Korea Tour: The Jokes Come Last with Darcy Paquet

Published: Dec. 21, 2014, 5:29 p.m.

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In Seoul\'s Garosu-gil, Colin talks with Darcy Paquet, critic of Korean film, founder of\\xa0koreanfilm.org\\xa0and the\\xa0Wildflower Film Awards, author of\\xa0New Korean Cinema: Breaking the Waves, teacher, and occasional actor. They discuss why\\xa0movies\\xa0have a hard time capturing Seoul; the unusual way the Park brothers\'\\xa0Bitter, Sweet, Seoul\\xa0captures the city;\\xa0how\\xa0Cold Eyes\\xa0relocated a Hong Kong story into Seoul; how, after arriving in Korea in 1997, he got to know the city in step with getting to know the cinema; how he knew Seoul would grow dramatically as soon as he got there, but how nobody expected the Korean film industry would grow so much; why, right when Korean culture started going worldwide; Korean filmmakers were ready; which Korean movies Koreans tried to steer foreigners away from, and which they themselves have returned to more recently; what strengths older Korean films whose makers had to "fight the system" have that modern ones don\'t; how effectively one can ready oneself for Korean life with Korean film; the size of Korea\'s cinematic iceberg beneath the tip of\\xa0Oldboy,\\xa0Shiri,\\xa0Snowpiercer, and the like; the less-defined border between Korea\'s mainstream theaters and its "art houses"; what happens when Korean directors go Hollywood to make movies like\\xa0The Last Stand\\xa0and\\xa0Stoker; what part movies (and associated pursuits) have played in helping him master the Korean language; the kind of diversity Korea has as revealed in cinema; the meaning of modernized hanok; why the last twenty minutes of Korean movies are so often just crying; the importance of\\xa0Chilsu and Mansu, the first film that stepped in after the relaxation of censorship to make a political point; the sort of political criticism expressed in more recent movies like\\xa0The President\'s Last Bang\\xa0and\\xa0The Attorney; whether he feels more critical freedom than would a Korean; how Korean producers have done less to "protect directors from the money" these days; the "difference of opinion on objectivity and subjectivity" between Korea and the west as expressed in documentaries and their switch from "we" to "I"; what filmmaking techniques work on him now that wouldn\'t have when he first came to Korea (and which still don\'t); whether\\xa0films have yet begun to take\\xa0him back to his previous years in Seoul; what he sees when he revisits\\xa0Christmas in August, one of the first Korean films he ever saw; how much of the Korea ahead, the country his sons and their generation of Koreans unlike those the world has known before will grow up in, he can see in the movies.

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