilisation (as it relates to family, and maternal and paternal subjectivity). As Kim Kyung Hyun (2005) describes it, contemporary Korean cinema up until the millennium (he clarifies “1999”) invokes feelings of personal self-loathing, institutional repression and a damaging sense of shame; critically, this regime is gender-specific.
A SERIOUS MISTRUST OF CAMERAS
The roving camera lens in Oren Peli's Paranormal Activity (2007)
EYES WATCHING HORROR AND CALCULATED ASSAULTS IN THE REEF
The first-person camera in Andrew Traucki’s The Reef (2010)
In horror cinema the appetite for explicit, punishing and phantasmagoric deaths is insatiable. At the Frightfest screening of Final Destination 5 (Steven Quale, 2011, USA) this year, the artless nature of gymnast Candice Hooper’s (Ellen Wroe) death was so breathtaking, so lingeringly unashamedly brazen, that we very nearly gave this one sequence a standing ovation in the aisles (it received enthusiastic applause instead).
SOUTH-KOREAN ACTRESS BAE DOO-NA
Koreeda Hirokazu’s forthcoming Air Doll (Kuuki Ningyo) and Jeong Jae-eun's Take Care of My Cat
SOUTH KOREA’S FIRST ROTOSCOPED FILM
Choi Ik-Hwan’s Life Is Cool (2008)
MORPHOLOGIES OF IDENTITY
Examining the alien life-cycle in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979)
There is a scene towards the end of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) that I want to explore in some depth. Having just successfully detonated a gigantic star-freighter, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the remaining survivor of a seven-man crew, busies herself prepping the Narcissus lifeboat (her spaceship) for the journey home).
SOCIAL PROBLEMS IN HWASEONG, 1986-1991
Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder (2003)
Through the cold eye of history, director Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder looks back on the turbulent years of the mid-eighties—before the successful democratisation movement which peaked in 1987—to an era of tight authoritarian control under Chun Doo Hwan’s Fifth Republic. It is a remarkable serial killer/police procedural that highlights the failure of military rule, a failure of such monumental proportions that countrywide civil-defence orders and gas attack drills are not only common domestic policy, but, when combined with a governmental emphasis on discipline and flag-waving unity to support national security, actually function as a drain on state resources.
THE GUILT DREAM
Kim Jee-woon's A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)
A Tale Two Sisters is a guilt dream in extremis. Su-mi’s life is disrupted by the effects of memory, by the emancipatory possibilities of imagination. There is something terrifically indulgent about this form of self-attention yet as Kim’s directorial vision becomes clearer via the film’s double-whammy of revelations, as the sensual and romantic "present" contorts and deferred feelings of guilt return to the surface, and even while Su-mi’s bedevilled father Mu-hyeon wrestles with his own feelings of parental inadequacy and emotional disconnectedness, amongst all of this we can’t help but completely forgive Su-mi for wanting it the way it always was.
