Friday, January 28, 2011

I'm sold! Boa's Dance Movie Will Have a Plot!

I liked this post from PopSeoul about Boa's upcoming dance movie.

The real kicker: according to reports, this movie will not only have dancing, but also a plot, which will differentiate it from all those other dance movies.

The film directed by “Step Up” Duane Adler hopes to spice up things up, compared to “other” dance moves by focusing on both plot and choreography, instead of a plot that doesn’t end working.

Fair enough...

a plot would also set it apart from other Korean filmmakers' and Korean stars' forays into Hollywood.




Eventually one of Korea's talented people will turn this trend around... there are tons of Koreans doing well in television (unfortunately, other than Kim Yunjin, I couldn't tell you who those are, because I don't watch much TV)...

Though I think it's awesome that one of the top Korean-American actors is John Cho, because the movie that made his name (Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle) was all about weed, which means that, unlike most cases, where Koreans are happy to claim anyone with a tenuous connection to Korea as their own, there's very little talk of John Cho as one of Hollywood's top (Korean) stars, outside of KO-Am circles. I have never heard "Do you know John Cho?" as a conversation opener.

[and as a side note, I love that the one Nobel-Prize-Winning author who wrote about Korea, also has a name that's REALLY hard for Koreans to pronounce. "Teacher? Do you know Fall S. Fuck?" "Huh?" "The Good Earth." "Oh. Do you mean Pearl S. Buck?" "Yes. Fall S. Fuck." that actually happened.]

Also... it's a testament to just how bad a movie Blood: The Last Vampire was, that even in Korea, where some people will even defend The Last Godfather and D-Wars, Blood: The Last Vampire came and went without mention, and nobody will defend it, or talk about it at all.

(By the way: my favorite evisceration of The Last Godfather so far is this one, which, among other things, gives us a new one to add to Brian's list of "Korea's X" equivalents:

Shim Hyung-rae is Korea's Uwe Boll)

... and stop the presses: this old release, from back when The Last Godfather got the greenlight, says that originally, they were planning on digitally re-animating the late Marlon Brando's Don Corleone, to play the Godfather, before Harvey Keitel signed on.  I'm partly relieved they didn't do that... but then, what a lost opportunity to absolutely shatter the scale of unintentional comedy!  If they'd tried it, they might have even topped William Shatner's Rocketman on the "So bad it's awesome" scale.

8 comments:

Yeongung said...

So you just made me look up "Blood: The Last Vampire" on IMDB. The phrase "career suicide" comes to mind.

Might seem an odd question, but exactly how popular IS BoA? She just seems kind of "old," in that I havn't heard anything about her in a long while until now. Have I been living under a rock?

Roboseyo said...

Last I checked, she was a megastar in Japan, and never really caught on in the US. She hasn't been working domestically much, though.

Roboseyo said...

I tried to watch "Blood: The Last Vampire" once on my desktop but it totally failed to catch my attention. Even the combat scenes.

3gyupsal said...

Nonsense. Dance movies have plots there are just three of them.

1. Dance battle: Rival dance crews battle for something. (You Got Served, Step Up 2)

2. Save the community center: Dancers must dance in order to prove that the place where they practice is worth saving even though the place doesn't make any money. (Step up 3, Honey, You got Served)

3. Prove that street dance can be accepted as a high art, or use dance to gain some kind of acceptance: A person of low station in life tries out for some kind of ballet, or a classically trained dancer tries to become accepted on the streets, or a dance enthusiast tries to give the gift of dance to puritanical community. (Flash Dance, step up 2, Foot Loose)

Actually step ups one two and three covered the spread on these topics, but these are the three formulas that make a dance movie. Another nice touch is that someone should die.

The early 1980's film "Beat Street," Accomplished everything quite nicely. The rival NYC breakers and the rocksteady crew had a battle. A tagging artist died, and so his D.J. friend organized a benefit concert to raise money for a community center. The sound track was also provided by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.

So I'd be impressed if BOA can make a dance movie without at least one of those elements.

Brian said...

BoA's cute, and I'm glad to see her successful in Japan. I really have no recollection of her being popular, or even releasing anything, in Korea the last five years. Her English songs were atrocious, and the much-hyped attempt to conquer the American music scene seems to be over. Strange that they were so bad, because I've heard her sing her Korean releases in English . . . it's just the whole rap, Ko-thug thing didn't really fit.

Bonnie said...

Sorry, a bit off-topic, but what did Pearl S. Buck write about Korea? I know she was active in advocating for adoption for Amerasian children from Korea, but to my knowledge her fiction was set in China. Just curious...

Roboseyo said...

I'm pretty sure Korea is mentioned in The Good Earth (which I haven't read), or maybe parts of it happen in Korea.... but considering that the Good Earth won the Novel Prize, I guess Paul S. Fuck will be given the full adoptive treatment.

Unknown said...

Blood: The Last Vampire wasn't a Korean movie, it just happens the main actress was Korean, although they didn't even use her Korean name on the credits. The anime was pretty bad a$$ insane, but you can't really do live action from Anime without failing somewhere. At least they made an attempt to keep with the story line and original intent.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0432428/

Yeah Gianna is actually Jeon Ji-hyun, I didn't even recognize her at first when I watched the movie.