Finding Korean Film |
Watching Korean movies—or just about anything other than mainstream Hollywood fodder—has, for better or worse, become a small-screen rather than a large-screen enthusiasm. It's a rare opportunity to see any outré Asian or other foreign film in a theater these days. Here in Las Vegas, they might flicker for a week or so at the Suncoast or the Village Square, then they're gone. Two technological innovations have brightened the picture—literally: the Internet and the DVD. The Netflix DVD rental empire has many of the more popular Korean flicks, and once you've burned through that inventory, it's time to move on to www.KoreanDVD.com, with a far deeper and more up-to-date catalogue, particularly on the genre side. They've got about 1,500 titles available, on a $19.95-a-month rental plan, four discs out at a time. (Bear in mind, though, that the numbers are inflated by multi-disc releases of South Korean television shows, which are probably of more interest to Korean natives living in the U.S. than they are to film buffs.) KoreanDVD.com is part of Colorado-based Cinflix.com, which has an apparently valid claim to being the largest online rental source for Asian films in general—so if your interest extends to HK, Japanese, Thai and other Asian movies, you might be better off signing up with Cinflix rather than its division KoreanDVD.com. Or go retail. At one time, eBay was plagued by counterfeiters with cheap, nasty and copyright-violating DVD-Rs of both hit and obscure movies, but the scene has been cleaned up to a large degree. Official DVDs of most Asian films now follow so quickly upon their home-market theatrical release that it's often possible to acquire the DVD of a film that's still making the rounds of the international festival circuit (as is the case with Kim Ji-Woon's A Bittersweet Life). Just typing the English-language title of a recent Korean or other Asian film into the eBay search engine will usually turn up multiple online sellers. All the discs I've acquired this way appear authentic, with original sealed packaging and inserts. Prices with shipping work out to around $11 or $12—given the cost of theater tickets, owning the disc is competitive with renting a seat for a one-time viewing. One eBay seller with whom I've done repeated business, always with good results, uses the screen name "Mr.International_DVD"—deep Asian inventory, multiple copies available, purchases shipped quickly from a U.S. location; no complaints so far. K.W. Jeter Suggested Films NOWHERE TO HIDE (1999, directed by Lee Myung-Se) Visually tweaked cops 'n' criminals pursuit flick, set to the Bee Gees' oldie "Holiday," with a massive performance by Park Joong-Hoon as low-rent police detective Woo; when he lumbers onscreen in his overalls and sockless sneakers, he makes the CGI tyrannosaurs of Jurassic Park look like the toe-dancing scene in Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. ATTACK THE GAS STATION! (1999, directed by Kim Sang-Jin) Sleeper hit in Korea, a hostage comedy with feckless teenage criminals applying all the stereotypes about Koreans' supposedly innate skills at running small businesses to a screwed-up Dog Day Afternoon scenario. Pump gas or whack more people over the head with big sticks? Neither choice works out. R-POINT (2004, directed by Kong Su-Chang) Small cast, chamber opera version of Apocalypse Now, with a plotline lifted from Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (or perhaps John Carpenter's The Thing) rather than Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness. Just as we are, Koreans are still sifting through the bones of the Vietnam war. GREEN FISH (1997, directed by Lee Chang-Dong) Slow-paced, understated mob drama, with the emphasis on relationships within the "family" rather than power politics between gangs. THE WIG (2005, directed by Won Shin-Yeon) Yes, it's a movie about a haunted wig, and yes, it's way over-influenced by J-horror—but there's more parodic intent than its detractors give it credit for. Among its other virtues, it reduces the usual Asian long-haired female ghost to the minimum: Eliminate the ghost, keep the scary hair.
K.W. Jeter See Korean Film Live Kim Ji-Woon's A Bittersweet Life will be shown at the Seventh Annual San Diego Asian Film festival, along with Kim Dong-Won's comedy My Boss, My Teacher, Takashi Miike's The Great Yokai War, Ringo Le's Saigon Love Story and more than 30 other films from Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and elsewhere. The festival runs from October 12-19. For further information, including the complete schedule of films, see the festival's website at www.sdaff.org. |
The sudden boom in Korean cinema began in 1996. On the artsy side, Hong Sang-Soo debuted with The Day a Pig Fell into the Well, as did self-taught master of shoestring budgets Kim Ki-Duk, with his film Crocodile. Commercially, Korean films also ramped up, culminating in Kang Je-Gyu's 1999 Shiri, which demonstrated that homegrown directors could blow up buildings as well as anybody. (Shiri is often described as a Die Hard clone set in downtown Seoul, though the last long action sequence resembles John Frankenheimer's 1977 Black Sunday more than anything else.) By 2001, some 60 to 70 feature films were being made in Korea per year, selling more tickets than the 200 to 300 Hollywood and other foreign titles released there.
That kind of local success doesn't sit well with the U.S. film industry, which relies on overseas ticket sales to dig itself out of the craters left by its own multi-gazillion-dollar disasters. The same gutter-libertarian, Cato Institute "free trade über alles, protectionism is the Great Satan" ideological pretext that lines Wal-Mart's shelves with cheap Chinese-made plastic has been used by the Motion Picture Association of America and its frontman Jack Valenti (along with lots of U.S. government arm-twisting) in a successful campaign to get South Korea to halve its film quota to 73 days per year for homegrown films in local theaters. (Shiri's director, Kang, joined with other Korean industry figures in shaving his head in protest. The only American even marginally on the political scene to argue for the Koreans' right to defend their culture as they see fit is—deal with it—Pat Buchanan.) Even with reduced government support, homegrown films appear to be holding up well in local theaters. In a praiseworthy response to Hollywood bullying, a number of Korean theater-owners announced that they'll maintain the previous quota. It might just be too late for the MPAA to strangle the Korean film industry, as it's managed to do with other national cinemas.
It's not just a matter of directors, either. If Korean movies hold their own at home and even wind up carving their way onto U.S. screens, it might well be due to the sheer good looks of their talent pool, male and female, similar to the visual impact of Hong Kong's Chow Yun-Fat and Andy Lau. Now that the Western definition of Asian beauty seems to have defaulted from Michelle Yeoh or YoYo Mung to the annoyingly elfin Zhang Ziyi—either the new transcultural Audrey Hepburn or Chinese cinema's gift to the Humbert Humberts of the world—South Korea's Jeong Ji-Hyeon and Choi Ji-Woo might have a shot. (Though it remains a personal mystery why eerie pop songstress Park Ji-Yoon hasn't been drafted for anything other than the occasional TV soap opera.) A number of Korean actresses have hit it big recently with Japanese audiences; U.S. moviegoers might catch on as well.
KIM JI-WOON: LUCKY AND EASY
The outside world's awareness of Korean films ticked upward in 2004, with director Park Chan-Wook's Oldboy. (Winning the Grand Prix at Cannes didn't hurt.) Foreign audiences were both repelled and flattened by the film's crazed narrative—half Kafka, half Count of Monte Cristo—and actor Choi Min-Sik's brute avenger armed out of the $1.98 bargain bin of some Korean Home Depot.
Ultimately, Oldboy might have been a little too far out there. (The other parts of Park Chan-Wook's loose trilogy—Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Lady Vengeance—didn't make as make of an international impact.) If a current Korean director is going to slide under Hollywood's defensive radar and take over a chunk of the mass market, it'll probably be one with a slightly smoother intent, if not technique. That director might be Kim Ji-Woon. To more than one interviewer, he's stated that he considers himself fortunate to have gotten into movie-making, since it's so easy for him. If Kim Ji-Woon isn't breaking a sweat, then he's one of film's natural talents; the on-screen results aren't shoddy-looking. His fourth movie, A Tale of Two Sisters (2003), nailed his reputation with Korean audiences; elsewhere, it was lumped in with the tail end of the recent Japanese horror pack, only because Seoul is closer to Tokyo than wherever it is that Shirley Jackson—or Alfred Hitchcock—is buried. J-horror purists—they do exist—regard Kim Ji-Woon as having gotten it all wrong, inasmuch as his film actually includes an explanation for the spooky events. (In true J-horror, a cell phone is haunted apparently because it came from the factory that way. A feature, not a bug.) With Two Sisters, though, it's not the usual narrative package, neatly wrapped with a bow. The big-deal revelation that buttons up the fading M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense is casually tossed in halfway through Kim Ji-Woon's movie. A lower-key but more powerful horror is found in Two Sisters' characters having to find a way of dealing with the situation they're in, not just finding out what it is. The explanation opens the door for the rest of the story, rather than closing it at the end. Kim Ji-Woon's latest, A Bittersweet Life, bears a filial relationship to Two Sisters. When Bittersweet's over-stoic hitman isn't capping his lengthy To Do list, in modern thriller cinema's best hyper-stylized visual manner, he's brooding about his own wasted life, a deliberately icebound realm that only violence can thaw.
Finding similarities in another country's artists, rather than regarding them as individuals first, is done at the risk of the Exoticism-Made-Easy cultural tourism that promises insights from the comfort of a La-Z-Boy recliner, remote control in hand. Nevertheless, one comment that pops up a lot in head-scratching reviews of Korean movies is that they don't seem to end when they should, or rather, they have two or three endings too many. (Though lots of commercial Korean movies nail the three-act Hollywood playbook perfectly.) If there's some deep explanation rooted in Korean culture, or if it's a viral style thing that one Korean director caught from another—beats me. As sleekly as a director like Kim Ji-Woon can move around inside different genres—he can deliver tightly edited horror and action set-pieces with the best of them—the end-to-end sostenuto rather than accelerando pacing of his films is something from which instant-caffeinated American audiences would benefit by getting their minds around.
KIM KI-DUK: ROUGH AND HATED
That Korean filmmakers aren't a homogenous pack is borne out by the case of Kim Ki-Duk, South Korea's most simultaneously admired and reviled. Though whether Kim Ki-Duk is still a Korean director is a moot point; chafed by reactions against him in his home country, he recently announced his decision to abandon Korea and make his films elsewhere. He'll have little trouble rounding up financing—he doesn't require much, often working on shoestring budgets—and distribution in Europe, where his reputation is higher.
It would be hard to imagine a director and scriptwriter more perfectly suited for pushing politically correct outrage buttons than Kim Ki-Duk. Doctrinaire feminist reaction to his 2001 film Bad Guy went off the charts, describing him as both a "psycho" and a "monster." It's not hard to see why: With a storyline that can be misconstrued as "Innocent girl falls in love with brutal pimp who forced her into prostitution," the misogynist tag can be hung around Kim Ki-Duk's neck pretty easily, if incorrectly.
Self-taught as a filmmaker, after stints both as a factory worker and in the South Korean marines, Kim Ki-Duk can be rough technically, especially in his early films. (Later ones, such as The Isle and The Bow, are more accomplished.) Whores and thugs predominate in his backlist, though he's gone a bit softer with the nonviolent protagonist of 3-Iron and the overtly Buddhist-themed Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter ... and Spring. Western cinephiles who look forward to Asian films for the visceral thrills of watching people beat the crap out of each other were nonplussed by the shift.
More so than The Isle, notorious for audience members passing out during its "fishhooks as dietary supplement" scenes, Bad Guy and its inverted counterpart, Samaritan Girl (2004), are discomfort-producing films. A low-rent pimp dismantles his life and world by bringing the object of his obsessions into it; a teenager takes over the client book of the dead friend for whom she had been setting up "dates," systematically sleeping with and returning the johns' money. Kim Ki-Duk's cinema is the cinema of watching. Through a one-way mirror, the self-tormenting pimp watches his captive service her customers; he reacts in rage when he discovers an associate's surreptitiously planted video camera. He has no problem renting out his beloved's mere body, but her image is sacred to him. He's an optical being—as much so as a film director, or a film audience, for that matter. Who's the voyeur now? The teenage girl who watches over her hooking friend, as much sexual missionary as mercenary, ultimately becomes a self-willed ghost, living someone else's life backward—or trying to, and failing. The prostitute doesn't at last fall in love with the pimp as much as she seems to realize that she's responsible for him now; he's destroyed himself for her sake. In Kim Ki-Duk's films, those who watch—sound like anybody you know?—receive their comeuppance.
Or their transcendence. The gentle housebreaker of 3-Iron—he sneaks in while people are away, just to fix their broken appliances—schools himself to ghosthood as well, becoming invisible to everyone except the battered wife who has fallen in love with him. She cuckolds her abusive husband, reaching past the oblivious bastard to embrace the unseen but more real person behind him. The husband doesn't see and doesn't matter. The housebreaker doesn't exist and sees everything. Holy Ghost or just another schmuck watching life rather than living it? And where does that leave you?
Perhaps Kim Ji-Woon is more facile than Kim Ki-Duk, and Ki-Duk is deeper than Jee-Woon. (Or perhaps it's the other way around, and Kim Ki-Duk is exactly the pretentious fraud that his most vitriolic critics charge him as being.) And those are just two of the active crop of Korean filmmakers. Either way, they prove what a messily fascinating, overstuffed package comes apart when you tug on the ribbon of Korean movies.