So, since the end of last year, I’ve been watching The X-Files. Or, rather, I was at first re-watching it, since I saw the first five or so seasons as they aired, and then I continued on into the seasons I’d missed. I thought I’d sum up my thoughts about it here.
I think I’ve figured out why I keep coming back to The Walking Dead and its spinoff franchises, even when they descend into repetition, holey and hokey plots, baffling characterization, and zombified soap drama.
I’m not the last person in the world to stumble upon the Terrace House franchise, but I do kind of feel like it. I’m not much for reality TV, and mostly avoided it until Netflix sucked me in a few years ago with a few reality TV series that I hate-watched. (Love in Blind, which I see not as an exploration of the moronic question of whether love really is blind and more about how easy it is for smarmy, manipulative jerks to to do twisted psychological experiments on lonely, unhappy, and emotionally unstable people living through a massive social …
In Korean cinemas, upcoming and currently-running films are advertised using handouts (available on a stand within the cinema) that are A4 printouts of the film’s poster on the front, with a writeup and some still frames from the film on the back. Maybe these exist in Canada now too, but I’d never seen such a thing before I arrived here, years ago. As long as I’ve been here, these flyers were always just a re-texted version of the film poster, with the title in Hangeul. (Sometimes, the title really is just “in Hangeul”—not translated, just written using English words in …
If you’re hoping for something about Peter Venkman hitting on a Kpop star, or who’s the sexiest female ghostbuster according to Koreans, or some Korean pop Ghostbusters mashup video? Sorry, this isn’t the post for you. (It’s not really an addition to the middle-aged man kvetch-fest of last summer, either.) I just saw the 2016 reboot of Ghostbusters for the second time (in just over a year: we saw it in the cinema in Canada last year, but I wanted to see the extended cut). Watching it, all the little callouts in the film to online furor and criticism and …
As our baby has grown a bit, his needs and demands have shifted, so I’m trying to ease off watching TV and focus on him more, but for the first couple of months I found myself casting about for something to do while burping and feeding him, since he didn’t really engage much and “Aww, cute!” is less effective when you’re dead tired. Since reading was tough with both hands full, I set about catching up on TV series I’d missed over the years. More recently, I finished Mad Men, which… well, I’ll save that for another post, but before that it was Deadwood. After …
I just saw the movie I’ve been waiting years to see: a biopic about the infamous Crown Prince known as Sado Seja. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR89DcvmAtY My reaction?
It’s rare I see a film as full of human ugliness as Mr. Turner, and rarer still when it’s a biopic. It’s also rare to see a film as beautiful as Mr. Turner… and rarer still when it’s a biopic. But most of all, it’s rare to see a film as astute about history—inaccuracies and all— as Mr. Turner. The title character—a representation of J.M.W. Turner—is, on a personal level, a monster almost half of the time: he uses his maid as a sperm receptacle, he stomps on people when he disagrees with them, he is ugly and weird, and when he …
Mrs. Jiwaku and I saw Whiplash a week or so ago (it’s in theaters here in Jochiwon right now), and I’ve been ruminating. Some thoughts, in no particular order, in a suitably pretentious (and very long) list.
Well, I’m still at about page fifty of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which is an entertaining book so far, but which is nonetheless a bit slow going: the sentence structures take some getting used to, to say the least. I’ve temporarily abandoned ship to reread Gulliver’s Travels (for the first time since childhood), another popular Georgian novel and one with much less tangled prose. Still, I do intend to continue with Tristram Shandy–and for that matter Moll Flanders–once Gulliver’s finished his travels. I only made an effort to see Michael Winterbottom’s film adaptation of the former, titled A Cock and Bull …