Books, blog and other blather

Category: Movies (Page 3 of 5)

A Spoonful of Sugar Versus an Apple a Day

A very interesting and long article in the New York Times today about sugar, asking whether sugar is essentially a poison. Really interesting stuff, especially as the whole low-carb/paleo/etc. movement seems to be gaining steam … or at least more mainstream coverage recently. As flawed as some of those diets may be, they do seem to agree that the big bad guy in our Western diets is sugar and processed foods.

(Full disclosure: I rather obviously eat a lot of sugar in my diet. But I am trying to eat less).

I find it rather fascinating watching how the common wisdom on something as basic as food can change so much in one’s lifetime. Repeatedly. But even acknowledging that, I am inclined to agree with the anti-sugar folks. I know when I stick to meat, veggies, eggs, dairy, that I feel a lot better, eat a lot less, and just seem healthier in general.

You can check out Robert Lustig’s Youtube lecture on sugar here.

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I’ve been working a lot on Korean music history lately, helping out on a book about the rock scene in the 1960s and 70s. There is just so many interesting stories from that period, and the music was great. I think when the new book comes out, people are really going to enjoy it.

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Over at Yonhap News, Niels Footman has a really interesting story about live music in Korea, and the difficulties promoters face bringing international acts here. Niels has written a lot of good features for Yonhap over the past year, and this one is particularly interesting.

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Oh, this year’s Cannes films have finally been announced. Nothing from Korea in the main section, but three directors in the Un Certain Regard section — the new films by Hong Sang-soo, Kim Ki-duk, and Na Hong-jin. Congratulations to them.

Barney’s Aversion

So I just saw the movie adaptation of BARNEY’S VERSION, the great book by Mordecai Richler — and wow was it terrible. Completely awful. Now, to be fair, I went into the film pretty skeptical — Paul Giamatti as Barney? Scott Speedman as Barney’s best friend, the fast-living, drug-addicted writer Boogie? Really? Minnie Driver as the second wife? Those are some odd casting choices. The trailer was pretty uninspiring, too. But it was a movie based on one of my favorite books of all time, so I had to check it out.

Usually I don’t like to pile on bad films (or music or whatever). Far better to spend one’s time talking about the (all too rare) good stuff out there than to complain about the bad. But then I saw that this movie has an 80% freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes — yikes — so I had to post my tiny little protest against this bizarre onslaught of bad taste.

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Where to even begin describing how wrong this movie was? There is so much to cover, and I’m sure I will miss many things (or hopefully my brain has already begun the healing process, and is forgetting the worst of the film).

The Point(less)

The whole point of BARNEY’S VERSION is a old man looking back on his misbegotten life. It is narrated from his point of view, so is full of his judgments, his unfair analysis, his biases — and made all the more unreliable by his struggle with Alzheimer’s.

So a movie taking a third-person, objective look at Barney’s life is already facing a pretty tough challenge. The filmmakers have immediately shifted the story away from what made the original tick and what gave it heart. Maybe, given sufficient inventiveness and wit, they could have overcome that challenge — but there is not and they do not.

Casting

Barney, the main character in BARNEY’S VERSION is a man of many, many faults — he is drunk, crude, cantankerous. But he is not a schlub. And that is how Paul Giamatti plays him, as a schlub. A soft, unread bore (whereas Richler’s Barney wa a voracious reader — sure, he read for the wrong reasons, but he did read a lot). I think Giamatti thought he was being tough a couple of times when Barney growled a couple of lines, but he sounded about as authentic as Kevin Costner was in Robin Hood.

Barney may have been a jerk, but there was a reason he was able to marry three beautiful women, it made some sense. Richler was never known for being terribly insightful or rich with his women characters, but somehow this movie makes them all even more shallow. Why do they fall in love with Barney? Why do they even give him the time of day? This part really had my wife snapping and angry.

And who is the Rosamund Pike woman (who played Mariam, Barney’s saint-like third wife)?

Minnie Driver was a poor choice to play Barney’s second wife, but at least her acting is pretty good, and she is one of the few characters who have some life in this soggy story. Hoffman does a good with his bad material, too, although his storyline is as random and clunky as everyone else’s in this mess.

Satire

Mordecai Richler was, first a foremost, a satirist. Practically every page of his books are full of witty, brutal takedowns of our politics, society, culture, hypocrisies, and vanities. But this is a movie without satire (or wit, for that matter). It just a convoluted love story, with an unimportant murder-mystery tacked on.

And, really, you could cut out the murder and everything with Boogie and not changed the movie was all, whereas the murder-mystery was the core of the book. BARNEY’S VERSION was “written” by Barney, seeking vindication for his misspent life. So on each page Barney settles scores with a fierce, acidic wit. But the movie? Nothing.

Music

Okay, this is a little more random and less serious — I love the music of Leonard Cohen, but I fear it is time for a new rule: if you have Leonard Cohen music on your soundtrack, your movie probably stinks. If you have Leonard Cohen music during a sex scene, multiply that stinkiness by 100 or so. The evidence is overwhelming — WATCHMEN, PUMP UP THE VOLUME, BIRD ON A WIRE, SHREK, and now BARNEY’S VERSION (obviously the exception to this is MCCABE & MRS MILLER).

Wrapping Up

Yes, fans of books who complain about the movie adaptations can be tiresome (and cliche). But I do find it interesting how the ways movie adaptations stink have changed over the years. Most of my life, the problem was Hollywood changing everything, with no respect for the source material. But now, I think the opposite error — over-faithfulness to the source material — is the main problem. WATCHMEN, THE OLD GARDEN (a Korean movie from a couple of years ago), and BARNEY’S VERSION are all fairly accurate to their original books, and all three suffer because of it. (Faithful to their plots, that is … they are about a million miles away from being faithful to the essence of those works).

THE WONDER BOYS is a good counter-example. Absolutely wonderful film, but it diverges significantly from the book, especially in the second-half. And in most of the ways it is different from the book, it improves upon the book’s failings.

Anyhow, a movie needs to stand or fall on its own merits. And even if you completely forget about the book, the movie BARNEY’S VERSION is a mess. Worse, it is dull and torpid. Save yourself the pain and just read the book (in fact, I think I will start re-reading it).

Movies, Music, and Other Links

– My latest article is up at Korean-Content — this time a talk with director Jang Cheol-soo, whose film BEDEVILLED was screened at Fantasporto, the fantasy/science-fiction film festival in Porto, Portugal. I attended Fantasporto, too (greatly enjoying it, as always), and spent some time with Director Jang, walking around the old city with him, and taking a quick trip to Guimaraes to see the castle and old town.

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– Which reminds me, Fantasporto is a really fun festival. Different than most, but in a good way (the festival organizers are more hands-off than most, but I like being more independent). And I really like Porto, the look of the city, the food. And this year, they actually had sunny weather (Porto is usually rainy this time of year).

– Speaking of Korean movies, as I write this, local films are taking in over 60 percent of the box office in Korea in 2011. Sure, attendance is lagging (there has been no AVATAR-esque blockbuster to dominate things), but still, always good to see a country’s cinema performing well.

– A bunch of articles have appeared on the web recently that talk about Korean indie music and my music website, the Korea Gig Guidea round-up on the indie scene in the March music issue of KoreAm magazine; a profile of the Gig Guide over at Groove magazine.

– And speaking of music, this is shaping up to be a pretty exciting time for Korean indie music. Four Korean bands are slated to play SXSW this year — DFSB Kollective taking Galaxy Express, Vidulgi Ooyoo, and Idiotape to SXSW, Canada Music Week and a couple of other gigs, and Apollo 18 doing their own 16-gig mini-tour through Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennesse. Plus 3rd Line Butterfly and W&Whale appearing on Monocle magazine’s podcast recently, and Balloon & Needle just had a mini-tour of Europe, showing their more avant-garde electronica. Seriously, the Korean music scene at the moment really reminds me of the movie scene back in 1996, full of talent and energy, just waiting to take off. Despite (because of?) the music industry being ravaged around the world, I am getting strangely optimistic about the chances for the Korean indie music community breaking out.
2K11 SEOULSONIC promo

– Btw, how cool is it that Apollo 18 got themselves included on one of the main posters for SXSW? That’s them on the lower left, on the same poster as Emmylou Harris and The Kills. Shawn writes a bit about Apollo 18 and their tour plans over at the Korea Gig Guide.

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– Terrible news coming from Japan, as that earthquake has been upgraded to a 9.1. Fortunately, no one I know there seems to have been hurt … but with so many thousands hurt, dead, and missing, tragedy is going to be overwhelming for some time.

Asia Leads World Box Office 2010

A few years ago, when I was writing for THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER, I remember trying to convince the powers-that-be to put more resources into Asia because Asia’s box office was much bigger than most people realized. I did some math and figured out that in 2006, Asia represented a little over $6 billion at the box office, compared to about $8 billion in Europe and $11 billion in North American.

Despite those numbers, I would say THR’s focus was about 70% America, 20% Europe, 5% Asia, and 5% everything else (just a rough estimate). Clearly those ratios do not really match up, but I could tell that nothing was going to change any time soon, which made leaving THR much easier.

(For the record, I loved the people I worked with, but was frustrated by the bureaucratic inertia and the lazy thinking by the higher-ups).

Well, those trends have just gotten more pronounced. The Motion Picture Association of America just released a report on 2010’s world box office, and Asia is stronger than ever. Europe (including the Middle East and Africa) has grown to $10.4 billion, and Asia is now $8.7 billion (and Latin America is a blistering $2.1 billion). Of the growth since 2006, 40 percent has come from Asia.
World Box Office 2010

America and Canada have grown to $10.6 billion from $9.2 billion, but most of that is from 3D — regular 2D box office actually fell to $8.4 billion.

In case you are interested in such things, the USA/Canada market had its best year in terms of admissions in 2002, when it sold 1.57 billion tickets, as opposed to 1.34 billion in 2010 (the worst year in the past decade).

Of course, as far as the movie publications are concerned, the big issue is not box office but marketing spending — how much the Asian movie companies are spending on publicizing their movies outside of their home territories. And that is not much. Additionally, the numbers out of much of Asia are pretty opaque: China has swung way too much over the years, and who knows what is going on in India. But Japan remains the world’s No. 2 movie market, and Korea is close to $1 billion.

Clearly, the person whose business strategy more closely aligns with global spending (maybe these guys?) is going to make a lot of money. But for now, most people’s focus remains on America first, and the West in general second. Asia gets a lot of lip service, but continues to be really underrepresented

Movies, Democracy, and Media Thoughts on a Saturday Morning

– Kind of amazing that, as I write this, there are two Korean films on Andrew O’Hehir’s top movies of 2011, including the No. 1 spot for Lee Chang-dong’s POETRY. Sure, it is early in the year, but I still think that is impressive.

– Currently with a rating of 84 on Metacritic, POETRY is tied for fourth-best rated film in American theaters at the moment — tied with SECRET SUNSHINE (Lee Chang-dong’s previous film). That’s pretty cool, too.

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(click on the pic to see larger)

– Interesting stats about movies in Europe in 2010 over at the European Audiovisual Observatory. Overall attendance dropped 2 percent, but different territories varied wildly — Italy leapt 11%, and France had its best year since 1967, but Germany was down 13%, and Spain down 11%.

What was especially interesting for me was the national cinema share in each country. In Korea, domestic movie share has always been a big deal (at least since I started covering its cinema), and it was pretty amazing to see local films steadily rise from around 20% when I first arrived there in the 1990s to a high of 65% in 2006 (and since then, hovering around 40-50%).

Over in Europe, however, no country’s domestic cinema took in over 36% of the box office (except for Turkey, with an impressive 52%). Italy and the Czech Republic both had good years, with local films rising from the low-20’s to 32% and 35% respectively. France was down slightly, but still pretty good at 35.5%. Spain had just 12%.

(You can also click here to see a chart with all the data).

– Very happy to see Mubarak step down. But still so very far to go before Egypt begins to get any real freedom or democracy. Still, that was an important first step. I just hope things work out for them.

– In a related vein, there is a very interesting article by Konrad Lawson at Frog in the Well comparing what is happening now (protests, torture, democracy) in Egypt and the Middle East to Korea’s democracy movement of the 1980s.

– A lot of people talk about media bias, left or right, usually depending on how right or left you are (btw, what a torpid way of viewing life or yourself). But the more I read and work with news aggregators, the more I think the biggest bias in the media is story bias — that is, writers and editors continually try to push events and analysis into easily digestible, high-conflict stories. So a complicated event turns into a decently nuanced analysis in the Wall Street Journal or Financial Times or whatever. But then the news aggregators (like Drudge, Gawker, Newser or whoever, the options are endless these days) get ahold of that original story, find the juiciest quote or idea, and play that up in large fonts and active verbs. And before you know it, everyone is screaming at each other, all over again. Could it be the way we consume news is pushing bias (or at least our perceptions of bias) more than the writers and editors themselves?

(Of course, I am only talking about real news outlets, not silly propaganda/argument machines like Fox, MSNBC, or Huffington).

2010 Korean Movie Wrap-Up

Patrick Frater over at Film Business Asia gives a solid overview of the Korean movie market in 2010, using data just published by CJ CGV. The key points:
– Ticket sales were down 5 percent to 148 million. That is the lowest level in five years.
– Korean film attendance was down 2 percentage points to 47 percent of the overall box office.

Sadly, the report did not include any estimate of 2010 revenues. Given the rise of ticket prices in general (thanks to 3D, 4D, and IMAX screens), I would not be surprised if overall revenues were about the same as 2009. But final, official data probably will not be released for another month or two.

Also worth noting is the Korean movies accounted for 7 of the top 10 last year, and 10 of the top 20. There were no non-Hollywood, non-Korean films in the top 20.

If you do not include AVATAR (which was released in 2009, but made most of its money in 2010), the top film of the year was Won Bin’s THE MAN FROM NOWHERE, with 6.25 million admissions — not bad, but that is only the 15th best Korean film.

So, not a great year financially for Korean movies, but not a disaster either. Kind of “meh” — like too many of the movies themselves.

Park Chan-wook+iPhone=Movie

I was more than a little amazed today to read that Park Chan-wook has made a short film on his iPhone. Called NIGHT FISHING (파란만장, or Paranmanjang, in Korean, which translates to something like “Eventful Life” or “Troublesome Life”), it’s a 30-minute film he co-directed with his brother, and it will be coming to Korean theaters soon.

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Of course, this is all a KT promotion, so who knows what it will end up being. But, still, kind of cool.

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‘Bent It’ in North Korea

There has been a lot of stories (and here and here) over the past couple of days about North Korean television airing BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM (Gurinder Chadha’s 2002 film, which starred Parminder Nagra and Keira Knightley), apparently the first Western film to be broadcast on TV there. This has led to much speculation about why–Why now? Why this movie, about a Sikh girl who dreams of playing professional soccer?

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Most speculation has focused on the film’s content (apolitical), with a bit about the current state of life inside North Korea. But these stories miss one important fact–North Koreans already know the movie, as it was shown at the 2004 Pyongyang Film Festival. It was censored then (just as it was on the TV broadcast), and not many people could see it, but it did play there. And I think one of the film’s producers was invited to Pyongyang, too (I recall talking to one of the producers at PiFan the following year).

North Korea can be a difficult, opaque state, but once the powers-that-be there know someone/something and have a personal relationship, they often grow much more comfortable. Witness Dan Gordon, whose documentary about the 1966 North Korean soccer team, THE GAME OF THEIR LIVES, has allowed him to return to North Korea to make other documentaries. Or Johannes Schoenherr’s trips to North Korea. Or the foreign animators who work there.

Reefer Madness – Korean Style

I have said many times before that one of my favorite websites in the world is ehistory.kr, a site full of thousands of old pictures and videos of Korea going back decades. I can waste spend hours there, just trying out the search function and seeing what I can find.

Recently, though, I hit the mother lode. While looking for video about music in the 1960s and 1970s, I stumbled across this wonderful video — an anti-pot PSA from November 1975. That is just days before the Korean government launched a big crackdown on marijuana usage that rounded up dozens of celebrities (including the great rock star Shin Joong-hyun) in December.

(You can read more about the anti-pot crackdown of 1975 at Frog in the Well).

It is a great film, like all such marijuana-scare movies. You have general craziness, addiction, jumping off of great heights, death, depravity, and a stern doctor explaining how smoking pot will make your brain fall out. Sorry I do not have the time to subtitle it … but, really, I think you will get the gist pretty easily.

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