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 …

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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. …

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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 …

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Ape @ KOFA this Monday…

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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The Imo Incident (or, The Incident of the Imo Year, or maybe just Eight Days, or Eight Days in the Imo Year)

Whew! Well, I’ve just about finished the finishing touches on a story I’ve been on-and-off working for a long time, my Sado Seja story…. which wasn’t originally a ghost story. Actually, I have heard a few people claim that there were ghostly happenings at Changdeokgung, and even Lady Hyegyong mentions palace ghosts — some poor woman who was executed for necromancy against the queen a generation or two back, for example, was thought to have left an evil spiritual residue behind — but strictly speaking, I’ve never encountered the story of Sado Seja as a “ghost story.” And yet Sado’s …

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