Tag: freezing

Concrete Utopia
(Konkeuriteu Yutopia,
콘크리트 유토피아)

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 1 April 2024
No Comments on Concrete Utopia
(Konkeuriteu Yutopia,
콘크리트 유토피아)
Sticky post

Director – Eom Tae-hwa – 2023 – South Korea – Cert. 15 – 130m

****1/2

A massive earthquake makes the residents of the sole Seoul apartment block still standing close their doors to survivors outside – out on UK digital platforms on Monday, April 1st

Concrete: a structural material made of aggregate, cement, and water. (Definition from Encyclopedia Britannica.) Harsh. Unyielding. Impenetrable. Opaque. Not alive. Commonly used in today’s world in the manufacture of buildings, and associated with Brutalist architecture.

Utopia: an ideal community whose inhabitants exist under seemingly perfect conditions. (Definition from Encyclopedia Britannica.) The English word derives from two Greek words, the compound meaning of which is nowhere. Hence, “seemingly”. Utopias tend to have some fatal flaw. If they didn’t, any story about them would lack dramatic conflict. Thus, the word carries within it a degree of irony.

The eponymous montage of these two words pits them against each other: an unyielding, dead physicality confronts the optimism of a better world. The title evokes JG Ballard’s novels Concrete Island (1974) and High-Rise (1975), the former about a stranded motorist struggling to survive on a spaghetti junction after a car accident, the latter about a newly built block of flats in which the residents descend through social breakdown towards a new order.… Read the rest

Tags Anti-Crime Force, apartment, apartment block, architecture, block of flats, brutalism, Brutalist architecture, buildings, city, community, compassion, con, concrete, congressman, construction, couple, crime, decision-making, decision-making process, delegate, devastation, dystopia, earthquake, Eom Tae-hwa, extinguish, family unit, fire, food, foot in the door, freezing, freezing weather, homeless, hose, identity theft, jet of water, JG Ballard, Kim Sun-young, LEAFF, LEAFF 2023, Lee Byung-hun, London East Asia Film Festival, London East Asia Film Festival 2023, murder mystery, neighbour, new order, Park Bo-young, Park Ji-hu, Park Seo-joon, payment, people, representative, residents, scam, schoolgirl, search for food, selfish, selfishness, sentenced to death, Seoul, social breakdown, South Korea, special effects, steal, survival, survive, survivors, Taxi Driver, theft, thriller, Tremors, urban, utopia, violence confrontation, vote, weather, Women's Association

Features Live Action Movies

Finding Angel
(Cheonsaneun Baileoseu,
천사는 바이러스)

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 23 November 2021
No Comments on Finding Angel
(Cheonsaneun Baileoseu,
천사는 바이러스)

Director – Kim Seong-jun – 2021 – South Korea – Cert. 15 – 114m

****

Who is the mysterious so-called ‘Angel’ who every Christmas delivers a box containing a large sum of money to a needy local resident of a small, rural town? – out in cinemas on Friday, November 26th

For the last seventeen years at Christmas, the ‘Faceless Angel’ has visited the town of Rohsong in Jeonju City, South Korea to leave a box containing money for a local person in need. Last year, an old woman received the money she needed for a knee operation. Who this person might actually be has remained a mystery, but the locals are glad the Angel is there doing what he or she is doing.

Wishing to solve the mystery and with the journalist’s scent of a good story, newspaperman Kim Ji-hoon (Park Sung-il from Samjin Company English Class, Lee Jong-pil, 2020) arrives in the town in December as the temperature plummets. He makes enquiries at the town office but the girl on the front desk (Lee Ga-kyung) stonewalls him. His attempts at talking to the townspeople don’t get him very far until he talks to old Miss Ok-bun (Moon Sook) about renting a room and she promptly puts him up in her freezing upstairs bedroom.… Read the rest

Features Live Action Movies

Battle
In Outer Space
(Uchu Daisenso,
宇宙大戦争,
lit. The Great Space War)

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 31 March 2021
No Comments on Battle
In Outer Space
(Uchu Daisenso,
宇宙大戦争,
lit. The Great Space War)

*****

Director – Ishiro Honda – 1959 – Japan – Cert. U – 90m

Battle In Outer Space is one of those films that paints on a bigger canvas and sacrifices character development in favour of big-screen visual spectacle, brought to life with state-of-the-art special effects. According to Kalat, the film owes much to the bigger Hollywood 1950s SF feature film films made in colour. These include not only films by former Puppetoon animation creator George Pal such as The War Of The Worlds (1953) and Conquest Of Space (1955) but also This Island Earth (1955) and Forbidden Planet (1956).

Honda’s film wades straight in to alien war scenarios… [read more]

Over at All The Anime, I review Eureka!’s Ishiro Honda Blu-ray double bill of The H Man and Battle In Outer Space.

Tags 1950s, alien, America, astronaut, Battle In Outer Space, bombardment, cinema building, Cinerama, Columbia, conference, Conquest Of Space, damsel in distress, East Germany, Eiji Tsubaraya, Etsuko Shiraishi, Forbidden Planet, freezing, gags, gender bias, George Pal, George Whitman, Godzilla, Golden Gate Bridge, Great Space War, India, Iran, Ishiro Honda, Japan, Kyoko Anzai, landscape, life form, meteors, mind control, moon, Mothra, New York, nuclear tests, Philippines, position of women, Puppetoons, ray, rover, Ryu Ikebe, San Francisco, science, science fiction, scientist, SF, Shinichi Sekizawa, ship, space torpedoes, space travel, special effects, The H Men, The War Of The Worlds, This Island Earth, Toho, Tokyo, UFO, US, weightlessness, Yoshio Tsuchiya, zero gravity

Features Live Action Movies

Ishiro Honda
Double Feature
The H Man
(Bijo
To Ekitai-ningen,
美女と液体人間)
and
Battle
In Outer Space
(Uchu Daisenso,
宇宙大戦争)

The H Man

*****

Director – Ishiro Honda – 1958 – Japan – Cert. X – 86m

Battle in Outer Space

*****

Director – Ishiro Honda – 1959 – Japan – Cert. U – 90m

Alongside the standalone release of Mothra (1961) comes a double bill of two more Toho science fiction movies directed by Ishiro Honda with special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya: , The H Man (1958) and Battle In Outer Space (1959). The Toho studio is associated more with monster movies than any other genre, notably Godzilla (1954) and Mothra. The superior entries in this cycle tend to be the ones they directed, including the initial 1954 film which ticked all the right boxes to prove a massive success.

When no-one at Toho was quite sure what had made Godzilla work, the pair collaborated on a number of different SF films before everything came together on Mothra. The H Man is a monster film dressed up in gangster trappings while Battle in Outer Space is an epic with space stations, flying saucers, rocket ships, an alien moon base and alien mind control… [read more]

Over at All The Anime, I review Eureka!’s Ishiro Honda double bill Blu-ray.

Tags 1950s, alien, America, astronaut, Battle In Outer Space, bombardment, cinema building, Cinerama, Columbia, conference, Conquest Of Space, cops, cops and robbers, damsel in distress, detective, East Germany, Eiji Tsubaraya, Etsuko Shiraishi, Forbidden Planet, freezing, gags, gangster, gas, gender bias, George Pal, George Whitman, ghost, Godzilla, Golden Gate Bridge, Great Space War, India, inspector, Iran, Ishiro Honda, Japan, Jasper Sharp, Kaiju, Kyoko Anzai, landscape, life form, liquid, Matango, meteors, mind control, monster, moon, Mothra, mushroom, mutant, New York, nuclear tests, Philippines, police, police procedural, position of women, Puppetoons, ray, rover, Ryu Ikebe, sailor, San Francisco, science, science fiction, scientist, SF, Shinichi Sekizawa, ship, singer, song, space torpedoes, space travel, special effects, Takashi Kimura, The H Man, The H Men, The Human Vapor, The War Of The Worlds, This Island Earth, Toho, Tokyo, trauma, UFO, US, Warning From Space, weightlessness, Yoshio Tsuchiya, zero gravity