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Dream (or Bi-mong, as is the Korean title) is already Ki-duk’s 15th film. It’s also the 15th Ki-duk film I watched so obviously you can consider me a fan. Ki-duk is a director who’s known to stay pretty close to what he does best, so even though the differences between Dream and his earlier films might not seem stellar, they do present a big deviation for Ki-duk standards. Yet in the end, Dream is still 100% Ki-duk and couldn’t have been made by any other.Read More »
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Perhaps the reason why this movie is getting such a bad rap is mainly a fault of its well-meaning, but still incoherent style and narrative structure. I have not read any articles on this movie or interviews with the director to know what his overt intention was, but in the end I think the movie falls short of its mark due to Kim’s perennial fixation on obsession, whether it was his intention to delve into this subject matter or not. On most levels, obsession is a largely private affair, and any exegesis of obsession enmeshed within the loaded geopolitical situation that is now Korea would require a broader vision and canvas matched with a technical command of story telling than any that Kim has been able to provide here or elsewhere.Read More »
Romances end in blood and the frail hopes of individuals are torn apart in a vile karmic continuity of colonialism…
Address Unknown (2001) is Kim Ki-Duk’s most political film so far which traces the scars left by the Korean war of the 1950s and its contemporary reverberations on a US Army base.Read More »
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From the award-winning Korean writer/director/editor Kim K-Duk comes this critifcally acclaimed and exquisitely beautiful story of a young Buddhist monk’s evolution from innocence to Love, Evil to Enlightenment and ultimately to Rebirth.
Prayer, meditation, and appreciation of nature are the sacraments by which two monks live a simple life in Korean director Kim Ki-Duk’s SPRING, SUMMER, FALL, WINTER… AND SPRING. A wise old monk (Oh Young-soo) is master to a young student, and remains so throughout the changing seasons of the younger monk’s life. In springtime the young monk is a 5-year-old boy, in summer he is a teenager, in fall he is a 30-year-old man, and in winter he is in mid-life. The master and his student live in a tranquil house that floats in the middle of a pond hidden in a vast woodland. Paddling their row boat to the edge of the pond, they roam the forest collecting herbs for medicine, observing animals, and learning deep lessons about life.Read More »
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After finding her husband’s infidelity, YEON absent-mindedly heads for the prison where condemned criminal JIN is confined. Although she doesn’t know him, repeated news of his suicide attempts on TV had subconsciously grown in her mind. Their first meeting is as awkward as it can get. YEON treats JIN like an old friend whereas JIN doesn’t open up so easily. To JIN’s surprise, YEON comes back for the interview again and again, with the decorated interview room like sping, summer and fall. YEON sings him seasonal tunes in dresses of that season. JIN gradually accepts YEON’s efforts and opens up to her. One day, her husband witnesses the intimacy between YEON and JIN and tries to separate them. They can’t see each other again while the limited time for JIN is ticking away. But the two are already attached to each other more than her husband assumed — more than life and death.
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Lee Kang-do (Lee Jeong-jin) is a debt collector. If he shouldn’t get his money he doesn’t refrain from committing any atrocity. Therefore, he has already turned quite a few of his victims into cripples in order to get his hands on the insurance policy, and some of them even took their lives. But Kang-do’s world is completely turned upside down when one day a woman (Jo Min-soo) stands at his doorstep and claims to be his mother who left him alone after giving birth to him. The debt collector turns her away several times, but the woman is stubborn and wants to atone for her sins. Read More »
The Isle is a case in point. Based around a primitive fishing community on a lake, it’s beautifully shot though morally bankrupt, far too eager to visually astound one moment then deeply shock the next. It focuses on a pseudo sado-masochistic relationship between a mute woman and a murderous ex-cop and, seemingly, is out to break almost every taboo available. There’s animal cruelty on a grand scale. There’s at least one rape scene, and one scene in which sexual violence towards women is almost justified by the filmmaker. There’s self-mutilation; a myriad of bodily functions; and, perhaps only a hundred lines of dialogue in the entire movie. It’s almost as if Kim is setting himself up to be Korea’s Takashi Miike, only with better cinematography.Read More »