Posterized Propaganda October 2012: Summer Excess and Festival Freshness

“Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover” is a proverb whose simple existence proves the fact impressionable souls will do so without fail. This monthly column focuses on the film industry’s willingness to capitalize on this truth, releasing one-sheets to serve as not representations of what audiences are to expect, but as propaganda to fill seats. Oftentimes they fail miserably. Summer is over and the studios still have a few genre flicks to unload before the arthouse, festival favorites begin rolling out. Oh, and Halloween is here too. The sad…

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NYAFF12 REVIEW: 범죄와의 전쟁 [Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time] [2012]

“There’s no end to a man’s greed” Set against President Tae-woo Roh’s 1990 crackdown on organized crime in South Korea, 범죄와의 전쟁 [Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time] places us into the wild life of a former Busan customs agent and the selfish games he plays with two of the city’s most notorious gangsters. Written and directed by Jung-woo Ha, the film being hailed as its country’s Goodfellas sifts through time in order to illustrate this man’s odd trajectory from crooked civil servant to crime syndicate boss while discovering whether…

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REVIEW: 악마를 보았다 [I Saw the Devil] [2010]

“You already lost” No one seems to know how to do a revenge flick like the South Koreans. You could infer this is caused by the strife they’ve been enduring for so long with their neighbors to the north or maybe they just possess some of the most violent and volatile minds in the world. With 악마를 보았다 [I Saw the Devil], writer Hoon-jung Park and director Jee-woon Kim have crafted a two and a half hour long epic of evil versus evil. Because even though Special Agent Kim Soo-hyeon…

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