BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Korea, take four.

The King and the Clown was a taboo buster in Korea, and it also became the biggest box office hit in Korean history. The film demonstrates the generic hybridity that typifies a number of big Korean hits, as it straddles the conventions of melodrama, historical epics, romance, slapstick comedy and action. The film looks at two clowns (Gong-gil and Jang-sang) who decide to satirise the despotic head of the Chosun Dynasty in order to improve their impoverished lot. The rather wildly unpredictable repercussions result in chaos, love, obsession, revenge and ultimately a societal shift. Art does indeed effect political change, if The King and the Clown is to be believed.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Korea, take three.

GEORGE LUCAS, I think, infamously once said that the way to make an audience feel emotional was to choke a kitten on-screen. It wouldn’t work for me, that’s how much I fall on the dog side in the perennial cat vs dog debate. So it was a good thing Barking Dogs Never Bite opened with a warning stating that no dogs were harmed in the making of this film. Though I was slightly dubious as the film progressed, as a bunch of ratty looking dogs were thrust over balconies, cut up for soup or threatened with hanging. However my canine concerns aside, the film ultimately is a free-wheeling satire, a dark comedy, and a sharp take on Korean social stratification and gender roles.

TIM WONG asks if Circa Theatre’s new stage production of “Wait Until Dark” holds a candle to the play’s 1966 film version.

RISING quietly above the ‘psycho-biddy’ histrionics of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford – grand actresses whose dwindling careers gained unexpected traction through notoriety in such hag horror classics as Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte, and Strait Jacket – Terence Young’s screen version of Wait Until Dark is a controlled, hermetically-sealed thriller. If conventionally lumped into the same women-in-peril bracket of sixties cinema – its home intrusion premise a cousin of Lady in a Cage’s handicapped dame in terror, where a frazzled Olivia de Havilland, trapped inside her mezzanine elevator, is traumatised by a psychotic James Cann – it’s important to note the picture circumvents these cruder tropes. Through its elegant, headstrong lead (Audrey Hepburn), scenery-chewing adversary (Alan Arkin, the unhinged star of the film), and micromanaged turn of events, Wait Until Dark is not in the least bit lurid, but a superior, clockwork suspenser that neither overreaches nor degenerates like its campier peers. While the film holds up as a gripping chamber piece, how would it fare transposed back to its original stage setting? Until November 8, Circa’s presentation of the Frederick Knott play tests this water, with variable results.

GREGOR CAMERON reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Korea, take two.

A DIRTY thought makes the world spin around, but a decent moral sets a stable tone. There’s something very alluring about circling the darker side of human sexuality and Kim Dae-Woo’s film Forbidden Quest gets it just right. He leads us into the seedy world, involves us in the dialogue about the rights and wrongs of it, without ever descending into the deliberately prurient.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Korea, take one.

KOREA has undoubtedly been making some of the great art/cult/commercial cinema of the last decade, assisted no doubt by the rigid quota systems (which unfortunately is being eroded), heavy investment, and a commercially sustainable population. The Film Society has decided to show a mini-collection of Korean films, from recent years, and provides a chance to see some Korean films which haven’t made the Film Festival or much of a dent on the local circuit. Driving With My Wife’s Lover mines similar territories to the great Hong Sang-soo, with a symmetrical(ish) structure, ménage-a-trois/quatre, and a beady depiction of contemporary Korean relationships. While it doesn’t have the resonance or overall sharpness of Hong, the film is a wry, fractured take on masculinity.