Category: Entertainment Files

Tweet of the Day: Best Korean Film of 2014?

| January 27, 2015

<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” lang=”en”><p>‘Han Gong-ju’ picked as best film of 2014 by Korean film reporters <a href=”http://t.co/3TBjw7y9u4″>http://t.co/3TBjw7y9u4</a> <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/HanGongJu?src=hash”>#HanGongJu</a> <a href=”http://t.co/gxiBDe0bh6″>pic.twitter.com/gxiBDe0bh6</a></p>&mdash; The Korea Times (@koreatimes) <a href=”https://twitter.com/koreatimes/status/559803858663141376″>January 26, 2015</a></blockquote>
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Tweet of the Day: Korea’s Rap Queen

| January 14, 2015

<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” lang=”en”><p>Korean rap queen <a href=”https://twitter.com/Yoonmirae”>@Yoonmirae</a> interviewed: &quot;Aside from the language barrier, music is music.&quot; <a href=”http://t.co/b792EzHe1I”>http://t.co/b792EzHe1I</a> <a href=”http://t.co/v3SqjHhA4I”>pic.twitter.com/v3SqjHhA4I</a></p>&mdash; MTV Iggy (@mtviggy) <a href=”https://twitter.com/mtviggy/status/555039307611000832″>January 13, 2015</a></blockquote>
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Sony’s “The Interview” is Released and Critics are Not Impressed

| December 27, 2014

The highly controversial movie “The Interview” was released yesterday despite threats from North Korean sponsored hackers and that means more reviews of the movie are in.  Like some of the initial screening reviews I read these reviews are not good either:

The Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy calls it “an intensely sophomoric and rampantly uneven comic takedown of an easy but worrisomely unpredictable target, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. In the relatively sparse annals of irreverent major studio comedies that pissed off foreign nations, for big laughs this one doesn’t rate anywhere near Borat or Team America: World Police. … As political satire goes, The Interview has the comic batting average of a mediocre-to-average Saturday Night Live sketch, with a few potent laughs erupting from an overall mash of sex, drugs and TV broadcasting jokes that feel rooted in a sense of humor primarily characterized by a frat-boy/altered state/prolonged adolescence mind-set.”

Additionally, “if you set up as provocative a premise as do the makers of The Interview, you ultimately have to deal with all its implications; let’s just say that what concludes the film is rote action, simplistic wish-fulfillment stuff that feels cheap and naive and more concerned with looking coolly kick-ass than with any real-world consequences. Even if one part of the film is sincere in wanting to highlight North Korea’s negatives (famine, ideological orthodoxy, cult of personality, militarism, nuclear brinkmanship, et al.), the larger part is devoted to very Western-style sexual grossness, deterministic outrageousness, self-satisfied obliviousness and contended immaturity.” Alongside Franco and Rogen, “Park brings great energy and enthusiasm to his tricky job of portraying the world’s least known big-deal ruler — there are even scenes of him getting the famous Kim haircut and selecting a suit from a closet full of identical ones.”  [The Hollywood Reporter]

You can read more reviews at the link, but this movie appears to be pretty horrible.  I think I will pass on watching it even if it is supposed to be my patriotic duty now to do so.  Has any ROK Heads seen this film and can verify how bad it is?