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News
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Written by Samuel Jamier
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Tuesday, 05 June 2007 |
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There have been a few developments in the making of Blood: The Last Vampire.
As many people know, Korean actress Jeon Ji-Hyun will be credited as Gianna Jun (why not?), perhaps an unheimlich alliterative echo of her much talked-about stint for Giordano.
More importantly perhaps, the direction of the movie has changed hands. Initially piloted by Ronny Yu (Yu Yan-Tai), the $35 million live adaptation of Kitakubo Hiroyuki’s japanimation work based on a script by Chris Chow, is now helmed by French director Chris Nahon, for whom this will be the second action movie. Nahon is working with the martial arts choreographer/director Corey Yuen, who is overseeing action sequences, as he did on the somewhat mediocre Kiss Of The Dragon. In defense of this uninspired Jet Li movie, this was a first collaboration that did have a couple of original concepts (a Chinese cop lost in a postcard-lookalike city of lights, who becomes friendly with an American prostitute… what are the odds) but suffered from a number of problems of execution. For one thing, Corey Yuen has none of the pyrotechnical grace of some his peers like Yuen Woo-Ping, so that his fights, full of blood and violence, in Kiss Of The Dragon in particular, are often closer to pure and simple brawling. This could suit the visual style of Blood though. Wait and see… (I, for one, am a little worried, I must admit, considering Nahon’s pale record as a director)
Ronny Yu will remain involved in the project, but as a producer and screenwriter. The shoot has already started and some paparazzi pictures (from China, I think) leaked and are, like all things Korean these days, or so it seems, just about everywhere on the internet.
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Read more...
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News
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Written by Samuel Jamier
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Tuesday, 29 May 2007 |
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Un homme et une femme: Alain Delon and Jeon Do-Yeon
Of course, the big event of the week is Jeon Do-Yeon’s Prize for Best Leading Actress (prix d'interprétation feminine) in Cannes yesterday, a success that was accurately foretold by Darcy Paquet a few months ago.
After having the audience give a round of applause for the late Romy Schneider, who passed away 25 years ago and a vibrant homage to women “without whom, he would be nothing as an actor” (so French, au fond), Alain Delon (Le Samourai, Le Guépard, La Piscine, Plein Soleil, and many, many, many more...) awarded the Prize to Jeon Do-Yeon, for her performance in Lee Chang-Dong’s Secret Sunshine.
Read more: Jeon Do-Yeon: A portrait.
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Essays
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Written by Ernest Woo
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Tuesday, 29 May 2007 |
Since I was mentioning Kim Ki-Duk’s presentation of Breath for the official competition at Cannes a few days ago, I thought of sharing a couple of interesting insights I gathered from recent informal conversations with Sue-Young Park-Primiano, after her monthly Classic Movie Night lectures at The Korea Society. I would like to linger over the persistence (and the relevance) of her usage of the term homosocial when describing both post-war Korean cinema and Korean culture in general, but maybe some other time…
To breathe or to live, that is the question
So, here is the idea… one troubling thing appears if you think about Kim Ki-Duk’s works as a whole: in a lot of his films (3-Iron, Bad Guy, Spring…, Time, Samaria), there is invariably a turning or vanishing point at which one of the main characters actually ceases to exist. As a matter of fact, a number of the protagonists literally die, sometimes at an early stage of the narrative, and spend the rest of the story wandering as ghostly supplements, who haunt rather than inhabit the film. Most viewers and critics have noticed their inability to speak. This silence could very well be the translation of their non-existence. Thus, what they do is not so much being, as appearing. The natural state of the usual Kim Ki-Duk character is that of a vision, and its primary quality seems to lie in the passage: s/he passes away, out, and so on. Hence its spectral status and the general impression of morbidity that they convey.It is very tempting indeed to read all the directors’ films as ghost stories, and see them as painterly staging of disincarnate ciphers or symbols (“a vision of society”, as Kim Ki-Duk recently put it).
The staging of the romantic couple in Ago (Crocodile. This is the Japanese poster)
In other words, they stand for something else than themselves. Instead of flesh and blood, the director seems to offer spirit, intervals, breathing between moments of being, mobile figures that are more like medieval allegories than realistic representations of actual humans. This could explain at least part of the violence usually associated with the director’s works. Basically, if the bodies of the characters are subjected to all kinds of unsavory treatments, it is because their skin, their bones, their being are already too much. One could say that what happens in Kim Ki-Duk’s is a slow mise à nu (stripping bare) of a man/a woman. What is there, beneath the face, beneath the skull, beneath this messy bag of organs? The answer may be: a bit of time and a lot of suffering.
Time does not heal in Kim Ki-Duk's films
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News
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Written by Samuel Jamier
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Wednesday, 23 May 2007 |
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Things are looking good for Kim Ki-Duk, who had a rough year in 2006 with Korean audiences and film critics. His 14th work, Breath, which is in competition at the 60th Cannes Film Festival, was screened on Saturday May 19th, at the Lumiere Theatre in the French resort town that becomes the world capital of cinema for a brief fortnight (May 16-27, this year).
Kim Ki-Duk, Chang Chen, Park Ji-Ah and Kang In-Hyung (Photo: Reuters)
The director walked the red carpet with his two stars, Korean actress Zia (Park Ji-Ah) and Taiwanese actor Chang Chen, and newcomer Kang In-Hyung. The film was very well received, to say the least: the audience at the Lumiere Theatre loved it and gave Kim a 10-minute standing ovation.
Penitentiary love.
Breath (“Som”, which opened in Korea on April 26) depicts the strange and strained relationship between Yeon, a young woman whose husband is having an affair and Jin, a silent and suicidal death row inmate. Hidden, as often (did he pick up the habit from Wong Kar-Wai?), behind his sunglasses, Kim declared at the press conference: “I wanted to show the difficulties of social and human relations – when it reaches the point where you find it hard to breathe.”
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