Frankly, when I saw the title, I thought this was going to be about something else entirely. I think I heard one allusion to a "pot" at some point, but that's about it.

In any case, the concept of Kim Tae-gon's film (which I saw yesterday) was quite strong: put simply, The Pot follows the uncanny happenings surrounding a small upper middle-class family in their new apartment. Mostly, the film suffers from poor directing and editing, and after half an hour, it just starts losing focus and scattering itself between too many things/themes at the same time: social criticism of the neo-bourgeois family, indictment of religion, etc. the whole of it packaged as a horror story.

The cast was good, particularly the actresss (Yang Eung-yong). Unfortunately, that simply wasn't enough.

Choi Jin-Sil would have turned 40 in December. She reached the peak of her career in the 1990s and appeared in about twenty films, among which Lee Myung-se's popular romantic comedy, My Love, My Bride (1990).

Her marriage with baseball player Cho Sung-min was a much less fortunate affair. The actress got divorced in 2004 and obtained custody of her two children.
 

Malicious rumors had been circulating on the web recently, questioning the way she was raising her children, as well as a considerable loan she had granted to another actor and friend, Ahn Jae-hwan, who was also found dead a few weeks ago. Ahn was apparently deep in debt.

Last Thursday, tv channels changed their programs to broadcast the news. A dozen high-profile personalities killed themselves in the past few months. The Republic of Korea has become the country with the highest suicide rate in the world since last year.

Seen at Megabox this afternoon.

Thorougly original, mesmerizing, brilliant piece of visual poetry. Noh Kyeong-tae's second feature is not just a film, not just something you like/dislike, but an extremely beautiful experiment in thought.

These days, it sometimes feels like most movies we get to see are little more than one-hour-and-a-half commercials for a bunch of corporate sponsors and a celebration of their more or less good will. Land of Scarecrows is something else.

Seen at one of the market screenings. My expectations were high, so I was rather disappointed. Somewhere between Lee Jeong-hyang's The Way Home and Koreeda's Nobody Knows, minus the poignant brilliance of either one othese films (the latter, in particular, which I deem to be a masterpiece), Kim So-young's Treeless Mountain is a largely autobiographical story about two little girls, abandoned by their mother. Maybe it's just me but it completely failed to resonate with my (perhaps) jaded sensibility and left me utterly unmoved and bored from start to finish. One of my firm beliefs in life has always been that: just because it's personal doesn't necessarily make it interesting or exciting. In the end, the feelings that the director seems to be trying to convey feel like a quotation. Like a lot of  openly autobiographical works of art, I am tempted to add. Curious how the will, the desire to be "authentic" often leads to an end-result that feels borrowed.

First impression, then: a painfully slow and formally clumsy (too many close-ups among other things) piece of self-indulgent cinema. I might give it a second try later, though.