Tag: movies

Definitely not the best marketing strategy for the Oppenheimer movie in Japan:

Sachiko Ishikawa, a YouTube video blogger from Tokyo, talks about the “Barbenheimer” controversy in Japan against a backdrop of the fan poster on Aug. 9, 2023. (Sachiko Ishikawa/YouTube)

When “Barbie,” the live-action movie about a plastic doll, opened Friday in Japan, it did so without “Oppenheimer,” the rival film with which it shared a bill in the United States.

“Oppenheimer,” a biopic about the father of the atomic bomb, has no opening date in Japan, thus far, and Universal Studios has said nothing about the film coming to the only country targeted in anger with atomic weapons. 

“Barbie” arrived divorced from its trendy “Barbenheimer” partner, a phenomenon in July in the United States but a cultural faux pas in Japan. (…………..)

Warner Bros.’ official “Barbie” account on X, formerly known as Twitter, re-tweeted a fan-art poster showing Murphy’s Oppenheimer carrying Robbie as Barbie superimposed over a mushroom cloud.

“It’s going to be a summer to remember,” declared the tweet, since deleted.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.

Hollywood has finally taken me up on my suggestion I made many years ago to make a movie on the life of Korean War hero Jesse Brown. It is amazing it took this long to make such an inspiring story into a movie after all these years of mostly trash war movies. Hopefully Hollywood sticks to telling the real life story of Jesse Brown and does not Hollywood-ize it:

Devotion, an aerial war epic based on the bestselling book of the same name, tells the harrowing true story of two elite US Navy fighter pilots during the Korean War. Their heroic sacrifices would ultimately make them the Navy’s most celebrated wingmen.

Youtube

You can read my prior posting about Jesse Brown at the below link:

I'm really concerned that Ant Man & The Wasp failed to capture the diversity of the White experience. https://t.co/cNeUpvzcPy

— Jenny Yang 👲🏼👲🏼👲🏼 (@jennyyangtv) August 15, 2018

The Ghost in the Shell movie that has come under criticism for “whitewashing” sounds like a pretty crappy movie, but this is what some Japanese actresses had to say after watching it:

Yoshihara: People in Japan worship white people.

Kato-Kiriyama: Even in the story, there are Japanese people involved in creating these beings and they also may very well see the ideal human being as a white woman. So you’re sort of messed up all the way around.

Agena: Yes! I felt more messed up watching this movie. It reinforced my own personal messed-up standards of physical beauty.

Okatsuka: This is an important conversation to have.

Yoshihara: Even my ex-boyfriend, who is Asian-American, said, “What Asian lady has a body like Scarlett Johansson?”

Agena: There are certain priorities there.

Okatsuka: It’s this weird thing where Asian-Americans or Asian nationals living here like me, working in film, are fighting both our motherland and white producers here. We’re walking this in-between where I scream at Hollywood but I’m also like, “Why’d you do that, Japan?!” Et tu, Brute, on both sides.

Yoshihara: Japanese people are self-loathing.

Okatsuka: Is it crazy that suicide rates are so high in Japan?

Yoshihara: Even my sister committed suicide. That’s how many people commit suicide in Japan. That’s how messed up it is.  [Hollywood Reporter]

You can read much more at the link.

Powerful Video Shows Why Ghost In The Shell Whitewashing Has Real Consequences https://t.co/UN4ut1cYtl

— JamesTurnbull (@JamesTurnbull) March 5, 2017

New documentary about NKorean defector artist, I AM SUN MU, now available on iTunes: https://t.co/HJ2H4tqo7d pic.twitter.com/SQJAhF4sOd

— Sokeel Park 박석길 (@Sokeel) August 24, 2016

Just like back in the US, Disney’s “Finding Dory” is dominating the box office in South Korea:

The blue tang fish Dory swept the box office in Korea over the weekend.

“Finding Dory,” the much-awaited sequel to the 2003 hit “Finding Nemo” debuted third on its opening on Wednesday but climbed up the box office over the weekend to the No.1 spot.

“Finding Dory” sold 852,140 tickets between Friday and Sunday.

According to the Korean Film Council, the animated feature film produced by Pixar Animation Studios has already sold an accumulated 1 million tickets since its release on Wednesday. None of Pixar Animation Studios’ work has achieved the feat this fast in Korea.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link, but I have watched “Finding Dory” and I thought it was pretty good, but I think “Finding Nemo” was funnier.  However, if you have kids they will love this movie regardless.

It does seem like every few years we hear about a movie studio theme park coming to South Korea that never materializes.  Maybe someone in the ROK should pursue a K-drama theme park instead of waiting to partner with a major Hollywood studio to make one?:

Is Korea a burial ground for movie studio theme parks? Every attempt to attract amusement parks by major U.S. film studios has failed in the past decade.

A huge plot of land in Songdo, Incheon, has remained idle for the last seven years. In the midst of tall weeds is a worn down sign that reads in Korean, “Paramount movie park Korea construction site.” In 2008, the site was chosen to be home to a Paramount theme park. The park was supposed to turn the area into a global tourist attraction by offering Asia’s first destination linked to Paramount, a studio famous for blockbuster films like the Indiana Jones and Mission Impossible franchises.

The project never went through because the Korean company driving it, Daewoo Motor Sales, was financially strapped due to the global financial meltdown in late 2008.
“This used to be a neighborhood that couples frequently visited but it has been empty for a long time,” said a 58-year-old realtor. “The damage caused by the cancellation of the project on the region’s commercial businesses has been huge.”

Since 2007, plans for four U.S. movie theme parks were announced but none were ever built. Analysts say the 2008 financial crisis was one cause, followed by friction between the studios and Korean project-operators.
The situation was similar when the South Gyeongsang government tried building a global theme park in the Busan-Jinhae Free Economic Zone. The local government and Fox Studios signed a memorandum of understanding in 2014, but the project never materialized.   [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read the rest at the link.

This image, captured from North Korea’s Korean Central Television on Jan. 4, 2016, shows a scene from a North Korean film, “Comrade Kim Goes Flying,” that the broadcaster aired for the first time on the previous day. The romantic comedy, the first North Korean film co-produced with British and Belgian partners in 2012, is a tale of a young woman coal miner who dreams of becoming a trapeze artist. (Yonhap)