Korean cinema 101

The highest grossing Korean film of all time was The Host, a monster film with some very significant connotations. The Host was inspired, in part, by an incident in 2000 in which a large amount of formaldehyde was dumped down a drain by a mortician in Seoul. The local American Military base accused the South Koreans of complacency towards their environment. In retaliation, the chemical agent used by American forces in The Host to defeat the monster is called ‘Agent Yellow', a thinly veiled reference to ‘Agent Orange,' the herbicide used by the US to destroy crops during the Vietnam War. Ironically, the US has bought the rights to The Host. Gore Verbinski, director of Pirates of the Caribbean, is attached to produce a remake.

THE HOST

Before working on The Good The Bad The Weird, Kim Ji-woon made the highest grossing Korean horror film of all time, A Tale of Two Sisters. DreamWorks bought the rights to the story and produced ‘The Uninvited', which will be released later this year and stars David Strathairn (The Bourne Ultimatum) and Emily Browning (Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events).

A TALE OF TWO SISTERS

2008 saw the release of Na Hong-jin's The Chaser, an underworld detective drama. In March last year, Warner Brothers bought the rights to The Chaser for 1 million dollars. William Monahan, the writer of The Departed, and Leonardo DiCaprio have been attached to the US remake.

THE CHASER

The Good The Bad The Weird has had similar success to previous big budget Korean films. Director Kim Ji-woon says that the films is a "story of three men who love their homeland but are forced out of their country to take refuge in the vast deserts and plains of Manchuria," a subtlety to which Korean audiences have recognised as an attitude towards exile from their mother country, or an undertone of division. The film picked up four prizes at the 29th Blue Dragon Awards, Korea's version of The Oscars. Byung-hun Lee, who plays ‘The Bad,' has been cast as Storm Shadow in next year's remake of the classic '80s cartoon G.I. Joe - The Rise of Cobra.

Korea seems to have provided Hollywood with some decent remakes in the last few years, however this isn't a new phenomenon. The West has always looked east for filmic inspiration; Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai was the basis for The Magnificent Seven. Ironically, many of the original Spaghetti Western films owe their inspiration to Eastern cinema; Yojimbo (cited as Clint Eastwood's favourite film) became A Fist Full of Dollars. Korean cinema completes the circle with a (semi) homage to The Good The Bad and The Ugly; The Good The Bad The Weird.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE WEIRD