Tag: South Korea

Give Me My Turtle Back! | Decision to Leave (2022) Review

October 29, 2022

Decision to Leave is South Korea’s submission for the American Oscars, and it is, in no way, an Oscar contender. It is not an event film, it is not an issues movie, it’s not based on a book. And yet, Park won Best Director at Cannes, and I can see why. His actors, Tang Wei and Park Hae-il, are electric and lived-in, respectively. His touch with film language is delicate but precise. The way he plays with time and space can only be described as “masterful,” in the sense that he becomes like a god of time and space. We see the flash of an image, and moments later, that image is contextualized, shepherding us through the story with a proper disorientation. In fact, we’re being oriented toward puzzle-solving. You could put a crumpled paper bag in front of Park Chan-wook, and he’d shoot it the one way that would make you feel something. If one of his films happens to be emotionally bereft, more fascinated by than curious about human nature, it must have been a choice. … More Give Me My Turtle Back! | Decision to Leave (2022) Review

Highest Tension | Permission to Exist (2020) Review

October 31, 2020

The film Permission to Exist releases December of this year, into a pop culture climate where documentary films and miniseries are bingeably popular, but its journey to screen traces far back, to a time before Tiger King and the Fyre Festival. An independent, crowdsourced production directed by Kelley Katzenmeyer, this broad look at the human cost of South Korea’s intense education system has a personal touch and an empathetic eye, but loses narrative momentum in its hard balance of styles and subjects. Katzenmeyer introduces herself within the film early on as a Korean exchange student dating a boy named Dabin who’s under extreme pressure to rate a perfect score on the national exam and gain access to a prestigious university. Though she keeps the focus of the story on others, her presence is felt as a curious outsider making sense of a foreign concept for the rest of us. If you’re interested in Korean culture, Permission to Exist is a no-brainer, a definitive film document on the subject to stand alone should Netflix or Hulu one day replicate it, because of the director’s unique perspective. … More Highest Tension | Permission to Exist (2020) Review

Fashion Empire | The Royal Tailor (2014) Review

September 17, 2020

A lot of the Korean pop culture I’ve witnessed so far eschews context, even before exportation to America. There’s a propulsive energy to movies like Parasite and The Handmaiden, like “Wowzer, where did that come from?” and you’ll see highly-paid and highly-respected Korean celebrities doing absurd things in the name of cinema (or variety shows). A film like The Royal Tailor doesn’t stop to observe its absurdity, doesn’t replicate the audience to lie prostrate before it and be judged, and this allows the earnest deliveries of lines like “I’ll make sure your clothes never see the light of day!” The magic trick, then, is that this line is a gut punch. … More Fashion Empire | The Royal Tailor (2014) Review

Even More Zombies | #Alive (2020) Review

September 15, 2020

Zombie movies stopped being weird a long, long time ago. And I don’t mean “millions of Milla Jovovich clones” weird — though before I fall into this visible trap for genre snobbery, is that any better or worse than Return of the Living Dead III’s zombie power loaders? To my mind, still, there’s a difference between Paul W.S. Anderson and Brian Yuzna. There’s a difference between in-groups and out-groups, the names made in the heyday — teeth cut, conventions defined, practical effects — who attach to a classic like Re-Animator, itself apiece with Evil Dead 2 and Dead Alive and the original Return of the Living Dead — the good ones. Whenever a zombie movie passes before my eyes — or I watch a zombie movie, whatever — all of this history trots out again for parade, all this embittered narrative and stolen history, borderline appropriation / vandalism of our darkest realms, us — genre champions — for coercion into the mainstream. What you call perhaps the last bastion against genre monopoly by superheroes I call… the rape of the natural world! … More Even More Zombies | #Alive (2020) Review