Tag: FILMS & TV

Reading The Host in Context, Part 2: How I Read The Host

gordsellar24 Comments
This entry is part 11 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

NOTE: The following is a continuation of my earlier post on Reading The Host in context. You should probably start at part 1  first, and proceed here afterward. Though I have trawled through the books I’ve recently read for over a half an hour now, I cannot now find the passage that sticks out in my mind where an SF critic points out that American readings of Gojira, while they tend to correctly grasp the political subtext of the film — anxieties about nuclear weaponry, loss of colonial territory after the war, the threat of American power — miss out …

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Reading The Host in Context, Part 1

gordsellar2 Comments
This entry is part 10 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

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 …

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The KOFA 괴수 대백과

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This entry is part 7 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

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 …

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PiFan 2008

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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 …

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Ape @ KOFA this Monday…

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I’m sure I’m the only person interested, but the Korean Film Archive is showing some old SF movies this month. That is, this weekend and Monday. My Friday is already spoken for, and I have a DVD of Yonggary here, but I’ve never seen Ape (1976) and I’ve heard it’s deliciously awful, and since I’m researching Korean SF at the moment, — and it is apparently some kind of a Korean-American co-production — I am definitely going to see it. It’s playing at 2pm this Monday at the KOFA theater. I’m sure I’m the only one deranged enough to be …

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V and the Protesters

gordsellar26 Comments
This entry is part 11 of 14 in the series Beef Protests '08

Some of the protesters have been using references to V for Vendetta during the demonstrations. Turns out Scott went up and talked to them, and asked whether they knew that V is an anarchist, or that the V sign is an inverted anarchy symbol. They didn’t. Scott thinks they’re “retards” who are guilty of “ethnocentric cultural misappropriation,” and that “they think that going to a massive anti-government demonstration is cosplay and means nothing serious in the end…” and that I’m being patronizing in excusing this. I disagree. Wanna know why?

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Bad Run at Cinema

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By the way, since I want to say this: What a crappy month it’s been for films in the cinema. I hadn’t gone in some time, but of the three films I saw, only Kung-Fu Panda amused me. Actually, it was good fun, once you got beyond the feelgoodishness of it all. I mean, it was very nicely animated and had some funny bits, some cool imagery — man, that scene with Master Oogway the turtle and the peach blossoms, man — and all that badass Tai Lung business, that was some fun, even if I was snickering (inwardly, always, …

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Why SF Has Failed to Put Down Roots in Korea, Part I: To Start With, Questions…

gordsellar9 Comments
This entry is part 3 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

I had a post I was going to write, about fantasy, SF, and the demonstrations going on in Seoul these days, but I decided to pitch it as an article idea. The editor to whom I pitched it liked the concept, so I’m binning that post to keep the juice for my article. That leaves me with two things to write this summer about SF and Korea. The article on the protests is a theme I’m putting off limits, but the paper on the general failure of the SF genre to take root in Korea in  is something I can, …

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It’s Not Just the Lateness of Industrialization: How and Why Korean SF Doesn’t Quite Work

gordsellar16 Comments
This entry is part 2 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

I should be grading in-class essays, but my guilt at not yet having done so has been assuaged by the fact that another professor in the department, someone above me, confessed to not having graded her midterms either, and not feeling the slightest bit badly about it! So among all the other insanity of the last week, I also spent some time working up a couple of abstracts for a conference that I think I have no realistic shot at, mostly because I’m not an “official” Korea studies scholar, but at least one of my abstracts was for an essay …

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