Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival
2002
by Russell Edwards
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Part 2: Korean films at PiFan 2002
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| I kicked off with the excellent One Hour Photo but since that Robin Williams flick will be covered by the mainstream media I'll leave it
alone.
Second off the rank was Sympathy For Mr Vengeance the follow-up to
JSA from Park Chan-wook. Using the black market for human organs as its starting point this film has some brutal humour and as it develops into a story about a botched kidnapping it ventures into some deeply bleak areas philosophically speaking. |
Sympathy for
Mr Vengeance
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| Park Chan-wook fielded questions afterwards (in fact all the directors of the Korean films fronted up for discussion) and revealed that the Korean title is a straight quote from the Bible (Vengeance Is Mine) which presented the film with a moral tone that seemed missing or at least considerably understated in the film itself. In other words, the rest of the quotation being
"V.I.M. sayeth the Lord" means Revenge is God's business so don't fuck with it. |
| Over The Rainbow was a romantic film directed by Ahn Jin-woo which echoed
Il Mare and Ditto in that it featured Korean lovers out of synch with each. Closer to being a detective story than the time travel romance defined by the earlier films,
Over The Rainbow portrayed what happened when a TV weatherman gets a form of romantic amnesia after a traffic accident. With the aid of his university friends said weatherman attempts to be reunited with his secret girlfriend known only as Rainbow. Sweet and mildly melodramatic this flick is doing the rounds on Korean Air flights (that wasn't a plug, I didn't get any money) and was written by the co-writer of the most popular Korean film of 1997
The Contact. |
Over the Rainbow
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| Also impressive was Make It Big which was like a cross between an 80s teen comedy and
Reservoir Dogs sans violence, with an emphasis on silly dialogue between the protagonists. Made by a 27 year-old and his similarly aged film school classmate cinematographer,
Make It Big is as slick as they come and should appeal to those who caught
Guns And Talks when it played in Australia last year. Funny, with twist upon twist the story centres on three high school students (One arrogant, one pretty boy and one plain looking) live the high life after finding several billion won and a near dead burglar. |
Make it Big
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| At a Q & A director Joh Ui-seok was keeping tight-lipped on his influences, but I detected a whiff of
Shallow Grave alongside the Tarantino influence. Regardless if this protégé of Pifan film festival director Kim
Hong-Joon, can follow up this film successfully
Joh Ui-seok should become a name to watch and may end up with the longest resume this side of Im
Kwon-Tek. |
| The big noise in the range of Korean films that were shown at Pifan was
Bet On My Disco. Mixing the stories of rival gangsters with a combo of
Strictly Ballroom and Shall We Dance, this comedy was extremely popular with the local audience and visiting journos alike. More straightforward (white-suited John Travolta references etc) than
Make it Big (my personal preference) Kim Dong-won's feature debut didn't skimp on the laughs. When the festival finished the audience survey nominated this as the best film of the festival.
Other Korean films unseen by me that showed at Pifan were Funny Movie
which was billed as Korea's first parody film and allegedly parodied 28 different Korean films (a test for the aspirational international film buff) and in particular the storyline of
Shiri.
Volcano High's outdoor screening was cancelled due to a day of monsoonal rain (though skies had actually cleared by the event's time, the ground was sodden). According to the press notes,
Volcano High has a student body full of martial arts experts and the macguffin driving the teen drama is a secret manuscript which will allow one person to rule the world. Enter a student who is transferred to
Volcano High after being expelled from 9 other schools. Shame about the rain, could have been fun.
Lastly there was also The Way Home about a teen who is dumped with his toothless, mute grandmother. No clues as to what happened next. The second film by Lee Jeong-hyang who made
Art Museum By The Zoo this film went totally unmentioned in any mid-fest discussions between journalists and guests. A fact that viewers of her first film will understand totally. |
Bet on My Disco
Funny Movie
Volcano High
The Way Home
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