I was looking through the movie channels on the Roku Channel app recently. One of them is called "Hi-Yah", and is dedicated to East Asian "action" movies, "action" here being a bit of a broad word to include the war movies and the sort of historical movie that has battle sequences; I'm also using it to contrast with drama in the Korean K-drama sense that's become a fad over the past decade or so and which has other channels dedicated to it.
Anyhow, coming up in a few minutes from the time I turned on the Roku box was a movie about an incident in the Korean War that I as an American didn't know anything about, Battle at Jangsari from Warner Bros. Korean division in 2019. I decided to watch it, although as I was watching it I found myself thinking more about foreign movies than about the movie itself in particular.
For those who don't remember the Korean War, the South made an advance at first before the Communist North called in the Soviets and the new Communist government in the PRC. They overran much of the peninsula, leaving the South and its allies including the US and other western countries in a small portion of the southeast. Douglas MacArthur, head of the US forces until Harry Truman summarily removed him over thoughts that MacArthur might want to use nuclear weapons, decided on an invasion at Incheon (I haven't seen the early 1980s Unification Church movie about Incheon), on the coast near Seoul.
But they also needed a diversionary tactic, so they decided to attack on the other side of the peninsula. However, the South Korean military was in a parlous state at the time, and the feint was to be carried out on a requisitioned ship carrying only four landing craft and several hundred student soldiers who were so untrained that they didn't even have serial numbers. Their job is to take a hill overlooking the Communists' supply routes and then break those routes, making it easier for the South to break out of their toehold.
In order to make the movie more palatable to American audiences, there's a not-quite-subplot that's really exposition, involving a lady American reporter (Megan Fox) dealing with a US military liaison officer (George Eads). She realizes that Jangsari is going to turn into a suicide mission and is horrified by it. Much of their scenes seem more aimed at making the action going on clearer for those of us in the west who wouldn't know as much of the situation on the ground at the time the movie was set. I'm assuming most of this stuff is intimate history for people in South Korea.
As a movie, Battle at Jangsari is serviceable, although for me it suffers from a lot of the things I think of as irritations in latter-day movies: a color palette dominated by greens and oranges; scenes that look too much like CGI; and the like. (Indeed, I found myself thinking of 1917, released a few months later, during the movie.) The story itself is OK, and if you want something different, it's worth a watch.
But as I said at the beginning, I was thinking as much about foreign films, and more specifically, what of the voluminous foreign output we get treated to here in America. I've complained on quite a few occasions how the influence of critics means we get a disporportionate amount of arthouse crap fed to us as "great" foreign film. However, there have always been a few niches that have a sort of underground cult status. I had a friend in high school who was into the cheap martial arts stuff that Hong Kong was putting out in the 1970s; anime is another genre that's had a strong following in the west. And, in recent years, there's the rise of the K-drama which I also mentioned above.
But when it comes to the sort of stuff generally produced for domestic consumption? You'd think that in this age of 5,000 channels there would be more niches for stuff that isn't trying to be Oscar bait, and yet that doesn't seem to be the case. There is stuff marketed at immigrant populations, especially older Spanish-lanugage movie from Mexico thanks to the US's increasing Hispanic population. But most of that isn't subtitled.
Now, I know there's also an adage that 90% of anything a culture produces is crap and that the reason foreign films have a cachet is that we're only getting the 10%. But I wonder at times whether what the critics think is the 10% really is the 10%.
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