Back when I was traveling around the US in the summer of 2009, a number of people were talking about the TV series Dexter, but it took me until recently to check it out. If you don’t know the series, it’s basically about a “moral” psychopath who hunts down people essentially like himself. He follows a set of rules that determine who “deserves” to die and who doesn’t, or at least that’s how he operates in the first couple of seasons. I haven’t read the books by Jeff Lindsay (upon which the series is based) but I have seen about …
Tag: reviews
The American, Tron, and the “new” Harry Potter
Well, I’ve seen a few movies in the last few weeks, went into all of them blind (because no, I still haven’t read the Harry Potter books) and there are two things I can say about those films. The first is that you can tell a lot about a movie by how badly Koreans took it. The American, a European film featuring George Clooney, has been getting some pretty negative reactions online in Korea. People are reporting things like a quarter of the audience getting up and walking out at some point in the film. Lots of people are complaining …
A “Knockout”
My friend Tinatsu mentioned coming across a mention of my work in an article by Paul Di Fillippo, in an article of Salon. It’s a very flattering mention, indeed, as it’s mentioned in connection not just to the Shine Anthology, but also Di Fillippo’s take on the perennial question, “Is Science Fiction Dying?” He seems to suggest both the Shine anthology and my story is evidence that it is not, or something like that: One of the best anthologies of recent vintage is Jetse de Vries’ “Shine.” Its virtues are easy to enumerate. It offers a clear-eyed theme and unique remit: …
짜증나는 로맨스
Okay, the thing is, I knew I wasn’t going to be crazy about this film, 쩨쩨한 로맨스. It’s not because I have anything necessarily against love stories, to be honest… I don’t go for the Hollywood version of “romance,” to be sure, but look, love is the theme of the vast majority of mainstream literature, including tons of “classic” novels and even some I have liked myself. It’s bizarre to hate films that deal with love and relationships, if you like literature. That said, cinematic handling of love is usually unsatisfyingly shallow. Still, once in a while a film will …
초능력자
Tonight I saw 초능력자 (Choneungryeokja, which you could translate as “Psychic” or “Person with Supernatural Powers”1) with Miss Jiwaku, and I have to say that it actually pretty much was what one of my students described: …pretty good for the first hour or so, and then ramps up an exponential curve of silliness until it hits infinite silliness at the end. That said, the film seems to have been received rather well by the Korean public, and some people are praising it. My experience is that films that are very highly praised in Korea are sometimes good, but often don’t …