Sositamtam (JTBC)

Choi Jieun (writer): Girls’ Generation is back. It’s been five years since the group took a hiatus in 2017 so the members could focus on pursuing individual goals. Despite all the time spent apart, they have been by each other’s side for roughly half their lives, so their synergetic energy comes out less during the more structured aspects of the show itself and more when they converse excitedly over trivial topics or when they play jokes on each other, like when Sooyoung, who has been pursuing acting, says she doesn’t know what a 4K fancam focus video is, and TAEYEON, who now works as a solo singer, informs her “there’s 8K, too,” then YURI, who is still a singer and following other pursuits as well, ribs her with, “Those who didn’t go solo wouldn’t know.” There’s also a moment where the group stops by a supermarket in Gangwon Province during a trip to the East Sea and a young woman working there, clearly moved, says, “I’ve been SONE”—an official fan of the girl group—“since elementary school.” And Sositamtam is a gift designed for just that sort of person.

It’s a Summer Film! (July 20)

Im Sooyeon (CINE21 reporter): There are girls in those teenage years who feel no shame when it comes to candid displays of emotion and fall deeply for romance films. Cinephile Barefoot is not one of them and, unlike her classmates, likes samurai movies that were released before she was even born. When the script she wrote for a movie called Samurai Spring is passed over by the film club, she recruits her best friends Kickboard and Blue Hawaii and they band together to set in motion a plan to produce her movie themselves and give it a guerrilla screening on the day of the festival. The basic plot and overall mood of It’s a Summer Film! follow in the footsteps of other Japanese coming-of-age films, like the high school band struggling to enter a festival in Linda Linda Linda, the clever reflection of the ups and downs of filming a low-budget passion project in One Cut of the Dead and the innocent romance between a country girl and a boy from out of town in A Gentle Breeze in the Village. On top of those elements, the entire idea of filmmaking adds a distinct shade of interest to It’s a Summer Film! Key to the film as well is Rintaro, a boy from the future set to play the lead in Samurai Spring and who, like the movie, connects past, present and future, and gives the movie a creative blend of young fiction, sci-fi and romance. When the film was shown at Japanese Film Festival 2022 earlier this year, it set off a social media frenzy, prompting it to be officially exported to Korea and shown in theaters.

“Pseudoscience” feat. Chang Kiha (Mudd the student)

Na Wonyoung (pop music critic): Genre itself is a pseudoscience; it’s more that we believe genre should be governed by certain laws and strict standards. In this world of pseudoscience, where he purports to be a student, Mudd has effectively proven the hypothesis that both music and genre are fiction by jamming his music full of all kinds of information and breaking down the idea of boundaries from the inside out. Even after last year’s album Field Trip, his trip is ongoing. While his guitar tries to form the foundation of the song by functioning as both riff and beat, it sounds indecisive, offering consistency only as far as tone goes. The addition of electronic drums that constantly mingle with the rock beat and his vocals as he hums along with the chorus or mumbles over the sound of the turntable butts up against the driving force of the track in an attempt to establish a certain pattern. If you had to categorize him, you could say Mudd is a rapper but also a rocker. Chang Kiha, the featured artist, is also a rocker-cum-rapper, and injects a “feeling of something floating in the air”—a clever twist on even in the simpler parts of the song. The shaky pretense of belief in the lyrics seems to point to coming to terms with randomness (“Fate is only a lie, there is only coincidence”), but that idea later turns around to a different sense of certainty (“We are fate, I can believe that”). Perhaps the certainty arises from Mudd’s vocals, leading the melody with the power to become an unmovable constant in the equation of a song that swirls around like a conspiracy theory, even despite the bizarre sounds and conflicting elements in it. Nevertheless, even though the song is swept up in countless variables as it attempts to systematize itself with scientific terms, “Pseudoscience” stays diligent in its research, reserving the possibility that “magic may actually exist.”