The Miraculous Power of a Perfect Montage

by Cláudio Alves

Sometimes you can forget why you love cinema so much. The world gets you down and it's like nothing can bring you up to the light, rolling clouds of cinematic mediocrity make it even difficult to remember there was a light to start with. Before you know it, going to the movies is more like a chore than a pleasure. If you give in to despondency, those belabored affirmations of the death of cinema may start to ring true. But are they?

No. We know this because even in the darkest times, there are small miracles that prove cinema is alive and thriving. Parasite is one of those miracles.

Allow me to elaborate on a bit of recent personal history. At the beginning of last summer, after hitting an emotional roadblock and getting to a point I couldn't function anymore, I finally looked for professional help...

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Prizes for the Parasite actors... and other Korean Awards

Jo Yeo Jeong wins Best ActressWith the SAG Awards approaching TONIGHT and our hopes not high for an all-Korean win for "Outstanding Cast" (even though Parasite features an absolute dream of an ensemble performance), we've been thinking about whether the cast has been truly undervalued or whether we've just got American blinkers on. So let's take a look at the prizes and nominations that the cast has actually won.

At Korea’s two big awards ceremony, the Blue Dragon Film Awards and the Buil Film Awars, Parasite was the big winner. The best part of its dominance at both was that some of the actors won prizes. The winners of those two awards shows and a few other accolades for Parasite after the jump...  

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How Had I Never Seen... "Memories of Murder" and "The Host"

In this Team Experience series, contributors catch up with gaps in their film history. Here's Cláudio Alves...

With Parasite making history and Bong Joon-ho more celebrated than ever, it's a good time for me to watch the two films that propelled the Korean director to his first waves of international success. I had never seen 2003's Memories of Murder and 2006's The Host so I was eager to correct that. 

The first film is based upon real events, telling a story of police investigation and serial killing, while the second is a sort of South Korean answer to Godzilla's prismatic view of national trauma as monster movie hijinks. Not unexpectedly, I found myself in awe of both pictures…

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Review: South Korea's Oscar Submission "The Age of Shadows"

Tim here. Age of Shadows is currently making its way around the U.S. art house circuit, giving Americans our change to catch up with one of the biggest hits at the Korean box office this year. It's a historical spy thriller, set during a period of time that I suspect most of us English-speakers haven't thought about much, or at all: the stretch of time from 1910 to the end of World War II when Korea was occupied by Japan.

The film, set in the 1920s, takes as its subject the Korean resistance to Japanese rule, and follows the career of a double agent named Lee Jung-chool (Korean superstar Song Kang-ho), a Korean-born police captain operating under strict Japanese control...

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Doc Corner: Two Films Highlight the Outrageous and the Tragic of North Korea

Films about North Korea have an unfair advantage. The country is one of such baffling oddness that films told about it are often either tragic or outrageous, two extremes that make for memorable viewing. On the other hand, the nature of North Korea’s political situation means few films are indeed made about it. Titles like Solrun Hoaas’ Pyongyang Diaries in which the Australian filmmaker ventured to a North Korean film festival and gave us a glimpse of what it means to be a traveller in this land of fake smiles and concrete, and the giddy delight of Anna Broinowski’s Aim High in Creation in which she travels to North Korea to learn how to make propaganda films from the makers themselves.

This year we can add two more entertaining docs. Both are full of surprises that beggar belief at seemingly every turn: The Lovers and the Despot and Under the Sun. 

The former from directors Ross Adam and Robert Cannan is the most accessible of the pair; an espionage documentary about husband and wife filmmakers who were kidnapped by North Korea and forced to make movies for the country’s dictator leader before their brazen escape from the clutches of Kim Jong-il. Yeah, I know!

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