The Korean cinema is a wanting chapter here on my blog. It seems that the highest-grossing domestic films in South Korea have little to do with the best Korean movies per se. Fortunately Parasite (2019) dragged international viewers to Korean cinema, but again, it seems that only pure money-making investments are sold on foreign markets. Too bad, because Korean cinema has a flavor of its own, different from what the Hollywood fan was stuffed with over the years. Why Marvel movies are so popular? Because they’re part of a culture, the comics addiction. Life is tough as it is, and your distractions are few, the fantastic superheroes’ adventures in the 25 cents comic books being among them. I am not against high-grossing movies, they’re just a fruitful investment, but they are not tantamount to a good film.
My Sassy Girl 2002, a fine example of Korean cinema
Without them, without Avengers and Star Wars, you may realize why you don’t have a privileged life even if you make your duty as a citizen. Ignorance is almost identical everywhere in this world, amplified by nationalism and xenophobia, by division and misdirection. So, coming back to the Korean cinema, I feel that they offer a different kind of misdirection, they offer alternatives. They have substance, they show poetically accepted concepts, only differently. One perceives certain cruelty and gore, as the characters don’t have enough consideration for human life in itself, but it’s not that simple. Only the soul is immortal, the body upon the cruelty is exerted is carried out quickly and lightly, it doesn’t really matter in the great scale of things. Take Kim Ki-duk‘s Human, Space, Time and Human (2018), an exquisite transcendental drama, obscurely ignored by the IMDb and rottentomatoes’s voters combined.
I shall soon elaborate my ideas within the newest sub-category on Rodolfo Grimaldi Blog, the one dedicated to Korean Cinema. I should start reviewing Chan-wook Park‘s Oldboy (2003), one of IMDb top 250 movies (#67) of whom the disappointingly shallow American remake “neither surpasses the original nor adds anything new to its impressive legacy”, or My Sassy Girl (2001), the romantic drama equally remade in Hollywood in 2008, having a homonymous title but with significantly lower results. Not now, maybe later. Other movies are fresher in my mind, so I’ll start with them. They are not as famous but they are equally enticing.
I have already added the Indian Cinema sub-category, and I almost left it to dust. I don’t like corny movies even if I most certainly cry during watching them. I also don’t like the ultra-nationalist spirited ones, and that’s the reason I haven’t a Turkish sub-category. I am a sucker for Turkey, for Turkish spirit, for the Aegean Sea region, and most of all for Istanbul, but the cinema is 6 Feet Under, with my deepest regrets. The best Turkish movie of all times (#156 on IMDb’s Top 250), My Father and My Son (2005) is the apex of corniness. More than that, excluding the highly charged political conditions, it reflected the rural Turkish spirit. I didn’t understand how books in some people’s mind, means, in fact, comic books. Let me be more precise: in a village at the Aegean, in the late eighties, a 9-10 year boy is asked by his grandfather what he likes more than everything. “I like reading”, the boy said. “I need books”. The granddaddy goes then to the grocer and asks him about “books”, whatever that means. The grocer points toward the few comics scattered on a shelf around. The old guy buys them all, wrapped in a present-like fashion. A few days later, he leaves the packet somewhere in the courtyard, for the boy to find it.
“You made me the best present ever, grampa”, said the boy happily, after he found it. Now I ask you, why comics? Why not real books, even just for kids, like Grimm Brothers Stories, Mark Twain, or others? Why Superman, Batman, or Zagor, with their ten-twenty words in fifty pages? I don’t get it.
Anyway, I hope you’ll enjoy my new Korean Cinema related chapter on this blog.
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