Hong Sangsoo's The Woman on the Beach and Night and Day

Friday May 28th and Saturday May 29th, 7pm, Northwest Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium, 1219 SW Park Ave.

South Korean movies have become somewhat of an American subcultural obsession over the past few years, mainly because an increasing number of directors have laid claim to the title of 'southeast Asia's most ingenious maestro of  violence.' The success of Park Chan-wook's Oldboy and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, Bong Joon-Ho's The Host and (from this year, and excellent) Mother and Na Hong-jin's yet-to-be-widely-released The Chaser, have given South Korea a deserved reputation for producing the best violent suspense movies in international cinema.

Yet even the crowd of Americans who have been paying attention to this miniature South Korean invasion probably wouldn't perk up at the prospect of a "South Korean Eric Rohmer." This is both a distinct probability and a shame, since that "Rohmer," Hong Sangsoo, is making some of the most emotionally detailed and beautifully observed little movies around.

When a large disaster strikes somewhere in the world, workers from the International Red Cross begin to appear in daily news footage. When they do, many of the nearly 800 Oregon Trail volunteers are likely to be asked by friends, family and acquaintances when they’ll be going to areas like Haiti. And the answer is, they won’t. Members of the International Services section will. Since that doesn't include Oregon Trail volunteers, the question of what the Red Cross is doing locally usually comes next.

That answer is, quite a lot, every day.

Since Jan. 12, the day a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck Haiti, the Oregon Trail Chapter alone  has received on average 150 to 200 phone calls a day, according to Kate Fagerholm, Community Programs Specialist at the Oregon Trail Chapter.

A former Portland Meadows mechanic named Scott Rice called Sentinel editor and publisher Cornelius Swart today about a wallet he'd found on North Rosa Parks Boulevard. It contained a Media Pass bearing the picture and name of the Sentinel's part-time film critic  (me), as well as twenty bucks in cash and a wad of bar receipts from places Rice had already called and been told they had no idea who I was.