Johnny Cash, the iconic outlaw of country and western music, may have come straight out of Arkansas, and he may have launched his career in Memphis, but in his story, unlike those of many other legends in his musical tradition, the Golden State also plays a major role. Even his casual fans understand that, many […]
The Korean name of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, sa-i-gu (사이구), means “four, two, nine” — or rather 4/29, the first of the six days they tore through streets after the the Rodney King verdict came out. Given Los Angeles’ large Korean population, the highest of any city outside the Korean Peninsula itself, and the […]
Mixers, sports matches, drinking contests, brushes with the law, anxiety about the future — Western audiences have come to expect all these elements from college comedies over the past half-century, and they’ll recognize them all in The March of Fools (바보들의 행진), a movie that belongs to essentially the same tradition. But it renders its college-comedy […]
Wednesday, March 22, 2017
The defining quality of Alfred Hitchcock’s Los Angeles is that he didn’t have one. Or rather, he had a Los Angeles in his life, but not in his work. By the time he passed away in his Bel-Air home in 1980, the Leytonstone-born director’s filmography had grown to include more than 50 features across a […]
One singer and one drummer on an otherwise nearly bare stage, expressing the pain of Korea for four or five hours: the prospect, to a great many foreigners, does not immediately appeal. Then again, despite its deep roots in the culture, the traditional form of musical storytelling called pansori (판소리) didn’t much appeal to a […]
Thursday, December 29, 2016
This week I talked with A Martinez, host of KPCC-FM’s Take Two, about how Who Framed Roger Rabbit? convinced Los Angeles that a General Motors-led conspiracy had taken away its streeetcars: Los Angeles isn’t a cartoon, but it is a main character in the 1988 film “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” The movie will be preserved this year […]
Monday, December 26, 2016
“LOS ANGELES NOVEMBER, 2019.” So, with that stark title card, begins the film that presented the most fully realized vision of the city’s future in cinema history to that point — and maybe still to this day. It also fixed its setting in the Western imagination as the go-to image of urban dystopia, though when […]
Sunday, December 25, 2016
Somehow, Christmas no longer feels like Christmas without Wes Anderson movies. Since he doesn’t have a feature out this year, we’ve held an Anderson marathon at home instead, and to go along with it I’ve compiled this list of all the Andersonian posts I’ve written for Open Culture, up to and including one on his […]
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Friday, November 11, 2016
“Is this what they mean by pure cinema?” New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane wrote in his review of “Speed” when the film came out in 1994. “The phrase sometimes hovers around people like Tarkovsky and Ozu, and with good cause, but Hollywood occasionally throws a punch so clean that it breaks through to the […]
Saturday, October 1, 2016
누군가 나에게 어떻게 한국에 대하여 관심이 생긴지 물어보면 나는 주로 한국 영화라고 대답한다. 대학교를 다닐 때보다 대학교를 졸업한 후에 대학교의 도서관을 더 자주 이용했다. 어느 날 도서관의 디브이디 수집품 중에서 아시아에 있는 나라라고 여겨지는 익숙하지 않은 많은 영화들을 발견했다. 그 당시에도 한국 식당과 교회의 간판들에서 한글을 본 적이 있어서 제목으로 쓰여져 있는 글자를 보고 그 […]