The London Korean Film Festival 2010

allure4u · 发表于 2010-12-13 07:23

回复楼上的亲, 大叔是开幕影片,

本来很想去的,结果忽然要去见老师, 就没去成

我可以帮你搜索下REVIEW怎么样

后来我还去卡迪夫看了义兄弟.........好冷清呀

就来了几个韩国文化中心请的电影专业人士来介绍了下电影还有类似南北韩电影

但是在大荧幕能看到韩国电影感觉还不错~~~~

allure4u · 发表于 2010-12-13 07:37

http://www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/reviews.php?film_id=19521

The men form nowhere

Sleek, stylish and ultra violent thrillers with a twist or two are seen in the West as something of a mainstay of Korean cinema, perhaps unfairly so given the breadth of imported films increasingly on offer on DVD and at cinemas since Park Chan-Wook's Oldboy made such an impact in 2004. But these intense films are one of Korea's prime exports and regular fixtures on the festival circuit. Not surprisingly, Lee Jeong-beom's crime thriller The Man From Nowhere holds pride of place as the opening gala film of the 2010 London Korean Film Festival.

Actor Won Bin, seen in UK cinemas recently in Korean director's Bong Joon-ho's acclaimed Mother, takes on a very different character here as Cha Tae-Sik. He's a young, withdrawn man who runs a pawn shop in the bottom of a crummy apartment block in Seoul, seemingly oblivious to the outside world. Only So-mi, a young local schoolgirl with an addict mother, seems able to get through to him with her child like persistence.

Despite himself, Tae-sik finds himself bonding with her, humouring her by accepting So-mi's MP3 player mixes in exchange for him letting her stay over when her mother is stoned. But when So-mi's mother foolishly steals top-grade drugs from the local mob, she and her daughter are violently abducted and So-mi is sold to a trafficking ring. Tae-sik, mistaken for a drug mule, finds himself a target for both the mob and the police. Only by once more embracing his former violent past as a government assassin and going on a rampage throughout the city, can Tae-sik get So-mi back.

A huge hit in Korea, The Man From Nowhere is not without its clichés (the theme of a little girl breaking through a hardened loner's defences being the most obvious of many) and flaws, but it is gripping, kinetic entertainment from start to finish and this means many of the film's problems can be happily ignored. The many fight scenes are laced with slick and ultra-fast choreography and crunching sound effects that really deliver a visceral punch.

There are also some strikingly orchestrated set pieces - a brutal knife and pistol fight in a brightly lit club bathroom that spills over from the claustrophobic cubicles onto the club dance floor, a torture scene with a hairdryer and a slow-motion plunge by Tae-sik into a golf course net in the rain are just three standouts. The cinematography is also moodily effective, this is a darkly lit Korea of neon and grime, where everyone is adrift and desperate or getting caught in the crossfire. Throw in issues such as organ harvesting and child trafficking and director Lee Jeong-beom can certainly be said to have bought a particularly stark vision of modern Korea to the screen.

Actor Won Bin is burdened with something of a blank slate character through much of the film, but the scenes with young So-mi (the very good Kim Sae-ron) are involving and funny and their relationship shows enough spark to make you believe her abduction would fuel the violence that follows. Won Bin also more than delivers when it comes to the high voltage action that this film delivers in spades, though the criminals and cops he dispatches are rarely anything more than grotesque stereotypes to be destroyed.

The Man From Nowhere holds few surprises, but those seeking the kind of sleek thrill ride that Asian cinema seems so good at delivering, are well advised to check it out. Director Lee Jeong-beom, still at an early stage in his directing career, is certainly worth looking out for in future.

credit from the eye for film website

allure4u · 发表于 2010-12-13 08:11

李导演的interview

Downstairs at the Korean Cultural Centre the film’s producer Lee Tae-hun is explaining how much he is enjoying being in London again. It’s his first time in 10 years, and then only as a tourist for a week. But he can’t quite get the hang of closing times in London. ‘Everything seems to close at 10pm, in Korea that’s when we’re just going out.’ And don’t mention the fact you can’t smoke in British pubs and restaurants either.

Lee Jeong-beom arrives exactly on schedule, to the second almost. He seems calm and relaxed, and to be equally enjoying his time in London. Though Jeong-beom is relatively new on the scene, having had one other movie under his belt, the crime drama Cruel Winter Blues, his latest film has become the highest grossing movie in South Korea this year. What does he put that success down to?

‘Won Bin!’, he exclaims. Casting Korea’s most popular and beloved actor in the lead is something of golden ticket in box office terms, he explains modestly. For male audiences, there’s the action element. Then the final scene builds to a gratifying conclusion, which is quite cathartic – that could also be a lot of the films appeal.

So how did he manage to get Won Bin the first place? Probably best known (in the West at least) for his role as the son in Bong Joon-ho’s Mother, Jeong-beom is keen to point out that Won has some form in th genre, having been inspired to make a step into movies from the film Terrorist, his debut film role was in Jang Jin’s action comedy Guns & Talks.

He explains that in Korea, it’s generally the case that film production companies tend to send out the scripts to actors, but in this case Won Bin came across the script himself and contacted him directly. Normally he would avoid such stellar names, preferring actors who have a great amount of potential but much less profile, but he’s been blown away by the passion and dedication with which Won has thrown himself into the role. In preparation for the role he trained intensively for three months with martial artists. ‘It was extremely impressive’, Jeong-beom says, and proved without doubt Won can be an action star.

So where did the idea come from for the movie? ‘At first I saw the beginning and ending sequences in my head’, he tells me. That mixed with films such as The Bourne Ultimatum and Taken, these really fast-paced action films were a big inspiration for him. For him, it was those faster developing Western plots that he wanted to have to create a very different style of Korean action film.

The main structure was evolved from discussing and consulting with other people, creating the journey from the beginning and end. As Jeong-beom puts it, if you were a director on a 007 movie (and I’m starting to get the feeling that he’d like to be) then you’d know that audiences would be excited to see what all the new gadgets, new weapons and new car are. Now rather than sit at your desk and try and brainstorm all that, you would consult with tech gurus and weapons experts and so on. He feels this process works really well for him as a way to give something fresh and new to audiences.

In this sense some of the more serious topics thrown up in the context of the film, such as human trafficking, organ harvesting and drug smuggling, are really just tools to place our lead protagonist in life threatening situations. There’s no social commentary intended, though he recognises these things go on all through South East Asia, outside of Korea.

So what of the challenges of making an action film, they are so notoriously difficult? Well, it’s expensive, but also really time consuming. For instance, in Korea when you film gun shooting scenes you have to imbed the receiving end of the bullet for the actual effect – which can take up to 30 minutes for each individual bullet. Then, as is typical for a Korean action movie, there are lot of elaborate moves and things that involve a lot of wires, and that takes training and a lot of preparation.

So did anything go wrong? Well, there’s one incident that could been disastrous. There’s a scene in the film where Won Bin’s character uses a towel to disarm a knife that’s being thrust towards him, but in reality the move sent the knife flying past the crew and just past their heads.

Won was also involved in another incident. During one scene he was on the receiving end of some bullets so had to wear a vest, but in the process of reacting to the impact the noise was so loud it left him partially hearing impaired for some time afterward.

The film itself turns out to be everything Jeong-beom described: a solid, well made rollercoaster ride of an action film with a little something for everyone. Particularly for the female Korean audience at the LKFF screening, who visibly (well audibly at least!) swoon at the sight of Won Bin with his shirt off. Jeong-beom later admits at the Q&A after the screening that he’s found it rather difficult appearing at press conferences next to a man who even he finds attractive – it doesn’t really do anything for him!

When I try to draw him on whether there are any moments he’s particularly proud of in the film, there’s a rather modest reply of ‘No’. But there was one scene were he took inspiration from The Bourne Ultimatum, where Matt Damon jumps through a window and the camera follows him, and when he smashes through another camera receives him on the other side. He wanted to take that further so the same camera shows him penetrating the window and landing, so he had to negotiate how that would work with the CG and martial arts team. Bus a lot of effort went into that scene and he thinks it will go down very positively with audiences.

He feels the action sequences in particular he feels are very real: you hit, you block, the blood, everything. It’s much more grounded and realistic in the grizzly consequences of such scenes than you’d find in a Western equivalent, and he’s quite happy about the way it’s been expressed on screen. He’s keen to point out that despite what people might think, Korea doesn’t have the same heritage of martial arts, so taking elements from Western action films to really create something new in Korean cinema.

He personally feels Korean action films have a tendency to be quite static, almost still, in comparison. I know what he means, there are plenty of great scenes, but these tend to be brooding, the camera more likely to hang uncomfortably while the action unfolds than to cut and move on. These ideas of fusing East and West are important to him, referring to Akira Kurosawa as someone who brought both Japanese and Western elements successfully to world wide audience, and as someone in whose footsteps he’d like to follow.

So had any other filmmakers influenced him? He explains he was never one of those movie kids who buried themselves in films, but he always genuinely enjoyed watching good movies. He name checks like Michael Mann and Takeshi Kitano, as well as the Die Hard series. He also reveals that because of his generation he grew up watching a lot of John Woo movies (me too!) and that undoubtedly had an influence on him. For all his rejection of being a film geek, it’s pretty obvious he’s been making mental notes along the way.

With such an obvious interest in action films, does he plan to stick with the genre or try something else, like a romantic comedy?

‘No romantic comedies!’, he laughs. He want to concentrate on making movies that appeal more to male than female audiences, bloke films. He wants to make films that concentrate on male friendship, the bonding you might have between peers committing a crime, rather like the relationship between the Al Pacino and Robert De Niro characters in Mann’s Heat. What the Chinese refer to as ‘yanggang’, it’s an extremely common theme of Hong Kong action movies by directors like Woo, Ringo Lam and Johnnie To.

So has he any plans for his next movie? Jeong-beom talks about wanting to make a film about a terrorist. He thinks it would be an interesting idea to reverse the roles, have the terrorist as the lead protagonist rather than the guy who everyone cheers about when they die at the end. He’s quite excited about trying to make a very new kind of terrorist genre film.

He’s then a bit uncomfortable about having brought it up, realising that as London is one of those cities where terrorism does occur perhaps he’s making too flippant of it. (He also divulges later at the Q&A that he’s thinking about making a prequel to The Man From Nowhere.)

But whatever Jeong-beom turns his hand to next, you can bet it’s going to be a ripping good yarn, a real ‘blokes’ movie.

The Man From Nowhere was screened as the opening gala to the London Korean Film Festival 2010 yesterday. So far it hasn’t been picked up by a UK distributor but lets hope one comes to their senses soon.
Thanks to Lee Jeong-beom for his time, Lee Tae-hun and Paul Koren, Media & Marketing Manager for the Korean Cultural Centre UK.

太逗乐,一开始就小报怨了下英国酒吧不能抽烟的问题

若寒的思念 · 发表于 2010-12-18 12:30

太感谢亲啦，提供这么详细的Review

现在北京这边韩影放映的越来越多了
希望韩影能越来越繁荣
那样我们就有眼福啦哈哈

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The London Korean Film Festival 2010

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