June 15, 2008
two movies about faces
a couple of weeks ago we rented face. i noticed then that it had no "korean" title -- just the transliteration of the english word "face". i believe it was 페이스.
언 석환 was in it, as an evil doctor; an actress from the horrible drama hotelier was in it, too. 페이스 was all about a facial reconstructionist, and maybe about black market organs -- i can't remember. it was really unmemorable. so much so, in fact, when we watched a different korean movie about faces last night, i couldn't even remember why the movie called 페이스 was even called so.
then last night we rented kim ki-duk's 시간. it's about facial reconstructive surgery. i had never seen a kim ki-duk film although i swear that somewhere -- the korea society, or MoMA -- had just done a retrospective on him. i feel sure i have been seeing his name a lot in my e-mail inbox. anyway, this was a good movie. 마음에들어요. we look forward to seeing more of kim ki-duk's work -- time to add it to the netflix queue.
does anybody know where the sculpture garden in korea is, where many scenes in this movie were filmed? people seemed to get there by ferry and it was near the coast. 어디예요?
May 15, 2008
조용한 가족/the quiet family
this is one of the first korean films i ever saw. i was telling a friend today that i thought it would be an excellent introduction to korean film for her in particular because a) it's funny b) it's bloody c) it features actors who went on some films later to do amazing, amazing things -- and i'm going to take a phonetic stab at this, here, because that's what this blog is for -- 송 강호 (song kang-ho) and 최만식(choi min-sik). (i'll admit i froze up on "choi" and looked it up.)
this is perhaps the slimmest i've ever seen song kang-ho -- who is in many of my favorite korean films (memories of murder, sympathy for mr. vengeance.) and choi min-sik -- whom i always think of as "the korean gary oldman" -- is his regular chameleon self here, almost unrecognizable as the man who would play oh dae-su in oldboy.
even more exciting, ben and i realized in re-watching this film again last night, is the fact that the father in 조용한 가족 is "mr. hwangbo" from one of our favorite dramas -- 아줌마가 간다 (here comes ajumma).
