Iron Man 3 isn’t out in the US, so I suppose I should put some kind of spoiler warning on it… since we saw it this morning. (The film was released today in Vietnam.) So, consider yourself spoiler-warned: If you haven’t seen the movie, don’t read past here: bookmark it and come back when you have seen the film. Unless you are the sort of person who doesn’t mind spoilers, that is.
Note: This is another post from last semester, when I was teaching a film class. I am not teaching now, but the thoughts seemed worth posting. (Because right now I’m too busy to write much new for the blog, but feel I should post more often than I have been.) The post is definitely not intended to be any definitive discussion, just interesting notes from a small class discussion. I had an interesting discussion in my class today about horror across the three cultures represented in my Understanding Anglophone Cultures Through Film course: Korean, Japanese, and Anglophone.(1) We watched …
I haven’t read The Hunger Games or the other books in the series, in part because I hadn’t caught much buzz but also just because I’ve been busy with other things. (The first book has been on my shelf about a year, as have many other books.) But I hadn’t heard much of the buzz, like I said, but it seemed like a potentially interesting North American, SFnal treatment of the Japanese film Battle Royale, so I thought we might as well give it a shot. When I heard there was a movie coming out — which was not long before it did come out, by …
I was invited to write a guest blog post for Apex a little while ago, and it’s now up. It’s about global SF, culture, and translation, with some attention to Korean SF and horror in the cinema, and it’s titled “On the Translation of Dreams.”
Last night, Lime and I watched a film I’d requested last semester for my Anglophone Popular Culture course, Wag the Dog (1997), and a couple of things hit me. See, the thing is, all this watching Korean SF movies and thinking in terms of the Korean adaptation of foreign genres or narratives to a Korean context has impacted how I watch American and other foreign films now, and I was asking myself how or even whether Wag the Dog could be retold in a Korean context. I haven’t seen many political films here, I’ll admit; The Host (2006) doesn’t feature …
There it is. I hereby coin it. I googled it, and found only this, and that’s an email address for which even the cached page it was contained on was somehow empty. So Trope Salad is mine. I know, I know, you’re thinking, “You can have it. But what does it mean?” What it means is that I am trying to have fun while working on an academic paper. Always a dangerous route. What it signifies is the phenomenon wherein someone who knows absolutely jack squat about SF, or seems to know jack squat, treats it as a kind of …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …