Pusan

[Khash Najib]

Hello,

Some late comments on the Pusan International Film
Festival:
The festival was a great experience for me, on both the
quality of works shown and the organization and
atmosphere.
However, the film that someone on this list inquired
about, "THe Coastguard" was a disappointment. The social
message about the effect of war on man was washed out by
the melodramatic and sometimes sometimes utterly mocking
scenes. For example, the main character ( a crazed
ex-coastguard) enters his former base secretly (for the
zillionth time!) and actually shoots one of two guards on
patrol at night. The other guard takes a good look at our
hero through the night-sight binoculars on his trifle, and
gest scared. He doesn't shoot, he doesn't get shot, and
the distance between the two is about 4 meters.
In another scene, the angry brother of an insane village
girl that was impregnated by one of 6 suspect soldiers
watches by as a commander makes the six soldiers go
through the punishment they deserve: running until they
get exhausted on the beach!! The commander's purpose is to
stop the brother from reporting the incident to the MP,
and because of that the intellgent brother gets suspicious
about the commander himself.
The lead actor Jang Dong-gun does deliver a good
performance as Kang the disturbed soldier, but the work
altogether is not convincing.

Another time-waster was The Resurrection of the Little
Match Girl, a videogame-turned-into-reality film that
loses its grasp on the plot quite early in the film and
never regains it. For me even the special effect were less
than imaginative. But it was interesting to see a bit
about the lifestyle of video gamers, who seem to be real
stars in Korean youth society. If the case is the same in
Japan I must be out of touch with cuyrrents events here. I
Korea they have fan clubs with memberships of thousands.

Some of the very impressive Korean films that were shown
in Pusan such as Oasis and Too Young to Die will be shown
in Tokyo Filmex which starts today I guess, so I'll be
looking forward to read what kinejapaner think of them.

David Bordwell gave a lecture in Pusan on the 16th of
November with the title :"South Korean Cinema and Recent
Film History". Did anyone on this list go to it? Do you
have an ideo how to get a text or video copy of it? (does
Bordwell -or the Korean Society of Film Studies- have a
website?)


Cheers,
Najib El-Khash













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