#Song Gang-ho

[tomitaakanemi]

シークレット・サンシャイン

[leejieun]

BROKER : ONECLICK LIMITED EDITION - photobook

[toastinthegrass]

[gregor-samsung]

브로커 [Broker] (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2022)

[ladymacbeth3759]

My Favorite Films of All Time(Updated!) pt.2

Solaris (1972) dir. Andrei Tarkovsky

Breif Encounter (1945) dir. David Lean

In the Mood for Love (2000) dir. Wong Kar-Wai

Thirst (2009) dir. Park Chan-Wook

Call Me by Your Name (2017) dir. Luca Guadagnino

[entrehormigones]

[surprendslejour]

[laserpinksteam]

Film after film: Broker (dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2022)

Another great film by Koreeda, who is incredibly skilled at combining sadness and laughter. It's a kind of a genre film, but also not: a young mother seems poised at giving her newborn to the church institution, which she does by leaving the child in a specially designed box outside the building. But then she comes back and discovers two men running a project of sneaking the abandoned newborns from the boxes and selling them to families who want to have children in this way (because, for instance, their relationships are not registered - there's a bunch of biopolitical statements smuggled here). They set off in a trip, being followed by two female-presenting cops (Bae Donna is the amazing standout) and being joined by a child, who blackmails them into remaining in their company - he soon becomes the film's comic relief. It's beautifully filmed and leisurely paced, never adding too much sugar into this melancholic story.

[virusreviews]

Film of the Month

March 2023

브로커     Broker     (2022)

Dir. Kore-eda Hirokazu

From the renowned director Kore-eda Hirokazu, a collaboration with the international talent of South Korea creates a tear provoking story of found family. Kore-eda’s all-star cast are familiar faces to those wise to South Korea’s cinematic exports (see: Song Kang-Ho (Parasite and Snowpiercer) and Lee Joo-Young (Itaewon Class and Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok-Joo). The harmony crafted from the story and the actors drives into any audience member’s open heart, found family is an uncommon event especially for Korean society yet no one could deny the hope and connection felt towards the characters in Broker. Unhurried and scenic, this film takes its time to tell a heartfelt story without aid of crammed action shots and contained studios. Without Kore-eda’s artistic direction, Broker would have fallen flat, missing the tangible sensitivity between the characters and their conflicts.

[rookie-critic]

Rookie-Critic's Top 25 Films of 2022: Honorable Mentions - Broker (dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda)

If you've seen Hirokazu Kore-eda's 2018 film Shoplifters, the themes of found family and unconventional relationships explored in Broker won't be anything new. What Broker does boast, however, is a story that, in its own way separate from Shoplifters, is profoundly beautiful. The characters and overarching trajectory of the plot in Broker is slightly more straightforward in its positive message and uplifting spirit than Shoplifters was, and, of course, it's yet another great acting showcase for Korean powerhouse Song Kang-ho. It's also an incredible acting showcase for K-pop star Lee Ji-eun, who is probably better known by her stage name IU. I hope Broker is a launchpad to seeing her in more stuff, because she is wildly impressive in this.

Currently available to rent/purchase on digital (iTunes, Amazon, Vudu, etc.) and on DVD & Blu-ray through Decal Releasing.

Read my full review of Broker here.

[k-star-holic]

The big four are worried about the Chuseok theater in poor performance.

Source: k-star-holic.blogspot.com

[twenty-words-or-less]

Broker (브로커) (2022)

Summary: A group of people sell babies dropped off in baby boxes on the adoption black market, and two detectives are hot on their trail.

Intriguing, uplifting, occasionally funny. Ferris wheel and fake prospective parents scenes highlights. Feels convoluted at times but doesn’t interrupt flow.

Rating: 3.75

Photo credit: MUBI

[leejieun]

BROKER : ONECLICK LIMITED EDITON - unreleased image postcard book

[toastinthegrass]

Romantic bastards.

[cutesyaddy]

From Foes to Forever (part one)

min ho moon x reader

a/n: i’m a very inexperienced writer so please bare with me 😭 

warnings: characters may be ooc (my bad gang 🌝) and im not that great with grammar but i try 🥲

-anything spoke in korean will be written like this, but so will any words being dragged out so i’m just gonna have to hope you’re smart enough to know the difference.

-anything written in bold is gonna be song lyrics

-‘example’ means it’s being thought, while “example” means its being said aloud.

summary: reader meets some of the main characters and makes some impressions. (idk guys just read 😭🙏)

————————————————————

Music blares through my headphones as I was discreetly bobbing my head to my favourite song right now, Lovers by Anna of the North (guys, this is a CLASSIC banger go check it out).

While anticipating the BEST part of the song, my eyes trailed up to a handsome—and I mean really handsome—guy walking towards whatever was behind me.

For a moment, my breath hitched, and I couldn’t help but stare at him while he moved, his stride dripping with confidence. He walked like he had a big ego.

I could swear he started to walk in slow motion when the beat finally dropped.

now i’m in the dark

show a little loving

His sharp features were captivating; I genuinely couldn’t pull my eyes away from him.

shine a little light on me

show a little loving

His eyes met mine for what was probably only like 2 milliseconds, but in that short time, his gaze sent a shock throughout my body.

I was pulled out of my trance when the boy bumped into the arm of a pretty girl sitting beside me.

I pulled off my headphones and let them sit comfortably around my neck as I watched these strangers converse.

I was a sucker for things like this. He was super hot, and she was gorgeous. He bumped into her, and now they’re going to have a little meet-cute and start their love story.

“Excuse me,” she grunted, craning her neck to look back at him. He stopped and turned towards her.

“Wait,” she started; I think she noticed something on his bag. My eyes followed her own, and they landed on a KISS keychain.

“Do you go to KISS? I’m going to KISS." Oh my gosh, it’s happening; they go to the same school! Coincidentally, so do I, but this isn’t about me.

He paused for a second. “no Englishshi” Oh, I guess not then. Before the girl could say anything else, I interrupted,

“Do you speak Korean?” they both spun their heads in my direction. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything; now they know I was listening.

“I think you should apologise man; that was pretty rude.” his position remained unchanged. “What's rude is you not minding your own business. Ugh, I don’t have time for you people."

‘Yet you had enough time to be walking so slowly?’ No, I shouldn’t say that; he’s totally right; I shouldn’t have gotten involved. Not everything is a kdrama.

I defeatedly watched as he took long strides in the opposite direction. “Hey, thanks for defending me, or what I think was defending me? I’m not sure; I don’t understand a word of Korean, haha! Anyway, my name is Kitty Song Covey! It's nice to meet you!”

‘Oh my gosh, what an earful.’ “Don't worry about it! I was just telling him he should apologise; I don't think he took it very well, though.” She stared at me expectingly.

“Oh! Sorry, my name is (y/n) (l/n). It’s nice to meet you, Kitty.” I held out my hand for her to shake out of pure instinct, but I instantly regretted it as it was such an old-fashioned greeting.

Without a beat, she took my hand anyway, which brought a smile to my face. “I couldn’t help but hear you are attending KISS?”

Kitty nodded her head vigorously. “YES! I’m super duper excited to be reunited with my boyfriend, who also attends KISS! He’s one of the reasons I decided to enroll!”

I blinked. “Are you travelling all this way and studying abroad for a boy?” Ok, I misread the situation earlier; maybe this was like a kdrama, just not the one I was originally expecting.

“No, of course not! It’s not all because of him. KISS was the school my mother attended when she was my age. I’m travelling to Korea to learn more about her.

“Oh, so you’re from Korea?” I was pleasantly surprised. “Yes! I’m half Korean.”

————

Lucky me! I made it just in time for the bus that's heading straight for KISS. Jeez, I feel a little bad for the students that didn’t get here in time; I would get lost trying to locate the school in this massive city.

My headphones were at home, snug around my ears, as they played my favourite tunes. Music was the only thing fun about going on drives.

I grinned to myself like a weirdo when my favourite—dare I say the BEST song of all time—played through my headphones for the hundredth time.

you told me i would never see you

walk away

With the familiar melody filling my ears while I stared out of the bus window, my mind wandered back to that boy from earlier.

said you’d never break my heart

never leave me in the dark

He sure was cute; I mean, he was sorta mean, but I'm kinda into it. What can I say? I'm a sucker for a good old enemies-to-lovers story.

i guess there’s just some promises

you shouldn’t make

I’m a sucker for all things romance, matter of fact. Ironically, though, I’ve never been in a relationship. I’m more of a third wheel, the audience, the viewer, the reader.

should’ve know from the start

now i’m in the dark

thoughts full of this nameless douche from the airport, I began to drift off, head bumping against the glass of the bus window.

SORRY IT WAS SO SHORT BUT I HOPE YOU LIKED IT

PART TWO HERE

[fatehbaz]

In 1833, Parliament finally abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, and the taxpayer payout of £20 million in “compensation” [paid by the government to slave owners] built the material, geophysical (railways, mines, factories), and imperial infrastructures of Britain [...]. Slavery and industrialization were tied by the various afterlives of slavery in the form of indentured and carceral labor that continued to enrich new emergent industrial powers [...]. Enslaved “free” African Americans predominately mined coal in the corporate use of black power or the new “industrial slavery,” [...]. The labor of the coffee - the carceral penance of the rock pile, “breaking rocks out here and keeping on the chain gang” (Nina Simone, Work Song, 1966), laying iron on the railroads - is the carceral future mobilized at plantation’s end (or the “nonevent” of emancipation). [...] [T]he racial circumscription of slavery predates and prepares the material ground for Europe and the Americas in terms of both nation and empire building - and continues to sustain it.

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. "White Utopia/Black Inferno: Life on a Geologic Spike". e-flux Journal Issue #97. February 2019.

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When the Haitian Revolution erupted [...], slaveholding regimes around the world grew alarmed. In response to a series of slave rebellions in its own sugar colonies, especially in Jamaica, the British Empire formally abolished slavery in the 1830s. [...] Importing indentured labor from Asia emerged as a potential way to maintain the British Empire’s sugar plantation system. In 1838 John Gladstone, father of future prime minister William E. Gladstone, arranged for the shipment of 396 South Asian workers, bound to five years of indentured labor, to his sugar estates in British Guiana. The experiment [...] inaugurated [...] "a new system of [...] [indentured servitude]," which would endure for nearly a century. [...] Desperate to regain power and authority after the war [and abolition of chattel slavery in the US], Louisiana’s wealthiest planters studied and learned from their Caribbean counterparts. [...] Thousands of Chinese workers landed in Louisiana between 1866 and 1870, recruited from the Caribbean, China and California. [...] When Congress debated excluding the Chinese from the United States in 1882, Rep. Horace F. Page of California argued that the United States could not allow the entry of “millions of cooly slaves and serfs.”

Text by: Moon-Ho Jung. "Making sugar, making 'coolies': Chinese laborers toiled alongside Black workers on 19th-century Louisiana plantations". The Conversation. 13 January 2022.

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The durability and extensibility of plantations [...] have been tracked most especially in the contemporary United States’ prison archipelago and segregated urban areas [...], [including] “skewed life chances, limited access to health [...], premature death, incarceration [...]”. [...] [In labor arrangements there exists] a moral tie that indefinitely indebts the laborers to their master, [...] the main mechanisms reproducing the plantation system long after the abolition of slavery [...]. [G]enealogies of labor management […] have been traced […] linking different features of plantations to later economic enterprises, such as factories […] or diamond mines […] [,] chartered companies, free ports, dependencies, trusteeships [...].

Text by: Irene Peano, Marta Macedo, and Colette Le Petitcorps. "Introduction: Viewing Plantations at the Intersection of Political Ecologies and Multiple Space-Times". Global Plantations in the Modern World: Sovereignties, Ecologies, Afterlives (edited by Petitcrops, Macedo, and Peano). Published 2023.

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Louis-Napoleon, still serving in the capacity of president of the [French] republic, threw his weight behind […] the exile of criminals as well as political dissidents. “It seems possible to me,” he declared near the end of 1850, “to render the punishment of hard labor more efficient, more moralizing, less expensive […], by using it to advance French colonization.” [...] Slavery had just been abolished in the French Empire [...]. If slavery were at an end, then the crucial question facing the colony was that of finding an alternative source of labor. During the period of the early penal colony we see this search for new slaves, not only in French Guiana, but also throughout [other European] colonies built on the plantation model.

Text by: Peter Redfield. Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana. 2000.

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To control the desperate and the jobless, the authorities passed harsh new laws, a legislative program designed to quell disorder and ensure a pliant workforce for the factories. The Riot Act banned public disorder; the Combination Act made trade unions illegal; the Workhouse Act forced the poor to work; the Vagrancy Act turned joblessness into a crime. Eventually, over 220 offences could attract capital punishment - or, indeed, transportation. […] [C]onvict transportation - a system in which prisoners toiled without pay under military discipline - replicated many of the worst cruelties of slavery. […] Middle-class anti-slavery activists expressed little sympathy for Britain’s ragged and desperate, holding […] [them] responsible for their own misery. The men and women of London’s slums weren’t slaves. They were free individuals - and if they chose criminality, […] they brought their punishment on themselves. That was how Phillip [commander of the British First Fleet settlement in Australia] could decry chattel slavery while simultaneously relying on unfree labour from convicts. The experience of John Moseley, one of the eleven people of colour on the First Fleet, illustrates how, in the Australian settlement, a rhetoric of liberty accompanied a new kind of bondage. [Moseley was Black and had been a slave at a plantation in America before escaping to Britain, where he was charged with a crime and shipped to do convict labor in Australia.] […] The eventual commutation of a capital sentence to transportation meant that armed guards marched a black ex-slave, chained once more by the neck and ankles, to the Scarborough, on which he sailed to New South Wales. […] For John Moseley, the “free land” of New South Wales brought only a replication of that captivity he’d endured in Virginia. His experience was not unique. […] [T]hroughout the settlement, the old strode in, disguised as the new. [...] In the context of that widespread enthusiasm [in Australia] for the [American] South (the welcome extended to the Confederate ship Shenandoah in Melbourne in 1865 led one of its officers to conclude “the heart of colonial Britain was in our cause”), Queenslanders dreamed of building a “second Louisiana”. [...] The men did not merely adopt a lifestyle associated with New World slavery. They also relied on its techniques and its personnel. [...] Hope, for instance, acquired his sugar plants from the old slaver Thomas Scott. He hired supervisors from Jamaica and Barbados, looking for those with experience driving plantation slaves. [...] The Royal Navy’s Commander George Palmer described Lewin’s vessels as “fitted up precisely like an African slaver [...]".

Text by: Jeff Sparrow. “Friday essay: a slave state - how blackbirding in colonial Australia created a legacy of racism.” The Conversation. 4 August 2022.