That’s what Andrew Lowry of The Guardian seems to think. With the upcoming release of Kim Jee-woon’s I Saw The Devil (what again? Yes, I know!) Lowry takes a look at some recent blood-soaked revenge thrillers from Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy to Lee Myung-se’s Nowhere to Hide and Na Hong-jin’s The Chaser and beyond. You can read the full article here.

Of course, this rather feels the way Korean cinema is perceived in the West. When I put this to Jang Cheol-soo, director of the very violent (but only in the last half hour) Bedevilled, he said he felt Korean films were a lot less hypocritical than those of Hollywood, but admitted that the history and geopolitical status of this country has meant it’s been more exposed to violence.

So what do you think? Drop us a comment and let us know…

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This entry was published by Andy H on Thursday, March 31st, 2011 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Editorials, Filmmakers, News, Releases, South Korea. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Comments to “Is Korean cinema really that angry?”

  1. Hi, nice to find your blog via the Grauniad article. As loads of commenters, myself included, noted, we only get to see a fraction of Korea’s output in the UK, and that tends to be of the violent, revenge-driven variety thanks to Oldboy. We don’t get to see lots of the S Korean films which do well with domestic audiences, but it was ever thus. For years, Western audiences thought Japanese cinemas was all about Kurosawa and Ozu – the Japanese were watching Yoji Yamada’s Tora San films. So it’s good to come to this blog and read what the actual filmmakers have to say about their own films and country (not that they are always the most reliable guide ;-) .)

    Helena April 1st, 2011 at 12:39 pm

  2. Thanks Helena!

    Andrew Heskins April 1st, 2011 at 7:56 pm

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