Word: koreans
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...That's where Old Boy and the Tarantino oeuvre part company, in the Korean movie's belief that guilt, not vengeance, can be the spur to a man's darkest deeds. The film's big set pieces?the devouring of a live octopus, the tongue removal without benefit of anesthetic, even a bout of lovemaking?are essentially acts of self-mutilation, in a world where Original Sin blots out the sunlight of redemption. That's not a Hollywood precept. What American movie would climax with the hero begging for the villain's mercy and licking his shoes? What U.S. movie...
...Popular Asian films, like their counterparts in North America, have a crucial movie element that is often lost in Cannes's worship of directors: star quality. Choi had already vaulted to celebrity in the Korean blockbusters Shiri and Failan. Jackie Chan, Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh and Jet Li were bulwarks of Hong Kong cinema, before they decamped to Hollywood. And in India, actors like Amitabh Bachchan are near-deities. (Alas, the delirious seductions of Bollywood musicals still elude the Cannes programmers?no Indian pop musical has been invited to compete for the Palme d'Or in nearly a half...
...screen persona has made the 22-year-old poster girl of South Korean cinema's commercial renaissance a star. Despite having made just five films, Jun has become famous throughout much of Asia, smiling on magazine and TV ads from Sapporo to Singapore. Her TV campaign for Olympus digital cameras helped hike the company's brand recognition by more than 15%, according to advertising company LG Ad. My Sassy Girl was seen by more than 5 million people in South Korea and sat on top of the box office for two weeks in Hong Kong, where local films and Hollywood...
...became Asia's favorite South Korean actress by shattering stereotypes. "Korean women have been portrayed generally as submissive, but that's simply not true," she says. Her opening scene in Sassy buries that possibility: she wobbled drunk onto a subway train, vomited on a stranger's toupee and passed out in the arms of a scandalized young man (Cha Tae Hyun). Jun's bossy character quickly took control of her timid boyfriend's life. Through it all, Jun was in charge, and audiences loved it. Wild, free and utterly herself, Jun became a model for an assertive generation of young...
...Great talent often leads to typecasting, however, and in the aftermath of Sassy, Jun was inundated with scripts that called for a vivacious, semiviolent heroine with a slight drinking problem. Instead, Jun signed on for The Uninvited, a classic South Korean horror film that dealt with infanticide, suicide, parricide and severe wedding anxiety. The depressing film had a lukewarm performance at the box office, but the role proved she had range...