[And it totally blows me away that someone out there heard this and somehow thought, "Damn, remember that 빠삐코 advertisement song? That would totally fit with this!"]

And I’ve added a link to the DJ Koo EP which is online for download — maybe illegally, but anyway, you can hear the track among the files here, and then delete them, if you like. It’s track #2 or #4, I’m not sure if the relevant bit is different.

Weird. But you’re in Windows, right? Here in Linux-land, I had to fiddle to get Youtube to work in FF in the first place, but now that it works, I still sometimes get those “unavailable” error messages — even for videos I know are available.

Well, I’ll be checking out the 놈놈놈 film tomorrow before I see you, so I’ll tell you my impression (and whether I recognize the song) then. Oh, if only I could listen to the damned file sample from the 놈놈놈 soundtrack.

I don’t know if cynicism is a good exaplanation, seeing as I turn into a little kid (i.e no complaints about continuity or plot holes) when watching any Bollywood film, for example. Perhaps having seen Taegukgi on a small screen in a DVD-방 didn’t help — I imagine it’s more moving on the big screen. But yeah, it’s also probably partly a taste issue: I’ve never been very big on war movies. (Maybe favorite was Le Grand Illusion which was, anyway, about escaping a prisoner camp, more than about war.)

I’ll have to ask Lime what she thought of it, as I remember her also being a bit so-so on the film. (I couldn’t be mixing it up her reaction with Silmido, which we were both less impressed by, though it was a well-made film too.)

Rob,

Ha, I missed the Angry German Kid thing when it went around. Ah well…

I should note that I think fantasy is for grown-ups too… that repackaging emotions and mythologies is what adults do all the time, we just demand a few more “literal” facts thrown in. Isn’t Pan’s Labyrinth as “realistic” as any war film, in a sense? Just, realistic about things have have little to do with history.

And in that vein, Hobsbawm and Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition is a great book for showing how so much of tradition everywhere is recent inventions granted an aura of historicity. I’m reminded of a post I made long ago — though, please, forgiven my know-it-all-ness, as it was my first year here — about how Chuseok apparently was a far different affair in the distant historical past.

Anyway, yes, I’m beginning to think there are some “genres” in Korean film that we don’t have in exactly the same way. There vast number sexual morality plays is an interesting one — one that snapped into focus as something that had a long tradition behind it when I saw 하녀 in the cinema last week, and found myself strongly reminded of films like 바람난 가족 — which I think deserves looking at, though I should see if any academics have had anything to say about it, and I think there may be similar thngs going on in melodrama, too. Sort of like how “Reincarnation drama” was at some point a mainstay in Indian film (understandably, given the widespread belief in it, and its prominence in Indian literature — there’s at least one major plot twist I remember in the Mahabharata that turns on reincarnation and revenge), but never became a genre in the West, despite having featured in one or two films (like Dead Again or Made in Heaven or What Dreams May Come. (Or in Korea, either, despite 번지점프를 하다. Which is by the way the oddest reincarnation drama I’ve ever seen.)

Kind of like how Westerners kind of scratch their heads at how so many Koreans think of “ballads” as a musical genre… I suspect the configuration of genres here follow subtly different forms. Not exclusively different, just, with different points of overlap that let lots of people assume there’s no difference, and that the odder Korean examples are really badly-done versions of foreign genres. Some are, of course — Korea hasn’t been kind to SF, for example — but some may be bad examples of foreign genres because they’re playing by a different set of rules and conventions, which, if you’re not familiar, will make the thing less penetrable.

(Sort of like how someone who’ve never read a fantasy novel would probably find things in contemporary fantasy mystifying. One example I can note as an SF author is about “the rules of magic.” Being that I almost never read fantasy as an adult, only SF, when I arrived at Clarion West to find people critiquing the fantasy pieces we critted sometimes in terms of what seemed a pretty universal understanding: that use of magic always has a price. I was like, “Huh?” but all the well-read fantasy people argued it was just a fundamental, important genre convention which, you know, I don’t think we have in SF.)

Of course, I’m still dubious that this makes such films impenetrable to us: human intelligence extends farther than most acknowledged — but it is hard work, the hardest of all being that first step of recognizing that the language barrier isn’t everything — that culture barriers can exist in creative works that run deeper than mere language barriers.

But of course, then we can do the homework and soak up the culture enough to see past that. So no, I don’t think it’d be fair to tell someone, “Meh, you’ll never understand X,” though, “Unless they really try hard, I think understanding X is going to be beyond the grasp of most Westerners,” might be fair.

I haven’t seen Radio Star but as for 왕의남자, I’m already convinced that there are things in the film I just didn’t get, which link up interesting to the stuff I discussed here about popcultural feminizations of male forms. Because not only was I shocked at how it outperformed 청연 (which I found a vastly superior film that flopped during 왕의남자’s run, though maybe not for the reasons I suggested previously), but also because, you know, in a Western context, a male like Lee Jun-Ki would, if he managed to get into films at all, be cast as a bad guy of ambiguous sexuality, reminiscent of the sexually ambiguous indulgence-hawking Pardoner in The Canterbury Tales. So yeah, I’ll definitely admit there are subterranean things I just didn’t get about 왕의 담자 though I don’t think they’re permanently inaccessible to me, any more than superhero films are to Koreans. But misconceptions and muddiness are probably to be expected along the way. (And language study would help me a hell of a lot, well, us, with the exception of Charles, you clever 놈.)

Which reminds me, I’ve been meaning to watch that series
네 멋대로 해라 for the longest time, since both Lime and my old friend Sang Jun both recommended it to me in the span of a week as “the best TV drama” they’d ever seen (as of 2005, I think it was)…

but that’s the thing, isn’t it, Gord — the idealization of the past — I mean, movies are the purest, fastest form of mythmaking a culture’s ever come up with — nobody knows or cares about william wallace’s real story, because Braveheart was more gripping — I’ve picked up that idea a few times here and there, that a good story travels faster than the rigors of truth, and I think it’s true — you can quickly learn the true story of the “angry german kid” who went viral on the internet. . . but it doesn’t make as good copy, and isn’t as likely to make me hit the forward button. a good story has more legs than fact. . . apply to numerous situations in numerous countries’ politics.

i didn’t mean that Welcome to Dongmakgeol ought to be taken as a historical drama, of course; however, emotionally, I think that movie puts the Korean feeling of loss of innocence in that war, and the unresolved hurt of a divided Korea, into a package that communicates those feelings extremely well, in a way that outsiders can understand more easily, and that children can tune into more readily, than a Korean language screed.

sometimes I wonder about that, too — whence the preponderance of ambulances, wheelchairs and hospital beds in breaks in Korean ballads, and even sex comedies? Is that just a goofy fondness for melodrama, or is there something I’m missing — if I look at something like that and decide to judge it, I’ll lose respect for Koreans, so I try to look at stuff like that as a chance to learn something about Korea, but what can be learned from it? I don’t know. (yet, I suppose) and yeah, there’ll be nuances that can’t make it past the language barrier, that I’d have to learn Korean well enough to get, but I think there’s enough there in the main gestures to make useful observations, as long as they’re qualified.

somebody once told me that “radio star” — that korean film about the washed-up popstar — somehow channeled something about Korean friendship that she didn’t think I could understand. I found it a touching story about loyalty between friends close as brothers. So didn’t I get it? or is the Korean idea of Jung not as mysterious as it’s cracked up to be? or did I get enough of it to THINK I got it, but missed the crucial je ne sais quoi that really got to the heart of things, and made it a uniquely Korean film?

ditto for “The King and the Clown” -the lee jun ki movie. Somebody told me I probably wouldn’t be able to get it, and I’m pretty sure that I got whatever was there to be gotten. . . ???

anyway, enough about that for now.

For some reason, the video works for me in IE (but not in FF). Whatever. Anyway, it does sound familiar, but I think it’s a different mix. It’s not just the handclaps. There is something else, but I can’t quite say what.

As for Taegeukgi, all I have to say is this: you are all too cynical. I’m not going to get into an extended discussion of the point now, though, so I’ll chalk it up to differences in tastes.

I know what you mean, though I can’t remember enough of the opening to say if I felt that way when I saw Taegukgi.

Sometimes, though, when I look at idealizations — Welcome to Dongmakgol being a major example! — I have to stop myself and say, “Wait a minute! Isn’t that how it is in Hollywood too?” The idealization of the past has been so effectively carried out in some Hollywood films that we forget life wasn’t like that, either.

I think there’s even a kind of manipulation that invites you to a game, like, for example, in 효자동 이발사, where I felt like a lot of history was being glossed over not to hide things, but as part of the game. How much sympathy can you develop for Park? How idyllic can we make the past — even a torture session — look? It’s the kind of manipulation that’s all out on the table, and interesting.

(And for example, like superhero movies. The Superhero never is tempted to use his powers to make big bucks? Never loses his shit and commits a crime of passion? Well, at least we have Watchmen coming…)

Anyway, when it comes to a film like Welcome to Dongmakgol or The Barber of Hyojadong I just think literalist readings miss a great deal of the point, which is that they’re more like fairytales about modern history.

Anyone whose brain is working doesn’t think that life in 1948 in Korea was idyllicly perfect — or that those of differing ideologies in Korea were all buddy-buddy until the bad Americans (and, er, Russians who made no appearance in Dongmakgol) stepped in and messed things up. But the movies mythologize the same kind of loss and longing that from what I’ve read of Korean lit has long been a recurring theme. Read as being a fantastical exorcism of Korea’s contemporary anxieties and identity issues, there are still problems with Welcome to Dongmakgol but fewer and less awful than if one decides to treat it as some kind of moronically-conceived historical drama. Which, really, it doesn’t advertise itself as being, at all. It’d kind of be like a Korean critiquing the first Shrek movie as monarchist, Eurocentric, and anti-modern, when really, it’s making fun of old fairy-tale tropes, about remixing the media landscape we live in, and as much about being different in our world today, and about contemporary changes in gender roles and all kinds of stuff. If you miss all that when you talk about Shrek, you kind of look like a tool. But increasingly I suspect Western viewers are missing all kinds of things in (some of) the Korean films we watch, too.

That’s not to say Dragon Wars is great cinema and the Anglo world (and rare Korean critics) are fools for having missed it, but rather to say I suspect that sometimes the language barrier (한국어) isn’t the only “language barrier” to understanding certain Korean films. Like, for example, nearly every movie in which I’ve seen Moon Sori. (Sigh: Moon Sori rocks.)

I put Taegukki in the same category as “Top Gun” — either the best bad movie ever made, or the worst good movie, but, like you, I don’t like being told what to think, so in the end, I didn’t buy the beginning, and watched the whole movie through a bit cynically after it tried to manipulate me at the get-go.

On the other hand, I think it was an important movie to have made in Korea — I think that movies are one of the ways a culture collectively gives itself permission to grieve, and you can see that all through Korea’s war-themed movies — from Welcome to Dongmakgeol to Taekukki, in the same way you see it in Platoon for VietNam, Spielberg’s (and so many others’) WWII movies, etc.. Good or bad, those movies had to be made.

Yeah, I’ve been having weird Youtube errors too — of the “This video is no longer available” type.

Which probably makes me posting this silly, but anyway — does this sound familiar? It’s the Santa Esmerelda track as used in Kill Bill 1:

(I should add that I’ll be seeing the movie soon anyway, so I’ll be able to say whether it’s the same track then.)

The 빠삐놈 thing seems to be lacking the handclaps, or else they’re submerged in the noise of DJ. Koo’s beats, I’m not sure, but it’s (relatively) easy to cut percussion if you know what you’re doing, and if you have something else to fill up the space and cover for residual noise.

What’s hilarious is that your discussion of “nom” reminds me of how people explained Japanese phrases to me back in undergrad, as if it was all so utterly mystifying and impossible for foreigners to understand. But here we are, discussing the various ways in which the meaning of a Korean word can vary according to tone, context, speaker, qualifiers, and so on.

I think I first figured out “nom” could be polite when someone smiling widely slapped his buddy on the back and used the word when the buddy confessed to having gotten himself a girlfriend. And in some movie, a teacher was whacking kids on the head and called them “nom,” as he terrified the kids. Then of course, gangster movies have the best modifiers for “nom.”

(I have to admit that my favorite is one I heard in Jeolla, where I noticed people often pronounce 씨 as 쎄 (ie. “shay,”) or so it sounds to me. Nobody I’ve mentioned it to believes it until I point it out while someone else is doing it, though. Anyway, rough-spoken guys in Jeolla would say “아이, 쎄~발!). It has always sounded a little harsher and more, I don’t know, 시골 (countrified?) to me. :)

I’ll let you know what I think of 놈놈놈 once I’ve seen it. But it seems our tastes may differ in Korean films, anyway — Taegukgi didn’t do so much for me. It was alright for a war movie, but it didn’t move me to tears, for various reasons I can’t quite remember and which I apparently didn’t write about here at the time. (I thought it was sad, I thought it was well-made, but maybe I sensed a degree of, uh, manipulation one expects from, say, Lars von Trier, but which just pushed me out of the movie too often? I think that was the gist of my feeling. But it’s so long ago I saw it that I can’t remember.) I’d like to see some older Korean war films, to see how they depict things.

Like you not going to films for an ordeal, I tend to prefer not to be told what to think. One of the first Korean films I saw was 결혼은 미친지시나, which was not so great, really, as a film — nothing brilliant — but it also was a bit of a The Lady and the Tiger story, in that you’re left not with judgment, but with a question: ought one to marry for stability and comfort, or for sexual passion and attraction? (I’m not sure “love” comes into it in the story, to be honest.) I had a long discussion with the friend I’d seen it with, and we differed in opinions. It was kind of cool that a film could spark a discussion like that.

But films that have that affect are relatively few and far between, so I settle for laughing my guts out, being surprised, and sometimes, the good old pleasures of watching characters doing the only thing they could do, even if it’s a little predictable. But like you, weeping’s not a regular attraction for me.

I watched the second video in IE, and I have to honestly say that I don’t recognize anything that might be similar to what appeared in the film. There was a moment when I thought I might have caught a musical phrase that sounded similar, but then it was gone.

As far as gnome (hah, I made a funny) goes, I think what it ultimately comes down to is that Koreans will often use the word with a modifier, and the modifier makes all the difference. When used without a modifier, it is almost neutral, but still definitely leaning toward the negative. Of course, it also depends on who is doing the talking.

I was deliberately vague on the two things I enjoyed about 놈놈놈. Granted, it’s not the kind of film you watch for the plot twists, but I still didn’t want to spoil it. To qualify it a bit, though, I would change “weird moral or lesson” to “sappy moral or lesson,” and add the idea of over-the-top melodrama to the tragically sad part.

Still, though, I’m not really one for sad films. Did you ever see Taegeukgi Hwinallimyeo? I thought it was a really good film, but I bawled my eyes out in the cinema watching it. We bought the DVD shortly after it came out, but we haven’t been able to work up the courage to watch it. So I think a film can be tragically sad and still be good, but it’s going to be something of an ordeal for me to watch it–and that’s not generally why I go to the cinema.

Thanks! That put a piece of the puzzle more clearly in place, though now I’m left wondering what version was sampled — it seems to be the one from Kill Bill, but with the handclaps cut, but the film version here:

… is a little more ornate. I wonder if there’s an instrumental version of them theme appearing in the film’s “score” somewhere. (And I’m just barely resisting the tantalizing job of tracing the different popular versions of the song back to the Nina Simone version, here:

Also, I still don’t know whether it’s in the Korean film’s soundtrack. (Charles, you saw it! Was it?)

Charles,

Yeah, man. Though the “moral” thing sometimes can make a film interesting as a critical viewer — 하녀 and 바람난 가족 being two films separated by approximately 40 years, with remarkably similar moral messages — though in the end, the woman’s response to it is to sin the same was as her husband in the newer movie — it can be a little tedious.

I find tragically sad films are okay, but I also find Korean films that try to be tragically sad often end up over-the-top or muddled with melodrama, and that doesn’t entertain me. I’m convinced that’s a recognized dramatic style here, though: I’ve seen young people filming melodramas for drama classes, or whatever, and they were doing the same thing: long shots of one actor saying, essentially, “Hey! Hey, Chulsoo! Wake up! Are you okay? Wake up! Chulsoo! Please, wake up! Please be okay! I love you! Please! Please!…” for so long that you keep thinking the shot will end, but they keep going. It’s found a cruddy homemade drama worldwide, I’m sure, but it’s been in so many TV shows I’ve seen as well.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing the film, even if it is just for kicks.

Maybe it’s a different version of “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstod” that’s used in the Korean film — was it all instrumental? I tried to listen to a preview but none of the Korean websites seemed to like Lionux enough to play it for me — but that is the same song from the Tarantino Volume 1, the bit with the fight in the snow at the end, I think.

As for 놈, good point. I used “bastard” because it’s a word my friends and I used to use in the same way — it could be “f*cking asshole,” or it could mean, “buddy.” Maybe that’s too idiosyncratic, though. (I’ve occasionally gotten into trouble with the more priggish older people I’ve known for the way I speak around them; I’ll tend to assume a word like bullshit is 100% acceptable, and a phrase like “son of a bitch” is permissible when highlighting extreme distaste for someone. Others have disagreed. So I guess the easiest way is to triangulate on how permissible it seems among others in this or that usage? You being more polite than me, I’m sure your instincts work well. (Though, come to think of it, I’m way more polite in Korean until someone pushes my buttons hard.)

I’ve heard the word used in such a range — from calling someone on to a fight, to someone slapping his buddy on the back in approval for someone winning a prize or “getting the girl” — that only a range of words can do as translations.

As for 똥=shit, I think they have a prurient pleasure in the fact that the word just isn’t a cuss here. Then again, I think a lot of them are in that generation and class where the forcefulness of the cuss is rather watered down. Hell, I am to some degree myself. But even I rendered it as “Dog Poop Girl.” (Though I can, in that one case, almost understand using the word “shit” as it captures some of the really vicious emotion that the backlash against her was fueled by.)

“Dude”… unfortunately that seems to be becoming a Korean word, at least among trend-setting netizen otaku of Lost who hang out over at DCInside (and rapidly fansub, in real time) the show and post episodes and fansubs the same day a new episode comes out.

Babble more if you like — your discussions of translation are fascinating.

PS: More remixes of remixes. Not great, but interesting as part of the social process.

1) It wasn’t tragically sad, and
2) It didn’t have some weird moral or lesson at the end.

As I’m sure you know, a lot of Korean films suffer from one of these two problems, if not both. But 놈놈놈 was free of them, and we could just sit back and enjoy the over-the-top ridiculousness of it for two hours.

Incidentally, the music is not from the Kill Bill soundtrack, although it is reminiscent of it. I actually liked the music a lot, and I think I might pick up the soundtrack at some point.

Finally, 놈 is a difficult one to translate. “Jerk,” maybe, but probably not “bastard.” When translating negative terms, slang, or curses, I always submit the word to the “polite company test.” In other words, would I say this word in polite company? If so, then I choose a word in English that I would feel comfortable saying in polite company. This is why I will almost never translate 똥 as “sh*t,” even though a lot of Westerners seem to enjoy doing just that.

Anyway, the meaning of 놈 depends a lot on the modifier that precedes it. It definitely has a rough, not entirely positive feel to it, but it can also be used to convey familiarity rather than negativity (in some cases, I might even translate it as “dude”).

I have babbled enough, I think.