Roboseyo

Tuesday, March 28, 2023

My Oma died.

Oma is the Dutch word for grandmother.

I will add more later, but for now... I feel very very far away from my family in Canada.

Monday, March 20, 2023

Roboseyo leaving Weekly Review on TBS EFM, Squeezed Out by Budget Cuts

Hello Roboseyo fans!

I hope you've been well, and happy, and all that great stuff.

It's been an action-packed little while for me (as always?) but there's been one change that I want to talk about.

Starting in Fall of 2019, I began hosting Weekly Review, the one-hour weekly program that TBS Efm, one of Korea's English radio stations, runs in order to fulfill some legal requirement about media outlet accountability.

All fair and fine. It was... a fantastic experience, frankly. I started just a few months before the pandemic hit, and it was a little thing that kept me having things to look forward to, people to meet, things to get excited about, during all the very worst days of the pandemic, when my default would probably have been to become a Howard Hughes-grade shut-in. Instead of letting the days blur together and turning into a toad... I made new friends, deepened old friendships, acquired a new skill, found a lot of joy in hosting a radio show and making the show a place where a big variety of people felt comfortable sharing their views, and did a bunch of other stuff that made me happy, along with scads of laughs and jokes and smiles.

Well, you may have heard about the politics around TBS's budget problems -- as an outlet funded in large part by the government, TBS got in hot water when one of their Korean DJs said a bunch of stuff that the mayor of Seoul and the new President of Korea disliked, and they used their political pull to withdraw TBS's funding. The review show -- required by regulation -- survived even when a lot of other shows were either wholly or partly cancelled, but in the end, they ran out of money to pay a host (me), and I had to say goodbye to a gig that helped me enjoy my life.

On air, for my final signoff, I asked the producer if I could say a few things about the value that an English language radio station like TBS Efm brings to the culture of a global city like Seoul, and they graciously said I could, so just below, is a capture of that farewell address, for posterity, and in the hope that maybe it'll reach some of the ears that need to be reminded what an independent, non-education, non-news radio station can contribute to a local culture, as well as global views of that culture.

I have more opinions about it than that, connected to the idea of reprisals for free speech, the importance of a free press, and where exactly media outlets can turn for funding in 2023, when everybody wants content, but nobody wants to pay (except advertisers, which introduces a whole other set of problems), but I might save those comments for a future post.

For now, I want to say again, to everyone who listened, who appeared on air with me as a panelist, or who was on the other side of the soundproof barrier, in production, engineering, or whatever they were doing... thanks to all of you, for an experience I've enjoyed immensely, and hope to do again.

You can hear my full comments here!

And here's the text of what I said, in case anyone wants to read along.

That is all for our reviews this week!
I’ve appreciated your insights I look forward to hearing more from you next time!
With that, we’ve reached the end of another episode of tbs eFM’s Weekly Review. Thanks to all of you for listening.
Listeners, we’d love to hear your feedback, too. Our email address is: weeklyreviewefm@gmail.com tell us your thoughts or say hello!
The team will be back again next week, Saturday, at 9am with more feedback and constructive criticism on all your favorite TBS Efm programs, but I have sad news for any of our listeners who have enjoyed my hosting during my time here.
Loyal listeners have surely noticed the way TBS budget cuts have squeezed out many of the programs listeners love, and that squeeze has reached Weekly Review at last. I’m sad to say that this is my last week as the host of Weekly Review.
For me personally, that's a loss, and for all the team members who've enjoyed working with me, and also for listeners who've enjoyed my hosting, hopefully, or my cheesy jokes by some strange bit of luck, but the greater loss is one that I’ve seen up close as a reviewer here at TBS Efm: strangling TBS Efm's funding has robbed Seoul, Korea, and people from every country who are streaming TBS Efm or listening online of an amazing resource.
As a reviewer, I’ve a huge variety of programs presented by TBS efm, and it's my job and here’s the bigger picture: TBS Efm delivered a huge variety of perspectives on Korean life and culture, to a global audience, in real time, for hours every day, in a global language.
A news or education or Korea promotion only station just can’t show the richness of Korean life the way TBS EFM could at its best. We had family stuff, comedy, chat, live music, deep analysis, conversation with listeners from across the globe, not to mention personal interviews with culture and thought leaders both big and small.
All together, tbs efm was much more than the sum of its parts. It was a window into all Korea is, could be, and might become.
So… I’m not here to talk about the politics connected to the TBS EFM budget.
I AM here to say Seoul, as a global city, is culturally poorer for cutting TBS Efm adrift.
So if you care that global audiences get to see Seoul and Korea as it really is, through the eyes of creative and interesting people who live here and love it… I encourage you to contact your local representatives, and let them know you’d like them to support TBS EFM.
It’s been an honor to work with the teams I’ve had here, and it’s been an honor to serve you, listeners, these three and a half years. THank you, all of you in the studio and everywhere.
And that’s it from me and from our team today. This has been Rob Ouwehand for Weekly Review. Enjoy the rest of your weekend, be safe, and support Korea’s culture by supporting TBS Efm.

Sunday, October 30, 2022

Halloween Party Crowd crush in Itaewon: I'm OK, but ffffffuuuuuuu.... (updated)

First of all: I'm okay. My family is okay. One nice thing about being a dad is that my Halloween party plans tend to be in the afternoon, not at night.

A few thoughts on it:

First... if I were going to go to a Halloween party, it would have been either Itaewon, where this whole thing happened, or Hongdae, where the youngs like to hang out.

Second... if you asked me to drop a pin last Thursday, the location where it happened is one of the two places where where I would have thought it would happen: It's right next to the subway station, it's also a little T-shaped intersection between the back streets where there are a lot of clubs and restaurants, and the main strip. What that means is: in that little area, a bunch of people are trying to get OUT of the back streets, a bunch of people are always trying to get IN, a bunch of people on the main strip are trying to head AWAY from the subway station to get down to where there are more party events, and a bunch of other people on the main strip are trying to head TOWARD the subway station, to head to the other end of Itaewon, or get to the subway station.

Normally that just means dodging past a bunch of people going in every direction, but if the crowd is big enough for it to become a bottleneck... this happens.

This is particularly haunting to me, because all last week I was telling my students that it's fun to go to a Halloween party at least once while you're a university student. I hope they all went to Hongdae (the other club area popular with international folks and students).

A little while ago, I think when the thing in Indonesia happened, my son asked me about crowd crushes, and we learned a bit about them through some Youtube videos. So here: learn a little about how they happen, and a bit about what to do:

Now I am hearing people invoke the Sewol Ferry disaster here—the Sewol Ferry sinking was a horrible confluence of risk factors that led to 304 deaths, worst of all, many who were high school students.

This time we will again see shocking numbers of casualties in their teens and twenties—these were partygoers! [update: this is starting, and god it's sad]

But I don’t think they are quite as comparable as all that, other than the utter, gut-punch grief that will wash over the country as we start seeing photos and learning about the people we lost last night.

The Sewol became a political disaster because it was a boat run by a company that had been cutting corners, exploiting loopholes, and taking advantage of some sloppy or careless safety inspectors, to pile up risk factors until they all went wrong at once. The failure of safety inspectors and regulations directly implicated the government who’d loosened regulations and the entire chain of command who systematically turned a blind eye as conditions that should have been enough to ground the ship until it passed safety protocols... didn't. The slow, confused, chaotic response by the coast guard and reporters who utterly botched the initial reporting meant that some lives were lost that didn't need to be.

But the things that went wrong this time? I don’t think you can put them at any regulator or safety inspectors feet. The response was pretty quick, though a crowd crush happens so fast that unless crowd control is already on scene, it won't matter much. [UPDATE: I am changing my mind on this. Word is that people were calling emergency services hours before the crush turned deadly, saying "Hey the crowds are out of control in Itaewon... is somebody on the job of making sure nobody gets hurt?" Not to mention... crowds are always bananas on Halloween in Itaewon. Everybody knows that. And if that's the case... yes. Let's get mad.]

How did this one happen?

Among the factors that led to this crowd crush:

1. It was Halloween and Itaewon.

See, every other holiday has festivals and parties all over Seoul—you can go to a Christmas or New Year's or Valentine’s Day party in Kangnam, Jamsil, Hongdae, Jongno, Itaewon, Sinchon, Keondae, and nine other areas that are mad that I forgot them in my list. For Halloween, Itaewon and Hongdae are very much THE destinations, so everyone wanting to dress up and party went to one of those two places.

2. Hallowe'en is special and kind of weird.

For a crowd to get THIS big, it has to be a holiday that's celebrated by Koreans. At least... enough Koreans. If it were celebrated by all Koreans, there'd be parties all over town (see above)... so Hallowe'en is weird, because it's celebrated by a lot of Koreans (mostly younger ones who had Halloween parties at their English academies), but it's still mainly associated with foreigners (who mostly live in Itaewon). This odd confluence is the reason you'd have a lot of people wanting to celebrate, but also find all on them crammed into one or two places to do it.

It was the first “post-pandemic” Halloween.

3. For partygoers:

The Covid pandemic isn’t *actually* over, but regulations are relaxing and people are moving a bit more freely. Anyone who likes Halloween parties, but didn’t get to go in 2020 or 2021, was sure as hell going to go balls to the wall this year!

4. For Bars and Clubs:

If you think the pandemic was tough on people who like to party, imagine how much harder it was for people whose livelihoods depend on selling stuff to partygoers! With that “post-pandemic” feeling, every club and bar with an online presence was sure as shooting planning a “Hallowe’en is Back!” Event to bring out the customers. And bring them out they did.

5. It happened around 10-11:00pm.

This is exactly when the early partners, who came for dinner but have a bedtime or curfew, are leaving the area, and the late night partiers, who plan to go until dawn, are showing up. That means a lot of coming and going at the same time, so traffic would be heavier coming both in and out of the subway station -- and one of the busiest subway exits was right around the corner from the crush.

6. Midterm exams just ended.

This means that all the university students who have been stressed out about midterm tests and wanted to cut loose, needed a place to do so. Where better than Itaewon, where the Halloween parties are?

I've watched a few videos about crowd crushes -- junior was curious about them after the Indonesia disaster earlier this year, and here are a few things we learned.

7. First: a large crowd can turn into a crush unexpectedly

It doesn't take much with a large enough crowd. If the people at the back are nudging the people ahead of them with light pressure, that's no problem... except if the crowd is 200 people deep, and each layer nudges the row ahead with that same slight increase in pressure... well, a light nudge in every direction at once, multiplied by 200, is enough to pin someone so tightly they can't breathe. The crowd doesn't even need to be loud, wild, or panicked, for it to happen.

8. Second: Such a big crowd makes it hard to communicate.

That same large crowd is big enough that the people at the back or outside might not know, or hear, what is happening at the front, or center, of the press. At a rock concert, everyone's paying attention to the singer, so the performer could stop the music, ask everybody to take three steps back, and stop pushing. There was no center of attention for this crowd that could stop the music and ask everyone to stop pushing. The specific place where this happened is especially bad for communication, because it's a narrower bottleneck between two wider streets (see map)

Courtesy of google maps and imac screenshots

The bottleneck is the bridge of an H, with brick walls on every side. On one end was the main Itaewon strip with a subway station people were trying to get to -- or out of -- and the main restaurant/club backstreet just back from the main stretch on the other end. This means that the disaster was around a corner from many of the people who were pushing and shoving to try and get through the crowd. They could never have known.

I'm not going to post photos or video clips (I've seen them, though)...but that crowd was definitely deep enough that the people at the back didn't know what was going on in the center.

I hope you're all safe, my dear ones.

*UPDATE*

I am steadily having my mind changed on the theory that there isn't really one spot to place blame here. Diffusion of blame -- each of the groups responsible for the problem aren't responsible for enough of the problem that they see an incentive to changing their behavior (see, for example, the US political process) -- makes it easy for groups to point fingers and say "It's out of my hands" but... I've seen Korean police navigate massive protests and big rallies and counter-rallies close enough together that it's a surprise violence didn't break out... with surprisingly minimal damage to life and limb.

Reports I am hearing from people I know who were in Itaewon that day are saying to me that the crowds were absolutely nuts hours before the crushing incident, which means there was time to deploy police and get the crowding in hand. That this didn't happen is inexcusable: no, the Halloween party isn't run by a single organization the way a protest or a tourism festival is, so there isn't a point contact to talk to the police about expected crowds, or an organization with an insurance company ready to answer the phone, or pay whoever it is that makes crowd size estimates, but it's well known that Halloween is bonkers in Itaewon, and the writing on the wall was there that it was going to be unusually busy, because... the writing was literally on the Facebook walls of dozens of clubs and restaurants and other venues promoting their Saturday Night Halloween Bash. The police should have been on site in very very large numbers by 4pm that day, certainly by 7pm, and whoever makes that call missed it, and now 150 people are dead who didn't have to die.

I have changed my mind.

*/UPDATE OVER*

So what happens next?

Well, after the Sewol Ferry disaster, Koreans came together in sorrow and solidarity in a really cool way. I hope the communal grief experience ends up being one that pulls Koreans together in a tough time.

After the initial outpouring, it started getting political, as the opposition party started attacking the party in power for its slow, confused and jumbled response, and from there the Sewol disaster and the yellow ribbon that symbolized it began to be a symbol of political conflict instead of grief and solidarity.

There were clear, actionable responses along the lines of safety standards and rigor in regulation checking with the Sewol, but I don't know if that will happen here. The confluence of those eight danger conditions, all at once, in that specific time and place, was a great example of the swiss cheese model of a disaster. You could hold a hundred festivals in Itaewon and not repeat this disaster -- and they have. The things that prevent a crowd crush -- and there are some -- aren't particularly useful if they're installed in that spot, because the next crowd crush in Korea might be in Busan, or outside the stadium before or after a Kpop concert or a big sports event, or in City Hall during a World Cup soccer game, or on the morning of a super mega discount crazy sale at a shopping center. If that alley in Itaewon should have guard rails and direction arrows, about a hundred other places around Seoul -- entrances and exits for concert or sports venues, outdoor festival locations, subway exits with narrow stairwells that open into popular shopping, clubbing or event-having neighborhoods, subway stations close to once-a-year-events, and public protest spaces, should all be kitted out with the same things.

That might be a good idea... but there isn't a clear fall guy to blame for this one the way there was for the Sewol Ferry Disaster, so let's hope it doesn't turn into a political fight. [*Update... see above. I am changing my mind on this... but I'm still not convinced the event creates the kind of political leverage the Sewol did. It might, though.*]

Here are some of the things that can prevent a repeat crowd crush:

--Steel barriers separating people walking one way and the other way.

They could put these up, but if that alley needs steel barriers, about a hundred other alleys around Seoul need them, too.

--CCTVs and computer modeling that predicts when an area will reach danger level

Someone should already be at work designing a Seoul-wide system for observing crowd density, with details about which measures should happen at which point.

--Close down the subway stations serving the busiest areas

The Seoul Fireworks Festival already closes down the subway stations serving the busiest areas closest to the fireworks display. The train doesn't even stop: it just passes through that station until the event is over, and then subways show up to bring people home. There should be a rule that the subway stations stop dropping people off at a station once crowd density reaches some threshold: this could be the next level intervention, if police deployed haven't made an impact on the crowding. This might not work as well as it does for the fireworks festival, because that has a clear ending after which nobody is still trying to go to Yeouido, so urban planners might have better ideas than I have.

--Putting up LED signs around subway exits and narrow but busy alleys that can flash instructions like "This subway exit closed. Please cross the street" "Dangerous Crowding Ahead: Take An Alternate Route" Make sure these instructions are multilingual.

--Spreading out the time of an event -- after a crowd crush in Mecca, Hajj organizers started giving people passes that told them what time of day they could attend the most crowded parts of the Hajj ritual, so that people would be coming all day long, instead of all at once.

This could happen at every festival in Seoul, and maybe should. Someone could design a process where clubs and bars and restaurants get assigned hours of the day, or days of the weekend, to host their own festival event so that the stream of visitors is spread out, instead of every bar in Itaewon planning an event from 9pm-1am. It might take some tweaks to get a system everyone feels is fair, but it could work if some stickler in the bureaucracy really wanted to make himself a pain in the ass of every business proprietor in busy areas.

Again, if these measures are implemented in Itaewon, they should happen in a dozen areas around Seoul -- around Lotte Mall and Myeongdong on big sale days, around the stadiums and sports watching venues during the World Cup, and all protest zones.

My hope is that this was enough of a freak incident that nobody finds a way to turn it into a political bludgeon, no dumbass starts making arguments that there's something about Korean culture that makes Koreans particularly prone to crushing each other at Halloween parties, nor that foreign cultural festivals are clearly a blasphemy and Dangunshinhwa must be punishing Korea for letting its culture be sullied with foreign traditions.

Celebrity pastor blames the gays in five.... four.... three....

Keep safe, everyone. Hug the people you love, and keep your head on straight next time you go to a busy event.

Friday, September 09, 2022

September 8th, 2022: Missing Mom again is OK. Grief is part of Loving [Updated]

This was a note I wrote on Facebook, but I think it deserves commemoration on my blog, too. It's not the first time I've written about mom on my blog (her eulogy is here, and my Jesa post, which is still one of my favorite blog posts that I've ever written, is here, and if you want to know more about Jesa -- korea's ritual to honor those who are gone, and the ancestors in particular, you can read about it here, or from Ask A Korean! here.)

Story: When mom wanted to finish a roll of film, she would walk into a room and say “hey everybody” and snap a picture of them all looking over with dull “whaa?” expressions, until the roll was full. Consistently bad, uninteresting pictures. This day, she had a roll of film, and started doing that, and me, Deb and Dan said, “no, Mom. Let US fill out the roll” and took a series of photos that are, to this day, some of my favorite pictures of the youngest three siblings.

September 8, 2005, was the day my mom left this earth. If any of you has ever spent some time with me and come away thinking I'm gentle, or caring, or a good listener, that I'm warm and affectionate, or encouraging, or good with kids, then you have met my mother as well, one step removed. If you have not thought those things, I take the blame entirely upon myself, because that is the kind of person she showed me to be, and I guess I failed to live up to that.

Most of these pictures are of mom. The one of me sitting in a tree was taken by her, and it has a story.

Rob alone, sittin' in a tree... story below.

See, for all her good qualities, mom was a spectacularly bad gift-giver. She just never got the hang of figuring out what other people would like, so she mostly got other people the thing SHE would have liked to get as a gift.

This led to a nadir one Christmas that involved some tears and a quick save through our family's very very weird sense of humor, but at that point mom kind of threw her hands up, and instead of trying to surprise us, she made a plan to take us each shopping on our birthdays: bring us to the mall or wherever, and let us pick out the thing we wanted or needed. This worked much better in general than trying to surprise us and disappointing us instead.

Near the end of my university years, she moved up a level: the best thing she could offer, really, was her time and her company. Mom was a wonderful person to be with, no matter what you were doing, so the last few birthdays I had with her, she figured out that the very best gift she could give me was to take me out to spend some dedicated time with her. She'd take us out to a play, or something we wanted to do or see. The picture of me in the tree was from one of those excursions. She picked me up at university and drove me into Vancouver, where we had tickets to see a play (Amadeus). Before the curtain opened, we hung out in Stanley Park, probably Vancouver's best landmark, and she'd brought a camera, so we snapped a few pictures, that being one of them, and one of my favorite photos of myself from that time, because of the day when she took it, which was a lovely day from top to bottom.

We saw the play, and then we went for dinner, and I had lobster for the first time in my life... Mom hadn't asked Dad for permission to eat such fancy stuff -- I suggested lobster almost as a joke, airily saying, "You know I've never had lobster!" with the subtext, "How ridiculous, suggesting such an expensive meal! Can you imagine if Dad, who makes the responsible money choices, heard us suggesting such fripperies?" (Dad ran the family checkbook), so she agreed to do it with a conspiratorial smile. The lobster was wonderful, and the feeling of mild transgression with your mom was another layer of fun on the entire day.

(We did get busted: mom paid for part of the meal with cash to hide how large the bill was, but Dad noticed a disproportionately large tip when he was balancing the checkbook, and mom 'fessed up. He couldn't do anything anyway: that money was already spent!)

Mom was the best at making people feel loved. The absolute best. Nobody's perfect, but that is the thing that stays with me all these years afterwards.

Grief is the mirror image of the love you had for someone: some loves never end, some people leave impacts on us that linger for our entire lives, whether they're still around or not, and where mom's love made me a better, kinder, more balanced or confident or generous person, each of those spots is a little hollow, a knot in the wood, where sorrow gathers now that she's gone.

But that's OK. It's normal, it's appropriate, I'll even say it's *proper* that such an important person in my life is still grieved, all these years later. She absolutely deserves the occasional tear or sob, the occasional melancholy 'wish you were here' dream (I had a dream where I introduced her to my son once), the occasional nostalgic thumb-through of the photo album. That's just the mirror image of the love and goodness she brought to my life, and ultimately, my life is richer and fuller both for the good things she gave me, and for the ways grieving her made me softer, more gentle, more empathetic, and better at showing my special people I love them while they are still around for me to appreciate them.

Miss you mom!

RIP

Mom with her oldest grandchild. She had a special relationship with him, and one of the hardest parts of losing her is that she never got to be a special Oma for my kid, or a special mom-in-law for my wife. My step-mom, Nana, is wonderful, and a blessing in all our lives, to be clear. I'm thankful for everything about her because she's just awesome. But I'm still sad Juniorseyo never met his Oma. It's hard, but those can both be true.

Mom and dad, at their 25th anniversary party. This is how Mom looks in my memory. A little soft, in just the right spots to give transcendent hugs.

Mom with Dad, in her last year. Losing weight because of stomach cancer. Fuck cancer.

Update: My sister Deb shared the post I wrote, which I've copied above, and added a few thoughts of her own, which were just lovely. I've had a few really nice responses and reflections from a few of the people who loved mom -- including one of her best friends, and a few cousins and relatives whose lives were touched by Mom's love, and I'm really grateful for them, too. How wonderful is it that seventeen years after someone died, they can still bring people together? That is just such a perfectly Mom thing to do.

So, with permission, here's what my sister Deb wrote.

[My brother wrote this linked post:] This is a beautifully crafted piece about my mom. My brother describes both her and the loss of her so perfectly.

One of my favourite memories of my mom was ALSO an excursion rather than a gift (I had a dream once where she NAILED Christmas. Every gift was perfect...I woke up laughing, realizing it had to be a dream because in real life that never happened!! 🤣🤣🤣)

My mom and I went walking one day up and down the walkway at White Rock. We did the beach on the way down, and the shops and restaurants on the way up.

We stopped for dinner and shared a Bellini, my first restaurant bought alcohol and still my favourite drink when I'm in the mood for a drink.

At the end of the day we had dessert (crème brûlée) and watched the sun set and rabbits frolic from a rooftop patio. It wasn't fancy, we didn't solve the world's problems, but we were together and I knew there was nowhere else mom would have wanted to be that day than spending time with me.

Mom loved unconditionally, laughed with her whole body and held onto the special moments and memories that were given to her in time shared.

I miss her on the good days and the hard days.

I don't wallow in sadness, I don't have a deep unforgiving ache, but Rob puts it very well, deep love leaves a deep hollow and I do have moments where I just wish that hollow could be filled.

That dream where mom gave great gifts? I woke up laughing, but also, I got in a few more great mom hugs during that dream, and I'm glad I remembered those when I woke up too.

17 years feels like forever and so fast all at the same time. Love you, mom.

/END QUOTE

I'm so grateful to my sister for sharing this. I never heard this story, nor about her (hilarious) dream where mom got every Christmas present right... but it's so great any time you get a few more mom hugs, even if they're in a dream. I love the line that "I knew there was nowhere else mom would have wanted to be that day than spending time with me." --one thing that was always great about mom is the way that when she was with you, she was with you -- she was fully present and focused on the person she was with. She died before the first smartphone appeared on the market, but I think she would have hated them more than anybody, because they cause people to be only half-present, half-looking at the phone, and mom was never less than 100% present for someone.

and I'm also grateful for my sister mentioning that mom laughed with her whole body -- things got silly in our house sometimes, and mom was a little small, and a little round, and when she really laughed hard, it looked like she'd roll right onto her back: a rock backwards so that her (so very short) legs were off the ground as she rocked back in her seat, accompanied with a welt-worthy thigh slap, and a full-throated belly-laugh that could be heard from outside the house. Oh, it was fun to try to get her to laugh like that.

Thanks again to every last person who saw and responded to my little FB tribute to mom, or who comments here. Grief doesn't have a time limit, and neither does love, and if this cluster of paragraphs can encourage someone to make a phone call or send a note to remind someone that they're loved, that'll be a perfect fit with mom's legacy, so go on and do that, and somebody new will get a chance to meet my mom, a few steps removed!

Love Rob

Speaking of grief, today, the 17th anniversary of mom's death, was also the day Queen Elizabeth II went to meet her maker. The whole English speaking world is sad on the day I'm remembering mom... Queen Elizabeth was my favorite royal by a long-shot, and carried a great deal of the English royal family's legitimacy on her strong shoulders. I wonder what will happen next, but QEII was awesome, and I'll miss her being around holding the entire rest of the royal family back from being sucked completely into a black hole of scandal.

Friday, August 19, 2022

Walking Around Samcheongdong, my annual blog post. 삼청동 서울

I took some walks around Samcheongdong recently, and turned on my camera. Just because.

If you like walking around neighborhoods, or think my voice is cool, or want to hear my thoughts on the neighborhoods, enjoy them!

Warning: they have not been fact checked, and only minimally edited, so... set expectations accordingly.

This is the long one.

I was sending them to a friend, so for a while I tried to keep them under 2 minutes so that messenger wouldn't go "Durr. File too large." But then I gave up.

It was on August 8, and there was some serious rain in parts of Seoul, so you hear me talking about the chances I'll get wet, but it never quite came to piss. I mean pass. This is a tiny temple near the entrance to Samcheongdong.

I talk here a little about gentrification in this neighborhood.

The little graffiti street near the National Library.

Thursday, November 04, 2021

MCU: Looking Back, Looking Forward

The Eternals is hitting theater screens this week...

to celebrate, I made a video series of my thoughts on where the MCU is right now, how it got to be so darn successful, and which pitfalls are coming up, which might undermine the success of their next phase.

Video One: How the MCU got to the top.

Video two: Trouble on the Horizon: problems that will become big for the MCU very very soon.

Coming soon: Video three: Problems bedeviling the MCU right now.

Thursday, October 28, 2021

Dave Chappelle's "The Closer," Edgy Comedians, and Cancel Culture

Lately, everyone's mad (or at least riled up) about Dave Chappelle's "The Closer" on Netflix. I made two videos about it. The first one is about edgy comedy in general, and a few things we need to consider when transgressive comedy is in the news.

The second one is about the transgressive comedy special of the hour, Dave Chappelle's "The Closer" on Netflix, where he really tried to get cancelled by taking aim at trans folk. (ps: he's not cancelled). There's been a big discussion and a lot of points of view expressed on the issue of Chappelle's special, and the issues in Chappelle's special.

I hope you like them!

In all this, I think it's important to make sure that we're listening to what actual trans people are saying rather than getting carried away with what is being said about them. I am dismayed to find there are a lot of articles talking about Chappelle, about Netflix, about the media furor, and about the Netflix employees who walked out in protest of the special, but I'm down on page two and three and four of the google search results, and still finding a very disappointing lack of articles reporting trans folks' take on Chappelle's comments.

Here are some articles featuring the voices of trans people, talking about Chappelle's special. Please make sure the subjects of the conversation have their voices heard.

CNN asked four trans comedians what they thought of Chappelle's special.

CBC has a video which includes a black trans artist on the panel, who makes some good points.

Comedian Dahlia Belle has a response in the Guardian that's blistering.

A very good perspective from the Independent:

Back in 2005, there was a very specific incident that had made Chappelle realise his comedy might be harmful. In a sketch he considered to be ironic, he was dressed in blackface and dancing, when he heard the loud echo of a white man’s laughter reverberate across the set. To Chappelle, this was evidence that his satire wasn’t working: regardless of his intention, some people felt he was giving them the green light to laugh at an oppressed minority. Over 15 years later, The Closer confirms that Chappelle is no closer to remedying his original problem. After all, he is still drawing out mean-spirited laughs from a crowd – the difference is that the laughs are now at the expense of another marginalised group.

This Vox article includes vital statistics about the frequency of violence and abuse against trans people, including domestic violence, workplace harassment, hate crimes, homelessness, and suicide.

This LA Times article quotes several transgender people who worked with or for Netflix, including Terra Field, the Netflix employee who was fired (and re-hired) for speaking out against Netflix.

This report quotes trans activist Drian Juarez.

Readers, if you have another trans voice who's weighed in on this topic, please link it in the comments.

More facts about violence against transgender and nonbinary people. If you can watch a Chappelle special full of trans jokes, don't look away from this.

Tuesday, October 05, 2021

CoronaVirus CoVidEo Corner: Plague Film Bonanza: Part 5

Weirdo that I am, I'm commemorating the CoVid19 lockdown by watching plague movies, and because I love you, I'm writing them up for you, readers, and I'll end the series with a nice best-of countdown!

If you aren't up to date on the series, the rules for inclusion or the scoring, I'll put a recap at the bottom of this post, or you can read the full description and official rules at the table of contents page.

I... I kind of ran out of gas on this blog series, probably because as the pandemic got worse, watching plague movies stopped being quite so fun, but every half-finished blog post in my draft file bugs me, so here's a chance to move one from "unpublished" to "published"

In This Episode (Part 5)

The Crazies (2009 and 1973)

Day of Resurrection/Virus: The End (Fukkatsu No Hi) (1980)

The Andromeda Strain (1971)

REC (2007)

Blindness (2008)

The Crazies (2009) (IMDB Page) and 1973 (IMDB Page)

The Skinny: George Romero, creator of the modern zombie film with "Night of the Living Dead," took another kick at horror/plague can with the 1973 original, and produced the remake in 2010. An airplane crashes outside a small town, releasing a bioweapon government scientists have been working on into the water supply of a very small town. The infection causes people to either die or become extremely violent.

In both versions, the military sets up a perimeter to try to quarantine the town, and things turn really, really sour. For some reason the military wants to get everybody into the school gym for quarantine (sounds like a rotten idea if the infection makes everyone attack each other), which gives the military (and the filmmakers) an excuse to roam all over town in search of extreme situations. We follow different townsfolk and military personnel as the "Crazies" virus (nicknamed "Trixie") goes to work. Things get pretty ugly. The 2010 version follows Timothy Olyphant’s small-town sheriff character close enough that the film has a protagonist, which can’t really be said for the original.

Scoring: 1973 DNF. Night of the Living Dead was better, but a lot of fans of old horror and exploitation films have a soft spot for The Crazies as well. I'll be honest, I didn't feel the film made the most of its premise, it failed to create a real mood of menace or dread, and the gore was dialed down compared to your average zombie attack. There's something about 70s and 80s movies of this type -- there are just so many scenes of someone in military garb shouting "Shut down the thing" into a walkie talkie, while somebody else in a different outfit shouts, "You can't shut down the thing, dammit!" It started with a lot of shouting, and ended with a lot of shooting, but lacked a clear, compelling protagonist and amounted to quite a bit less than the sum of its parts, in my opinion.

Scoring: 2010 DNF/DQ’d. The 2010 film is a little slicker and better acted, and the imagery is quite a bit better. There is a bit with a pitchfork that’s quite well-done, and a set piece set in a car wash that is very silly, and people with the rage virus get more or less disgusting-looking, depending on how well the protagonist knows them. Now, I love me some late ‘00s Timothy Olyphant, but 2010 Crazies still never quite amounts to something impressive. These films are way better-made than Cabin Fever, but the 1973 version was not compelling, and the 2010 version was more of a monster movie than a plague movie, really, so given that it wasn't a great film to begin with, I'm not giving it a full write-up: it’s either DNF as a plague film, or DQ’d because it’s a monster movie.

Both films seem to be trying to make a point about government overreach -- as the military tries to contain the breakout, they herd people into fenced cages in 2010, and confine them in a school gym and confiscate their guns in 1973, but this muddles any thematic coherence the film might have had, because if the disease makes the infected do what they do in this film, the military is very much right to contain the outbreak at all costs, and the group (both films have one) who tries to escape the quarantine is incredibly reckless and irresponsible. The 2010 film commits the sin of multiple sudden-noise+hand-appears-out-of-nowhere startling the viewer, only for that person to turn out to be a friend. Bad enough once. There is also at least one, and possibly more, scenes where a character we like is in a bad situation, about to be killed by a baddie, only for them to be shot from offscreen by a character we hadn’t known was nearby. The sauce is too weak to forgive the story’s shortcomings.

Day of Resurrection (1980) (Fukkatsu No Hi)

The Skinny: The most expensive Japanese film ever made at the time. It tells the story of a virus created by the military that makes other pathogens much more deadly, and kills all life on earth, except the inhabitants of a few Antarctic research stations. The Cold War finally over, the researchers try to imagine life repopulating the earth after the virus has died away, only to realize US and Russia have set up automated nuclear launch deterrents to a nuclear attack -- launches that will happen automatically if a nuclear explosion is detected, kind of like a dead man's switch, and that these automatic launches might be triggered by a coming earthquake. A few researchers and a submarine crew must go to Washington to turn off the automated retaliation machine before it leads to an automated nuclear exchange between all-dead USA and Russia that would irradiate the earth and perhaps end even chance live eventually makes a comeback.

The Good: There's something nostalgic about watching Cold War films in 2020, I admit. Jaw-clenched men in military garb shouting "Cancel the code red" at each other, gazing off in the middle distance and musing, "It could be the end of life itself, Mr. President" -- there's just something so cheesy and quaint about it now, even though in the 70s and 80s the stakes were so high. The film is competently acted and directed, a little slow, and gives the plague mostly superficial treatment as part of the premise for the drama happening at the Antarctic station.

This film was headed for a DNF until one scene so ludicrous it approached the sublime. An Antarctic station crew is trying desperately to find someone, anyone, still alive on the rest of the planet, and end up talking with a five-year-old who got scared, went on his dad's short wave radio, but doesn't know to let go of the broadcast button when he finishes talking, meaning that people can't reply to him. There's about a three minute scene of scientists and doctors huddled around a radio microphone, shouting "TOBY LET GO OF THE SWITCH" at a five-year-old who can't hear them. Of all the different ways to portray the world ending, they chose this.

Enjoy it with me.

The Bad: The film's premise is a little silly, and it ends on a serious downer. I guess the film's supposed to be a warning about nuclear weapons? Really, it doesn't seem to know whether it wants to be a plague film, describing the outbreak of the plague, or a "stuck in isolation" film about the people at the Antarctic station: the characters we meet and care about are just about all at the research stations, or dead in the first half of the film, yet the climactic conflict to be resolved involves a trip to Washington to shut off an armageddon machine, disconnected from almost all of the characters we cared about, rather than some problem that must be solved at the research stations. As the scientists decide what to do about the future, the women (there are 8 women on the Antarctic stations, at about a 100-1 man-to-woman ratio) agree to some pretty damn awful living conditions for the sake of the preservation of the human race, in a gross scene that doesn't fit the rest of the movie, and sure sounds like a middle-aged man writing out his sexual fantasy, more than something a group of women would actually agree to. The storyline jumps around between places, groups of characters, and time a lot, skipping around from before the breakout, to during, to the Antarctic bases' long stay and search for a cure, to the point that it feels like the story got away from the filmmakers, or the editor perhaps.

Scoring:
Frightening: This film starts out as a political drama, turns into a survival drama, and ends weirdly. None of the marks it's aiming for are trying to scare the audience. It's frightening that the Cold War led USA and Russia down such horrifying paths to find an advantage over each other, but especially now that the Cold War (as it was then) is over, the film and its stakes don't really hit the mark any more in 2020. 1/5

Scary: The scariest it gets is people coughing, and grossest part of the film isn't anything disease-related, but the women of the Antarctic stations agreeing to lend out their wombs to all the men of the research stations for the sake of the human race. There aren't any jumps or gross-outs: this film is not going for that audience. As I said, I probably would have turned it off if not for the unintentional comedy of the Toby scene, which got me to watch the rest of the film, but not to love it. 1/5

Plausible: The origin of the plague, the idea that USA and Russia might have been engaging in a biological warfare weapons race, the cloak and dagger around how the virus got developed, and got loose, are all ideas/plots/schemes/fears I've heard before in the context of the Cold War, and the idea that a reckless scientist would be the one to invent the pathogen that gets us isn't farfetched enough. We don't get too many details about the type or progress of the plague, and what we do find out is described in a few exposition lines rather than dramatized interestingly, but it's believable that a couple of diseases could interact with each other to create something much worse, or that low temperatures could make a deadly virus go dormant. 3/5

Awesome: This film is a real period piece, for its music and acting, the slower pacing than we get in films today, and for the Cold War context. It's been long enough since USSR fell that it's getting hard to remember just how scary the nuclear arms race was at the time. Moreover, as I said in "the bad" above, the film seems to be unsure of what it is, and not enough of the spaghetti they're throwing at the wall sticks. It was competently made, the short wave radio scene is transcendent, and peak Olivia Hussey sure was something, but none of that was enough to save the film. 2/5

But Wait, There's More! Stinger? You can't really tease more when you've already killed the entire human race save a few dozen, so... nope.

Verdict: If you're going to watch a film where the entire world gets wiped out, The Stand's "what comes after" is more interesting than this.

Total Score: 7/20

The Andromeda Strain (1971) (IMDB Page)
The Skinny: One of the older films on the plague viewing list, but also one of the very plaguiest, The Andromeda Strain is about a group of crack scientists sent into a deep underground scientific lab to study a virus that has wiped out an isolated American village.

The Good: This film probably gets into the details of how scientists would investigate a virus in more detail than any other film in this series: robot arms moving samples around airtight laboratories, computer scans revealing screens of data (in old timey 1970s beep boop green text on black screen style), and detailed discussion of how the virus reproduces, its size, what it feeds on, and how it kills, mean that if you really do read books on epidemiology for fun, this is the plague movie for you. There are a bunch of Very Smart Men (and a woman!) with PhDs gritting their teeth and making Very Important Decisions, and it's kind of charming, but anachronistic (in 2021) how much faith this film shows in science and the scientific method. It wasn't a problem with the science that led Covid to be as devastating as it has been.

The Bad: If you don't read books on epidemiology for fun, this film is a little dry. There are long scenes showing, for example, a robot arm moving animal cages around and exposing them to the virus. The scientists all wear identical red jumpsuits, so a few of the characters kind of blur together, and the way the plot hinges around certain protocols being followed or not, and a bit of a contrivance for the reasons a key piece of information doesn't come to light... well, I suppose it's better than Jake Gyllenhaal in VR glasses punching a virus in the jaw, but again, the film suffers from slow pacing and does a lot of explaining. Sure, every film from the '70s is a slow burn to the MTV-addled attention spans of 2021 movie viewers, but... this one is too, and maybe it's not them, it's me... but given that you, dear reader, probably also have an MTV-addled attention span, be warned.

Scoring:
Frightening: Nah. This film isn't really frightening. You sense academically that the virus is deadly, for one thing by how many precautions the characters take to avoid it (though those precautions slow the action waaay down). The animation and graphics used to represent the andromeda virus are also '70s nifty, and create a few moments of "whoa. It's coming!" but they don't linger enough to count as frightening. 1/5

Scary: There are a few mild gross-outs when investigators discover dead virus victims with entirely coagulated blood, and during the science testing a few animals are shown dying of the virus, but the purpose of this film is not to make us gasp in horror at the disease, but to marvel at the cleverness of those who unlock it secrets (and the writer who came up with it all). 2/5

Plausible: The idea that scientists would be doing science somewhat like this in a super-fancy underground science lab: plausible. The idea that the government has a super-fancy underground science lab and a set of disease investigation protocols including a pre-selected crack team of virus experts standing by for the call? Less plausible, especially after how the pandemic unfolded since 2020. They put a baby on a four-foot-high flat stretcher, keep it there for days, and he never once falls off. The science of the virus and the investigation are very well-thought-through, as they were in the Michael Crichton book. This film lives or dies on whether you think its investigation and results are plausible, and they mostly are. 4/5

Awesome: If '70s competence porn is your thing, there's lots to love here, and yeah, the details of the virus and the investigation are so thorough there's a ring of authenticity that if space viruses came down to threaten the earth, they might work this way, but yeah, it's also 70s cinema with the pacing and style that entails. 3/5

But Wait, There's More! Stinger? The virus escapes containment, but because of things they learn during the investigation, that turns out not to be much of a concern, so yes and no: no points awarded or deducted.

Verdict: The more you know and care about scientific process and epidemiology, the more you'll enjoy this film. The only other films in this series that come close to the level of detail in explaining the workings of their plagues are The Girl With All the Gifts and Pontypool, and of them, Pontypool has the best zinger at the end. It is very very sciencey, and very very plaguey.

Total Score: 10/20 ... perhaps I weighted scary/frightening a little heavy on my scale if the most sciencey and the most plaguey film in the set can only manage a middling score. Than again... it's my series, so I'll score for the things I like, by gum!

[REC] (2007) (IMDB Page)

The Skinny: In this Spanish found footage film, a young news reporter follows a fire department call into a building where people are getting sick. While inside, authorities lock down the building, stopping anyone from escaping while a zombie-like infection spreads through the population of building tenants. This film was a huge success, spawning three sequels as well as the shitty tribute of an inferior English language Hollywood remake (which was alright, but close to a shot-for-shot remake, and if I recall correctly, lacked the manic energy of the original). It could qualify as more a zombie movie than a plague movie, but the fact that a lot of my readers are currently in quarantine, lockdown, or under stay at home orders of varying degrees of severity make it relevant enough for inclusion.

The Good: This film does a good job at slowly escalating tension and fear. Even more, the directing and acting strike me as realistic, simply because if there were a zombie breakout an apartment building, people would be losing their shit and the actors in this film actually show fear and panic. When something happens, people are all shouting at the same time, the cameraman doesn't know where to point, and three people have three different ideas about what to do. Most people wouldn't stay cool and turn into Vin Diesel zombie slayers in this situation, and even police and rescue workers are shouting, panicking and making rash decisions. The film does a few tropes well -- the creepy kid, the harmless old lady gone wrong, and the ending, in an attic, mostly in the dark, is a pretty darn great ending, probably good enough on its own to justify sequels and remakes.

The Bad: To be honest, all the usual reservations about found footage films apply. The premise -- that it's a professional cameraman -- helps sell the idea that camerawork should be mostly good, and there are a few haunting images that fit seamlessly into the story -- my favorite is when a character shouts for her friend down a spiral stairwell, and about ten zombies in the stairwell at different levels all look up, and all start climbing -- but there are also places where the shaky camera and dancing flashlight beams mean that horror reveals are too short, murky, or unsatisfying. It's a hard balance to reveal just enough to be scary, but leave the rest to the imagination, but films that use found footage shaky cameras to skimp out on horror reveals are a bugbear of mine. This film had about 70% as many really frightening images as it could have, in my opinion.

Scoring:

Frightening: Yes! The way this film turns a perfectly ordinary living area into a house of horrors is very well done, the suspicion that you never know what your neighbors are really doing is a good foothold for terror, and the idea of not being able to escape as things curdle is real and effective. The ever-escalating creepouts and scares make this film a very good variation on the Blair Witch Project template. Showing the raw fear of the building tenants slowly increase makes the frights work, and the cast really sells it. 4/5

Scary: Yes! The film bends its own zombie rules - the speed at which people turn into zombies keeps increasing - and the explanation of the whole thing is perfunctory at best, but there are enough surprises, things jumping out of shadows, and gross or startling images that the film takes the viewer where it wants them to go. Good use of light and darkness to set up surprises and increase suspense means that there are jumps, but none of them are cheap. 5/5

Plausible: Explanations or origins are barely better than hand-waves, but I it was refreshing that there wasn't a "how do they know all these things/how did they find out so quickly and correctly?" character explaining things, the way Jeffrey Wright's character in Invasion or Hallorann in The Shining or Gottleib and Geiszler in Pacific Rim seem to always have a theory, or know something, or pop in with a bit of exposition, and always be correct. They point a camera around a creepy science lab and zoom in on some creepy newspaper clippings, but nothing is ever fully, or even partly, explained. It is fully believable frightened local authorities would quarantine a building and let everyone inside fester. Every zombie film is preposterous from the very premise, but this film was chaotic and fun and scary enough that it earns a little slack just for being fun. 2/5

Awesome: I've mentioned things like people who know what's going on; a lot of films also spend screen time on the public official whose choices make things worse, and part of me was waiting for them to come along and clarify the situation. They never did, and for all the unanswered questions, I actually appreciate how limited and narrow this film's focus was: we only see what the single cameraman recorded, we only know what the characters inside the building know. This film is a concise, adrenaline spike of chaos, panic and fear, and then it's over, and that's enough. It delivers what it promised. 4/5

But Wait, There's More! Stinger? Even though there are sequels, this film does not end with a tacky sequelbait scene. Plus one point.

Verdict: The film succeeds by knowing what it is, what its audience wants, and delivering that. The found footage genre has some inherent drawbacks, but I didn't find myself getting annoyed by them, because of the film's excellent pacing, tight narrative focus, and an excellent performance by Manuela Velasco.

Total Score: 16/20 A taut, tightly focused, scary film about small spaces. It might be hard to watch for someone quarantined themselves, but the film delivers on its promise and follows through its premise. It doesn't always make sense, but between the pacing, the energy, and the scares, that doesn't matter.

Blindness (2008) (IMDB Page)

The Skinny: A mysterious infectious disease causes people to suddenly "white out" and lose their vision. Julianne Moore's husband, an optometrist, is exposed very early, so she travels into quarantine with him, while still sighted, to take care of him. Quarantine gets pretty rough as more suddenly-blind people arrive in the quarantine facility, and then, as the rest of the world goes blind, too, resources get scarce and the quarantine wards begin to compete. As the only sighted person in quarantine, Julianne Moore has some hard choices to make about how to use her sighted advantage over the other quarantinees. The first third of the film explores the spread of the plague a little, as Danny Glover describes what happened to the people in quarantine, and the middle of the film retells a Lord of the Flies type story of humans becoming shitty in shitty circumstances, and then the final third of the film introduces the theme of finding hope and home in dire situations.

The Good: Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo are two of my favorite actors to watch, so that is a pretty durn good start! According to wikipedia, about 700 actors had to be trained to act blind for the scenes in quarantine, and wandering around the city. The film is interestingly made, with some interesting visuals and excellent incorporation of music throughout.

The Bad: Trigger warning for sexual violence. Some of the men in the shitty quarantine ward do classic shitty man behavior, and the film is not shy about showing that, but at least also shows its impact and consequences, both on the victims and on the perpetrators. There is very little explanation of what is happening, or why, and the progress of the plague and its workings are less interesting to the filmmakers than how the film's characters react to it. That can be fine, but then I wish the scene-writing had drawn the characters' personalities and their choices in sharper relief. As it is, the film is almost an abstracted series of moods and ruminations rather than a character or acting-driven story... again, which is fine, but perhaps an underuse of Mark Ruffalo, Julianne Moore, Danny Glover, etc.'s talent as actors. Moreover, the final third of the film, where Julianne Moore (the characters are never named) and a few of her friends escape the quarantine and explore their benighted city, seems like almost an entirely different genre of film than the first part, the quarantine drama.

You're gonna have to get all the way off my back...
(source: pitch meeting)

Meanwhile, Julianne Moore seems to be the only person in the entire city, or perhaps the entire world, who retains her sight, and short of "that's just the premise of the film, so..." that's not explained or examined either.

Scoring:
Frightening: This isn't a scary plague film in either sense. The moods, the feeling of being hedged in and helpless in quarantine, the gross feeling as humans start being shitty, and keep getting shittier: this movie has some downer spots, but none of them are really frightening. The most haunting part, for me, was when Julianne Moore and a few of her closest wandered out of the quarantine, and wandered through the city trying to find food or safety: one of the group falls one step behind, reaches his hand out in the wrong direction to touch the back of the person ahead in line, and ends up getting separated from the group through simple bad luck and happenstance: he goes from being a part of the group, protected by numbers, to just another vulnerable, solitary soul in a city of lost souls. Just like that. 1/5

Scary: Other than the horror of sexual violence, as well as some physical violence with a knife, there aren't jump-scares or gross-outs here. Where it does get horrific are in the predatory behaviors of the men who control the food in quarantine, and out in the city, where if it seems like you have food, you'll get mobbed by groping, lurching bodies trying to grab at whatever you have, like those scenes in a zombie movie where hundreds of zombie hands reach through a doorway and pull a person back through. Also, there is a short scene of dogs eating the bodies of dead humans in the street. Gross, but a sharp underscore of the idea human life has no value once society has broken down. 2/5

Plausible: It's kind of a "Lord of the Flies" vision of what would happen if everyone lost their sight at once, but to be honest, none of the gross behaviors we see people do seem beyond imagination. And in the midst of that, effort is also made to show that the characters do continue to form and develop their relationships, and do those other, lovely things that humans do, too. 3/5

Awesome: As I said, any film with Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo and Danny Glover is off to a good start. The film gives an interesting and well-realized portrayal of an interesting premise and, while I wouldn't say it's fun or always enjoyable, there are interesting things going on throughout. The initial dramatic tension that comes of Julianne Moore being able to see when nobody else can doesn't really yield much story-wise: she operates more as an observer and audience stand-in than as the story's driving energy, though she thoroughly refutes the idea that "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man (or woman) is king." The film is careful to include little moments of human connection, intimacy, spontaneity and surprise, for example when it rains and suddenly all the lost humans groping for food take a moment to enjoy the water pouring over them. On the other hand, with few exceptions, the film is not beautiful to see: colors are washed out, and almost every scene is full of clutter and human squalor, cruelty or desperation. If you are into films showing a lot of people down on their luck and heading toward bottom, people who don't know how to groom because they can't see mirrors, this film is for you. 3/5

But Wait, There's More! Stinger? None.

Verdict: Perfect Sense was the uplifting art film about plague and loss of our senses. This one was the dark, cynical one. If you like that dark edge, Blindness isn't a pretty look at humanity, but it's well-made in its bleak vision of human isolation and meanness.

Total Score: 9/20 That seems about right for a film with some good bits, but slow pacing and parts that were hard to watch.

Series Recap:
Weirdo that I am, I'm commemorating the CoVid19 lockdown by watching plague movies, and because I love you, I'm writing them up for you, readers, and I'll end the series with a nice best-of countdown!

To sum up the ground rules:

Qualifying:
It has to be a film. There might be some great plague television out there, but I have a kid: binge watching six TV series that are too scary to share with my kid this week is off the table. It has to be a narrative film, not a documentary.

The film has to be about a plague or viral infection. That is, the film has to put significant attention on what the infectious agent is, how it spreads or works, and what can be done about the infection. If the response is "we need to hide from/kill all the zombies" it's not really a plague film: it's a zombie film. If the response is "we can beat this if we discover and exploit a weakness in how the virus spreads" then it's a plague film. (So, World War Z: yes; Dawn of the Dead: no.) There's a little wiggle room here, and I'll be making some calls. Deal with it.

Scoring:
Films that fail to hold my attention get a DNF (Did Not Finish)

Films that hold my attention are scored on four dimensions:
Frightening (is it the kind of scary that's moody, builds up, and stays with you afterward?)
Scary (is it the kind of scary that makes you jump in your seat, or wish you'd eaten a smaller lunch? Surprises and gross-outs get points in this category.)
Plausible (does the plague, and people's response to it, seem realistic, as if it could possibly happen?)
Awesome (is it a good movie? Does it hit its marks?)
Each of these dimensions will be scored out of five.
Finally, for bonus demerits/points:
"But wait, there's more!" stinger - does the film end by hinting that the infection is on its way to a ~~sequel~~ new location? You know...the montage where the contaminated water ends up at a bottling factory while ominous music plays? Yah those are cheesy, and I will be docking points for them, depending on the amount of cheesiness.

It's unlikely that any film will get a 20/20 on this scale, because frightening, scary and plausible are usually a trade-off: films that make me jump like a cat usually don't also make me fear door handles, and a film that does both probably asks for a big suspension of disbelief in the plausibility category.

Go Back to Part 1
Films reviewed:
(Carriers (2009)
Deranged (연가시) (2012)
Patient Zero (2018)
Outbreak (1995)
The Bay (2012)
Perfect Sense (2011)

Go Back to Part 2
감기 (The Flu)
Black Death
Pontypool
Extinction: The GMO Chronicles
괴물 (The Host)
Viral (2016)
The Girl With All the Gifts

Go Back to Part 3
And The Band Played On (1993)
12 Monkeys (1995)
Cabin Fever (2002)
Planet of the Apes Trilogy (2011-2017)
World War Z (2013)
Contagion (2011)

Go Back to Part 4
Antiviral (2012)
Maggie (2015)
10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)
Pandemic (2016)
Stephen King's The Stand (1994)
28 Days Later (2002) / 28 Weeks Later (2007) duology
The Invasion (2007)

CoVideo Corner sidebar: Social Distancing Edition:
This post discusses a set of films about claustrophobia, isolation, boredom and helplessness: the feelings we're all feeling during our stay-at-home quarantines and self-isolation.

Friday, October 01, 2021

Things are Rozy in Korea's Uncanny Valley

Every so often, one of those "weird news" stories leaks out of Asia about a celebrity who's entirely virtual. Lately, there's been a dancing girl on TV and bus ads, as well as posters on the sides of city buses, called Rozy. Here's what she looks like.

Source

Here's how she moves (youtube)

I've been intrigued by the idea of virtual humans, VR humans, brains in computers and computer generated people for as long as I can remember, so this caught my eye, and it's funny how little media coverage I've seen about it, given that for a few weeks there, she was playing in the ad rotation of every single bus's ad/announcement TV. A few months ago, one of my radio pals talked about this topic on air, and mentioned a name that sent me down a google rabbit hole.

(a lot of this info was from this blog post)

You see, here in Korea, there's a surprisingly long history of artificial celebrities: all the way back in the late 1990s, there was 아담 (Adam - fitting name for the first male cyber celebrity) nicknamed 사이버 가수 (사이버 = the phonetic spelling of cyber; 가수 means singer).

Source: Tumblr

The music of his I've heard was mostly bog standard ballad stuff, but hey: give it a listen.

It's weird to think of it now, but Adam really was a sensation in 1998. This Youtuber has made a very nice little history of animated, virtual popstars). Notice how stiff his movements are -- that's a sticking point especially for early lifelike or kind of lifelike animation -- but my buddy says she had his poster up in her room, and hey: look at that perfectly formed nose, right?

One thing that interests me about this "animated human" and "robots imitating humans" thing is something called the "Uncanny Valley" -- back in 1970, robotics professor Masahiro Mori predicted that as human-imitating creations got closer and closer to resembling humans, humans would respond to them in more positive, familiar or friendly ways... up to a certain point. Once a robot or simulation of a human got TOO similar, it would flip from being cute to weird and off-putting, to the point that the imitation was perfect, and we'd respond exactly as to a normal person.

If you think of some famous examples of robots and computer animated humans in pop culture, you'll see that the theory bears out.

A few examples:

The very, very non-human robots in Interstellar

...they were weird in a cool way and we couldn't look away. They were like an IQ puzzle that told jokes. We laughed at the sarcastic one.

Think also of the very non-human droids in Star-Wars, like R2D2 and BB8 that could never ever be mistaken for a human, and whom we adore.

Then think of the way the characters move in 2001's Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, which just bit off more than it could chew trying to create 100% cgi characters for an entire movie, it was a daring move, but it flopped, because the characters' movements were off-putting. They were so realistic...but not realistic enough. CGI at this period always looked to me like gravity didn't affect it properly, as if it floated above things.

Think of the creepy animatronic talking robots whose lips move all wrong...

Gross. The youtube video about Erica the animatronic humanoid robot can't even go four minutes without talking about making out with a robot.

The most famous example of the uncanny valley is almost certainly The Polar Express, which is just two hours of cringe every Christmas. The characters are so alien. The way they move through space, the way their faces imitate normal facial expressions but miss. Their faces move but there clearly aren't muscles beneath the skin. It's just... ug.

Does your heart feel warm?

Once you get close enough to human, we start focusing on the ways the thing is different instead of similar, and it's really hard for non-humans to pass that test.

I think this is why Pixar very smartly dialed back the realism: instead of trying to be photo-real, they created human characters that looked like caricature drawings, or moving action figures (which was an ingeniously perfect fit, of course, for The Incredibles) -- these characters weren't human enough to make us go "weird" but definitely human enough to make us go "cute."

Exactly in the sweet spot.

It was a long time between 2001's Polar Express and the next attempt to pass off a fully animated, fully human-looking character. James Cameron made non-humans move as if they were affected by gravity in 2009's Avatar, but didn't do it with actual humans; Ex Machina (2014) [one of my favorite movies about AI] did some very clever stuff combining a human actor with robotic CGI (this "VFX Artists React to Bad & Great CGI" video shows three video effects artists discussing what they did well); the Marvel Cinematic Universe edged closer and closer to really lifelike with their remarkable de-aging technology seen first in Civil War (2016) [notice him moving to the foreground -- daring viewers to admire the effects work] and then used it to entirely recreate a young Princess Leia and Grand Moff Tarkin (originally played by the late actor Peter Cushing) in Star Wars: Rogue One later that year...

And even here, they got... 99% of the way there... but that last one percent made people go, "ug"

Making nonhumans look and move like humans is hard.

You know Disney's got bottomless pockets, and they're still trying -- de-aging Samuel Jackson for the entire Captain Marvel movie worked out, and when someone doesn't need to look human, they've got it down pat -- when Thanos lays Hulk out, it looks like it hurts.

Now to be honest... superhero action is probably one of the easier places to replace everything with CGI -- fast cuts, fast moving body parts, noise and chaos: you can hide a bit of bad animation in a blur if you need to.

But there is nowhere to hide in a Kpop music video: one of the hardest things to animate is dancing, because it has to have gravity, it needs to stay within the bounds of what normal humans can do, a human limb changing direction on the right beat of a song takes timing, and not only that, it has to look attractive! Meanwhile, characters get a lot of facial closeups, and in a two second closeup, they'd better show us three or four facial expressions. Making one facial expression is hard for CGI, but stringing several together as happens in every Kpop video close-up? Yikes.

So you've got to admire the attempt, even as you suppress the willies.

And willies are the word for this first attempt by animation studio Pulse 9. A made-up, digital-only kpop group called Eternity sings a song called "I'm Real." The lyrics are the "robot trying to trick us into believing its human" equivalent of me walking into my son's school saying "Hello fellow youths. Why don't you say hello to your hep-cat new youthful friend. Let's listen to a Drake on TikTok. DAB!" (oh gawd READ THE LYRICS)

Brace for cringes, and watch this:

So that was...

(side note: here's a write-up below their Youtube video:

<Prologue>
AIA, a mysterious planet-- distant and parallel to the Earth.
AIA is inhabited by aliens called AIAN, who resemble humans on Earth.
In the center of AIA lies the Red Crystal Flower, which protects AIA’s glorious civilization and happiness with its vibrant energy.
Thanks to the flower, AIANs were able to preserve their youths and lives for eternity.
However, the flower started to wilt. Not even the greatest intelligence and technology was enough to confront this crisis.
After years of struggle, the AIANs came across Earth and found out that the key to restoring life and energy was ‘love’.
In order to save their beloved civilization, AIA elected 22 agents who would learn the language of love from the humans.
[I’m Real]
During their debut, Yeorum, Sujin, Hyejin, Seoa and Minji carry out their first mission: to signal AIAN’s appearance to the human civilization in hopes of communicating with them.

I don't know that every AI character needs a back story, you know? And especially not, uh, this, which should have stayed in the animator's personal notebook.

But after that video and its reception... check out their follow-up offering.

That... given the starting point... that went from a faceplant to very nearly a flex.

Now, there is Rozy, the AI instagram model from the opening video. (here's her instagram) She looks fake in... maybe 3 out of every five pictures on her instagram... and I'm sure that ratio will improve. An interesting thing they're doing now is giving these virtual models and 'grammers little blemishes so they don't seem too perfect (like Adam above) -- Rozy closes her eyes in this adorkable way when she smiles sometimes, and she has freckles.

But she can also dance like this.