Category: REVIEWS

I Love You Philip Morris

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Just saw this movie. Not sure if it’s in cinemas anymore… or, in other parts of the world like the USA, whether it’s in cinemas yet — Wikipedia says it comes out (pardon the pun) in the USA later this month — but I recommend it. This film has Jim Carrey swerving back and forth across the line of serious and funny, and serves as a reminder that he actually is a pretty damned good actor when he’s given the room to be. Likewise, Ewan McGregor’s acting is also outstanding. I could hear people sobbing in the cinema during a …

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Strangely Like Oulipo

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So, I’m taking a break from a paper that’s almost done. Something distressing happened the other day, and while it’s sort of looking resolved, I’m still having trouble focusing. It’s interesting, though: I’m sort of performing a narrative analysis of a couple of independent creative projects that my students did in some classes I taught back in 2008-2009. The narratives of their creative works can be read not just as a generalized social critique of TEFL and its impact on Korean society, but also as an encoded, implcit critique of particular gaps in mainstream classroom TEFL practice, as well as …

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On by Adam Roberts

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Imagine the whole world is a cliff, a wall stretching out above and below you farther than the eye can see. The sky arcs not above, not a dome above your head, but rather from the hazy depths below, to the hazy depths above, the otherness that hangs alongside the wall as you do.  You are a young man who lives — who has always lived — on a small ledge of the cliff, among a small cluster of ledges where your village is situated. There are no trees, no roaring ocean waves nearby — you have no word for …

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Neo-80s Korean Music Videos (From 2008) and some Oldies

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I’m busy grading but I thought I’d share this crazy stuff. Despite what it looks like, it was made a couple of years ago. Looks like the 1980s are finally back. I am both horrified and amused: And some more videos for you, by the same weirdoes: Bizarrely, I find these videos way more “authentic” in some way than mainline K-pop. Maybe because the people in the video look like normal Koreans —  by which I mean, not plastic-surgeried beauty queens — just like in old K-pop? And because there’s an exuberant cheesiness in it. Now, some real old K-pop …

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The Load is Over

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Which is not to say exam period is over. I mean, I’m overloaded, so… I’ve done up a series of posts starting today, about the issue of using essays in Korean content courses. That’s going to be what my blog displays on autopilot this week, one post a day, as I work my way through the pile of written work needing to be graded. I’ll try get to comments as soon as I can — there’s been a flurry of them, all worthy of  responses — but it may take some time. Also, I can’t find a decent embeddable version …

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Religious Freedom, and What Kind of Hero We May Need: A Footnote to Five more on Kick-Ass

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This is a follow-up to a series I started last week, which begins here but is not for the faint of heart. This post as well is not for the faint of heart. The series, if you’re interested, began here. Okay, I know it’s an old headline, but how does it happen that a Catholic Cardinal and the Mormon church agree on something… especially on this? Okay, so, as a non-American… how does gay marriage threaten religious freedom in America? Seriously. Set the histrionics aside, the screaming and shouting and wild eyes, and explain it. Because, frankly, unless “religious freedom” …

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Boyran, a novel by “World’s Youngest Fantasy Writer Wonje Song”

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This entry is part 33 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

UPDATE (9 Feb 2010): Yeah, I know he’s not really the world’s youngest fantasy writer. The book was marketed this way, though, and I wanted to include that in the title of the post. It’s exactly the kind of hyperbole one sees in Korea all the time, absolutely not fact-checked or anything. Anyway… ORIGINAL POST: On Friday last, my friend Nick and dropped by that jazz festival I mentioned. I’ll post more about that soon — I have some pics I want to add to the post, but it’s already written up. On the way back to the subway station, …

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Last Weekend’s Jazz Festival… and Some Thoughts On Improving For Next Time

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By the way, last weekend I also took in an evening of jazz with my friend Nick. It was, in some ways, a disappointment, though I always have a good time with Nick so all was not lost. As a brief summary: 정성죠 Big Band, well, we mostly missed them, arriving only in time to see them back some vocal jazz. Not my thing, and more depressingly, they played some charts that I myself played in high school and university big bands… and not as well as we played those charts, back in the day. The Nana Quartet came next, …

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The Song of Days

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(NOTE: I wrote the post below around this post a year ago today, but didn’t post it. Not sure why, but I found it as I was looking through the unpublished draft posts a week or two ago, and figured it was still worth posting. I scheduled it for the anniversary of when I wrote it, just for the hell of it.) Something about these guys, guys like Mississippi Fred McDowell, equipped them to sing what is just the absolute music of our lives. It’s the music of missed planes, the music of trains that leave on time, the music …

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