Harry Potter 7: More Stupid Wizard Duels

OK.  So I saw the first part of Harry Potter 7 the other day.

Not sure what I think about the increasing trend of filming multiple film/sequels in one shoot... but I'll save that for another day.

I'm also glad this one wasn't in 3D.  I'm not impressed by 3D... but I'll save THAT for another day, too.

Actually, it was a pretty good movie, all told.  I've never believed novels translate well into movies, because there's just too much in a novel.  Short fiction? Yeah. Graphic novel? Heck yeah.  Novel?  It's hard.  And with Harry Potter, especially as the books got longer, it got harder and harder to fit all that junk into a movie, and some of the movies barely tried.  The best Harry Potter movie was the third one, before the books got bloated.  The worst one was movie 5, where they tried to fit almost 900 freaking pages into a two hour movie.  They'd have had to make a miniseries to do all the plot points justice.  Book five was a good read, in my opinion (despite it being the first step into Harry becoming a somewhat unlikeable protagonist: too sulky and Holden Caulfieldy for a fantasy book), but the movie was awful: it was like a rushed series of sketches meant to evoke the story, and had no room to fit in the little bits of color and fun that made the first three movies cool.  The minor characters are part of the charm with HP - people like Neville Longbottom - but with so much plot, him, and Moaning Myrtle, and even Hagrid got short shrift.

That is why I think it was not just a cash grab, but good for the storytelling, to split book 7 into two movies.  The story finally has time to breathe again... and while in the book, I thought it was poor storytelling the way the first two thirds of the book are a bunch of wandering in the woods and re-visiting all JK Rowlings' favorite characters and locations, the movie evokes the frustrated stagnation of that part of the book very well.

However, there's just one thing... and this is something that, the more I see it, the more I think is just a lame, lazy cliche: 

The superpower battle.  Let me explain. (with apologies to Alice and the Mental Poo blog, where I got the inspiration to use illustrations I drew myself.)

It seems that wizards like nothing more than to give their enemies magic high-fives.  Especially if their magics are different colors.  I think that if your magic is the same color as another wizard's, you have to be friends.

And if you're the opposite (fire and water, for example, or oranges and toothpaste)?  Enemies for sure!

(source)

Also, it's not only hands that can magic up a wizard fight:

It's seen most often in fantasy and science fiction.  Especially anime.  It happens so often I can't even begin to list them.  

From Harry Potter alone (screenshots: these images don't belong to me, but to their respective copyright holders - JK Rowling and Warner Brothers film studio):

Movie 4: Goblet of Fire

Movie 7, part 1: Deathly Hallows

 Movie 5: Order of the Phoenix Harry's magic is the same color (red) as Dumbledore's.  That's why they're friends.  (for the record: AFTER the dumb wizard cliche fight, Dumbly and Moldy do some cool magic-ing.)

I wonder how many superpower/magic duels there will be in movie 7-1.

This is one area where George Lucas went really, really right: his Bright Side Jedi can't shoot magic hand beams, so even though the bad ones can, most Jedi battle is done with lightsaber duels -- the other absolute coolest feature of the Star Wars universe, because sword fighting is the awesomest kind of combat (with the possible exception of really good, Tony Jaa storming the castle/Bruce Lee vs. Chuck Norris level hand combat), and there are no hand-beam battles in the Star Wars movies.

This is as close as they get: (screenshot from a youtube version of the battle between Emporor Palpatine and Mace Windu.  Property of George Lucas: Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith)

Oh yeah.  Superhero and comic book stories also like having their cliche fights.

(X-Men 3: The Last Stand screenshot: property of Stan Lee, Marvel Comics and 20th century Fox.)

These silly cliche battles are everywhere.

So, readers, what's your favorite superpower/magic power-beam duel?  Let me know in the comments.

Also: what are some magic fights/superpower battles that have COOL effects, instead of just lame power-beam showdowns?  Tell me in the comments.

Argue with Roboseyo: Feral Kids/Latch-Key Kids

Update: the show went great!  We had more callers than we knew what to do with, and that's always the way to have the most fun on the radio.  Thanks to everybody who called.

Also, thanks for the awesome comments here; to get your comments read on air (we won't always have time to get to every one of them), following the patterns of Marc Hogi, and Dan, in the comments to this point, is great: concise, specific responses, with concrete experiences or points.  I especially like how Dan did one or two sentence point-by-point comments.  Thanks a lot.  Well done, readers!  See you tomorrow!

Well, folks, I'm hosting a part of The Evening Show on TBS E FM, one of Korea's English radio stations now.  It's a call-in show, where you can phone the station and voice your opinion about different topics, and the more callers we get, the more fun it is.  You'll see previews about the topics here, and any comment you leave here might get read on air, and if you really have something to say, drop your e-mail address in here and I'll write you about calling into the show: it's more fun with callers than with me reading comments on air.

The topic today is "Mart Kids" - this really sad article in the Korea Times looks at kids whose parents are working long hours, who aren't signed up for hagwons (the way most kids fill their hours until mom and dad get home), so they hang out in shopping malls killing time until the folks get home.

Questions that I'd love you to have an opinion about:

1. Is this any different from the latch-key kids of double-income families in North America?

2. Whose responsibility is it to make sure these kids have safe places to pass their time (the government? schools? charities? parents?)

3. What are their parents thinking?  Where's the disconnect, where these kids fall through the gaps?

4. The idea of free-range parenting: giving kids enough freedom to develop a sense of independence - is good, but it should be age-appropriate, right?  What age do you think is an OK age for a kid to hang out alone, or with two or three other classmates, at the mall all afternoon?

5. Is it so bad for kids to have minimal parental supervision?  When I was a kid, my brother biked all around the city, as long as he was home by dark.  Why are people so freaked out now by unsupervised kids?

6. After talking about "Tiger Moms" who fill their kids' entire days with study and lessons, and "Mart Kids" who don't have any structure at all, what do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of the two systems?

7. If you were a latch-key kid, or grew up without much supervision, and turned out really well, or had a rough time, share your experience.  If you knew a kid who grew up without much supervision, share what you saw with them.  If you're a parent, what's your policy, and why?

Write in, folks.  The show's at 7:30: the more opinions we have, the more fun it is!

What's the point of kimchi? What's the point of ignorance?

So I just caught wind, through Mike, from TBS radio's twitter account @mikeontbs, of an article in the Guardian by a lady named Rachel Cooke, titled "What's the point of Kimchi"

Go read it.

Now, I'm not a huge fan of the boosterism thing, and I don't necessarily think that kimchi should be the main focus of attempts to promote Korean food abroad, because it isn't the most accessible of Korean foods (bulgogi is, and bibimbap's up there, as is chapchae, and those awesome fish-bread things you can buy on the street in the winter).  I don't believe Kimchi cures cancer, H1N1, bird flu, prolongs erections,  makes children learn to read faster, heightens spatial reasoning, improves TOEIC scores, increases resistance to the HIV virus, or does any of the other things Tom Waits claims it does in Step Right Up.



On the other hand, I'd also prefer if people writing about Kimchi around the world at least knew a damn thing about it.  Rachel Cooke tried Korean food a few times, didn't like kimchi the first time she tried it, because it reminded her of foul sauerkraut she once had, visited the Kimchi Field Museum in COEX's website, and wrote her article.  (I've been to the museum itself: it's no great shakes, frankly, but at least I've actually been there, eaten a whack of varieties of kimchi, and know enough about Kimchi to know a good kimchi from a bad one, and I didn't just find the Kimchi Museum's website through its wikipedia page after googling "Kimchi Information" and looking all the way to the second result.)

Now, if somebody walked into a newsroom, and said "Hey!  We need an article on Italian food!" and I was a member of that newsroom, I'd say "Gee. I have allergies to cheese and cream, and the strongest memory I have of Italian food is the smell of the burnt spaghetti sauce that got left on the stove while we were calling the ambulance after my father had that heart attack.  Since then I've avoided Italian food, so I'm not the best guy to write about it.  Find someone who actually knows about Italian."

I wouldn't have said "Hey!  I'll use those six hundred words to shit on Italian food without really knowing anything about it, and make my ignorance and avoidance of it a point of pride!"

Which is pretty much what Ms. Cooke did here.

I don't think netizens should publish her address on the internet and encourage Korean-English citizens who live near her to leave flaming bags of poop on her doorstep, I don't think VANK should engineer a DDOS attack on The Guardian's website, and I have no idea if Ms. Cooke is normally a very fair, well-informed and even-handed writer in the rest of her articles... but she sure ain't in this one.  And if she can dismiss the entirety of kimchi because of her few experiences with it, maybe I'll turn that same ignorance on her, and dismiss her entirety upon a tiny, ill-informed slice of information, and encourage her to piss up a rope.

Ms. Cooke: if you don't know anything about something, rather than flaunting your ignorance of it, next time I recommend you pass on the opportunity to make yourself look like an ignoramus, and let somebody else do the piece on Kimchi.

If the article is a troll to prompt "outrage hits" for The Guardian's website, shame on you and your editor for being so trashy.  If it isn't, shame on you and your editor for not seeing a problem with being so willfully ignorant of a national cuisine's signature dish.

And to The Guardian: if you want an article about Kimchi, I'll write one for you, or I'll recommend some people to you who actually know about Kimchi, and have strong opinions on it that are born of knowledge and fondness for Korean cuisine, instead of ignorance.

(by the way: the Urban Dictionary page for Kimchi is pretty funny, just because it's so easy to pick out which definitions were submitted by expats, and which were submitted by Koreans.)

Rant over.

Talking with a foreigner...

This cute video is a pretty funny take on that "Oh crap... a foreigner.  What am I going to say..." thing.  I've always enjoyed the face people make when I walk into a shop and they assume I can't speak Korean, and will have to speak English to me.

Weddings, K-Pop, Korean Food & Purity: Who Owns a Culture? Part 3

Janelle Monae, an African-American, stole this song from the white, British composer Charlie Chaplin, and white, british lyricists John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons, who originally had their song stolen from white brits by Nat King Cole.

See how ridiculous it starts to get when we talk about people stealing cultures?  It's just a great song, isn't it?

So the final point on the topic is the question, what happens here in Korea, when expats living here see something that vaguely resembles their culture back home, but it's been changed in unexpected ways.  It's analogous to the question of what Koreans do, or ought to do, when they see artifacts from their culture being co-opted by other cultures - Hollywood remakes (my sassy girl), Japanese repackagings (kimuchi) and even Korean-engineered revisions aimed at a new audience (Wondergirls).  I step into a Korean wedding hall, and I see an aisle, candles, a white gown, I hear Mendelssohn's march, and a bouquet being tossed... yet it's all two steps sideways from the weddings I saw back home.

This can be quite off-putting, even to me, and I've been here relatively forever.

The topic is interesting because familiar touchstones take on different meanings, or are used differently, in different cultures.  Not all of these differences are obvious, or jarring - more people here use Starbucks’ for studying than back home, and it’s firmly entrenched in youth culture (the older folks just can’t stomach six bucks for a coffee: it’s 100 won at the gogijip!)  The absence of middle-aged Starbucks-goers, particularly older males, and especially groups of them, barely hints at the way Starbucks occupies a different place in culture here than back home, and I didn’t notice that until five old men parked at a table near me in a starbucks once, and started the usual “loud ajosshi table” routine that one usually finds in a BBQ meat house, and I realized it was the first time I’d ever seen a group of older men in a Starbucks.  Back in Canada, that's a lot more common.

A few more: library means "place to study" here, where back home, it was "place to get books and then leave"; non-Korean restaurants serve a dish of sweet pickles with the meal, almost down to the last one (a friend of girlfriendoseyo once went to a little restaurant in Tuscany, and asked where the pickles were).  Other differences affect our lives more - any foreigner can point out to you the bars in their neighborhood which DON'T require you to buy side dishes with your drink (more and more these days).  Korean girls can have skirts right up to their uteruses (uteri?) and it's OK, but cleavage brands them “that kind of girl”; in America, it's vice versa.

(illustration from ROKetship: you should check out this comic!)
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