HanCinema's Korean Blog - Korea's Diary, Pictures, Reviews

Seoul Museum of Art is playing host to the popular Tim Burton exhibition until the 14 April. Fans of this prolific film director, producer, writer and artist will be able to view hundreds of his wacky and wonderful drawings, paintings, short films, sculptures, music, costumes and more! The exhibition originated in 2009 at New York's Museum of Modern Art, and now Korean fans are geting their chance to explore Burton's magical world first hand. I visited the exhibition last week and managed to snap a few pics, so enjoy and be sure to catch it if you can!...More

Yi-Rang (voiced by Park Sin-hye) is a young high school student who's feeling a collapse in motivation after losing in a high school relay race. She isn't, in most respects, that different than any other teenage girl. Yi-Rang is obsessed with the American movie "Love  Story" which plays in her local theater, and all the other ideals of adolescent love that go along with it. At the same time, she realizes it's kind of a silly idea, as teenage girls often do when they're trying to define their personality in terms of uniqueness...More

There's a voyeuristic element to reality television that we're often loathe to recognize. In the worst dregs of the genre, desperate people act deranged for our entertainment. Normally, when this shows up in satire and social commentary, it's an indictment of our shallow entertainment culture- but never of smart, cool people like us, who only watch this kind of stuff so we can laugh at how dumb it all is. "The Story of Mr. Sorry" doesn't let us off so easily, and forces the so-called "intelligent" commentator to acknowledge how involved we really are in this circus...More

HanCinema's Korean Box Office Review 

(2013.02.22 ~ 2013.02.24)

After dominating proceedings for the past month, Lee Hwan-hyeong's "Miracle in Cell No.7" has given way to Park Hoon-jeong-I's "The New World". Park was credited for the scripts of "The Unjust" and "I Saw the Devil", but "The New World" marks only his second film in the director's seat. The film stars Lee Jeong-jae, Choi Min-sik and Hwang Jeong-min in an action thriller that probes the spaces between Korea's National Police Agency and organised crime. "The New World" opened on Thursday and walk away from the weekend with more than 1 million admissions in its pocket...More

"Stoker" will be coming to Korean audiences next week Thursday. The film is a British-American psychological thriller distributed by the Fox Entertainment Group's "Fox Searchlight Pictures" division. It's an American-based film studio that focuses on independent and British films. The company's biggest success came in the form of the 2008 Oscar winner "Slumdog Millionaire", which grossed more than $377 million worldwide.

"Slumdog Millionaire" was directed by Danny Boyle, who is also the chairman of the U.S-based Danaher Corporation; and his own studio Indian Paintbrush was involved in the production of "Stoker", along with director Ridley Scott's own production house Scott Free Productions...More

Film: "The King of XXX-Kissing" (아부의 왕)

Director: Jeong Seung-koo 

Stars: Song Sae-byeok, Seong Dong-il, Lee Byeong-joon & Ko Chang-seok

Review Score: 3 / 5

Despite his past experience on films such as Lee Chang-dong's "Secret Sunshine" and the 2006 action film noir "A Dirty Carnival", Jeong Seung-koo has chosen to make his own entry into directing with the satirical comedy "The King of XXX-Kissing". Fans of Korean cinema will be familiar with Jeong's mocking encomium and witty humour as he critiques and exaggerates Korea's  socio-political bureaucracy. Jeong promised that it would not be 'empty laughs' as audiences will surely recognise the pressure and frustration of challenging that misty glass ceiling that continues to loom over many of Korea's young minds...More

Jong-Seong (played by Ha Jeong-woo) is a ghost agent working for the North Korean government. When an illegal multinational weapons deal goes bad, he has to do clean-up. And part of that post-mortem involves figuring out who tipped off a third party to what was going on. This being a North Korean operation, the investigation is less genuine curiousity about what happened and more about finding an explanation that can be easily and succintly described to higher-ups in the North Korean government as quickly as possible...More