Customer Reviews

Korean Cinema: The New Hong Kong

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Korean Cinema: The New Hong Kong is a refreshing change of pace from other texts on the subject in that it avoids the dense and very dry tone of academia and is thankfully free of pretension. As a result, it is very accessible to the average reader and provides a good basis for understanding the underpinnings of the growing success of South Korea's film industry.

The book is comprised of two distinct parts. The opening chapters provide some background on South Korea and the current state of its film industry, and though this may be something that some readers may wish to skip, it provides context for readers in understanding what makes Korean films special. Also, the author's style keeps the read light and interesting, so it is actually fun to read.

The second part consists of a number of reviews (I counted at least 80) of recent Korean films grouped by genre. One thing I liked about the author is his digressions into related topics in his reviews, such as how he discusses the alternate history genre in science fiction in his review of 2009 Lost Memories, or how he dabbles in guerrilla journalism in taking apart less-than-worthy films.

Whether you have developed an interest in Korean film or have been watching them for a few years, this book is an excellent companion and will help you build your DVD collection. For the author, I would suggest that he think about expanding the book in the future to include interviews with some Korean filmmakers and add more reviews (with the number of Korean films being released on DVD growing day by day).

It's about time that someone wrote a book about Korean cinema from recent years. Up until now, the only books available were about films before the early 90s and read more like textbooks. Korean Cinema is an easy read and has a good balance between insight and irreverence, such as how the author makes a parallel between Korea right now and Hong Kong ten years ago, his thoughts on all those time travel romances, and how he shreds absolutely horrible movies like Dream of a Warrior to pieces. This one is a keeper!

I have been interested in Korean cinema ever since I worked in Korea as an ESL teacher. My first Korean DVD purchases were Shiri and JSA, which I brought more for novelty and and as a momento of Korea than anything else, but I ended up being pleasantly surprised at the production values of both these movies. As a result, I have become a firm fan of Korean movies, and have added a number of titles to my DVD collection. This book will help me select some more good titles to add to the collection.

"Korean Cinema" fulfills a useful niche as it is basically a primer for Korean movies from 1998 to 2002 for newcomers to Korean cinema. The author reviews and rates a number of the movies made in this time span, from "Attack the Gas Station" through to "2009: Lost Memories", plus a couple of titles a couple of years older. The author also rates and discusses 10 Korean movies from that time period which he rates as must sees. It would be a good start for building a DVD collection. There is also a section devoted to the major personalities of the Korean movie industry, actors and directors. It is illustrated but only in black and white, and many of the pictures are of poor quality.

Ignore the low rating reviews of this book - the reviewers obviously brought this book expecting a serious textbook of Korean cinema, which if you actually read the advertising blurb for the book, it is most certainly not. There are books out there discussing the full history of Korean cinema, but make no mistake, this book is not one of them. It is strictly for the newcomers to the genre, and who has little knowledge of the Korean movie industry. It does have a chapter on the history of the industry in Korea, but it is only superficial, and it isn't the reason I brought the book anyway.

Especially ignore the twit who is critical of the author basing his movie reviews on english subtitles. Korean is a particularly difficult language to learn and to become sufficiently competent in the language to be able to follow a Korean movie without english subtitles is beyond the abilities of all but the most dedicated of people. The author of "Korean Cinema" does make it quite clear he is only a recent convert, and thus a beginner, in Korean movies.

This book would lend itself to an update every 3 or 4 years or so. There has been some considerably significant Korean movie releases since this book was first published, not least of which is "Tae-Guk-Gi". I also recommend checking out the website www.koreanfilm.org which has movie reviews, talent profiles and other useful informative articles. The author of the site, Darcy Paquet, is listed in the bibliography of "Korean Cinema" a number of times.

I received this for Christmas from my boyfriend and read it from cover to cover by New Years: its that good. Its like reading a magazine dedicated completely to Korean movies. Now when I go to the local Korean video store, I know which movies are worth renting and which ones to stay away from. Whoever wrote this, thank you for helping me appreciate some of the best movies in the world.

A certain quality which could have been redeeming about this book is that it approaches the films discussed from a point of view of a cinema reviewer or critic, and thus uses layman's terms without the hassle of all the academic jargon to explain what the critic's views are. However, there are more than just one point which mark for me the serious Achilles' heels(note, I use 'heels', and not 'heel')of the author's approach.

Firstly, the attempt to compare Korean film qualitatively with the cinema of Hong Kong, which defeats the whole point about Korean cinema's cultural idiosyncracies, which have often been pointed out by critics and scholars as both its strength and self-alienating weakness, yet very much an undeniable aspect Anthony Leong does not draw attention to. When one tries to call Korean cinema the "New Hong Kong cinema", one is just supplanting one's notions of what constitutes dominant filmic forms of expression in Asia for the rest which could be equally distinct and different apart from it. I managed to obtain access to the book via its online pages, where certain review sections were cut and pasted onto the Internet site for Anthony Leong's book, but disappointed at his whole paradigm of analysis, which assumes a certain shared culture or filmic set of paradigms for filmmaking between Korea and Hong Kong, I would dissuade anyone who wants to know more about Korean films to try doing so via Anthony Leong's book.

Secondly, the book shows little reference to the earlier periods of Korean cinema which are in fact the formative years, starting from the years of early Japanese colonialism and occupation, and the heavy censorship and propaganda exposure which seriously limited the film industry in Korea, to the deposing of the various military regimes from Sgnyman Rhee right through to the current legacy of the "Sunshine Policy" bequeathed by Kim Dae-Jung and how all these political-historical movements have affected the mediatised expressions of culture and nationalism on Korean cinema. Anthony Leong's book carries virtually little or no allusion to all these, which even the amateur interested in Korean cinema will make the effort to find out about.

If one desires a better and more comprehensive guide to Korean cinema and its auteurs, that is, for good publications in English, one would be better placed if he or she turns to Professor Lee Hyangjin's "Contemporary Korean Cinema" or journal articles written by either native Koreans or Tony Rayns and Chris Berry(academics established in the non-Korean world for their expertise in East Asian films).

I wish I had this book a year ago. I would have saved so much money in choosing which Korean DVDs to buy. This book rates and reviews a number of movies and even has some background on what's happening in the Korean movie industry. If you are a fan of Korean movies, check this out.

KOREAN CINEMA: THE NEW HONG KONG is clearly the product of a genuine convert to the form. Whether Anthony C.Y. Leong has remained so is anyone's guess as of late, but it indeed comes as a small surprise that this book was written by a regular contributor to Thomas Weisser's execrable ASIAN CULT CINEMA magazine, a publication that has done more to pigeonhole Asian cinema into one gigantic bowl of sex and sadism than any Pink-film-loving pervert could do in a lifetime.

From evidence provided here, though, Leong's passion for movies (which is also evidenced via various online review portals, the style here being little better than that) is better served by self-published efforts such as this than it is sandwiched between the salacious and error-ridden pages of Weisser's rag. Weisser's ASIAN CULT CINEMA book, a late-90's reference guide to Hong Kong cinema that has disseminated more MISinformation to the world than any fifty amateur fanzines could circa 1990, is still being peddled to an unsuspecting base of newcomers (I've yet to ascertain whether Leong was a contributor, but it's likely), so it's refreshing to know that viewers curious about Korean cinema at least have a reference guide that, while not blessed with particularly great prose, is at least honest and forthight in its appreciation of its subject matter, without resorting to the cheap putdowns and mysogynist leanings of the Weisser material with which its author, perhaps unwittingly, has previously been associated.

Leong is, however, WAY WAY OFF BASE in labelling Korean cinema "The New Hong Kong." The assumption that one country's cinematic fare is so lacking in cultural identity that it stands only to supplant the fare of another country - following that all Asian cinema somehow "blends" together in the eyes of outsiders - is simplistic and ill-informed to say the least. Leong, who is Chinese, makes repeated commentary about the downfall of Hong Kong cinema while holding Korean cinema up as the natural successor to the throne. Hong Kong cinema, however, is still very much alive and kicking, and while Korean cinema has certainly enjoyed a renaissance of sorts (both domestically and internationally) since the release of the high-tech action thriller SHIRI in 1999, nearly seven years on, many Korean films are still plagued by tired concepts, poorly-plotted screenplays, crass histrionics, and various culturally-specific idosyncracies that may yet be their undoing in the international market once the demand for genre pictures has dried up (as I write this, the Korean DVD market is in a serious state of financial decline). (2007 EDIT: much of this has come to pass: Korean films are garnering fewer distribs at film festivals, and they're lucky if they get one or two breakout smashes a year; DVD sales are nearlly dead in the country. They're still making films worth watching, but the industry is in serious pain right now.

However, Leong's book generally covers films from 1998 to 2002, which any Korean film fan will tell you is the period they first "discovered" Korean cinema, too. And as such, the book clearly is/was a labour of love. More scholarly books have been written on Korean cinema both before and since Leong's self-published tome, but none have ventured to simply provide straight-up reviews of the many varied films that came from this period, so depite his web-forum-worthy writing style, Leong still managed a small victory for the fanboys.. Mind you, scholarly works on Korean cinema (and Korea itself!) are virtually required reading--I strongly prefer them to a book like this--if one is to truly understand the cultural subtext running through much of modern Korean cinema. Thus, Leong's book stands as the best place to START your journey, but once you've seen the films, and if you truly want to know more, then it might be good to augment this book with a more serious cultural, cinematic or even socio-political study.

The format of Leong's reviews is a bit too structurally consistent (intro-synopsis-opinion-rinse-repeat), which means they're best digested a few at a time, preferably just before of just after watching the film in question, which will at least grant the book an extended shelf life as the reader builds a Korean DVD collection. Also, the reviews are grouped into "categories," which is restrictive, particularly as many of the films aren't so easily pigeonholed. It's a small gripe, admittedly, but straightforward alphebetical listings would be much more user-friendly.

Since the book's publication at the very beginning of 2003, however, Korean cinema has produced an incredible number of feature films -ranging from derivative-but-pretty junk like MY BOYFRIEND IS TYPE B and RED EYE to international arthouse darlings like OLDBOY and TAE GUK GI - that would be well served by an update to Leong's manuscript, something which has yet to take place but would firmly cement his position as one of the few non-internet-based reviewers to tackle the subject matter in this way. One hopes that the visible reduction in his output might mean he's working on a revised version of his book, but as he's not one to return emails from interested supporters (especially those who are, at the same time, like myself, openly hostile towards his previous "employer," Miami-based bootlegger and "author" Thomas Weisser), we may simply have to wait and see what comes next, if anything...

The odd grammatical and printing error aside, this is a well-produced and easy to use guide to some of the best film-making of the last ten years or so.

It's worth noting quickly that despite the glossy cover, the book is entirely black-and-white inside with pictures that are of an acceptable rather than brilliant quality. Personally, I find this to be a very minor quibble.

I was already very enthused by recent Korean cinema before reading this book and have enjoyed it very much, but it would also make an ideal introduction for someone only just thinking of dipping their toes into the invigorating waters of the Korean New Wave.

I can't fully appreciate the frequent comparisons made with Hong Kong film-making of the 1980s having seen very little of it, but it hardly matters; this book puts across in no uncertain terms just how exciting the film scene in Korea has been for the last decade, and it would be a hard-hearted person who isn't stimulated to seek out a DVD or a viewing of some of the films reviewed here.

This is not to say, however, that the book is unbalanced. The author's enthusiasm for Korean cinema is obvious, but does not stop him criticising those films - some, even, that have done very well at the box office - that he considers do not come up to scratch.

The book is sensibly laid out to make it easy to either read straight through or dip into for specific information. It begins with a brief - and NOT heavy-going - history of the Korean film industry coming right up to the beginning of the 21st century. There then follows a chapter of in-depth reviews of 10 of the best Korean films that 'Everyone Should See'. After that the chapters are divided up by film genre (Action, Horror, etc.), and there are 87 (yes, I counted!) high-quality reviews in all. The last few chapters introduce some of the rising stars of the industry, give some assistance to those wishing to find and see these films, and look to the future of Korean film-making.

The only major disappointment for me was that due to the book's having been published in 2002, wonderful films such as A Bittersweet Life, Memories of Murder and Save the Green Planet! are not included, having been released from 2003 onwards. It would be silly to complain about this type of issue since it is inevitable, but here's hoping for a new edition of Korean Cinema: The New Hong Kong sometime soon because the cinematic gems just keep on coming!

A good book on an ignored area of film. It does what it promises.

What a great book! Everything you need to know about Korean movies all in one package. With lots of background on why Korean movies kick ass right now, what movies are worth watching, and which ones should be avoided, you definetely get your money's worth here. I hope he writes another one soon!