Film, TV & DVD
Information sources
The best English language resource on Korean film is Darcy Paquet’s koreanfilm.org, which has reviews, news, features, discussion forums and more.
The Internet Movie Database (imdb) is a very comprehensive source of films, actors and directors, and there’s a very dedicated person who contributes to Darcy’s site who updates all the Korean films on the database. He’s even been going through the entries to update all the spellings for the changes in transliteration methods. You can do a power search on imdb for Language = Korean, and sort by imdb ranking. Treat the results with a massive pinch of salt because the rankings which come up under this search don’t benefit from imdb’s moderation process. For example, at the time of writing Daisy has a score of 9.7 out of 10 (based on 18 votes by devoted Jeon Ji-hyun fans), higher than the Godfather, imdb’s official highest ranked movie of all time with a score of 9.1 (based on 157,199 votes). And the consensus among the cognoscenti is that Daisy is not one of the best films ever.
Jason Bechervaise’s koreanfilm.org.uk (unconnected with Darcy’s site) is a recently started UK site containing lively commentary and, coming soon, lots of reviews and other information.
Other sites containing information & reviews on Korean film
Twitch is a film blog which has extremely good coverage of Korean film news. Filmbrain is another. Mediacircus has very user-friendly reviews of the more recent Korean films.
Kung Fu Cult Cinema unfortunately closed down during 2009, but there is a kind of successor site, Film Smash, which has yet to build momentum. Its forum contains news on upcoming Korean theatrical releases. Luis Canau’s Portuguese site on Asian film is progressively being translated into English. Heroic Cinema has a good selection of reviews by resident Korean film expert James Brown among others; Brown also contributes to Senses of Cinema, where among other things he has written a profile of talented director Song Il-gon. Finally, there’s the excellent Firecracker online magazine, which covers Asian film generally but has good coverage of Korean film.
Where to buy
I buy most of my DVDs from either Play.com for Region 2 disks (filter on DVD Language = Korean to get all the Korean films) or YesAsia for Region 3 / all-region disks. HMV often have good selections of region 2 Korean films, but make sure you buy in the sale. SeoulSelection only has Korean films, which sometimes makes things easier to find.
Where to watch Korea TV Dramas online
Probably the best online source is MySoju.com, which has complete dramas broken down into bite-sized 10-minute chunks, with subtitles.
More
Check out some brief info on Korean film directors and TV dramas, or go to LKL’s Film Zone for all LKL’s film articles
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I have bought a number of DVD’s from DVDfromKOREA:
http://www.dvdfromkorea.com
No problems this far.
Hello. Please advise me on how and is there a dvd I can buy showing JUMP. I have been to see this show twice at Peacock Theatre and have absolutely fell in love with it. It will make me so happy buying this on DVD so I can watch it over and over again. It’s just so good, I am so sad I cannot watch it again when JUMP leaves Peacock theatre.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Many Thanks
Deniz
Glad you enjoyed JUMP. I went last year and enjoyed it as well – particularly the second half.
I’m afraid I don’t know whether they’ve made a DVD. What I do know is that the Peacock is usually quite good at selling products related to the show (those Shaolin monks always have a lot of memorabilia for sale when they come). So if the DVDs aren’t for sale at the Peacock my guess is that there is no DVD.