Irony and uber-nationalism.

There's a movie called D-War or Dragon War that you might have heard about, but haven't seen (unless you're one of my readers who lives in Korea). I'll link to the preview here, but I won't put the clip up. The movie just hasn't earned it. Sorry. It's pretty terrible, and by sitting through it (I'd rather get a filling without anaesthesia), I've earned the right to criticize it if I wish. However, its maker made a play on Korea's nationalistic pride to try and sell it here in Korea, as he also tried to market it in America (it was even set in L.A.). Nationalistic pride or none, the movie's acting, direction, and most of all, writing, were just not good enough to attract an audience in the States: as Patroclus and Michelle Wie both learned, if you want to play with the big kids, you gotta have the chops! The grab for publicity, and the play on national pride, were perfectly encapsulated by the movie's closing credits in Korea, where he played Korea's greatest, favourite traditional folk song, while running a long description of the director's career and accomplishments (basically begging for approval), including pictures of himself in a director's chair and other film credits, and ending with his guarantee that his film will be successful around the world . . . "for Korea".

You can hear the sad, haunting melody of the Arirang if you skip to about the three minute mark of the video clip above. It's a wonderful song (when it's not being abused by film directors in cheap grabs for movie-approval-through-association-with-national-pride). Everybody joins in, and it gives me chills, and the melody is one of the best I know. I also love the performance leading up to the ending refrain, but if you need to skip to the end, go for it.

Anyway, it was crass but clever of Mr. Shin to tack National Pride onto what (from where I stand) looked more like a lurid act of blatant self-promotion, because just that easily, he placed his poorly-written, badly-directed, and horribly-acted movie/ego-trip above critical reproach. An attack on his movie was an attack on Korea, and Korea's entire culture, rather than just an honest review of a bad movie.

The silliness all came to a head when a single Korean film critic was brave enough to step out of line and tell the truth: "hey, everybody, did anyone else notice this was actually a terrible movie?"

Rather than a rush of other critics flying to his side and saying "THANK YOU! I thought so too, let's end this nationalistic silliness and call a spade a spade," that lone critic was attacked by many angry Korean netizens, it's not in the article, but one of my students told me the critic's life was even threatened.

It's sad and ironic to begin with that many Koreans bought into this guy's cheap play on national pride, and stood behind a movie that will more likely damage the Korean film industry's reputation abroad than promote it, but to shout down a critic trying to be honest is just too much. Not that netizens from ANY country are well known for being rational, sober-minded thinkers, but still. . .

And it's unfortunate that this train-wreck was the movie trying to break into the American market. There are a few great Korean movies out there. (Oldboy won second prize at the Cannes film festival a few years ago, and The Host was better than any Hollywood monster movie . . . probably since Jaws, hitting every note perfectly, and switching from satire to thriller to family drama on a dime,) so why offer this mess up as representative?

Here are some links that discuss D-Wars' awfulness,

and also netizens' blind nationalism causing them to defend the indefensible (the quote from the director at the end of this article is a hoot.)

At movies.yahoo.com, you can browse user reviews. . . notice the frequency of complete A+ reviews with broken English in the write-ups.

on IMDB.com Koreans have been logging on and giving D-Wars 10/10 ratings to balance out the 1/10s given by non-Koreans. (Note the high concentration of highest possible and lowest possible scores on the "who rated this movie" chart.)

but they couldn't save its abysmal score on rottentomatoes.com

In light of all that, to go with this incident, I had a funny moment in one of my classes last week. I brought up the knee-jerk nationalist netizen flaming of the movie critic, and asked a question about the way nationalism often goes so far in Korea that sometimes reason goes out the window, and when something starts sounding even a little critical, one runs into a lot of defensiveness, even in areas where it's generally acknowledged that Korea needs reform (for example, education, gender equality, or lookism). One of my students took umbrage, and told me, "You should be more positive. Why do you have to criticize Korea so much? Why can't you just accept it?" . . . if I wasn't taken aback at having my sincere and (I thought) neutrally-phrased questions answered with defensiveness, I might have been quick enough to snap back, "I rest my case."

I felt a bit stymied: I've lived in Korea for the greater part of my adult life now. I've read books about Korea, asked a lot of questions, studied the language and discussed Korean issues with a lot of different people. I try to have a generous, open-minded, non-judgmental, but well-informed view of what I see here, and being well-informed requires an honest look at both the positives and the negatives. If I criticize something, it is in hope of improvement, not for spite or mean-spiritedness, and certainly not because I think Korea should become exactly like Canada; I try not to talk about things I don't know about, or add qualifiers that "I might be wrong" and "please correct me if I'm wrong" or "this is just what I've observed personally". Basically, I've been here a long time, I've read the tourist brochures, and I wish I could dig a bit deeper without being accused of being a hater. . . but maybe conversation class isn't the time and place to do that (sigh). I like to think that if somebody came to me and, in the course of the conversation, we discussed Canada's social problems, with well-informed and thoughtful views, that I'd listen carefully, but maybe I'm just flattering myself.


Anyway, here's something I love about Korea:

Arirang is the unofficial national anthem, and holds a special place in Koreans' hearts, kind of like "Waltzing Matilda" to Australians, and the "Hockey Night In Canada" theme to Canadians.




(da da da dum dum deeeeeee, da da da dum dum de deeeeee, (everyone together now) da da da dah dah deee ba ba dum bee dah dah dum dee. . . )

(for the Aussies)



Here is a rough translation of the words to the first verse (the one sung most often) of the Arirang, adapted from a translation by Young-hae Chang:

Arirang, all alone
I am crossing arirang pass
if you leave me, my love,
your feet will fail you
before you even walk ten leagues.

It's a sweet, melancholy song, full of "han" (Korean word for a deep, sad longing for a better, but lost, time and/or place -- akin to the world-weary traveler's emotion when he thinks of a home he can never return to.) And it even turns up in soccer chants.



Man I love this culture.

Roboseyo saves the world. . .

I offered a solution for how to save the world earlier on this blog. Here's another. It was tagged on at the end of the previous post. . . but I don't think anybody read it, because I added it a day later.

In the new, global world, here's another thing I would do if I were king of the world:

I'd make an irrevokable law that, for the countries with the 30 largest populations, economies, and militaries in the world, the rest of the world gets to participate in their leaders' elections, with the Restoftheworld vote having a 10% say in the final election results -- 90% nationals, so that the home country gets most of the vote, but in a world where a world leader's decisions touch so many other countries, isn't it fair for the rest of the world to have a say in their leadership, too?

(I'd also cancel all veto powers in the UN: I'd change it so that unanimous minus one were enough to mobilize on security council decisions, so that rather than China vetoing UN action in Burma, unanimous minus one would have been enough to get peace-keepers in there. Same for the US vetoes on oil and Israel/Palestine related-type things.)

Any reactions?

and if you don't care for my world-saving solutions, how about this one:

Turns out, peeing on tourists is a BAD thing. Who knew?

Korean Trot Music

Remember my post a long time ago about dancing with the crazy old ladies on the boat? I tried to describe the music then, eventually giving up and saying it's impossible.

Well, this is what it was like. . . except faster. This is what old people listen to here. You hear it in taxis, on the street, on outdoor stages for open-air shows, and (worst of all) on loudspeakers in otherwise nice parks. Really, the only thing to do when you hear music like this (not unlike disco and certain kinds of country music) is to get out your pointer fingers and dance. Listen in particularly to the slow vibrato and the quirks in vocalisation -- trot singers (that's what it's called) imitate this style right across the board.







The best thing about this musical style is that it's usually VERY easy to sing, which makes it a smash hit in the karaoke bars (noraebang here -- singing room). Sometimes you hear a song on the radio and you think the radio play is just a formality: this song was totally written to go straight to the karaoke bar and become a sing-along hit. Kind of like sometimes in N. America you hear a song and you go "wow. That song must have a GREAT video," or sports broadcasters justify a player with poor skills by saying, "He's GREAT in the clubhouse! A real glue guy!" Here we go. This is what we danced to on the boat that day, not the exact song, but this tempo, and EXACTLY this sound.



Here's a picture from that brilliant day.




This is Shiina Ringo, my favourite Japanese artist so far. She's fun as anything! She reminds me of Bjork with guitars.



and holy cow there's a lot going on in this video (spanish subtitles, fun as anything music, a japanese artist flaunting cultural stereotypes with MTV editing. . . interesting.)

heh heh heh

Two American institutions, together at last.




I'll put a proper post in here sometime, but I've been busy lately, and haven't had time to find the shiny spots in life. They're out there, and I'm still a happy cat. . . just bear with me until I can get some pictures downloaded or something.

-Roboseyo


Heh heh heh.

pointed satire. I've ranted about this before, here on my blog.




And in case you don't trust the Mass Media to help you choose how to vote (if you have a vote) in the 2008 election, here's an information-rich clip that will probably influence many voters more than a 4-page spread in a newspaper -- was it the 2004 election where I heard of a survey that said America's main source for information about the electio candidates was the opening monologues of the Letterman and Leno Late-Night Talk Shows?



Well, I've pretty much decided who I'd choose now (if I had a vote). (remember back when policies and ideas were the thing -- thank goodness that fad has finally passed. SO much THINKING!--isn't there something very intrinsically wrong with the very fact people are bandying about the word "electability", rather than looking at the actual quality of the candidates?)

It's been a while since we've had a survey on here. . .

So I drank the Heroes kool-aid after all.

I don't have a TV at my house, and don't really miss it, but after seeing a few episodes of the TV series Heroes (which EVERYONE is talking about here in Korea these days) at my friend's house, I bought season one on DVD for cheap.

And, like the X-Men movies, The Bourne Identity, and Jim Carrey's The Mask, the best part of watching a show where people suddenly discover they have superpowers is entertaining the wish-fulfillment fantasy of what would happen if you discovered YOU had superpowers --

A good third of the fun of watching The Bourne Identity series is the daydream that, one day, when somebody threatens YOU, YOU'LL suddenly bust out deadly martial arts and super-spy skills, too; in the movie "The Mask", where the green mask brings out the side of your character that you hide in public, and gives it cartoonish super-powers, and it gives me a ninety-minute-long daydream about what side of ME would come out if I put on that silly mask. Ditto for x-men -- you can fantasize all day about which x-men power would be most fun, most useful, most frightening, and so on.

So in tribute to the TV series Heroes, the survey question is: which superhero power do YOU wish you had?

(and don't say x-ray vision, because then everybody will know you're a perv)

Two rules/qualifiers (just because everybody always says these ones -- like in Korea, you have to say "AFTER your parents, who is your hero?", because otherwise that's all you'll hear):

Don't say Superman's powers, because that's like going to a restaurant and ordering one of everything on the menu. Ditto for saying "Peter Petrelli's [from Heroes] power: the ability to absorb other people's superpowers": that's like saying "If I found a magic lamp I'd wish for a hundred more wishes." -- and kind of defeats the purpose of choosing. EVERYBODY would prefer to have ALL the superpowers, but if you had to pick one, which would it be?