Masquerade, a period film about a king and his body double, swept the board at South Korea's Grand Bell Awards on Friday Tuesday night.
The film, the second highest at the Korean BO this year, claimed 15 awards including best film and best director for Chu Chang-min.
Masquerade's male lead Lee Byung-hun also beat a strong field that included Choi Min-Sik of Nameless Gangster, and Ahn Sung-Ki of Unbowed to claim the best actor award, though in the female category Pieta's Jo Min-soo was the winner.
49th Grand Bell Awards — winners
Best Film: Masquerade
Best Director: Chu Chang-min (Masquerade)
Best Actor: Lee Byung-hun (Masquerade)
Best Actress: Jo Min-soo (Pieta)
Best Supporting Actor: Ryu Seung-ryong (Masquerade)
Best Supporting Actress: Kim Hae-sook (The Thieves)
Best New Actor: Kim Sung-kyun (My Neighbor)
Best New Actress: Kim Go-eun (Eun-gyo)
Best New Director: Choi Jong-tae (Hand In Hand)
Best Actress, Short Film: Choi Ji-yeon (Woman)
Special Judges Award: Kim Ki-duk (Pieta)
Best Screenplay: Hwang Jo-yoon (Masquerade)
Popularity Award: Lee Byung-hun (Masquerade)
Best Cinematography: Lee Tae-woon (Masquerade)
Best Lighting: Oh Seung-chul (Masquerade)
Best Editing: Nam Na-young (Masquerade)
Best Music: Mogue, Kim Joon-sung (Masquerade)
Best Planning: Im Sang-jin (Masquerade)
Best Art Design: Oh Heung-seok (Masquerade)
Best Visual Effects: Jung Jae-hoon (Masquerade)
Best Sound Effects: Lee Sang-joon (Masquerade)
Best Costume Design: Kwon Yoo-jin, Im Seung-hee (Masquerade)
Korea’s most notorious ruler, Joseon King Gwanghae, left a legacy marred in actions motivated by paranoia after constant threats of assassination and political rebellion. Surviving accounts of his sixteen year reign have revealed there is a missing fifteen days where Gwanghae cannot be accounted for. Shortly thereafter the King’s demeanour and attitude drastically changed for the better. What brought on this monumental change? That is what Masquerade looks to reveal.
Driven by paranoia, the 15th ruler of Korea’s Joseon Dynasty, King Gwanghae, sends out his chief secretary Heo Gyun to find a perfect double to safeguard the never ending threat of assassination. Heo Gyun finds a performer of satirical farces, Ha-seon, who bears a remarkable resemblance the King. Gwanghae’s paranoid delusions prove true as he is poisoned and falls into a coma. The chief secretary proposes that Ha-seon must fill the role of the King until their monarch recovers, so begins the process of grooming of Ha-seon to fully impersonate the country’s ruler. While assuming the role of ruler at his first official appearance, Ha-seon begins to ponder the intricacies of the problems debated in his court. He is fundamentally more humanitarian than Gwanghae, so uses his new found power to help the lowliest of his subjects which slowly changes the tense morale in the palace for the better. Over time he finds his voice and takes control of governing the country with real insight and fair judgments. Even the chief secretary is moved by Ha-seon’s genuine concern for the people, and realizes he is an infinitely better ruler than Gwanghae.
However, the King’s chief opposition notices the sudden shift in the king’s behaviour and starts to ask questions.
Masquerade applies the ‘Prince and the Pauper’ story to this fictional biography of one of Korea’s most famous King’s and the mysterious fifteen missing days. The paranoid King and the kindly performer are both played by the, now globally, famous, Lee Byung-hun with Masquerade bringing the megastar newfound success in America after its recent release.
Date: Saturday 10th November 19:00 Venue: London Odeon West End
Masquerade has become the fifth most popular Korean film recorded. According to the Korean Film Council's theater admissions database, Masquerade drew 272,736 on the weekend of 2-4th November, making the total admissions to 11,418,849. Masquerade has grabbed the fifth spot, surpassing Haeundae which drew 11.39 million. Attention is focused on whether Masquerade will break the record set by Taegukgi which brought in 11.75 million, grabbing the number 4 position.
Meanwhile A Werewolf Boy was number one at the box office in the first week after release, drawing 1.3 million. The film drew in 420,000 on the Sunday of 4th November, bringing the total so far to 1,294,473 5 days after release. The figure is nearly twice that of Architecture 101 which took 715,580 in its first week and All About My Wife which brought in 781,253, carrying on the torch for the melodrama genre in Korean cinema.
Actress Lee Min-Jeong expressed her hidden sexiness in a fashion pictorial.
Lee Min-Jeong showed her sexy attractions besides her pure appearance in usual in the 2012 F/W pictorial of Kolon Sports.
Even though she is wearing casual outfits with a vivid blue color of down jacket, her red lips and sexy eyes completes her unique atmosphere. In the pictorial, she tries fashion such as a camouflage down jacket and a snake down jacket with black and white colors. Lee Min-Jeong’s appearance with new outers aiming sensual urban women is going to be in InStyle in November.
"F****** custards!" Not the kind of words you'd expect from a king's lips. Except the king – who's just been told a tale of shocking injustice suffered by one of his subjects – is not the king. In South Korea's new 17th-century period drama Masquerade, a court jester is put on the throne after the reigning monarch, Gwanghae, is drugged by his enemies. The clown's a dead spit for Gwanghae (they're both played by GI Joe dreamboat Lee Byung-hun), and his advisors are powerless to reproach his cheekier impulses in public, lest the secret slip and chaos engulf the kingdom. So the time of misrule begins. Except that this means, by the venal standards of the Joseon court, a time of proper rule.
Choo Chang-min's film achieved the critics-and-public double whammy in South Korea: six weeks in the No 1 spot; $76m (￡48m) to date (second in 2012 only to the superb heist movie The Thieves); the seventh domestic film to pass 10 million admissions, 15 out of 22 possible gongs at the Daejong film awards, the country's Oscars equivalent. Bestselling novelist Lee Oi-soo suggested on Twitter that the film's parable – a spin on Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper – might even have some contemporary pertinence, with the Korean presidential election approaching in December: "Politicians in particular should pay attention to this movie, and citizens also ought to refer to it when thinking of what kind of president to elect." But Masquerade, with its fool catching the conscience of the king, is another great example of the caustic-flavoured political comment that so often seeps into the country's mainstream output.
Bong Joon-ho's The Host, another member of Korean cinema's 10m club from 2006, looked outwardly like a Hollywood monster-movie imitator, but it contained a series of sly digs at the US presence in the country; for example, it's an American scientist who dumps the chemicals that create the giant, galloping catfish in the Han river. It's hard to see that kind of abrasive humour making it into any noughties Hollywood counterpart, but it didn't come as a surprise to anyone who saw Bong's previous, 2003's Memories of Murder, which applied the same droll cuffing to the subject of policing standards under South Korea's 1980s military dictatorship.
Bong was at university during that decade, part of the politically active "386 generation" who campaigned for democracy in the country. Starting to hit their 30s in the 1990s – the era of the 386 computer chip, hence the name – they were also building directorial careers when the South Korean industry, under the guidance of the media conglomerates that boomed under a free market, turned towards US-style entertainment. Many of them – including Bong, Oldboy director Park Chan-wook and Kang Je-Gyu (of Shiri fame) – were graduates of the film courses at the 1980s metropolitan universities, which often spawned connoisseurs' cine-clubs; aesthetes, not activists, by conviction.
But a flinty politicised sensibility remained beneath the glossy surface of their later works – especially in the obsessive return to the north-south conflict driving the region's politics, and the mournful tone about its psychological cost, in mass-market films such as Shiri, Silmido and Taegukgi.
Park is an interesting figure because politics openly feature so little in his work (at least after his debut, JSA): no sarcastic asides or earnest outbursts anywhere. But maybe Oldboy can be seen as a traumatised reaction to South Korea's turbulent postwar political life. Its hero's apparently reasonless 15-year incarceration – charted at the start of the film in a series of televised public events from 1988, the first full year of liberal democracy, to 2003 – can be seen as a metaphor for a kind of collective blackout, or deliberate repression of past ordeals, in the new, neon, capitalist Korean republic. A wilful oblivion: the protagonist's name, Oh Dae-su, as he drunkenly harangues the police in the prologue, means "one day at a time".
But elsewhere, the repressed past keeps on piercing through. National Security, a film about the torture of democracy activist Kim Geun-tae in 1985, is due out in South Korea in a fortnight; about 90% of the film takes place inside the notorious Seoul interrogation room where he was electrocuted and waterboarded. The makers of 26 Years, an action-thriller about the massacre of pro-democracy groups in Gwangju in May 1980, recently announced that crowdfunding of $400,000 had finally enabled their production to get off the ground after a fruitless four-year search for investment (it opens at the end of the month). Apparently the script's revenge-obsessed premise – its protagonists try and assassinate military hardliner Chun Doo-hwan, who ruled the country from 1980 and 1988 and who still lives in disgrace in a Seoul suburb – was deemed too touchy.
It's that provocative showmanship, that charged populism, that makes South Korean mainstream cinema so distinctive and fascinating. Masquerade is on the gentler end of the scale, but there's something in its capricious mood switches – between a denigrating satire on the court mentality and a cue-the-string-section sentimental heroism familiar from 80 and 90s Hollywood – that shows it's still motivated by those sceptical instincts. Compare it with The King's Speech, which is also about the theatrics of political power but ultimately only out to reinforce them. The South Korean blockbuster, thrillingly unstable, is ready to toss them out of the window.
In an interview with Collider, Hollywood producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura discusses Red 2, Frank's (Bruce Willis) new emotional obstacle and how much time has passed from the last film.
Lorenzo di Bonaventura, producer of the Red sequel recently chatted with Collider about the upcoming film, that has been filming all across the globe. The original took place in the United States, but the sequel will have an international flair. "In Red 2 we go to Paris, we go to Moscow, we go to London," Lorenzo told the site. "We do some United States, Washington DC and a few other places as well, but it’s really sort of an international road trip movie."
Surprisingly, the plot for the film has been shrouded in mystery. Outside of knowing a few brief details about the new additions (Anthony Hopkins, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Byung-hun Lee, and David Thewlis) to the cast, we haven't had much else. Until now we didn't even know how where the first film ended and the second one begins. "Six, nine months has transpired between the first film and the second film," Lorenzo explained. "The logic of it was, the first movie we looked at Frank, Bruce Willis’s character, the story of a guy who is desperately trying to fit in to a world of retirement that he just doesn’t really belong in, right? It just doesn’t come naturally to him; he doesn’t really know how to do it, of course then the Mary-Louise Parker character comes into his life. So in this movie we thought what would be really fun is to see a guy who doesn’t really know how to have a relationship, let’s see what would happen."
Perhaps the most important new addition is the director, Dean Parisot. He is replacing Robert Schwentke (R.I.P.D.), but Bonaventura doesn't think Parisot's film will depart from the tone of the original. "What we describe as tone for that movie is all the characters are playing it very straight while outrageous, fun shit is going on. So we are maintaining that tone," Lorenzo points out. "Dean has a different sense of humor than Robert so there’s certain kinds of things that are a different funny, you know, different kinds of actions are happening. So it will be a different movie and it will be a new experience for everybody, but also our hope that we retain the thing that everybody digs about it because that’s what we dug about it too."
And Parisot has been making quite a name for himself, winning people over with his directing skills on FX's Justified, and of course his hilarious Star Trek parody, Galaxy Quest. Which Lorenzo goes out of his way to say was a major influence on his decision to pursue Dean for Red 2. "We looked at that movie—it was interesting, when we were talking to directors about the first one, Robert came in and articulated the tone we were going for even though we probably could have articulated it as well, but we kind of instinctually knew what we were trying to get. But, Robert immediately articulated it. Galaxy Quest is a very similar tone so, you know, we knew."
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