I’d be lying if I watch a lot of Asian films at the moment, but I used to… When I did I found that the South Korean films often stood out to me. I don’t particularly know why, just that they had interesting ideas and were generally very well made. The horror films in particular were very strong but I also enjoyed their dramas. I decided then that I like Korean cinema – hey, there comes a point where you have to lay your cards down.

It pleased me to see that JDIFF this year is dedicating a section of their schedule to Korean cinema so I wanted to highlight them for you.

Without further ado, here’s a summary of the Korean films in the JDIFF this year.

Mother (Madeo) – Friday Feb 19, 6.30pm, Cineworld 9

Mother is the latest film from Bong Joon-ho, writer/director of The Host and Memories of Murder.

If you haven’t seen those films I would highly recommend them. They’re very different though. The Host is great ol’ monster film, it’s like Cloverfield except more fun and not so hard on those who suffer from motion sickness. Memories of Murder is a crime drama based on the story of Korea’s first known serial killer. Think along the lines of Zodiac but oddly funnier…

Mother is a return to murder/mystery genre for Bong. It follows the story of a single mother (Hye-Ja) and her mentally challenged son (Do-joon). When a young girl turns up dead, suspicion falls on her son and Hye-Ja relationship with him is tested to breaking point.

I’m sure it will be better than I’m making it sound, after Memories of Murder I have faith that Joon-ho Bong will make this something brilliant.

Castaway on the Moon (Kimssi pyoryugi) – Saturday Feb 20, 6.15pm, Cineworld 9

This one looks like an interesting one. I’m not familiar with the writer/director at all but I like the idea of the film.

It’s about guy down on his luck. He’s lost his job, is heavily in debt and his girlfriend has just dumped him. He decides to pack it all in and jump into the Han river… things don’t go to plan though and when he wakes he finds himself stranded on a small island in the middle of the river. A modern day Robinson Crusoe. He decides to buck up and get on with his new life but things take an odd turn when a woman, a recluse confined to her apartment, notices him. What kind of relationship can you have if you never meet.

Like I said, sounds like fun.

Breathless (Ddongpari) – Sunday Feb 21, 6pm, Cineworld 9

I’ve heard a lot of buzz about Breathless lately, which naturally means I’ve been avoiding reading about it. Unfortunately I don’t think I’m going to have a chance to see it in the festival but I’m hoping it gets a general release. If you have a chance though I’d recommend you go along.

Like most of the Korean films in the festival, the director of this film is also the writer. The difference here is that Yang Ik-Joon also plays the lead. It’s probably simplest to say that Breathless is a gangster film. Or at least it’s about a gangster. I was a little disturbed by the description in the JDIFF programme, no offence meant folks, but it kind of put me off a bit.

Basically the film is about a low-life debt collector living in a spiral of violence, abuse and anger. Nothing new there I guess. But when he meets a schoolgirl he find he’s met a person who may force a change in him.

I guess it’s impossible to summarise a film without making it sound a little simple. I am assured by the internet that this is a film that is worth of the buzz around it so I hope you’ll go along.

A Brand New Life (Yeo-haeng-ja) – Tuesday Feb 23, 6pm, Cineworld 9

French-Korean writer/director Ounie Lecomte used her own life to inspire the story of A Brand New Life. The film is about a young child who finds herself abandoned at an orphanage, not knowing why or what to do next.

The ratings on IMDb seem good and it has won a couple of awards so I assume this is a good solid drama. Probably not a particularly happy drama but I wouldn’t hold that against a film.

Hansel and Gretel – Wednesday Feb 24, 6pm , Cineworld 9

This one is a little older than the other Korean films in the festival. It was first shown in South Korea in December 2007 and has been on the festival circuit ever since. It seems unlikely that this will receive a general release so if you don’t catch this at JDIFF you probably won’t get to see it on the big screen here again.

Out of all the Korean films it’s probably the one that sounds most interesting to me plotwise however that may be a bit of a risk It is a horror film though and I’ve enjoyed most of the Korean horror films I’ve seen Hmm.. I wonder if my budget can stretch to another film… anyway I should probably tell you a bit about it.

Hansel and Gretel is a… reworking I suppose… of the classic fairytale recorded by the Brothers Grimm. Eun-soo is a salesman, on the road late at night, heading to visit his sick mother. He gets a phone call from his wife and, distracted, he runs his car off the road and awakens hours later in a dark forest. A little girl finds him and takes him to their “House of Happy Children”. Creepy kids, car off the road, dark forest. You know this isn’t going to go well for our salesman…

I’ll leave it there but the more I read about it the more likely I think it is that I’m going to make a dash to Cineworld next Wednesday night…

So that’s all the Korean films in the festival. Let me know if you’re thinking of heading to any of them and if you do go along let me know what you think!

You can book tickets to any of these films through the Korean cinema section on jdiff.com

The force is strong with this one. Umm… the Paramount marketing force that is. This is apparently now the most profitable movie of all time. So of course, I wasn’t expecting much going in to it. Actually I genuinely wasn’t… I do wonder if I would have been better off carrying a bit of anticipation though, because as it was, I didn’t think that much of it. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t been expecting so little?

In the interest of full disclosure I should probably mention that I felt very sick for the last 30 mins or so of this film. I was only queasy for the middle 30 mins. I’ve always had a problem with motion sickness and the whole shaky hand held camera really gets me. I can’t even watch people playing First Person Shooters and this was well beyond that. The last time I felt it this bad was at Cloverfield. It was a bit more tolerable during Cloverfield though. That might have been because the film was a bit more fun…

It’s not that Paranormal Activity was a bad film, it wasn’t. It was fine. As I think it through though, I realise that I can’t really point at the “best bit”. Because there wasn’t a best bit. But then again there wasn’t really a worst bit either. There was a stupidest bit, but I’ll leave you to pick your own, if or when you see it. There were also some pointless bits. And yes, there were some scary bits. I guess what I’m saying here is that it was a bit bitty.

My main problem with it was that it was cheap. Not that it was cheap looking but that the scares were cheap. It was real “things that go bump in the night” scary. There was nothing that was really… … let’s just say I kind of expected there would be a more insidious creepiness to it. It was all a very straight up “BE SCARED NOW!” kind of thing. I would have liked to have seen a bit more thought behind it. Not that I like jump scenes – like I said, cheap – but all the scares were pretty telegraphed and that was annoying. What’s the point of a jump scene you warn someone about?

Ah no, I’m not being entirely fair. I mean ok, I may have been watching a film starring the two least haunting aware characters I’ve ever seen but yer wan Katie really did have a great scream. I was well impressed with that. And I quite scared by it to a certain degree. I live alone in a two bed apartment and I’ve never been up to the attic so… uh… I’d rather not think about it. But it’s not like I had trouble sleeping or anything, it was no Exorcist and it was certainly no Event Horizon

In the end, I was disappointed by this film. Which is not to say that I hated it. Or that I think that people shouldn’t be scared by it. On the contrary, I think many people are genuinely scared by it and there’s nothing wrong with that. I save my disdain for people who are into the stuff like Michael Jackson: The Live Seance. I just didn’t think it was a great film.

I really think this might be one of those rare films that would be better on TV. I could imagine renting the DVD, watching it with a few friends and having a good time. Or watching it alone at home and being terrified. But in Screen 2 in The Savoy it just didn’t seem up to much.

Or who knows, maybe I was just put off by the nausea; it’s hard to appreciate an atmosphere when you think you might need to run to the bathroom to be sick any minute. I gotta start taking travel sickness tablets before watching these types of films…

5/10

NB: I am somewhat dismayed to see that there are plans for a Paranormal Activity 2… did Hollywood learn nothing from Blair Witch 2?

Also, shout out to the Paramount marketing team on this one. Great job folks.

Happily, it wasn’t really a Western, it doesn’t really feel that long and it wasn’t overly “worthy” either. I still have no particular opinion on Paul Thomas Anderson though.

So what’s it all about? Well, There Will Be Blood is loosely based on the 1927 Upton Sinclair novel Oil!. Since you’ve probably never read the book though and I gather the association is quite loose, I shall summarise. Basically There Will Be Blood is the story of the life of Daniel Plainview (played by Daniel Day-Lewis). There really isn’t much more to it. It opens with Daniel happening upon oil while out on his own in the desert prospecting for silver and follows him as he grows his oil business, eventually becoming one of the most successful oil men in California.

It’s a very interesting film. I don’t usually enjoy films that just go from A to B but I found this one very interesting. Not storywise, it’s fairly mundane in that respect, stuff happens, la la la. Where There Will Be Blood excels is in the characterisation, it paints these people’s personalities and motivations so vividly… I know that doesn’t really sound like much but to be honest it’s something that’s very rare in recent films. I thought the acting was great all round and I have to say it eventually, Daniel Day-Lewis completely deserved the Oscar and every other award he’s won for this performance. Really, it’s an amazing performance. The other characters in the film are peripheral in a sense but I still thought they were very well played and that all the interactions between them were suberb. As an aside, I’ve noticed on the internet that opinion has been split on Paul Dano‘s performance as Paul / Eli Sunday. I just wanted to say that I thought he was good.

There was one thing that annoyed me though… I don’t want to give anything away but I did think that the film skipped too much time at one point, when it jumped to 1927… I would have liked to know what happened in the years between. It’s rare that I’d say that a two and a half hour film should have been longer but in this case I am!

Anyway, I thought it was a good film… I didn’t think it was a great film to be honest, but it was an interesting film and Daniel Day-Lewis was very good. I’m glad I saw, if only because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about…

8/10

Hmm… I sounded quite negative there… I actually liked this film, I thought it was very good, in fact one of the best films I’ve seen this year (granted it’s only February but I’ve seen a good few films). I laughed, I almost shed a tear, but I just don’t think that I’ll be thinking about Juno and her quandary in six months time. It was all just very neat and shiny, it was all very slick and “sorted”. It was just all too easy and I felt like I was being played.

I should probably tell you a bit about the film… Juno is a 16-year old girl – smart, independent, given to speaking in ridiculous slang (thankfully that’s mostly contained to the first ten or fifteen annoying minutes) and above all pregnant. The father is Bleeker, sweet kid but Juno doesn’t seem to appreciate this. Anyway to go any further plotwise would be to give it away but obviously pregnant in high school is not the greatest situation to be in and the film follows the tale of the pregnancy.

What I liked about this film was all the smaller roles, Bleeker (played by Michael Cera) was particularly good, as was J.K. Simmons as her father. It was the cast of characters around Juno that made her more believable, simply because on her own she was too cool, too sure of herself. Looking back at the film we didn’t really get much from her, it was the reactions to her that made the film interesting. That said, she was pretty funny – wisecracks don’t make a character but they do make you laugh and that’s always good.

To be honest, I did think it was a sweet film, I did laugh and I did like it but I think there was an opportunity here to make a really great film and it was lost. I would have liked to see Juno “deal” a bit more. I would have liked it all to be harder *look away if you don’t want to know a plot point* – which is not the say that I wanted to see disowned or anything – *you can look again* but I just think don’t think that anyone learned anything from the events in the film. Not that people have to learn things the whole time but… I don’t know, there just could have been more to it… That said, I’m still giving it 7.5 out of 10, I still think it was a good laugh and it’s well worth seeing.

Anyway, two random points to mention. One, it did quite remind me of Napoleon Dynamite. Two, I can’t believe this is the same guy who made Thank You For Smoking. I loved Thank You For Smoking and while this was a good film I do think it was a bit of a safe step back… but then that’s just my opinion… What did you think?

7.5/10

Control is a biographical film based on the 1995 memoirs of Ian Curtis’s wife, Deborah Curtis, entitled Touching From A Distance. It is directed by acclaimed photographer and music video director Anton Corbijn.

Shot in colour than transferred to black and white, Control is a portait of a man who didn’t seem to fit, no matter how much he wanted to. The film starts with Ian in school, just before meeting his future wife and chronicles the formation of the band, it’s signing, including the apocryphal tale of Tony Wilson signing the contract with the band in his own blood, Ian Curtis’s diagnosis of epilepsy and his downward spiral into depression, culminating with the events just before the band’s first scheduled US tour.

Despite the dark and depressing nature of the subject matter, this film isn’t particularly difficult to watch. I don’t know if that’s a good thing though, perhaps it should have been. It’s an interesting story that focuses on Ian Curtis’s life and relationships, as opposed to any telling of the band’s days on the road or anything like that. Looking back I suppose, given that it’s based on Deborah’s memoirs (and she was left at home with their baby), this is partly out of necessity. Also, given that it’s based on Deborah’s memoirs, it’s very balanced. What the film gives you is quite a stylised telling of the pressures that Ian Curtis faced and the pressures that he placed on himself. It doesn’t blame anyone for his death nor does it particularly romanticise his life, he was a normal man who just couldn’t cope with what was going on around him.

To be honest I’m not sure if it’s really right to rate this film as there are so many ways interpret a person’s life and to rate this film would be rating this particular interpretation. I don’t feel particularly qualified to do that, I didn’t know the guy. What I will say is that there were only really two or three moments in it that I really felt a truth to it, which is not to say that any of it was lies, but in many ways it did just feel like a story. The scenes involving Debbie and Ian around the housewarming party, during and after, and then one particular scene when Ian talks about how much he gives on stage but it’s never enough. Those scenes, I think, are really the most important scenes in the film, they give the couple character and sympathy.

What I can say, in terms of rating the film, is that the acting by the two leads – Sam Riley and Samantha Morton – was excellent. Having watched some videos of Joy Division now on youtube, Sam Riley had him spot on. Also, it looks great, the fact that Anton Corbijn is a photographer is obvious.

My main, and possibly quite odd, criticism of the film is that I felt it was missing a sense of time. I didn’t really know anything about Ian Curtis beforehand and it felt like a lot of time had passed between each scenes. I had no idea he was so young when he died and I think I would have looked at it a bit differently if I had had any idea of how quickly everything happened.

Anyway, on the whole this was a relatively entertaining way of spending 2 hours. I don’t think I could say that it was really fascinating but the music was great – I have to say, that song Love Will Tear Us Apart is one of my all time favourites – as were the performances. It really is a sad tale and one can’t help but wonder how things could have been. Of course, there’s no way of knowing…

7/10

Without further ado and in reverse order…

#5 – Superbad

Good comedy, very funny. Go rent it now. There’s really not that much I can say about it… simple story, endearing characters, good laugh!

#4 – Saw IV

Like ‘em or not, you can’t deny that the Saw films have staying power. As you can see from the position on this list, I like ‘em. I really they are the best of the genre at the moment and believe me I’ve seen a lot of the rest of the genre, the Saw films definitely are the best… Word from the wise, don’t ever watch Monster Man… and this is coming from someone who’s happy to watch the worst of the worst…

#3 – American Gangster

Solid drama, interesting story, well told. Been called into question lately but I still think it was very good film, very strong performances. And I didn’t hate Russell Crowe in it so that’s a major achievement on his and the directors part.

#2 – The Darjeeling Limited

I’ll have to write a proper review of this film when I buy it on DVD and watch it again but anyway… I love Wes Anderson – The Royal Tenenbaums is my favourite film – however I have to admit (very quietly) that I had been somewhat disappointed with The Life Aquatic. Not the case with The Darjeeling Limited, it’s very much a Wes Anderson film in the sense that it has the weird characters, the little details, the strangely out-to-time feeling… I could go one but like I said, I should write a proper review… so I’ll leave it at that.

#1 – Transformers

What can I say about Transformers, not since Snakes On A Plane had I been so desperate to see a film on the big screen. Admittedly Snakes On A Plane wasn’t that long ago… but I really wanted to see Snakes On A Plane. Anyway, really I had been waiting to see the Transformers in the cinema since I was a little girl and when it finally happened it did not disappoint. Giant robots people! Giant robots! Sure the plot’s a little hokey but that ain’t the point, the effects were amazing and the efforts of the actors were admirable. I was pleasantly surprised that Michael Bay actually bothered with the people, so often in big budget action films you see characters cast by the wayside (see the film below for a prime example of that!) but I think Bay got a good mix going here… Anyway, great film, if I see another as good in the next 12 months I’ll be surprised!

#1 Worst – Spider-man 3

I loathed Spider-Man 3, not just because it was a poor film, or because it rounded out a poor trilogy but because it could have been so much better. You only have to at the X-Men films or some of the Batman films to see what you can do with a comic book story.

The first film was alright but then they apparently went mad, forgot about characters, threw together some half assed villans and decided that if we were completely dazzled by sand effects, we’d never notice that the characters were made of paper.

I really felt that this particular film was excellent example of how not to do a big budget action film… and action films aren’t that hard to do… expectations aren’t that high… mine weren’t that high after Spider-Man 2 but this was still so very disappointing.

Plainly spoken, Knocked Up is the story of one drunken night and its consequences. Alison Scott (played by Katherine Heigl) is a 24-year old who’s been promoted to on-screen after working behind the scenes at the entertainment channel E!. Ben Stone (played by Seth Rogen”) is a 23-year old stoner living off a compensation award with a group of buddies. Theoretically they’re working on a website concept however really… they’re watching out for nude scenes starring famous actresses.

There’s nothing remarkably deep about this film so, don’t go looking for it but I did think it was very entertaining. All the supporting characters were strong (particular mention to Kristen Wiig who played Jill – an exec in E!) and the two leads were very well suited. I found it very funny and the situations, though somewhat ridiculous, were made believable, in the same way we saw in The 40-year Old Virgin to be honest. There was charm to everything and really, it’s just a nice film.

I will say this, I was initially apprehensive when this came about in the cinemas because it looked a bit like a chick film however after hearing that it was great from girls and guy alike and also because of Judd Apatow’s other films I thought I’d give it a go. They weren’t wrong and so I join others in wholly recommending it as a good way to spend approximately 130 mins of your life. I do wonder though, as a girl was it fundamentally a different film for me than it would be for a guy? Not humourwise I mean, just in general… I guess I’ll never really know!

7.5/10

On the whole I enjoyed No Country For Old Men. I thought the plot was interesting, the cinematography was excellent and the acting was very accomplished – strong performances all round. However, ultimately I found it somewhat unsatisfying and there were really two reasons for this…

The first of which is mainly a matter of taste. I enjoy a wide range of films however for a film to really stand out for me there has to have been a reason it was a film. I mean this is in the sense that I have to feel like I couldn’t have just read the book and felt the same. Now obviously this film was a book adaptation so it was always going to be primarily narrative and possibly this meant that I was never going to feel that it was brilliant… However, I think the best adaptations from books/short stories don’t simply tell the tale, they make full use of the added visual and aural elements to connect us to that story – take the scene in The Shawshank Redemption when the music is played out across prison – if you simply read that scene in a book it wouldn’t be the same. While the Coen Brothers showed us beautiful landscapes but I’m just not sure that it really added that much to the overall feeling of the film.

The second reason that is that I didn’t really feel a connection with the characters and I am firmly of the opinion that it’s the film-makers job to make me feel that connection. I was interested in what they were up to but for me it didn’t really matter what happened to them. I was engaged by the story, by the the cat and mouse chase, however it was like watching a cat chase a mouse… I didn’t care how it ended.

But I’m being overly critical of the film. It was a very good film, it’s won awards and it will undoubtedly win some more. It really did have a lot going for it, I appreciated its look at fate, chance and choice – Was the ending inevitable, perhaps? Is Chigurh purely evil? Does he make the choice to… not make the choice as it were? It made it interesting, something different from your usual drama, I suppose those situations are not unfamiliar territory for the Coens however that’s a good thing, it sets them apart from other directors. Also as I mentioned earlier, the performances were excellent, as you’d expect from such a lauded cast. I’ll give it a 7.5 out of 10 but for me it just wasn’t a classic film.

7.5/10