“This is the city: Los Angeles, California,” begins the narration of Thom Andersen’s “Los Angeles Plays Itself.” “They make movies here. I live here.” When I first heard those words, spoken over an assembly of black-and-white shots of freeways, studio lots and theater marquees from Los Angeles movies of the 1940s and 50s, I, too, […]
Over the past few months, a publicity blitz of the caliber usually reserved for Hollywood superhero spectacles has urged Koreans to see a I Can Speak (아이 캔 스피크), a movie about a straight-laced young civil servant who reluctantly gives English lessons to an old battleaxe. Or at least that’s how it looked at first: as more […]
Earlier this month, Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit opened in theaters across America, dramatizing an increasingly oft-referenced eruption of violence in relatively recent American history. At just about the same time, Jang Hoon’s A Taxi Driver (택시운전사) opened in theaters across South Korea, dramatizing an increasingly oft-referenced eruption of violence in relatively recent Korean history. The tagline of the American film’s […]
The World’s Best Design Cities 2017 (Metropolis) “The crowds coursing down Via Tortona or gathering outside Bar Basso for one week in April are no more than a memory when the city is deserted in August. For years, it was also a city of extreme traditionalism: The Salone del Mobile’s gravitational pull on innovative international designers seemed […]
On the day we caught Okja, the latest, Netflix-produced film by superstar Korean director Bong Joon-ho, my girlfriend and I went to a tonkatsu place we’d been meaning to return to — deliberately eating before the screening, not after. Everything we knew about the movie, posters for which went up in our neighborhood in Seoul […]
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 […]
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 […]
나는 지난주에 한국영상자료원에서 홍상수 감독의 최신 영화 <당신자신과 당신의 것>을 보면서 내가 로스엔잴래스에 살 때를 떠올렸다. 왜냐하면 한국어를 얼마 공부하지 않은 그 때 나는 로스앤젠네스에 본사를 둔 한국 신문 기자로부터 인터뷰를 요청받고 흥쾌히 응했다. 기자는 나에게 왜 한국에 대해 관심을 가지고 있냐고 물어봤고 나는 처음 본 한국 영화들 때문이라고 대답했다. 아버지께서 한국 영화 평론가라고 소개한 […]