South Korean actress Jung Da-bin, 27 years old, was found dead at her boyfriend’s house at 7:50 AM on Saturday, February 10th. 

The exact circumstances of her death are still unknown and many rumors have been circulating among the internet communities. According to investigators, the actress hung herself around 3:30~50 AM. In the absence of evidence and based on the testimony of Jung’s boyfriend and various acquaintances who spoke about the actress’s clinical depression, the police first ruled out the possibility of a murder. However, due to inconsistencies in the report, they are now examining the case in further detail.

Sedona Media, her management company, also expressed their disbelief  and requested an autopsy, which was approved by the family.

Jung was a very popular actress who had built a large fanbase thanks to her interpretation of petulant but cheerful characters in television dramas like New Non Stop (2002), Attic Cat/Rooftop Cat (2003) or My 19 Year-Old Sister in Law (2004), a couple of which I used to follow regularly.

She had a brief career in movies with He Was Cool (2004)  a comedy based on a popular Internet-based novel, This Good Fellow (2003) and The Legend of Gingko.

The filmgoers who are lucky enough to attend the 57th Berlinale (this year, from February 8th to 18th) will notice the exceptionally strong presence of Korean cinema. No less than 8 films were invited to participate in the prestigious European festival program - one of the key-events in the Old continent, along with Cannes and Venice - and are representing the peninsula (click here to see the list and full schedule).

Park Chan-Wook’s latest film, I’m a Cyborg but that’s OK opened on the second day of the Berlinale, and generated tremendous interest. All the screenings were sold out, but the reception was quite mixed. I will reserve my opinion until after I see the film, and in the meantime, I will save a little theory about which I have been doodling.

    

Tazza has opened exceptionally for a couple of weeks at The Imaginasian, last Friday, February 2nd.

The film went far beyond my expectations. Despite or because of its classicism, Tazza: The High Rollers, the third highest grossing film in South Korea last year (after The Host and The King and the Clown), never surrenders to the easy terms that the gambler genre offers. Quite the contrary, the film transcends its surface aesthetics by tightening its grip on the stake it has elected as its horizon, namely: becoming the number one “tazza” (Korean slang for a professional gambler), while effortlessly concentrating its narrative and visual energy on a sort of superflat formal beauty.

 “My form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid from its very resemblance.”

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“What makes a human a monster is not just its exceptionality relative to the species form; it is the disturbance it brings to juridical regularities”

Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth

 

Director Bong Joon-Ho will be in New York for a special screening of the multiple award-winning film The Host on February 27 at the IFC Center.

 

Warning: this review contains minor spoilers

 

Bong Joon-Ho has achieved preeminence in the world of Korean cinema with only three films. He has met not only with exceptional commercial success but also quasi-unanimous critical acclaim in the film festival circuit, notably during the presentation of The Host in Cannes.  I would like to give the sketch of an explanation for this with a few remarks about director Bong’s “exploitation of the unique and specific possibilities of the medium of cinema” (Panofsky).

In “On Movies”, a lecture he gave in 1936 (later published with the title: “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures”) art historian Erwin Panofsky defined several archetypes of viewing satisfaction that the first movie-goers seemed to share: “success or retribution, sentiment, sensation, pornography, and crude humor”. Aside from pornography, The Host cumulates all of the above and manages to incorporate and generate these quasi-primitive pleasures of cinema, by returning to a certain form of artlessness and naivety: from the almost scatological burlesque running through the film, to more typical (or typically Korean) family melodrama, not to mention scathing political comments, subtly sketched, but not entirely innocent of ambiguities, and at any rate, absolutely liberating. So one is tempted to ask the Matrix question: what is The Host exactly?