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 …
Tag: politics
Last Bit on This Discussion
The wider discussion that The Korean and Rob have sparked off continues with two more recent posts on the subject, here and here. Along the way, a very interesting post was contributed by Matt, that reads almost like a “bitching expat blog” roundup, except all the complaints were made by foreigners in Korea a century or more ago, long before blogs ever existed. I loved this post, and I wanted to link it, but I had it in my head that I’d be posting it with another installment: that’s not going to happen, so I am posting the link as …
Reading The Host in Context, Part 2: How I Read The Host
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 …
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. …
Madness at the Ministry of Bukkake: A Proposal for a New Mockery-Based Dokdo Strategy
For those of you not in Korea, you’ve probably never heard of Dokdo. Wikipedia has the scoop for you, and it’s pretty well balanced, but the bottom line is, Dokdo is a pair of rocks in the middle of the body of water that separates Korea from Japan. Dokdo is the subject of an ongoing territorial dispute with Japan. The issue flares up every so often, like a case of gout, and like gout, dominates life here for a while. Recently, the Japanese department of education announced that in new Japanese textbook guidelines, Dokdo is going to be described as …