Anyone who’s reading this series from the beginning will note that this post was written much later than the second post in the series. My thoughts on SF in Korea have changed somewhat, and I think it’s important to frame that. A few months ago, when I began looking into SF here, all I really had access to was a couple of websites, and the shelves of every bookstore I walked past. You see, everytime I saw a bookstore, I would hurry into it and look around for the SF section. Not the SF section in English, but the Korean …
Category: KOREA
Home With Split Head, But Good…
I’m just posting this to say I went to the festival both yesterday and today, met some interesting people, had fun, took a lot of pictures, and will be reporting back soon. (And looking into what I need to do to submit a notice to Locus about it, or whether that’s even possible…) But also to say that I was thinking back on my earlier posts on the SF in South Korea series, and will need to add a preamble to it, explaining how my impressions and opinions have changed since I started looking into this topic. Both those posts, …
Reading The Host in Context, Part 1
Well, here I go. This is my attempt to provide a reading of the 2006 blockbuster Korean film The Host in context — that is , not only a Korean cultural and historical context, but also in the context of Korean Gwoesu (“Giant Monster”) movies, and those films which influenced the development of the genre in South Korea. Disclaimer — all images not cited to an photographer at copyright their respective owners. They are used in this post for educational/critical purposes, and thus their use falls under fair use. Thank goodness, because this essay would be hard to read without …
2008 SF&F Festival (Seoul)?
Oh my… Well, I missed Denvention (this year’s WorldCon), but there is this, at least, to give a look-see: The 2008 SF&F Festival is going on in Seoul. It’s a two-day event with a bunch of movie screenings, along with some lectures (or maybe more like panel discussions?) I’m sure will be mostly incomprehensible. But it’s W1,000 — about a buck — to join in on the fun, it’ll be a chance to see a few films I’ve not seen, it’ll feature Korean SF geeks in their native environment, and it’s only a couple of days long… so what the …
Star Wars ROK Rock
The stunningly knowledgeable Helikkopter (of Indieful ROK), who was kind enough to remember I’ve been trying to get a handle on the status of SF fiction and film in Korea, very kindly notified me of the fact that in March of this year… a very odd little album was released by Ruby Record. It’s called Star Wars Project Compilation. SF fans, panic not! It features not some Korean form of the filk (perish the thought) but rather original works by (seemingly) competent musicians in homage to, reference to, or all about the Star Wars movie series. I can’t get the …
The KOFA 괴수 대백과
Unfortunately, I didn’t catch on to what was being played — or, rather, how very rarely some of it is seen — until the evening of the 3rd of August, when it was too late to see the legendary, much-sought-after first Korean monster movie, 우주괴인 왕마귀 (Giant Space Monster Wangmagwi), so I’ll have to just keep looking around and try to catch it next time around. Or, rather, get stomped by it. However, I did manage to see a few other Korean giant monster movies. I’m going to reserve comments on The Host beyond the few things that hit me …
Starcraft Animation!
Aha, I half-remembered this when I was writing about the Starcraft Pansori recently. Here it is! (Apologies to those who don’t have enough Korean to follow, but song’s essentially a cheerful little countdown of how four Zerglings get whittled down to one little fella during the trek home after being left behind enemy lines. For those of you too young to remember the 1998 game Starcraft, I hate you. (And yes, some people are still playing that game over here. That blows my mind too.)
PiFan 2008
I like the newish Listal Widget that lets you flow-scroll through the images in a list. This is an (incomplete) list of the films I saw at the Bucheon International Fantastic (PiFan) Film Festival 2008. (I’ll post tomorrow, at greater length, about the Korean Film Archive (KOFA) 괴수 대백과 (Giant Monster Movie Omnibus) retrospective I caught part of earlier this week.) View my Listal profile Get this widget at Listal I’m not going to stand a hope in hell of reviewing every one of them in depth, so I’m going to do a hit-and-run review: Ten words or less for …
Conference Change
Ack. I knew Dokdo would ruin something for me. I just didn’t think the conference I was supposed to attend in Fukuoka would be relocated to Seoul over the territorial dispute. My first, over-the-top reaction was to resentfully sneer and mutter darkly about how self-isolation is the perfect solution to every dispute, but Lime ‘s take on it was that it’s simply pre-emptive damage control, for, as she put it, some small number of netizens are sure to raise a stink if they hear that a Korean Studies conference is held in Japan during the current relapse of “Dokdo crisis”-itis. …
Quick Note
Thanks to, er, Noah Body mentioning a link in the comments to this post, I was made aware of a whole festival of Korean monster movies that’s playng at the Cinematheque. (I missed some I’d have liked to see — though I may get another chance, at some point… we’ll see — but anyway, still getting to see a bunch.) I’ll be there Tuesday, the closing day, for all three films. Just in case anyone else feelings like watching The Host, Bulgasari, and some other Korean film I’ve never heard of before. By the way, I wasn’t the only person …