Mini-Blog: I don’t know if it’s something I bring with my personality, or a natural tendency of guitar players, but whenever I get into a song in a style that’s sort of new to me I immediately want to somehow “get involved” in that scene. This happened recently for me with this song from Silent Hill 3.
Also, I noticed that City of the Living Dead is now streaming on netflix.
Anyway, I was hoping to get your opinions about something. Do you think it’d be lame to travel to Japan as part of a tour group? I’m kind of in a transition period right now and I think I might want to go over the next few months. I’m not sure what level of language proficiency I could obtain in the time frame and I think that just in general going around alone would be kind of stupid. Any advice from the more well traveled?
Bloody Reunion: Honestly, I’m only reviewing this movie in the hope that I can convince one of you to watch it so that I can then ask your opinion of it. If only we had stayed one more night at the river!
Brief summary: a group of young adults visit their old grammar school teacher, Ms. Park, in the South Korean countryside. Things are understandably tense as it is shown how Ms. Park, bitter over the collapse of her family, routinely inflicted varying types of cruelty on her students. For some reason, though, she acts more or less oblivious to it all, even when confronted about it.
I kind of wished they had kept the name “To Sir, with Love” which I suspect is the literal translation of the Korean title. I love the blatant irony of it as well as the obvious gender mismatch. But really, the most curious thing about this movie is the twist. I’d say I’ve watched a fair amount of K-Horror, and almost every K-Horror has a twist, but I’ve never seen a twist that was this incoherent. It’s reason enough to watch.
Anyway, for me, I think the best part of river night was sitting out under the stars, chatting with Ross and Zach. Without all the light from the city you could actually see the milky way and I believe we were also by chance, able to view the Perseids. It’s strange, when you think about it nothing is more futuristic than outer space but, when you’re in an urban environment you don’t really think to look up at night.
Mini-blog: I watched Phantasm 3 and Phantasm 4 recently. I’m still thinking them over.
Anyway, after Ross mentioned Running Wild I was all over it. At first I was a little skeptical but then found some really great songs. Then Darren an email talking about some Hobbit metal.
Has a song ever won you over in the first 6 seconds? (If it doesn’t your heart is officially stone.) You’ll know what I’m talking about. And seriously, “caught in the fine line between madness and pride.” Have I ever been there.
Mini-blog: Still in a somewhat relieved mood after defending. I was pretty beat at the end of last week and over the weekend, but I’m starting to get caught up on some personal stuff, practicing guitar, trying to do some reading. Oh man, Snow Country is kicking my ass. I think I’ve started this book three times. There’s just something about the narrator that just doesn’t appeal to me. I suspect that he was probably the definition of suave in 1920s Japan but it just doesn’t translate, at least for me. But I’ll keep at it.
This is pretty much essential viewing. I’m in awe of people with this kind of talent.
Coffee Prince: As you may know, when I really began to lose interest in mass entertainment, I was still watching Korean horror movies. Really wasn’t a straight line between that and Korean television dramas but I’d say I’ve become a fan over the past month. Coffee Prince was the first kdrama I watched and it definitely hooked me.
The basic plot: Eun Chan is a 24 year old tomboy who has struggled to support her mother and younger sister since her father passed away. She makes money by working at part time jobs such as being a taekwondo instructor, peeling chestnuts, stitching eyes on stuffed animals, and delivering newspapers and milk. Choi Han-gyul is heir to a wealthy family in the coffee business who has just returned to Seoul from studying abroad. His aimless lifestyle raises the hackles of his grandmother, the family matriarch, who is eager to see him married off and start a career. Han-gyul first meets Eun Chan by chance when she prevents his date’s purse from being stolen. He mistakes Eun Chan for a boy and offers her a job to pose as his boyfriend in order to sabotage some blind dates which his grandmother has arranged. You can see where this is going. The Twelfth Night situation is the main source of conflict and drama in the series. Since watching Coffee Prince I’ve seen other kdramas and wanted to talk about the general appeal a little below. Specific to Coffee Prince, however, it would be hard not to notice how charming Yoon Eun Hye is. She’s a famous actress so she’s obviously very pretty. But, within the role, I think she balances the credibility of her passing as a boy with feminine appeal. She also projects a kind of innocent boundless enthusiasm in a way that just levels you emotionally. Also, the soundtrack is, at times, such a snapshot of Zach’s music taste circa 2002, with artists such as Kings of Convenience and Azure Ray being featured prominently.
I’ve also been thinking a lot recently about what makes kdrama different than American television and why I find it to be so much more appealing. It’s a combination of a number of things, but overall I’d say Korean dramas obtain a certain frankness in a way that domestic entertainment never does. Here, everything always has to be some ridiculous overwrought statement, justice must always prevail, there always has to be a moral, a character will never get away with being a jerk if it isn’t justified as the symptom of a tragic flaw or if he or she is not a villain. It just gets to the point where it’s so far outside any conceivable realm of applicability to your own life that, minus the blatant appeal to the vanity of an inner psychodrama, it just starts to feel completely alienating. I mean, take the best recent American tv like Lost or all those HBO shows. Seriously, does that bodice ripper emotion shit mean anything to me? The image above is of a bottle of Soju, or Korean rice wine, which I guess is kind of the Korean analog of sake. It shows up all the time in kdramas. It kind of struck me as odd in the beginning but I guess that’s because I was so used to tv here where you hardly ever see people drink except if the show is about alcoholism or something. I guess that’s one example of what I mean by a frankness, i.e. things may not be perfect but the sun is still going to rise tomorrow morning. And this applies to all sorts of topics which kdramas touch on such as basic money troubles, relationship issues, etc.
That’s not to say that there aren’t some noticeable issues with kdramas. They can be very picture perfect in their portrayal of city life and love (everyone being uniformly attractive, designer clothes, and all kinds of crazy fancy apartments) but, for me, that’s forgivable as you can tuck away an awareness of the illusion in the back of your thoughts. And I guess it goes without saying that you’ll get an ambivalent impression comparing the world of kdramas with the world as presented in the films of Kim Ki-duk for example. What isn’t cool though is that apparently, and I don’t pretend to be an expert on this, the working conditions in the entertainment industry can be exploitative to the talent. If you followed the news from 2009 you may remember that there were a series of high profile suicides in the Korean entertainment industry. The story of Jang Ja Yeon in particular is heartbreaking to read and I think should make anyone think twice about what they see on screen.
Sorry for the scatterbrained nature of this review. I lost part of it while I was writing.
Mini-blog: Don’t mean to bump Rob’s world cup post but I’ve been wanting to post some reviews. Especially to keep the front page updated for the month of shadoweyes. I’ve got a lot of stuff I can talk about and hopefully this week I’m more productive than last week which had pretty much floored me.
I’ve been in contact with Leonard recently and he’s been turning me onto some new music. I’ve especially been digging this video. Which is as fun to shred to than bon jovi.
It’s very glamour which is not something I’m sure I know how I feel about. Hopefully I can get around to reviewing some albums.
It Might Get Loud: Imagine you’re back in high school, sitting in the cafeteria at lunchtime. The vice principal announces over the intercom 3 new initiatives to raise school spirit and fight student apathy: 1) additional study hall period on day of your choosing (with you so far) 2) hourly stretch breaks (uh…) 3) hip new school colors fuschia, orange peel, and slate (facepalm).
This is basically how I respond to the guitarists chosen to participate in It Might Get Loud. A brief summary: a documentary chronicling a meeting-of-the-minds of three famous guitar players, Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White. Biographical segments and interviews with each subject are edited together with a jam session (if you can call it that) with all three present. In a certain sense, the film is exactly what you’d expect knowing that it’s made by the people behind An Inconvenient Truth–a browbeating, pious look at rock music viewed with the cloudy prism of boomer nostalgia. Dumb all around, the Jack White segments are particularly heinous. Not only does he dress up like he thinks he’s still in Cold Mountain but his entire demeanor and everything he says comes off as cover-up-your-eyes embarrassingly contrived. And he’s so full of himself over ideas that have been exhaustively explored in the pages Rolling Stones and other cultural monoliths. Seriously, you’re authentic because you like roots music?
This is not a movie for people who are into guitar. While I can understand deference given to someone like Jimmy Page, none of the three are really shredders. They are primarily known for their songwriting I would say as opposed to their technique. And that’s fine. The only reason I even bring it up is that the jam sessions, which should be the saving grace, are just completely boring. My point being that, even if technically accomplished metal and shred guitarists like Paul Gilbert and Yngwie Malmsteen aren’t celebrated by the middlebrow hippies for which the director is aiming, you could at least sit them down in a room with their instruments and expect to hear something interesting.
