I don’t mean to suggest that Koreans are all pessimistic, but a lot of their movies are. The exceptions are few enough that they stick out in my memory… Marathon, for example, or Arahan, or Aheob Sal In-saeng (I can’t remember the title in English but it’s something like “A Nine-Year-Old Boy’s Life”). Koreans laugh about French movies being dark, but Korean film is very dark too!

Heh. Minus the not too controversial, apparently I share the Korean aesthetic. That sound is me looking for a video store with more Korean movies.

Good luck with story.

Yeah, I loved the Rucker books. I read the first few in Canada, and finished the series here. Plan on rereading them again sometime. Utterly wacky stuff.

Eager also to get into a few of his more recent novels. If only I didn’t have a million other things to do.

Now, off to go work on this story I’m drafting…

It occurs to me another book that might make “hacking” interesting is Cory Doctorow’s newest one, though it’s about teenaged nascent civil libertarians fighting Homeland Security, so the “hacking” is more of the civil disobedience, how to disable an RFID chip or figure out a way past the no fly lists type. The book is called Little Brother and you can download it here. Put it right in your PDA! :)

As for The Sopranos getting lost in translation, doubtless, it’s a part of the issue. But then again, I’m also sure that tons of nuance gets lost in Jailbreak, which was a big hit here; certainly while most weren’t aware of the distortions of history in 300, they must have registered the pro-American element in it. I’d bet most Eminem fans here have little idea what he’s saying most of the time, or even register the oddness of him being way more popular than any black rapper in Korea. Hell, even The West Wing did well enough that, according to my students, the last president referred to President Bartlet at some point as an ideal he was seeking to live up to. And the opacity of their dialog, even with Korean subtitles, was quite a barrier. (Lime says she’s still figuring things out on third viewings of episodes, and her English is really good.)

Still, maybe Sopranos is harder to get into if the New Jersey nuances aren’t coming across, though I think it has a lot of WTF factor in having a gangster who is seeing a psychiatrist, period That was what got me into Season 1, anyway. (Though maybe beyond that, it was the New Jersey stuff.)

But again, it might be a gender thing… especially in Korea, I don’t think women tend to be into that kind of show. Lime saw the first episode or two of Season 1 and called it “cruel,” and I’ve noticed she tends not to like those sorts of movies. (Fight Club also elicited the same response among students, and I bet Silence of the Lambs does too.)

(I wonder how much family TV viewing habits factor into it? All male households versus households of both sexes, where there’s one TV and viewing is communal. I stayed with a family once and it seemed that the TV viewing choices were being made by Mom, and it was melodrama all the way, till mom went to bed and the son switched the channel to some old Kung fu flick or Rambo or whatever.)

Weirdly, and I think this does say something about Korean cinematic aesthetics, the two foreign films you can count on any Korean having seen are Ghost (though they don’t know it by that name: the Korean title is something more like “love after death” or “love from beyond the grave” or something) and Léon, that French film directed by Luc Besson that was released as The Professional in North America.

I think there’s a certain combination of need to appeal to the Korean aesthetic (too positive will never fly, tragic and dark is more appealing and socially dystopian is a sure-fire winner — thus Jailbreak in depicting a wrongful jailing is a home run), a certain degree of mass appeal (not too “cruel,” not too sexual, not too controversial), and some dumb luck.

The aesthetic’s probably the biggest issue of the lot, though. It’s worth noting that a fair number of the Korean films that are well-received overseas (at festivals and such) are huge flops here, especially when they’re outside of the area of melodramas. One of my favorite Korean films of recent years, that depicted the Japanese colonial era with more complexity than I’ve ever seen in any other Korean movie, flopped purely over the very politics of such a depiction.

Oh and my bf, the comp sci Masters student LOVES Hackers; its a cult fave among the folks I know who have actual programming chops.

I know what you mean about the bar and BBSes too…

I think The Sopranos might be getting lost in translation. A good part of the appeal of the program, is the milieu, or “New Jersey” itself, and I would imagine that gets lost in translation. Cost wouldn’t even enter into the equation.

And he’s on record as saying every technology in the book, save one or two, is already in production or at least prototype phase, and that the convergence does look reasonably possible in the timeframe.

(No guarantees, but he was shooting for realistically feasible, not prophetic.)

The Vernor Vinge book I recommended also has some pretty interesting “hacking” stuff going on, though you’re presented with the effects of the hacking much more than the actual process. Which I think is the key to making narratives about hackers work.

It might be a gender thing, though, Val, which might help explain it more; most of my students are female, and the ones who had seen Scarface (two, I think) were both male. The Sopranos, though, surprised me more. I had thought that stuff being released on DVD in Korea meant it was popular, but apparently not so popular that you can expect more than one or two people in a room to have seen it.

Also, I should add, it’s not as if young people would have to hunt these things out; they’re all available online, and most young Koreans could get them for free.

I, too, am not so interested in cowboy movies, Icelandic sagas or no; they just never did much for me, and the last I saw, Wyatt Earp, put me to sleep in the middle of the afternoon.

And, sheepish moment, but I never got through Raging Bull.

As for movies about hackers — definitely! This was the point my students raised in class, and I was surprised to find myself agreeing that it was, on one level, about the best solution someone was likely to think of in 1995 for how boring a film about people doing command line hacking would actually be… in fact, I also pointed out when someone noted that the hacker bar was unrealistic that it was, but that it was a kind of funhouse simulacrum of a BBS the way Sterling described it. (I didn’t use the words “funhouse” or “simulacrum”, mind you.)

As for teeth… yeah, this is a molar, but happily, since this is Korea, the pain will be more physical than financial. Dental work is relatively cheap here. I think I paid less than $20 for the guy to adjust my cap and for a scaling. But since having my one wisdom tooth out was a total snap here — one day later, I was eating solid food and I think it was only one or two days later I was off painkillers completely — maybe the wisdom tooth won’t be so bad.

Though the whole, “four visits” thing scared me. I hate temporary fillings.

(Somehow, they’re a LOT funnier in Latin. Not sure why.)

On movies:
I’m almost 30 and from the US and I’ve never seen Scarface, The Godfather, or The Sopranos. I guess because I don’t understand the romanticisation going on, and they sound boring. Heck, I saw most of Goodfellas on TV and it was ok but mostly pretty dull. Raging Bull same thing (except for the truly disgusting moments). Maybe its a female/male thing as much as a cultural thing? I don’t see a warrior or anyone to find interesting in mafia movies, just a bunch of macho thugs. I know enjoyed one bit of Pulp Fiction, but it was the part where Wolf cleaned up the inside of the car Jackson and Travolta’s doofy characters managed to cover with gore. And westerns? They bore me to tears, even if they’re unwittingly based on Icelandic sagas. Although if you give me something located in a place and time more different from what I live in now, and I enjoy it, like cheesey fantasy or martial arts flicks or weird concoctions like “Six String Samurai”. Men I think are more encouraged to romanticise violence, but unless you add a coating of the unfamilar over it, I just see violence. I don’t want to gender essentialize this, but the culture variable isn’t present for me, so maybe gender comes into the equation too. There have to be more variables, but I’m not sure what they are.

Because Koreans watch a lot of foreign media, waaaay more than Westerners watch Korea media, and Koreans in the past also regarded Korean films as much lower-quality than Western ones, which implies they were watching Western films and comparing. Okay, Scarface might be more understandable, but The Godfather blows my miind. It’s kind of like how tons of people here saw the second Star Wars trilogy without having seen the first half of the story. The puzzled looks at the end of the third movie, where everyone wondered why the hero-child had become a scary villain, were quite something.

I don’t expect Koreans to have seen The Bad Cop or Henry Fool, but The Godfather I and Snow White are both accessible and extremely well-known. I don’t expect Koreans to have felt the need to read The Iliad and The Odyssey but I do expect that they would be required to by the senior year of University in a program teaching them about Western culture and the English language, since, like the King James Bible, Homeric epics are foundational texts for Western culture, and their resonances echo wide and loud.

Baedol,

Hmmm. Yeah, I didn’t sense that; actually, I find it quite ironic that 300 was so popular here, seeing as the Spartan warriors were encouraged to engage in sex with fellow warriors to build comradeship and love — something to fight for. I wonder if 300 would have been so popular if that had been made apparent in the film.

See, it’s interesting, I would have imagined being raised with stories of studious, diligent inventor types might make certain kinds of SF really popular here, but in all my inquiries, I’ve never found a reference to a single Korean SF author. (That is, when you define SF as different from fantasy and horror, which are more well-represented here.) I’m sure there are SF comics, but the studious inventor-types come across more in novels than action-dependent comics, I think. Ah well… Interesting, and thank you. I’ll try raise this when we get to our section on SF, which is after Gangsters, Black Widows, Femme Fatale & The Girl Next Door, and other discussions of women in media.

Man, only a few weeks left in semester!

Why is that so shocking? I’m assuming you teach ‘average’ Korean college students, right? How many ‘average’ Canadian college students do you think can even name 4 Korean movies, let alone can say that they’ve seen them?