Quote:
Originally Posted by bfisher
You whet my curiosity about Korean cinema.
|
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl
I'm curious too!
I'm looking forward to reading this book.
|
I'm looking forward to it too, and thanks Bookworm_Girl for the recommendation to the Ford guest review.
As to Korean cinema, I've seen my fair share. In addition to the aforementioned fantastic Mother, another all-time favourite film of mine from any country is the Korean drama film Poetry. It's about an older lady in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease who develops an interest in poetry. It's stunningly beautiful and a softer film whereas Mother is a bit more (purposefully) strange. Both of these films are from around 2010.
Those would be my top two but there's others I'd highly recommend as well depending on taste. A recent one is the drama The Handmaiden, which is a bit purposefully melodramatic to great effect but is beautiful and also has Japanese influences. There's also the mystery/thriller Oldboy which is amazing but very violent (think A Clockwork Orange levels, and by the way it was poorly remade in the U.S. a year or two ago). Another superb Korean film is Thirst, which is a vampire thriller, but not your average genre fare- it's more arthouse and based on Emile Zola's Therese Raquin. Finally there's the great mystery A Tale of Two Sisters, which is more genre but very well made (I'd compare it to being a bit similar to a Guillermo del Toro film; it also had a bad U.S. remake).
ETA- For anyone interested I decided to add links to the youtube trailers for the mentioned films:
Mother
Poetry
The Handmaiden
Oldboy
Thirst
A Tale of Two Sisters