Movie reviews

Past year's:

WARSAW KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL

킬링 로맨스 (KILLING ROMANCE)

Watchable. I entered at the opening but chances are I didn't miss any line. It's a musical,  unfortunately, very colourful, like in Wes Anderson's movies, fairy-tale like, where violence is exemplified by  throwing tangerines at somebody. Funny enough e.g. certain reaction to a guy who's started talking to animals after his 4th university entry exam failure.There's an end-credit. 

 

악마를 보았다 (I SAW THE DEVIL) (2010) AND Q&A WITH DIRECTOR

Recommended. Gentle music and the opening and closing are deceitfully peaceful. The perve up close is expectedly revolting and some scenes disturbing, but this revenge flick offers great twists and plot solutions and is cathartically brutal. 

The director has heard a suggestion the movie was too brutal for a theatrical release. In Warsaw, Poland, he found Łazienki vexingly beautiful. "If Korea had such a beautiful park maybe I'd be calm for longer and wouldn't have made such a brutal film". The director changed the final scene, the brutal script was by 박훈정 (Park Hoonj-jung), the guillotine was his idea and in whose hands he should die. His is also the dawn walk scene. In the 90s there was serial killer 유영철 (You Young-chul) - his TV interview inspired the director. Normally revenge movies see a long search and than a painful revenge. He wanted to make it differently so that the murderer feels the victims' agony and to show the emotions during exacting the revenge. Is a revenge possible in our moral code? It was inspired by Nietsche. He's made 10 full-length movies and the music has been chosen by him: 60-100 songs picked for the movie mood each time, down to 2-3, sometimes extra music created. His debut was in the early 2000s, at K-cinema renaissance, then the commercial versus art division came into being, also popular abroad - because it focused on genre cinema, that was the "cinephile" generation of directors. There is ear the pandemic may have finished K-cinema. 

HEADSPACE

Walked out. Trite plot where aliens steer people's brains so they move like zombies and a bullied kid with a bunch of friends he turns out to have is to save the planet is ludicrous even in a cartoon. Contrived pseudo-scientific jargon of the aliens and cool-talk of the teenagers are over the top. And one of the 'good' aliens makes a misogynistic comment about his ex-wife.