I find myself wondering why overacting — vast, wailing reactions of protestation, incredibly fake outrage, and the like — is the norm in comedic “acting” in Korea. (EDIT: Actually, it also seems the norm in movies, but in a different way: long brooding shots, action scenes five minutes too long, and hyperemotional crying is something we see both on TV melodrama and in films, but I’m particularly thinking of comedy at the moment.) Or, rather, not “why” but “how it became the case that…” One example is the various gag TV shows like Uchassa and Gag Concert. These are, roughly …
Tag: media
The Lone Ranger, and Tonto
So yesterday I was discussing Thomas King’s “How Corporal Colin Sterling Saved Blossom, Alberta, and Most of the Rest of the World” (from King’s collection One Good Story, That One), which is, well, sort of SF. “Sort of” because it’s not taking itself seriously as SF, but plays with SF tropes about aliens and spaceships. (Which, you know, is better than the kind of thing you see a lot of “mainstream” authors do — writing SF, and claiming it isn’t, because it’s not silly or dumb, or whatever. Yes, Margaret Atwood, I’m looking at you. Come over here and say …
Gender Iconography & Transformations in Korean Pop Culture: What Can We Learn From Japanese Women’s SF?
A lot of attention has been paid to Wonder Girls, to sexual imagery in advertising, but what about images of men an masculinity in Korean pop culture? This picture-laden post looks at both through the lens of a paper on SFnal treatments and transformations of gender in women’s SF in Japan by scholar Miri Nakamura. It’s long, it’s big, it’s one of those posts. Hence the excerpt.
Fake Beef Consumers? Media Failsafes and Media’s Future
It’s true that Koreans are not nearly so freaked-out about US beef as they were a month or two ago. The numbers are changing. ROKDrop writes that: With pictures of people lining up outside of meat markets with coolers in hand to buy US beef undoubtedly public opinion is going to shift greatly in favor of US beef. Well, yes, that’s true. And yet… Amusingly, or depressingly, I’m not sure which, both the Joongang Ilbo and the Maeil Gyeongjae (Daily Economics) have already had to issue apologies for using staged photos with fake consumers to accompany stories on the, er, …
Why Oh Why Can’t We Have a Non-Schitzophenic Media?
Oh yes, I’m thinking of Brad DeLong’s posts about the American newsmedia. Screenshot from someone browsing Daum today. One side reports that a protester was half-blinded by a water cannon used by police, and on the other side, the headline underlined in red suggests (roughly) that “claims of injuries from water cannons are lies.” (I know, I know, it’s the internet, but this really is what it’s like in the print media too. No wonder nobody I know here who actually thinks on a daily basis trusts the news, especially the mainstream news, and no wonder demonstrators have been ejecting …