Korea Weekend Box Office - July 3-5

TRANSFORMERS 2: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN continued its assault on the Korean box office (not to mention on eardrums, sanity, etc.), accounting for a huge 66 percent of all movie ticket sales last weekend. Michael Bay's robot film pulled in another 9.86 billion won ($7.8 million) on the weekend to bring its total to 35.28 billion won ($27.8 million) -- that is ahead of the opening of Bong Joon-ho's THE HOST, depending on how you count these things.

The blockbuster has now had over 5.2 million admissions in 12 days, making it by far the biggest foreign opening ever in Korea. Could TRANSFORMERS 2 be the first foreign film to make it to 10 million admissions? Possibly. I do not see any huge films on the calendar for the next couple of weeks (HARRY POTTER on the 15th, then HAEUNDAE on the 23rd). Although traditionally Hollywood films do not sustain at the box office as well as Korean films do.

After TRANSFORMERS, the next three films on the chart were all Korean, so I guess that is kind of good news. RUNNING TURTLE continues to hold up, landing in No. 2 with 1.84 billion won to bring its total to 16.18 billion won ($12.7 million).

The uplifting tale of some scrappy women overcoming the odds to compete in an unpopular sport FOREVER THE MOMENT BRONZE MEDAL had to be a disappointment -- despite a big advertising push and a big opening on over 500 screens, the weightlifting drama made just 1.78 billion won ($1.4 million) over the weekend (barely 251,000 admissions).

This Week	Title............................................	Release Date	Screens Nationwide	Weekend Revenue (bil. won)	Total Revenue (bil. won)
1.	Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen	6.24	1076	9.86	35.28
2.	Running Turtle (Geobuki Dallinda- Korean)	6.11	402	1.84	16.18
3.	Bronze Medalist (Kingkongeul Deulda - Korean)	7.01	529	1.78	2.27
4.	Blood Pledge (Yeogo Goedam 5 - Korean)	6.18	352	0.52	3.66
5.	Night at the Museum 2	6.04	254	0.25	12.25
6.	Missing Linx	6.24	204	0.21	0.65
7.	Mother (Madeo - Korean)	5.28	220	0.12	19.79
8.	Terminator: Salvation	5.21	118	0.084	29.60
9.	The Unknown Woman	7.02	21	0.066	0.093
10.	Drag Me to Hell	6.11	23	0.20	1.82

(Source: KOBIS - Figures represent 98% of nationwide box office)

Escaping North Korea, on The Daily Show

Mike Kim, author of ESCAPING NORTH KOREA, was on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show on Wednesday. You can check out the interview below.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Mike Kim
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Jason Jones in Iran

It makes me wonder how North Koreans learn Calculus using dead Americans...

There was also a short but interesting article on Mike Kim in the Japan Times.

Korea Weekend Box Office - June 26-28

TRANSFORMERS 2: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN had a huge opening last weekend, the biggest since at least PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN 3, and pretty close to Bong Joon-ho's 2006 hit THE HOST (Goemul).

The loud, toy robot sequel pulled in 14.1 billion won ($10.9 million) over the weekend, and 19.7 billion won ($15.3 million) since it opened on Wednesday. That equates to 2.1 million admissions over the weekend and 3.0 million since Wednesday.

If it seemed like just about every screen in Korea was playing TRANSFORMERS 2, you were pretty much right -- a record-shattering 1,038 screens. There are just 2,000 screens in all of Korea. (When I came to Korea, there were not even 500 screens in the entire country).

(Btw, the chart below says 1,200 screens for TRANSFORMERS, but remember the KOFIC list double-counts some screens, so tends to be a little exaggerated).

The real question will be staying power. Movies like PIRATES 3 and SPIDER-MAN 3 had openings nearly as big as THE HOST, but they ended up with much smaller totals. TRANSFORMERS (the first) by comparison had 1.3 million admissions in its opening weekend, but went on to pull in 7.4 million admissions, the best foreign film ever in Korea.

The only other movie that anyone went to see last weekend was RUNNING TURTLE (Geobuki Dallinda), which made 1.8 billion won ($1.4 million) to bring its three-week total to 13.0 billion won ($10.1 million). TURTLE is going to top 2 million admissions, making it officially a hit, I guess.

Everything else is sad. The No. 3 film BLOOD PLEDGE (Yeogyo Goedam 5) made just 499 million won ($387,000) over the weekend, bringing its total to 2.8 billion won. That's just 59,000 admissions for it last weekend.

MISSING LYNX from Spain opened in fourth. The only other Korean film was Bong Joon-ho's MOTHER (Madeo), in sixth. MOTHER has now made 19.5 billion won -- slightly less than what TRANSFORMERS 2 did in five days.

Rather amazing to me was that the 8th Mise-en-Scene Genre Film Festival landed in 10th. With just two screens. That's pretty wild. The 11th place film, THE BROTHERS BLOOM, sold fewer tickets, despite being on 110 screens. Wow.

Transforming Cinema

So I checked out TRANSFORMERS 2: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN over the weekend. And I must say, I agree with popular opinions -- both of them, the critics and the unwashed masses. TRANSFORMERS 2 is definitely stupid and ridiculous, at any level a terrible film. I also quite liked it.

Which seems to be how people in general are perceiving the film. Critics hate it, but audiences think it is much better than the first TRANSFORMERS.

That article I linked to points out that it is Michael Bay's worst film ever on Rotten Tomatoes, the review aggregator. But what I find really interesting is that is is also Bay's second-best reviewed film ever on Metacritic (behind THE ROCK). Rotten Tomatoes, of course, merely looks at whether reviewers liked a film, then averages the number of positive votes. Metacritic, on the other hand, assigns a value to each vote, then takes that average.

So what does that mean? It means that most critics on balance dislike TRANSFORMERS 2, but they do not dislike it that much. But for Bay's previous films, opinions were more divided, with some people liking them more but others hating them more.

Math is so much fun.

Wonderwha?

Hey, the Wondergirls are now launching their English campaign for the West. If you go to Wondergirls World, you can get their international website. Click on "videos" to see their old song Nobody dubbed into English. And there is this announcement for that site on Youtube -- to be honest, a little painful.


In case you have not heard, the Wondergirls are going to be touring with the Jonas Brothers this summer. There is a Seattle Times story about the tour here.

And an article about the English version of Nobody appearing on iTunes here -- the article is okay, but the comments following it are really interesting. It is beginning to sound like Asian pop culture is finally becoming normalized in the United States. Or at least it is becoming a lot closer to normal.

Yu Hyun-mok Passes

I just read that the great Korean director Yu Hyun-mok passed away Sunday night, at 85 years old (or 83, depending on what you read). Very sad news.

Yu was the last of the "three great filmmakers" of the 1950s and 1960s (the other two being Kim Ki-young and Shin Sang-ok). Yu was most famous for OBALTAN: THE AIMLESS BULLET, a neorealist film about the hard life of the downtrodden after the Korean War.


But for me, my favorite Yu film was EMPTY DREAM, a remake of Tetsuji Takeji's DAYDREAM. Yu was arrested for EMPTY DREAM, even though the actress Park Su-jeong did not really appear naked (good summary at the link above). Anyhow, I saw EMPTY DREAM at the Puchon Fantastic Film Festival in 2004, when they played it with a restored soundtrack. Very interesting, surreal film, and completely different than OBALTAN.

Yu's SCHOOL EXCURSION is pretty fun, too, and it used to be available on DVD (although I have not seen it in stores for ages... maybe the Yongsan black market still stocks it).

Sadly, I am no expert of Yu's films. I only met him briefly a couple of times, when he was obviously of fading health, and I never really talked to him at all. But I am happy that I did at least meet him (and Shin Sang-ok). You can read about Yu in the Korea Times. Darcy's page on Yu is here. And of course you can always read Wikipedia.

You can also briefly see Yu Hyun-mok in these old news videos from the 1960s, here, here, and here (that last one is from the 2nd Grand Bell Awards, back in 1963, with Yu winning Best Director for his film TO GIVE FREELY).

Weird. Wikipedia says Yu was born July 2, 1925. But my book The History of the Korean Cinema says he was born May 17, 1924. Quite a difference. Maybe the date is just a lunar/solar calendar thing. But I don't know about the year difference.

(Btw, I swiped that pic from Darcy's website. I hope that is okay).

Rock'n'Roll World -- And Some Random Stuff

As much as I love old Korean rock music, it is important to remember that the trends and forces affecting Korea were not occurring in a vaccuum. Rock music was shaping many societies around Asia around the same time, sometime in similar ways as it did to Korea, sometimes in different ways.

Surprisingly (at least for me), one of the most exciting places in Asia for rock music back in the 1960s and '70s was Cambodia (pre-Khmer Rouge, obviously). Thanks to exposure to rock music from Americans fighting in the Vietnam War, right next door, a real garage-rock/psychedelic sound emerged in the period, featuring both new bands and classic Cambodia crooners (like Sinn Sisamouth, Ros Sereysothea, and Pan Ron) who switched to take up the new rock'n'roll style.

You can download the music from the Cambodia Rocks compilation here. There is also a documentary being made about the music from that period; you can see a trailer for that film here.


The Philippines, with its history so entwined with the United States, also had a lot of rock music. Including the group Rocky Fellers, whose song "Killer Joe" made it onto US music charts back in 1963. India, too, had plenty of rock music (after all, even The Beatles went there for a while to hang out in 1968).

Japanese rock music is more well known, in particular the "group sound" movement. This website had a lot of great information about psychedelic rock music from all over the world, especially Japan (but, damn, it was also one of the saddest sites I have ever read).

And of course there is also Tuvulan throat singing. Who can ever get enough of someone gargling Love Will Tear Us Apart Again or Orgasmatron? Great stuff.

For psych rock, as always Gerald Van Waes's website about psychedelic music around the world is the most complete and interesting site around, with plenty of amazing information and links about the old rock music of Korea, Japan, India, and plenty more.

Anyhow, my point is that too often people think of music, movies and the culture of countries (especially in Asia) in too much isolation. How can one really talk about trends in movies in Japan without knowing about trends in movies in the countries around Japan? How can one talk about the Korean Wave in music without knowing what domestic trends are affecting music in countries around Asia?

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I seem to have been appearing in the Korean media a bunch recently. If you can read Korean and would care to check it out, there is a profile of me and my book at the Joongang Ilbo here, an article in the Joongang about how Korean movie titles change when going abroad here (which quotes me a bit). And this month's Esquire Korea mentions my book as well... I will link to it if I can ever find a link to the story.