Lee Chang-dong
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Steven Yeun: Sustaining The Other Vertices in Lee Chang-dong’s Burning
Jong-Su (Ah-In Yoo) meets Hae-Mi (Jong-Seo Jeon) dancing at a storefront display beside a lottery machine. Her dance partner projects keywords (“Sales,” “Prizes”) over a PA system and through a K-Pop deluge. They are lures. Hae-Mi has rigged the whole raffle, Jong-Su wins a pink wristwatch (per her intervention) and she expects he’ll gift it back to her. This is no meet-cute, it’s an odd-reunion, Hae-Mi reveals to Jong-Su, her old friend. They grew up together, but Jong-Su either can’t remember or can’t recognize her post-plastic surgery. He won’t forget her now. These two characters thicken and sink to form […]
by A.E. Hunt on Oct 26, 2018 -
“There’s Something Clearly Wrong, But We Just Can’t See It, Though It’s Part of Everyday Life”: Lee Chang-dong on his Haruki Murakami Adaptation, Burning
In Lee Chang-dong’s latest masterwork Burning, mystery is everything. The two-and-a-half hour epic lives and breathes the tiniest ambiguities of every waking moment, refusing to come to anything resembling true clarity, but in its way offering as clear a depiction of the stresses and concerns of modern life. The film, Lee’s first as director since 2010’s Poetry, is based on the short story “Barn Burning,” by Haruki Murakami, and tells the story of Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in), a young man living without much means close to the border with North Korea. On a visit to Seoul he bumps into a childhood […]
by Corey Atad on Oct 25, 2018 -
TIFF 2018 Critic’s Notebook 1: Boy Erased, Burning
An adaptation of Garrard Conley’s memoir (which I haven’t read) about attending a “gay conversion” camp at age 19, Joel Edgerton’s Boy Erased scans as, and turns out to be precisely, textbook Oscar-bait: it’s topical, its heart is in the right place, the cast is stacked, and despite all good intentions the final effect is very meh (“powerful” is a word I expect to see used a lot). Edgerton’s directorial debut, The Gift, was (minus its vile ending) a tautly commendable thriller; visually, Boy Erased looks very much in the same pocket at the outset, all nighttime darkness and tightly composed […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 6, 2018 -
Cannes Dispatch #6: Under the Silver Lake, Burning
While there are discoveries to be had at this festival, Cannes is notoriously light on unknown quantities; Yomeddine is the only debut in this year’s Competition slate, and who knows how or why that happened. It’s a festival that prides itself on grandiosity and presenting the vanguard of arthouse filmmaking, albeit with some degree of familiarity, which means that much of the excitement of coming to watch movies here stems either from promises fulfilled or witnessing the occasional familiar face move in a new direction. Invigorating as these latter cases are to behold, they inevitably arrive with mixed results, as exemplified in […]
by Blake Williams on May 18, 2018 -
Secret Sunshine — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Secret Sunshine is available on DVD and Blu-ray through The Criterion Collection.) The history of Lee Chang-dong’s extraordinary Secret Sunshine is a textbook case of both the problems and the miracles at play in the current marketplace for international cinema here in the United States. The film, which premiered at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival (winning the Best Actress award for Jeon Do-yeon’s devastating performance), was featured in the U.S. that same autumn at The New York Film Festival. But despite critical accolades (the film won indieWIRE’s 2007 Best Undistributed Film poll in a landslide), Secret Sunshine remained in limbo […]
by Tom Hall on Aug 25, 2011
