South Korea
Graham Fuller
The dramatic developments in The Woman Who Ran, the 24th film written and directed by Hong Sang-soo since 1996, are mild to say the least. The worst that befalls the protagonist, a romantically puzzled thirtysomething Seoul florist called Gam-hee (Kim Min-hee, Hong’s partner and muse), is a brief awkward meeting with a blasé older ex-lover, Mr. Jung. That the unease it elicits in her dogs the end of the movie shows how deftly Hong’s cinema ratchets up and sustains emotional states with minimal visual expressiveness or shifting of tone.The film consists of three short sections in which Gam-hee Read more ...
peter.quinn
EDM bangers? Check. Melancholic ballads? Why certainly. Great vocal arrangements which switch from rap to angelic falsetto in the blink of an eye? Step right this way. You’ll find all this and more on Be, which is no mean feat given that the album – the second collection of 2020 from South Korean septet BTS following their February release Map of the Soul: 7 – clocks in at just a little over 28 minutes. This could never be described as a recording that outstays its welcome.With four singers and three rappers, the BTS vocal palette is impressively varied, with everyone chipping in on lead Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
So what exactly is all the fuss about? For those of us from a cinema-deprived area, it’s been a long wait for the homevideo release of this much vaunted "masterpiece". And the trailer gives away so much, there’s probably little to surprise us, right? Very wrong.Hauntingly dark, South Korean director Bong Joon-ho's lauded Parasite is neither simply comedy nor drama but something – dare I say? – genre-eschewing. A sinister atmosphere is pervasive throughout the two hours in which we watch plan after plan go wrong for the Kims, a desperate but resourceful Seoul family. It serves to add yet Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“They say we all have a beast locked up inside of us,” a character observes early in this Korean crime movie. Monsters are certainly chewing at the moral fibre of police captains Jung (Lee Sung-min) and Han (Yoo Jae-myung) as they corruptly pursue promotion. The serial killer they race to capture, like the schoolgirl he’s torn to pieces, become incidental to ambition, and the tendrils of vengeance which turn jungle-thick in its wake.Jung-ho Lee’s remake of the French thriller 36th Precinct, which starred Gerard Depardieu and Daniel Auteuil as romantic as well as career rivals, throws elements Read more ...
Guy Oddy
To anyone out of their teens or without a grasp of the Korean language, BTS are probably an unknown quantity. Yet, they are probably the most successful boyband, if not the most successful band, in the world. In fact, just as Abba had a massive effect on the Swedish economy in the 1970s, BTS are a game-changing economic asset and boost to South Korea. Whether they will be better remembered by music lovers or economists in years to come, however, will be interesting to see.BTS are a seven-strong group of androgynous, Korean lads that look like clothes horses. However, a ten-year career has Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
With the Oscars approaching, one film building momentum in the fight for best picture – and whose victory would delight all but the most blinkered – is the Korean Bong Joon Ho’s deliriously dark and entertaining black comedy, Parasite. It remains an outsider, given that no foreign language film has ever won the main prize. But if Bong breaks that barrier, it will be no fluke. Parasite’s theme, the gulf between rich and poor, resonates far and wide; its delivery – mixing social satire, twisty plotting and Hitchcockian tension – a masterclass in serious-minded but accessible mainstream Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Like Snowpiercer before it, Bong Joon-ho’s rage-fuelled satire Parasite puts class inequality squarely in its sights. This time however, the story is grounded in the real world and concerns a family of hustlers who will do anything to get by. There are other similarities with his twisted 2013 sci-fi. Joon-Ho’s use of contained spaces once again allows the director to navigate his subject matter very effectively.The film opens in a basement flat, where a young man in his early twenties, Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik), lives with his sister (Park So-dam), mother (Chang Hyae-jin) and father (Song Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Burning, which is the first film directed by the Korean master Lee Chang-dong since 2010’s Poetry, begins as the desultory story of a hook-up between a pair of poor, unmotivated millennials – the girl already a lost soul, the boy a wannabe writer saddled with a criminally angry father. The addition of a Porsche-driving third millennial with a swanky apartment in Seoul’s Gangnam District not only ramps up the tension between the two instantaneously but creates one of the most infernal romantic triangles in modern Asian cinema. Entering its third act, the movie morphs into a noir-steeped Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Fear not. The Arts Desk has not suddenly sprouted a Sports Desk. Heaven forfend. Korea in late February had more to offer than luge, bobsleigh, skeleton and all the other bemedalled and potentially life-threatening variants of hurling bodies down icy slopes. The host region of every Olympic Games throws open a window to the world on its culture, and PyeongChang 2018 was no different.This mountainous province on the country’s eastern seaboard has staged a summer music festival for the last 13 years. When it was awarded the Games in 2016, the PyeongChang Winter Music Festival was born. This Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Is meat murder? Will people eat anything if it’s cheap? Is the taste of bacon really what stops us half the western world turning vegetarian? Okja is a commercial stretch, a partly subtitled children’s fable from South Korea which unstintingly confronts all of these deep moral questions. But it does so in the most – if you will – palatable manner. After the briefest release in the cinema, it makes the short on-trend transition to a streaming service, and it’s on Netflix that it should be consumed by anyone and everyone with a strong enough stomach to enjoy an enchanting adventure with a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Park Chan-wook is a Korean decadent and moralist who’d have plenty to say to Aubrey Beardsley. The lesbian pulp Victoriana of Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith proves equally amenable in this opulently lurid mash-up with a novelist he adores so much (the director once took a holiday to Tipping the Velvet’s Whitstable setting).Park himself calls The Handmaiden a “fan fiction” rewrite of Waters’ novel, but in transposing it to 1930s Korea, the Oldboy director sinks it deep into his own sensibilities. The country is a Japanese colonial outpost, where top-hatted Japanese toffs are sweatily entertained at Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“What’s it like to be a child prodigy?” is a question asked by violinist Min Kym several times in the course of this fascinating, agonising memoir. There’s no simple answer, but this description rings true: “There’s that peculiar sensation of feeling completely normal within yourself, but acutely aware that you are different.”And it’s something you never entirely grow out of. As she says later on, “Talent is a burden you can’t throw off.” Music came to her with ridiculous ease, but other aspects of her life have proved more problematic. The younger of two daughters of a Korean family living Read more ...