I’ll be traveling over the holidays, so I doubt I will get many chances to update the website. So I’ll just say “Happy Holidays” now.
And, for all the nerds out there, here’s a quasi-present — the trailer to the movie Prometheus:
Category: Movies (Page 2 of 5)
Yonhap has a great feature about one of the artists who used to paint the movie billboards for cinemas around Seoul (using what I believe is the Britishism “hoarding” instead of billboard). Before multiplexes dominated, Korea had mostly small theaters, with one to three screens, and they advertised their movies with large, hand-painted posters out front. Especially for the major theaters, those billboards could be really big and impressive.
The artist in the Yonhap story, Park Chun-tae, started painting movie billboards in 1959, when he was just 15 years old (!), and produced thousands and thousands of signs until he retired in 2005. It’s an interesting bit of Korean movie history and a good article — although it is a bit of a shame the writer let it end in the typical old-guy-bitterly-complains-modernity-lacks-the-soul-of-the-old-days cliche.
I’m pretty sure there are not any theaters in Seoul that use painted billboards anymore (although the Dream Cinema was using them for its retro-revival film series a while ago). But I like how you can still come across the occasional old, faded movie billboard on the side streets of Korea, indicating where an old theater used to be. Sometimes they might even be the poster for an old “ero” theater, where they used to screen soft-core porn — it always amused me to discover ancient, sun-bleached smut lingering on, years after a seedy theater closed, haunting an alley like an erotic (if sad) ghost.
Anyhow, if you want to check out some old movie billboards, some paintings by Park and a couple of other artists are on display at the Chungmu Art Hall (near Dongdaemun) until the end of the month.
I just received my copy of a wonderful and very important new book about Korea’s movie history, KOREA’S OCCUPIED CINEMAS, 1893-1948, by Brian Yecies and Shim Ae-Gyung. It’s really a subject that has long needed more exploring, not just in English but even in Korean, and so far I am really enjoying the read.
Certainly there is too little literature available in English about Korea’s cultural history this century. And I find that too much of Korean scholarship has focused on re-iterating boring old nationalism or re-fighting old cultural battles rather than digging into archives and unearthing more information about the past (probably a lack of language abilities has hurt, too).
But Brian and Ae-Gyung have gone into the archives and gotten a lot of great stuff that really changes and fleshes out the period. Most previous literature has focused on the movies made by Koreans, glossing over how foreign films did in Korea and how international cinema influenced and changed Korea. They take issue with the commonly told story of the first sound picture in Korea, talk about the success of Hollywood films in Korea in the 1930s, and lots of other stuff.
The book is rather academic — not surprising, considering that Brian and Ae-Gyung are academics and it was published by Routledge. And sadly, it is priced like an academic, library book, so you might want to get it from the library, at least until the paperback comes out. But when I do finish it, I will write up my thoughts and give it a proper review. Anyhow, great going, Brian and Ae-Gyung. I’m really happy and looking forward to reading it.
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?
Considering that I wrote about Billboard a couple of times last week, I really should have mentioned that the trade magazine has started to run a K-Pop chart (although I cannot seem to get it to work at the moment).
It’s quite a change from back when I was writing for Billboard. Back around 2003 or 2004 or so, Billboard had a pretty wide variety of little charts from all over the world, including such non-hot spots as Malaysia. There was never much interest in adding Korea to the mix, especially since there was nothing resembling an authoritative, transparent music chart. Most of the TV channels put together their own charts, based on call-ins and a variety of cryptic data. Every so often, not surprisingly, there would be some sort of kickback/payola scandal about a chart, causing a big outcry and shutting down that chart for a time. Things got so bad in 2003 that all the major music charts in the country were taken down.
I always thought it significant that Korea was unable to put together a reliable music chart at the same time music sales were falling off a cliff. It was a telling contrast that the movie industry was booming as movie box office data were getting better and better. Of course, the music industry eventually regrouped and went all-online in Korea, which I guess helped them put together the data for this new chart.
On the other hand, The Hollywood Reporter appears to have stopped running its box office chart for South Korea. That did not last very long. Back when I wrote for THR, I bugged them for years to start including the official box office charts, but never found much interest — even though the information was easily available online, and even though, at its peak, Korea was about the world’s fifth-largest box office. In one of THR’s more recent revamps, it started to include Korea’s movie chart, but I guess it was too much trouble…
Anyhow, it looks like Billboard’s new K-Pop chart has gotten a bit of press. Such as this article at the Globe & Mail, which says “It’s as if disco had a baby with European house music — then weaned it on candy” (thanks to Gusts of Popular Feeling for the pic).
There’s a nice little story on the Wall Street Journal‘s Korea blog about the success of a new Korean animated film, LEAFIE, A HEN INTO THE WILD. While not a blockbuster, LEAFIE has managed to pull in nearly 900,000 admissions since it was released at the end of July, which I do believe makes it the most successful Korean animated film of the modern era.
For a bunch of reasons, Korean animation just has not done that well over the years, with a long, long list of failures over the past 20 years (I mentioned a few in this blog post a few years ago). Considering one of my first Newsweek stories was about WONDERFUL DAYS, one of the highest-profile failures in Korean animation, it is kind of cool seeing someone actually doing okay.
One note about the WSJ story, though — it apparently needs an editor, because LEAFIE has not made 2 billion won, and 2 billion won does not equal $1 million. KOBIS says that the film has made nearly 6 billion won so far, which is around $5.4 million.
UPDATE: The LA Times movie blog has more about Cohen’s plans and the movie here.
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ORIGINAL POST:
Wow, some ambitious plans coming from CJ E&M Pictures (until recently CJ Entertainment) — they have tapped Rob Cohen, director of FAST AND THE FURIOUS, to helm a 1950, a $100-million movie about the Korean War. That’s rather impressive.
Most importantly, the story looks pretty interesting, too, based on the life of the famous New York Herald Tribune journalist Marguerite Higgins. After reporting on WWII, Higgins was sent to Tokyo in the late 1940s. So when the Korean War started, she flew over right away to cover the fall of Seoul. Soon after that, the Tribune’s star war reporter (Homer Bigart) arrived to cover the war and tried to send Higgins back to Japan, but she refused to go, and the two competed for stories. Then McArthur tried to ban women from reporting on the front lines, but she changed his mind. She would write WAR IN KOREA in 1951 and won a Pulitzer Prize.
Higgins died in 1966 when she was just 45 years old, covering the war in Vietnam.
The Film Biz Asia story says they are looking for a big Hollywood name to play Higgins and the marine platoon leader, and a major Korean actor will play a KATUSA (Korean soldier assigned to the US Army).
The film will end with the famous Christmas Eve evacuation of 100,000 Korean civilians from the Port of Hungnam in northern Korea, as North Korean and Chinese troops were moving in. This is quite an interesting place to end, as for years Cineclick Asia was trying to make a $20-million movie about that battle, called CHRISTMAS CARGO. At one point they had Terence Chang on board to produce and Bruce Beresford to direct, but I guess that project fell apart (as so many do).
– Kim Kiduk is pissed off. Again. This time, he sent out a press release for POONGSAN (which he wrote and produced), complaining about how hard it is for different kinds of films to get screens in Korea, which tend to be dominated by blockbusters (sorry, no link… but I have been looking for one).
Which is true enough … although I notice that this sort of rant rarely talks about the responsibility a filmmaker has to audiences, to make something they might want to see. Or the responsibility of audiences to see non-blockbusters. If there were hordes of people pushing to get into indie films, which were being forced out of theaters while still doing good business, then I would be much more sympathetic. But if a theater owner can make X dollars with an indie film, and 10X with a blockbuster, why should the owner take a loss? Just to make Kim Kiduk and other self-important artistes feel better? That’s culture?
Ezra Pound had a great quote:
Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance… poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music
And I think there is a similar delicacy to movies. They atrophy when they get too far from the dance. They might be a slow dance, a tango, a Lindy Hop or a late-night techno crunk, but they still dance.
(Of course, everything atrophies when it gets too close to money, so the opposite is not great either).
– Anyhow, I think my point is, if people are not enjoying the art you think they should, maybe you should do something about it, rather than just complain. Get aggressive with social media and personal marketing. If audiences don’t “get” your film, engage and work with them, help show them what there is to get.
Or turn to writing or comics (much cheaper than making movies). But if you want to spend millions of dollars to tell a story and it is not your money, don’t be surprised if people get all money-minded.
I also hate it when indie musicians complain about not being well supported in Korea, but then do precious little to make the scene better. They sit around complaining about how everyone else is failing, but do not take charge of their own lives and careers. Happily, though, that is beginning to change, and I think a lot of bands are being a lot more active about promoting themselves, getting better, and building the scene.
– After being out about a month, TRANSFORMERS 3: DAFT SIDE OF THE LOON looks like it is following the last two Transformers movies, making oodles of money at the box office in Korea. TRANSFORMERS was the top foreign film ever in Korea when it came out, with 7.3 million admissions. TRANSFORMERS 2 did slightly better with 7.4 million. And now, TRANSFORMERS 3 has 6.9 million admissions and is still going strong (637,000 admissions last weekend). So I think it has a very good chance of overtaking both of its predecessors.
(Of course, AVATAR kicked everyone’s butts last year, topping 13 million admissions and becoming the biggest film ever in Korea).
– HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS: PART 2 did okay in Korea, in its debut weekend, with 1.7 million admissions — okay, but not great. But whenever a HARRY POTTER film comes out, I always remember what it was like when the first one was released. I was working at the JoongAng Ilbo at the time, and when a reporter asked about the title, I thought it best to go with the story’s original title: HARRY POTTER AND THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE. Turns out Warner Bros. hated that (they wanted the American dummy title, THE SORCERER’S STONE), and yelled at the reporter. A lot.
HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS was really huge, but standards have really changed since then. It opened on 295 screens, about a third of all the screens in Korea then — today, there are around 2,000 screens, and big openings can get up to 900 screens. CHAMBER OF SECRETS was the biggest opening weekend Korea had ever seen then … with 1 million admissions. Today, plenty of films have opened to over 2 million.
The first two Potter films had around 4 million admissions (if I recall correctly), but since then, the others have been in the 2-3 million admission range.
– I’m pretty ambivalent about DEATHLY HALLOWS: PART 2, for what it’s worth. Yes, I was one of the lemmings that saw it opening weekend. It was definitely the most action-filled of the Potter films. And the CGI was really impressive — at times, even beautiful. The contrast between it and the first couple of Potter films is incredible (with their second-rate effects, bad child actors and really dull direction). But despite all its good points, I can barely remember DEATHLY HALLOWS 2. And at its core, HP is yet another “chosen one”, might-makes-right superhero story, far more American than British (despite the public school trappings). And it makes me want to re-read the original BOOKS OF MAGIC miniseries.
– The Korean film SUNNY is still chugging along, doing impressive business. It opened May 4, but it is still in third place, with 6.9 million admissions. But of course I have not had a chance to see it, so I don’t have any real opinions about it.
– Oh, POONGSAN has had nearly 700,000 admissions since its release on June 23, in case you are interested.
– 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.”
Young-hee and the Pullocho
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.
On sale now at:
Amazon
Pop Goes Korea
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.
On sale now at:
Amazon.com
Kobo eBooks
And hopefully more ebooks stores very soon.
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.
You can buy at:
Amazon.com
Chapters Indigo
Tuttle (my publisher)
Kyobo Books (in Korea)
Goodreads (not for buying, but still a good link)