Dead Friend (2004) - 령 (Ryeong)

2008/04/09 | Source | Permalink |  Digg |  del.icio.us | Stumble It! | Share this news

Get yourself ready for a two-hour thriller that takes place among the guard posts on the southern side of the demilitarized zone.
Director Kong Soo-chang is back with his second feature "The Guard Post".
Kong's film — released last Thursday — focuses on a mysterious massacre that occurs in the DMZ one rainy day. Twenty armed soldiers at a guard post have been mysteriously killed. One is left alive, but unconscious.

The Defense Ministry dispatches an investigation team. Sergeant Major Noh Seong-gyu (Cheon Ho-jin) is given 24 hours to find the body of Yu Jeong-woo (Jo Hyeon-jae), who was in command of the guard post.
Kong's previous feature, "R-Point", also takes place in a military setting. It's about a Korean unit dispatched to the Vietnam War that receives a strange radio transmission from a group of soldiers previously thought missing in action.
"I served in the army under Korea's military regime", Kong said. "During that time, the government was in total control".
Kong was a...

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2008/01/29 | Source | Permalink |  Digg |  del.icio.us | Stumble It! | Share this news

Popular actress KIM Ha-neul and YOON Kye-sang (of the former band G.O.D.) are faced with a relation crisis in their sixth year together. PARK Hyeon-jin directed and wrote "Lovers of 6 Years". She previously wrote scenarios for some of director LIM Sang-soo's projects.

KIM and YOON's characters live next door to each other and are in a long term relationship. Their relationship encounters some problems while at the same time they start having feelings for someone else who they met through their work.

KIM Ha-neul became a star when she starred opposite of KWON Sang-woo in the comedy "My Tutor Friend". They reprised their success with another comedy, "Almost Love". KIM also played in the romantic drama "Ditto" alongside YOO Ji-tae and in the horror film "Dead Friend".

Yi Ch'ang-ho (KOFIC)...

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2007/07/05 | Source | Permalink |  Digg |  del.icio.us | Stumble It! | Share this news

The popular Chinese drama "If Heaven Pities", starring Korean actor Cha In-pyo, is now being aired in Korea. A Korean cable TV station specializing in Chinese programs broadcasts the 36-part mini series every Thursday and Friday.

"If Heaven Pities" ponders what true love is by portraying the heartbreaking love between an 18-year-old girl and a 36-year-old man.

Cha plays a bachelor who falls in love with the daughter of his dead friend. The female lead opposite of Cha is played by a Chinese actress who previously appeared in the joint Korean-Chinese drama "Apartment" with Ahn Jae-wook.

"If Heaven Pities" was the highest rated show on Shanghai TV, Hunan TV, and Nanjing TV. ...

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2007/06/18 | Source | Permalink |  Digg |  del.icio.us | Stumble It! | Share this news

Soggy horror film more appropriate for TV drama fans

Kyu Hyun Kim (qhyunkim)

Ji-won (Kim Ha-neul) is a college student stricken by selective amnesia due to a near-drowning experience. The missing memory seems to suggest that she was a close friend with another girl (Nam Sang-mi), but the details remain fuzzy. Meanwhile, her friends, members of a high school clique, are beginning to turn up as dead bodies.

Made in 2004, "Ghost" ("Dead Friend") represents the nadir of contemporary Korean horror cinema, ravaged by the strains of a PSC (Pointless Sadako Clone) virus and put together in such a slapdash manner that it might serve as an object lesson in how not to make a generic horror film. (Even the title is super-generic.)

The fact that director Kim Tae-kyeong's screenplay is an irritating hodgepodge of plot elements (and scare tactics) stolen wholesale from Nakata Hideo's "Dark Waters" and the most awfully disingenuous and hackneyed setups cribbed from TV dramas is certainly a...

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2007/04/17 | Source | Permalink |  Digg |  del.icio.us | Stumble It! | Share this news

Deauville Asian Film Festival 2007

By Gautaman Bhaskaran

South Asia Correspondent

There are a million film festivals through the year, but there are some that sparkle. The Deauville Asian Film Festival on the French Atlantic coast in Normandy is one, and this year it gave in its recent ninth edition some interesting strips of celluloid.

My favourite was a South Korean movie by Lee Yoon-ki, "Ad-Lib Night". Shot in 10 days and in a chronological order to mark a single night, this film conveys the anguish of a young girl (played with remarkable sensitivity by television star Han Hyo-joo) when two men pick her up on a crowded Seoul street and take her to a dying man with a plea that she act his daughter. The girl hesitates in the beginning, but later relents, and the journey helps her in the end to understand who she herself is, and come closer to her mother.

"Ad-Lib Night" is obviously a series of night scenes created to produce an effect of a sombre tragedy — of a man dyin...

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