Came across a neat video on my usual movie torrent site – Casey at the Bat or The Fate of a Rotten Umpire is only 37 seconds long, the film is scratched, the camera is bouncing and it’s hard to make out what’s what, but…
It was also made in 1899 and filed on the lawn of [...]

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I said I wouldn’t link to it if it included TaeGukGi in the Top 5, yet here I am. Saving Private Kim is in fact No. 1 on the list, but I’m kind of disarmed by the fact that Welcome to Dongmakgol is No. 4 and My Sassy Girl is No. 2, even though I [...]

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I usually go to PopSeoul when I need some Korean pop music news to joke about, but I’ve always gotten the impression that the creators are more savvy than the content would sometimes indicate. Heck, I write about guys who take their shirts off at baseball games, so what am I going on about?

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by Itchy
France is currently hosting the annual battle royal in cinema otherwise known as The Cannes Film Festival. The French, who gave us the auteur theory, love directors almost as much as the women of the world love Brad Pitt. And with the roster of big-name auteurs scheduled to compete for the Palme d’Or this [...]

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I randomly stumbled on a film called The Juche Idea, which was released in 2008 and played at the New York Underground Film Festival that year. I was actually under the impression that it was an American made, pro-North Korea/anti-capitalism film, which initially drew me in. However, I’ve since realized it’s entirely fiction.
It’s a little [...]

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Obviously someone needs to name their band, Korean bar or fantasy baseball team after this. Heck, I might just start calling my wife this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3SzmfZ6F24

This comes from a site called The Echinoblog, where there’s a post titled Japanese Science Fiction: Monstrous Asterozoan Kaiju!, detailing the use of starfish-like villians in Japanese Sci-Fi films.

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Some call her the greatest Asian-American actor or actress of all time, and she was arguably the first Asian film actress to gain worldwide fame, yet Anna May Wong is largely unknown in her father’s native China.
Below is a clip of Anna May Wong from the recently restored 1929 silent film Piccadilly. The BBC 4 [...]

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Manuel Benitez, a former child actor whose credits include Galactica, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, and Stand and Deliver, was shot to death by police in the back of a Chinese Restaurant in El Monte, California, ending a four-year manhunt for the 38-year-old.
Benitez’s 7-year-old son was injured as police used a flash grenade to get into the [...]

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If you do you might not want to admit it here (but feel free to join me in the comments section). This is Shigeo Tokuda, a 74-year old JAV star who specializes in elder porn or other parts requiring a grandfatherly figure.  
Jokes aside, there’s a very interesting translation of an interview with him at [...]

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Interesting article here from the LA Times’s Barbara Demick about her trip to the recent Pyongyang International Film Festival. I wish there were a few more photos, but I’m sure one takes what they’re given when covering a film festival in Pyongyang.
After some run-of-the-mill “closed country,” “no Internet,” no “BlackBerrys,” she reveals a few tidbits:

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City Without Baseball  (official site) is a new film by Lawrence Lau Kwok-Cheung, and is ostensibly about the Hong Kong national baseball team. However, according to reviews I’ve read there is no actual baseball in the film, this despite the fact that actual members of the Hong Kong national baseball team play themselves in the [...]

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The Chinese film The Assembly, by Feng Xiaogang won the top prize at this year’s Pyongyang International Film Festival, which wrapped up during the weekend. Xiaogang also won best director. The film is about a group of communist soldiers at the end of the Chinese civil war in the late 1940s.
 Here’s the U.K. trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VG1DrvN4rE

The [...]

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About a week ago Korea Beat translated a preview/review of a good-looking Korean film called Crossing (크로싱), which opened in theaters here in early June. After reading some about the making and marketing of the film, my guess is it will open in the U.S. and other countries in the not too distant future.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThXzb4QSMzE

Synopses from [...]

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I doubt too many people heard about this, but prior to his major league debut last Saturday at Yankee Stadium, Reds pitcher Daryl Thompson, along with fellow rookie Jay Bruce, got on the No. 4 subway line headed for the Bronx. Except, they got on the platform headed to Brooklyn.
When I lived in Brooklyn I [...]

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For those of you living in the US or Canada I want to point out the June 19 airing of a documentary — Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story — about a 13-year-old Japanese girl abducted by North Korean spies on her way home from school. The film played at several film festivals and won a [...]

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Check out this trailer from The Good, the Bad, and the Weirda movie by Korean director Kim Ji-woon that’s going to be one of the big blockbusters in Korea this summer.
It’s the story of three Korean outlaws in 1930s Manchuria and their dealings with the Japanese army and Chinese and Russian bandits. A spaghetti western [...]

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Last month  a dental nurse and several friends walked into a Higashi Matsuyama Itoyokado McDonald’s in Saitama Prefecture, but what followed was no ordinary meal.
According to the Mainichi Daily News:
The group apparently took up a corner counter not easily visible to serving staff and went about their purportedly pornographic proclivities.
Ochiai apparently spent the time with [...]

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There’s a trailer for the US version of My Sassy Girl that’s been making its way around the Korean blog circuit. For those unaware, My Sassy Girl  was a Korean film starring Jun Ji-hyun, made about a decade ago. The American version will star Elisha Cuthbert.
Remakes of fairly recent films are always easy targets, [...]

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This was at the Pusan International Film Festival this year, though I didn’t see it because it was a quick sellout. Now the film is set to get a release in Japan, and right-wing groups aren’t happy about it.

“The threats began about two months ago, when we started press screenings of the movie in [...]

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I’d been wanting to see this movie for a while but surprisingly had a hard time finding it, despite the fact it came out just a few years ago. This is a Korean film based on the true events of Gam Sa-yong, a ateelworker who tried out for and made the Sammi Superstars — one [...]

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