Yes, that’s Gang Hye-jeong of “Welcome to Dongmakgol,” and yes, the sign reads, “The screen quota is the whole world’s Dongmakgol. Protect it.”
Ripped off from Star News.
On a positive note, Lee Yeong-ae is looking pretty good at the Berlin Film Festival. Nice hanbok.
22 Comments
What can one say: that they themsleves all know that they are simply not ready for prime time?
But …. but, then how can we be so superior??!!!
The terrible irony is that some of them are fit for the world stage.
Oh great, more stupid actors with miniscule knowledge of the world. Yawn, there’s enough of the morons back home, do we have to hear from these twits here, too?
She looks like my girlfirend without makeup.
Nice tieup of protest and self-promotion. In Taiwan a gov’t agency said it was considering restricting or banning foreign TV dramas from prime-time there–which most people interpret as directed against Korean dramas, because that’s when they air in Taiwan. If Korea can do it, why not Taiwan, or any other country, right? Instead of letting the market decide through peoples’ preferences about what they want to watch, let every gov’t impose its own quota based on the special interests of a priveleged minority. Brilliant.
Have any big names had the guts to do anything but toe the party line on this issue? It’s not even a matter of opposing the quotas outright; a simple, confident, “our movies are good enough to stand on their own” would do. Has anyone influential in the Korean film community actually said this? So far, I’ve only seen the folks who are terrified of losing their training wheels.
Whats wrong with it. I know they are chickens and dont want to compete with movies from other countries, but it happens in other countries as well. Pakistan has banned anything Indian; Dramas,Movies,Music. But still they do well in pirated copy sales and their movie industry is close to becoming bankrupt.
How is this different from trade?No country undermines its own industry to allow foreign products . They usually have high taxes and quota system. When EU wants to suspend trade with china, they just wanna save their industry but when it happens here,they are chickens,eh!
As Haisan demonstrated in an earlier post here, the quota system is basically symbolic, not useful:
http://www.rjkoehler.com/?p=2385
The whole point of trade liberalization is to remove artificial barriers like this. If you’re referring to the EU-China textile dispute, the quota was temporary, put in place to give time to EU producers to catch up to China in textile manufacturing. Some could argue that the S. Korean film quota has also outlived its usefulness, as Haisan showed.
Isnt that the North Korean propaganda movie?
Anyway, with the crap that Hollywood has been producing these past couple of years, I dont think these guys have anything to worry about.
I’m torn about the quota issue now. At first, I thought protecting it would impede the FTA, which is a good thing. But on the other hand, US movies tend to be rich in racist stereotypes. Koreans, who for the most part have little contact with foreigners, get most of their ideas about foreigners from American movies.
But, of course, now that I’ve said it, all the usual suspects would be jumping on me claiming nonsense and racism in Korea is solely due to Koreans’s obsession with “superiority” and “purity of blood”. Yeah, I get now. Korea’s “superiority”…it’s the expat’s new “bo-shing-tang” joke, ha ha.
I meant that the FTA is a good thing, not protecting the quota. That was a poorly worded sentence.
Movies are powerful media. They can change one’s perception about the world, history, other race and men-women relationship.
I think Korean movies need protection. Without protection, Hollywood and HongKong movies may stamp out Korean movies. With rich film technology and beautiful actresses, Hollywood can end Korean film production. End of HanRyu!
Korean value system {no Homo, respect for the old, compassion, no drug, family-oriented thinking} needs to survive in the Korean movies.
I support the movie quota system!
Having written that, it occurred to me that the recent best Korean movie, “King’s man”, is about a man’s love toward another man. I have not seen the movie, but I believe there is no intercourse, as in “Brokeback mountain”. I have not seen that movie either, but I have seen some trailers.
That movie is an exception.
No, it’s not an exception. I doubt you’d make it past the first scene of Road Movie (2002), which is compared to The King’s Man here. Broken Branches (1995) was Korea’s first film with an openly gay character, and Memento Mori (1999) was a teen lesbian ghost story. Those are the names I can think of off the top of my head, though gay characters pop up in a few other films.
Drug use is uncommon, though appeared in Tears (2001), but family-oriented thinking? How many movies are about husbands and wives having affairs - going back to 1956 with Madame Freedom.
Many of these Korean values you mention are just as likely to be absent as they are to be present in modern Korean films - they’re reflecting just how much Korea’s value system is changing.
Baduk, don’t worry about Korean movies–they are well established overseas and typically get great reviews in the L.A. Times and Village Voice and elsewhere. Korea has its own strong directors like Im Kwon-taek and Kim Ki-duk, who are as accomplished as any others.
We all know why Hollywood dominates the box office around the world, and yet there’s always a big audience for good movies from any country. Most non-Koreans I know like the Korean movies that don’t try to copy Hollywood formulas.
“HongKong movies may stamp out Korean movies”
HK films went through what the Korean industry is going through now 5-10 years ago… if Korea keeps up with their current practices of using the same leading actors, the same crappy stories… the industry will go down the drain like that of HK. Hallryu wont last for much longer…
HK films arent likely to stamp out Korean films, the HK film industry is a catastrophe at the moment… the next big market will probably be China
baduk ??n
what is the meaning of ?????
I’m still not completely certain as to the meaning of her sign. I’m assuming she means to say that the screen quota allows Koreans movies to coexist with foreign ones, but when I think of dongmakgol from the movie, I’m thinking first and foremost of people of different backgrounds *freely* coexisting with each other, and the quota is of course anything but a free system. Am I wrong to think that the sign is just stupid in that way?
“Drug use is uncommon”
Friend?
Dong Mak Gol sybolized the Shire, ie., Korea, a small of innocence and purity victimized by forces beyond its comprehension and specifically threatened by the prospect of annihilation at the hands of the unfeeling,heartless, clumsy American and their bombers. Her sign indicates that Korea is hopelessly stuck in the past, unwilling or unable to compete on a level field with global excellence.
Mizar, *her* film is a sign of a certain historical blindness of mythic proportions, as any honest Korean historian could tell one. “????? — as I call it — is modern-day revisionism of the worst kind, where one takes a variety of facts and creates a “mash-up” or collage from such, thus creating a work of realistic fiction.
One person’s art is another persons propaganda.
You know, as a film, I actually liked “Welcome to Dongmakgol,” or at least the first two-thirds. Yeah, its historical viewpoint and politics were problematic, to say the least, but I liked the way it was filmed. Very creative, I thought, especially the semi-anime work.
Robert, I liked it too - not that it was good, but since it didn’t bore me too much or make my eyes roll more than 60% of the time, I judge it successful Korean cinema.