What's the matter with Korea? Programming this year's New York Asian Film Fest is presenting all of us with the simple, bald, glaring fact that there weren't very many good movies from Korea last year. Beyond the handful of good flicks, the bad ones share similar problems: terrible scripts that don't know what they're about, bloated running times, no sense of a single unifying presence behind the camera (be it a director, a script or a producer) to give the movie a point-of-view, and an inability to "close the deal" with the audience, ie, deliver an ending that wraps up and holds together everything that's come before.

A punishing interview from Eiga Hiho magazine with Sai Yoichi, the Japanese director of BLOOD AND BONES and SOO (which he shot in South Korea with a Korean crew) has been translated by the kindly ones at Ryuganji and it boils down the trouble with Korean cinema to this: the young generation of filmmakers working today are unprofessional. SOO is not the greatest movie, and it flopped in Korea, but the whole interview is an eye-opener, and the following quotes give you a taste:

"Sai Yoichi: Alright, quiz time: do you know what the young generation of South Korean filmmakers places the most importance on?

Eiga Hiho: Hmmm, I wonder.

SY: Appearance. Looks, in every sense of the word. The offices of these film companies are amazingly unnecessary and lavish. A bit like Roppongi Hills. With two gorgeous surgically-enhanced receptionists sitting side by side [laughs]. The same applies to the rest of their staff, and the first stylist I thought of using for “Soo” was one too. She showed me the work she’d done in New York, and it was all patched together from the kind of costumes you’d see in some trendy cop show, so the content of her work was underwhelmingly shallow. As if she had absolutely no grasp of the basics....In the middle of the shoot, the art design team ran out on me. There were about 15 of them, but every single one ran away one night [laughs].

EH: I hear that your shoots are famous for their severity, so were you in a situation where you had to push the crew hard?

SY: No, of course not. The things that were necessary for the sets were already written in the script. Despite that, they tried to put single sheets on a double bed, so I had no choice but to tell them they’d messed up. As a result of them running away the shoot was shut down for a month, which did cause problems, but as the director I couldn’t let that go."

You can read the entire interview here.

How did it come to this? I don't know, but if you want to see a veritable list of things not to do in a movie, check out this trailer for the Korean film, A TALE OF LEGENDARY LIBIDO, out now. Here's what I never want to see in a Korean movie again:

- a bitchy, tough woman yelling at her husband

- arousal indicated by a bloody nose

- you think it's a hot chick but then...it's an old lady!

- gay predators who can't keep their hands (or feet) off the straight boys

- someone getting hit in the nuts

- women using an inanimate object to tell other women about the size of their lover's junk

- women who don't want it, but then they're forced to take it, and then they like it!

- spit takes

- Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" being used in any movie that powerful streams of urine moving boulders

Avoid these simple things, and maybe next time...a good movie?

(A TALE OF LEGENDARY LIBIDO trailer)

(Read a review of SOO)