Member schwartzteacher@hanm - My comments

The word "resigned" has been more clearly fixed to read as "re-signed" to avoid confusion. We apologize for the error.

👥 schwartzteacher@hanm (🕒2022-06-09 16:21:45)

Reply ↩

It's interesting that the movie portrays traditional gisaeng dances as uniquely patriotic and alluring, given that gisaeng culture was quite popular in Japan during the Occupation period and deliberately genocided by both Korean governments after the war for that exact same reason. I'm not sure whether Shin Sang-ok was old enough to remember this though. His declining popularity and interest in explicitly liberationist themes that were often considered verboten by authorities is also not discussed often enough in his work, I think, possibly because doing so might imply he was more of a willing participant for the North Korean part of his career than anyone's comfortable admitting to.

👥 schwartzteacher@hanm (🕒2022-06-09 16:17:34)

Reply ↩

Hey now. I did warm up to it a lot in the later episodes, once I had a better idea what was going on.

👥 schwartzteacher@hanm (🕒2022-06-09 16:08:17)

Reply ↩

Thanks :)

👥 schwartzteacher@hanm (🕒2022-02-14 23:43:16)

Reply ↩

Miracle's supposed to be melodramatic. Sentimentalism isn't a high-prestige genre and normally even I don't like it that much, but it's done well here. This is a lot more than I can say for movies like Space Sweepers and Hostage, neither of which seemed to have any point at all.

👥 schwartzteacher@hanm (🕒2021-11-20 23:52:19)

Reply ↩

Ki-hoon does get humanized a little bit better in later episodes, but for me the damage is already done in the earlier episodes. The players are shown as having enough control over their circumstances that they're just not sympathetic, and the attempt to clearly distinguish sympathetic characters from unsympathetic characters in the latter part of the drama feels arbitrary since they all have nearly identical motivations.

👥 schwartzteacher@hanm (🕒2021-09-23 08:38:09)

Reply ↩

Structurally the movie sounds a lot more similar to The Berlin File than I was expecting. This might explain why the movie seems to be doing better at the box office now that more people have actually seen it. The marketing made Escape from Mogadishu sound a lot more like an action flick than a political one. This probably seemed like a reasonable precaution given Steel Rain 2's underwhelming box office performance last year. But there's a key difference in that while Steel Rain's politics were borderline farcical, The Berlin File was built around convoluted but pragmatic spy game realism.

👥 schwartzteacher@hanm (🕒2021-08-04 09:44:41)

Reply ↩