The “SF2014 Science & Future” Festival (launched in 2010 as the Gwacheon International Science-fiction Festival, with the name changing nearly every year since then) is coming this fall, Sept. 26-Oct. 5. The festival is based in Gwacheon, just south of Seoul, and features a pretty interesting lineup of movies and events related to science-fiction.
There festival’s English website still isn’t functional, but looking at the Korean, there are several things worth checking out, imho. Among the movies being screened are 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY,UNDER THE SKIN, and the Korean animated film THE SATELLITE GIRL AND THE MILK COW, as well as the 2010 Tamil science-fiction extravaganza ENTHIRAN (aka, “The Robot”) (no word yet whether the non-English films will have English subtitles).
And astrophysicist Yannick Mellier will apparently be there on Sept. 26, introducing a documentary about dark matter.
Anyhow, once the English website is up and running, I’ll link to it. And hopefully they will have a press conference in the next couple of weeks to better explain about the festival. Also, Gord Sellar talks a bit about the festival here.
It’s been a good couple of days for people who like to read my ramblings about Korea (admittedly a rather small sub-section of humanity). First, I was quoted a fair bit in an article in the Scotland Sunday Herald about K-pop. And now the latest New Yorker, as John Seabrook’s feature article about K-pop, “Factory Girls,” references Pop Goes Korea a whole bunch — sadly, though, Seabrook’s story is behind a pay wall. (UPDATE: I nearly forgot, I also was quoted in an Ad Age article about the marketability of Psy and “Gangnam Style”*).
“Factory Girls” was interesting, as I got to experience the famed New Yorker fact-checking regime. Plenty of calls and emails asking about all sorts of K-pop details, sometimes basic facts, but other times more interpretive. They were nice enough to have uncovered a couple of errors from my chapter on Lee Sooman … in part because there is so much more information from the 1980s and 1990s online now than when I wrote the book. Luckily, none of the errors were crucial to my book — mostly they were details (like the number of times one K-pop star was arrested for drug use), the kind of things I hope to clean up should the book ever get another edition.
Anyhow, if you are interested the New Yorker’s fact checking culture, John McPhee’s article “Checkpoints” is also paywalled, but you can read it for free here.
* (How scary is it that when Anita Chang Beattie filed her story late last week, “Gangnam Style” had 283 million Youtube hits, and already it is at 335 million?)
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In other news, Park Jihyun and Gord Sellar’s short film, “The Music of Jo Hyeja,” just won the Audience Pick Award at the HP Lovecraft Film Festival in Los Angeles. “The Music of Jo Hyeja” is a spooky, atmospheric short film that re-tells Lovecraft’s story “The Music of Erich Zann.” It looks great and features music by Jambinai, so how can you go wrong? Hopefully it will come to a film festival near you before too long.
Well, I guess my plan to do daily updates for Fantasporto this year did not pan out very well. The festival is not over yet, but I had to return home yesterday. Very sad to be missing the Vampires’ Ball closing party, but I had a really good time again at Fantasporto, seeing a pretty wide range of films and meeting a whole bunch of interesting folks.
One of my favorite films was one of the most mainstream, The Holding — the story of a dysfunctional, all-female farming family, facing all sorts of challenges, when a mysterious stranger shows up one day. Vincent Regan, who plays the stranger, is really good.
The Spanish supernatural comedy Game of Werewolves was quite amusing. I’m quite surprised that it has not really been distributed, even in Spain, as it is a pretty mainstream, funny film. The part with the fingers and the sacrifice was especially good.
One film you might have heard about is The Bunny Game, a super-low-budget bit of “torture porn.” It is the story of a drug-addicted prostitute who gets kidnapped and tortured in the back of a truck. Really, that’s it — black-and-white torture while a teeth-rattling industrial-noise soundtrack blasts incessantly. It is about as extreme as cinema gets, but not in a good way. Some people have compared it Serbian Film, but I thought Serbian Film at least had a brain and a point of view (not to mention production values). Bunny Game, though, is more like something Alex would have been forced to watch during his reprogramming in Clockwork Orange.
The HP Lovecraft film, Whisperer in the Darkness, was also really bad. Schlocky and dull, without a hint of wit or creativity. Imagine HP Lovecraft as re-interpreted by Guy Maddin (that is not a compliment).
Most of the other films that I did not like were mostly bad because of budgets and other constraints, so I do not want to bash them. Most at least had the seeds of good ideas, interesting moments, or other redeeming features — perhaps not enough for a full-fledged endorsement, but not terrible either. I’m sure I’m forgetting some other good films, too, but that’s all for now.
If it’s the end of February, I must be in Porto again, for the Fantasporto fantasy film festival. It is always one of my favorite film festivals in one of my favorite cities.
So far, my favorite movie has easily been Juan of the Dead, the Cuban zombie film that has been racking up awards all over the world since making its debut in Toronto last September. So hard to believe that they actually convinced the Cuban government to let them film in Havana, but somehow they did it.
Bellflower is kind of a cross between Breaking the Waves and Fight Club. But I don’t think I mean that in a way that is complimentary to any of those films. It certainly was not terrible. It has a few stylistic moments, a couple of laughs (although perhaps the biggest one was not intentional), but not enough to sustain the meandering story and middling characters.
Bag of Bones, Mick Garris’s TV adaptation of the Stephen King novel, did not start until well after midnight, and old man that I am, I just could not stay awake that late, and gave up about an hour in.
I even checked out one Canadian movie, Eddie the Sleepwalking Cannibal — it’s a Canadian-Denmark co-production and a pretty silly film, but I seemed to be more forgiving of its problems than others I have talked to.
Friday night, I was stumbling home, dead tired (having given up on Bag of Bones around 1:30), when I passed an interesting-looking club called Plano B. It turns out the Catalan soul band The Pepper Pots were playing there … and, this being Portugal, they had not started yet. So I decided to check them out — apparently standing and listening to loud music is much easier to get through than sitting in a darkened theater. The finally went on around 2am and it was a good show. Very much in the vibe of Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings. And, as I said, it was a great venue; some old textile plant that was converted into a cavernous club.
Hopefully, though, there will be more sleep from here on out.
Hard to believe that the Busan Cinema Center is finally opening. I think I first wrote about it — and its ambitious architecture by Coop Himmelb(l)au — way back in 2005. But despite the odds, Busan actually built the $143 million movie haven, pretty much as first envisioned. You can read about it here (with some good video) and here (more pics). And plenty of pics here, of course.
Here are a couple pics of the Cinema Center under construction. Doesn’t it look like the USS Enterprise in dry dock?
– Amazing to see that the New York Asian Film Festival is 10 years old already. And ever better to see the fest getting such strong reviews in the mainstream press. A key quote:
But whatever it lacks in red carpets and seafood towers, it makes up for in the quality, quantity and variety of films. As it celebrates its 10th year with a program of 40 features, showing Friday through July 14 at the Walter Reade Theater and Japan Society, it’s time to acknowledge that this outsider actually belongs in the top tier of New York’s film festivals, next to some very serious, very inside gatherings.
– What is there to say about TRANSFORMERS 3? Everyone knows it is going to be bad and everybody knows it will also be spectacular. And T3 is definitely the most bad and most spectacular of the series. Once again, Michael Bay presents a world where everyone — young people, adults, robots — act like 20-year-old coke-heads. Basically, it is the cultural equivalent of sucking down too much Slushee (or frozen Margarita) too fast.
But all things considered, T3 is the worst of the bunch — surprisingly humorless and murderous. TRANSFORMERS 1 had the advantage of novelty: it was amazing to see giant cgi robots that felt so heavy. TRANSFORMERS 2 was terrible, but for reasons I cannot explain, I found it mildly amusing and did not hate life when I left the theater. But TRANNY 3 is just terrible, with the deaths of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) casually ignored, and all the “heroes” grimly promising to kill their foes throughout the film.
(Well, there are at least two Spock-related jokes, included because the main new robot is voiced by Leonard Nimoy… they are kind of witty, I guess).
– Congratulations to Kim Ki-duk, whose semi-autobiographical film ARIRANG just won the top prize in the Un Certain Regarde section at Cannes (along with Andreas Dresen’s STOPPED ON A TRACK). It is funny how Kim has kind of lost his relevance to most people in Korea today — I think many of his most recent films have been glorified orientalism for Western audiences — but the 52-year-old filmmaker can still make a film with fire when the inspiration comes.
– A very interesting profile of Lionel Messi in the New York Times. I am not the biggest football/soccer fan in the world and certainly am no expert, but even I can be really impressed by Messi and his creative scoring.
“No one plays with as much joy as Messi does,” said Eduardo Galeano, the celebrated Uruguayan novelist. “He plays like a child enjoying the pasture, playing for the pleasure of playing, not the duty of winning.”
My latest column is up at the Korean Content website — this one is an overview of some of the Korean films coming to film festivals over the next few months. There are eight Korean movies at Berlin this year (not including all the movies at the European Film Market), and more coming to Fantasporto, Udine, and more.
Okay, this was a bit unexpected–an article about the Seoul Independent Film Festival appearing in the Wall Street Journal. Even if it is just in a WSJ blog, I would not have expected them to cover something so unconventional. Anyhow, it is a pretty decent article, talking about the festival’s 35-year history, recent government cutbacks to the festival and the film industry, and an interview with Kam Jin-qu, a member of the festival’s organizing committee.
Last week was surprisingly busy, but mostly in a fun way. Starting the 16th, I was over in Bucheon for the Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival, or PiFan. It was the first time in three years I had spent that much time at the festival, and it was a lot of fun to get reacquainted with its rhythms and style.
The general pattern was: go to an early movie at 11am, then do my interviews and writing (I was contributing to the festival’s dailies), then there was usually some kind of reception or event starting around 7, which would be followed by some informal drinking, which would be followed by more fun (or a noraebang), finally wrapping up some time around 3-4am. Repeat. Some days you have more movies, some days more work, some days more fun, but that was the basic outline. But with plenty of interesting guests in town, it was quite fun.
The Festival now has an industry section called the Network of Asian Fantastic Films (NAFF), with a country spotlight, film education events, film pitch sessions for filmmakers and investors and things like that. It really contributes to the number of film professionals at the festival and makes everything feel more official.
But it also creates a bit of a cocoon effect, where you spend a lot of time hanging out in this big group, and the movie part of the festival gets a little sidelined. Especially now that almost all the movies are in two big multiplexes down the road from the industry hotel, PiFan has lost a lot of the festival mood it once had. Festival director Kim Young Bin said as much to me, and he really wants to get the city more involved next year.
One of the things I really liked about PiFan the first time I went, around 2000 or so, was how integrated with the community it felt. You could sit outside at a chicken restaurant (when it was not raining), and in one big group you might have some directors and actors, some press, some volunteers and some local film fans. The city seemed a lot more excited about the festival. It would be nice to get a little of that vibe back.
The short film winner was my friend David Kaplan, who made the very good movie PLAY. And you can actually see it online. It is a lot of fun and even has some thinky bits.
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Then on Thursday, I traveled a little further west to Incheon, where I was a participant at the first Pentaport Music Conference. Obviously, this event is a spinoff of the Pentaport Rock Festival (held last weekend), and this year, for the first time, they invited some big music professionals from the United States and around Asia to network with the local music scene.
And I do not mean SM Entertainment or the big pop labels. Korea actually has a few dozen small rock and indie labels, and they came out to meet some experts from other countries.
Among the speakers was me, which was a little strange — as a writer, my only audience is usually cats. But it was fun (and scary) speaking before a big room of music industry professionals. And it was great to meet so many new people in the music biz.
Saturday, a few of us went to Pentaport for the actual music. No way was there 27,000 people there, as reported, but it was a decent turnout. The highlight was seeing LCD Soundsystem, who were as bouncy and dancy as I had hoped — although I think their new album is kind of dull compared to their earlier stuff. The Korean band Ynot had a pretty good turnout. Vassline was WAY TOO LOUD, but from a distance it seemed solid. A surprising good diversity of food in the food area, and lines were all reasonable. All in all, a good time.
Young-hee stumbles into a magical world, where the fairy stories of her childhood are real and all the frustrations of her everyday life fade away — until her little brother is kidnapped by a goblin. The only way Young-hee can save him is by finding a magical plant called a pullocho, but little does she realize the fate of a whole world hangs in the balance.
Pop Goes Korea: Behind the Revolution in Movies, Music and Internet Culture (2nd edition) is the only English-language book to examine the whole of Korea's entertainment industry and how it became such a powerhouse over the past 20 years. With profiles of many of Korea's top stars (including Lee Byung-hun and Rain), Pop Goes Korea features chapters on movies, music, television, comic books, the Internet, and more.
The original edition of Pop Goes Korea is now out of print.
K-Pop Now!
K-Pop Now! takes a fun look at Korea’s high-energy pop music, and is written for its growing legions of fans. It features all the famous groups and singers, and takes an insider’s look at how they have made it to the top.
