Pusan

[Mark Nornes]

Bordwell's homepage is:

http://www.geocities.com/david_bordwell/

m




On Sunday, December 1, 2002, at 12:26  AM, Khash Najib wrote:

>
> 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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