Train to Busan (2016)

There's just something inherently cinematic about trains. From the Lumière Brothers' film of one arriving, to Edwin S. Porter's Great Train Robbery, to the Cinerama splendors of How the West was Won, and beyond, trains and moving pictures have been inextricably linked. It makes sense. If you're making a movie, you want things to move. Also, the continuous forward motion mirrors the driving narrative of a well-told story. And let's not forget the fact that trains also make stops.

Sure this train is headed to Busan, but there are plenty of stops to make along the way, and it's these stops that help give the viewer some variety. And not just variety of location and action either. This "horror" film makes protracted stops at the "family drama" station, the "teen romance" station, and the "slapstick comedy" station on the way to its conclusion. At one point it even becomes an extremely current allegory for the plight of refugees. This movie gets that the journey is just as important as the destination.

The Housemaid (1960)

After the release of Oldboy and Memories of Murder in 2003, South Korean cinema was everywhere. Suddenly cinephiles all over the globe were talking about the genius of Kim Jee-Woon, Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook. But this cinema didn't just spring up overnight. We in the West can be so egocentric some times. If we haven't seen it, it doesn't exist, right? Korea's domestic film industry dates back to the start of the last century. By the time Kim Ki-young's The Housemaid came along in 1960, the industry was more than half a century old.

It's interesting to compare and contrast this film with American films of the same time. Many of the concerns are the same (wealth, reputation, etc.) but this film addresses those issues in a way that Hollywood would have really soft-peddled. In fact, they probably would have considered this trashy, exploitative and low-class. Yet, thirty years later, facsimiles of this film (Fatal Attraction, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, etc.) were filling American multiplexes. I hope that fact prompted some Koreans to giggle. The Americans finally caught up.