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Morning Links

August 10, 2013 / Mark / 0 Comments

And in non-Snowpiercer things:

Choe Sang-hun takes a fun look at K-pop hagwon in the New York Times. As long as kids treat the schools like a hobby — like taekwondo, say — they seem fine to me.
Korea’s Bodhisattva in Pensive Pose (National Treasure No. 83) is heading to the Metropolitan Museum in New York after all. The new head of the Cultural Heritage Administration had vetoed a decision to include it in the exhibition, and the Met was kind of threatening to cancel the exhibition without it (Korea Joongang Daily).
These tourism trains look like they could be fun, traveling into Korea’s mountains (Korea Joongang Daily).
A preview of Kim Sung-soo’s new film, The Flu (Korea Joongang Daily again). It comes out Wednesday.

More Snowpiercer, and Other Things

August 10, 2013 / Mark / 0 Comments

I’ve been thinking more about Snowpiercer over the past few days, wondering why I had the reaction I did to the film. And I’m beginning to think it might be a comic book thing.

I’ve only glanced at the comic, Le Transperceneige (in Korean translation), not read it in detail, but I get the sense that it was a dark, more horrific story. With black-and-white, high-contrast art, the comic feels very stylized and ominous.

Oh, once again, SPOILERS.

You can do things in comics that are much harder to pull off in film. World-building is easier, as the reader can fill in more details mentally than movie audiences can. Especially for darker-toned works, comics allow for some striking symbolism and contrasts that don’t always work in a movie.

So, when you see the cockroach grinder … in the comics, I could imagine it being a really striking revelation. But in the movie, it just seemed silly. Same thing with the children in the engine — I could imagine it looking grandly terrible in the comic, whereas in the movie, I was just thinking, “That’s kind of dumb.”

As for monologues and exposition, they can be presented very differently in a comic. Reading text is just another way of telling the story in a comic, and it can be quite compelling. In a movie, it grinds the story to a halt.

And, of course, there is size. At around 252 pages, Le Transperceneige was not huge, but that’s about the equivalent of 11 or 12 regular comic books, which is bigger than a two-hour movie can hold. I’m sure Bong Joon Ho had to make a lot of cuts and changes to turn that story into Snowpiercer.

Bong’s movie is his movie, it was not the comic book. That’s fine. But a lot of the choices he made were sloppy, and some of the more ridiculous parts of the graphic novel seem really over-the-top in a film. Sorry, but for me it just did not work.

Look at Watchmen, which was as close to a frame-by-frame adaption of a comic book as anyone has ever done, but totally rang false as a movie (well, except Persepolis, which was wonderful).

Feel free to pick up Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics for a great explanation of how comics work and what makes them unique. Much better than anything I could write.

Some other things:

Snowpiercer had 368,000 admissions Friday to bring its total to 5.2 million (that’s 37.2 billion won). That is 41% drop from last Friday.
Terror Live had 252,000 admissions to bring its total to 3 million. Terror Live dropped just 24% from last Friday. It will be very interesting to see how both films are doing in a couple of weeks, as their audiences drop and The Flu joins the fray.

‘Snowpiercer’ barely even slushy

August 6, 2013 / Mark / 38 Comments

UPDATE: Hi all who’ve linked in to my Snowpiercer ramblings. Thanks for coming. To be honest, I’m used to rambling in a bit of a bubble, not for a wider audience. This was never meant to be an official, last-word on the film. Bong is great, but I did not like this movie, so I was trying to work out why. So these thoughts are a bit half-formed. Take them for what they are…

ORIGINAL: I didn’t want to pile on Snowpiercer, having made a couple of bitchy Tweets about it on Sunday. But perhaps I should expand on my thoughts a little bit…

In case you’ve missed it, Snowpiercer is Bong Joon-ho’s adaptation of the French science-fiction graphic novel Le Transperceneige. It’s about a train circling the frozen Earth, after a misguided attempt at fixing global warming caused the planet to completely ice over, killing everything. The train is incredibly divided by class, which, unsurprisingly, makes the poor folk in the back rather unhappy. So one day, a guy in the back, Curtis (Chris Evans), leads the poor in a revolution against the rich people in the front of the train.

Oh, there will be SPOILERS, so proceed at your own risk.

As I wrote Sunday, I found Snowpiercer to be rather ridiculous, heavy-handed and empty-headed. Not offensively terrible (like Kim Jee-woon’s I SAW THE DEVIL or everything Michael Bay has ever touched), but just really “meh.” For a director as good as Bong Joon-ho, I expect better and hold him to a higher standard.

Big picture first: the story just doesn’t work. It doesn’t work as science-fiction, and it doesn’t work as allegory. Just because a story with huge freakin’ plot holes was made by a favorite director doesn’t mean those holes aren’t there and aren’t massive. Even if you accept the silly idea of a train being the only thing to survive this massive, planet-wide cooling (and with a movie like this, you just sort of have to accept the initial premise, or why even watch?), nothing following makes sense.

Case in point: the last frickin’ scene in the movie (again, SPOILER!) … which shows that there is indeed life left on Earth. For a giant mammal to survive 17 years of this icy weather, things could not have been nearly that bad. It had to live somewhere. It had to eat. Clearly, things were not as bad as we were led to believe, which undercuts the whole point of the movie.

Nor does the train itself make any sense. There’s just no way the closed ecosystem of the train could support 1,000 people, at least not the train that we saw. And where do they get all those cockroaches?

The basic plotting is full of problems, too. Ko Ah-sung’s character has some kind of magic telepathy, which is unexplained and rather random (and certainly doesn’t match the rest of the film). People act like the train has been zipping through the frozen wastes for a hundred years, or even a thousand, not seventeen.

And the end of the film features not one but THREE big soliloquies, as Evans, Song Kang-ho, and Ed Harris all have to explain their characters and the big picture and whatever else hasn’t been made clear. That much exposition is a pretty bad sign a story has gone off the rails (train pun!).

Also, the ruling class on the Snowpiercer train are some of the stupidest villains ever. There are about a thousand ways they could have maintained order better if that was the goal.

Okay, if the story makes no sense at any sort of speculative-fiction level, maybe it was intended as an allegory for something about life today. But, then, an allegory for what? Today’s class divisions and rising inequality? I don’t think so. There are no parallels between the economics of the train and today’s inequality (you’d need to show the rich cars co-opting support of some of the poor cars for that to begin to make any sense).

Maybe capitalism itself is a high-speed train rushing through the frozen desolation it created? Ugh, now my head hurts.

Another thing I noticed that pissed me off: what’s with the trope used by so many (bad) sci-fi stories these days about the whole apocalypse and subsequent uprising being part of some convoluted plan to control things? Wilford’s speech at the end of Snowpiercer could have been said by the Architect in Matrix 2. And a lot of the themes parallel the story in Hugh Howey’s Wool.

I suspect the film suffered from that insufferable 386-generation trait, the romanticizing of the democracy movement and the violence that gave birth to modern Korean society. Given that Bong is a Yonsei University sociology major from the 1980s (a hotbed of the student movement), this is an understandable failing, but it’s still a pretty big failing. The equations are very simplistic: poor = good, rich = bad. Poor teaming up to oppose the rich with massive violence = very very good. Cathartic for some, I guess, put ultimately it is pretty childish. And Snowpiercer is rather dark and serious to be so childish.

Oh, all the axe-swinging in a key fight scene mid-movie makes me wonder how involved Park Chan-wook was in the movie — it looks like something right out of Oldboy.

But, in the end, the biggest failing of Snowpiercer, in my subjective opinion, is that it’s just not very entertaining or interesting. It starts slowly, has little action or fun stuff, and is way too dour most of the time.

Anyhow, after all that negativity, I think I should end with something positive. So … Song Kang-ho and the translation machine had some funny bits. And Ko Ah-sung is great. I’m really looking forward to seeing her in more films in the future.

Sorry to sound all negative. I’m sure Bong Joon-ho is going to make plenty more great films in the future. But Snowpiercer was a total misfire.

Morning Links

August 6, 2013 / Mark / 0 Comments

Since I am apparently dumping a bunch of fun links over on my Twitter feed, I thought I would repeat them here for the (wise) folks who don’t bother with Twitter:

2 million North Koreans have mobile phones these days (Chosun Ilbo). It’s kind of amazing how quickly that is growing:

In 2008, North Korea set up Koryolink with Orascom. The number of subscribers stood at only 1,600 in the first year but rose to 100,000 in 2009, 500,000 in May 2011 and a million a year later.

Foreign currency (mostly US dollars and yuan) surges in North Korean economy. Now 10% of NK’s economy (Chosun Ilbo)
This story about singer-turned-actress Nam Gyu-ri story was hard to get right. She called herself a 변태, which usually is translated as “pervert.” But that language struck some people in the newsroom as too strong and loaded, so we finally decided to go with “weirdo” (Korea JoongAng Daily)
A reminder Aug. 14 is the start of the Jecheon Film & Music Festival. A lot of my friends in the entertainment business think Jecheon’s combination of music and movies make it the best fest in Korea (JIMFF website)
I think this is turning into a really interesting year for K-pop. The quality of the music just keeps rising. At the moment, one of my favorite songs is Junsu’s “Incredible” (just a really fun tune):

Here’s an interview from last year with the producer of “Incredible” and some other Junsu songs, Bruce “Automatic” Vanderveer (All About Cassiopeia)
Vanderveer’s Twitter is here.

No Snowpiercer for Me

August 3, 2013 / Mark / 0 Comments

SNOWPIERCER has pulled in 1.67 million admissions in its first three days. But, sadly, my wife and I were not two of them. We checked out two theaters, but despite having Snowpiercer on four screens in one and five in the other, there were no tickets to be had for hours (and most of those available were right under the screen).

No idea if people really like the movie, or if the 34 degree weather (feels like 44, says Wunderground) just has people hiding in the theaters.

We might try again tomorrow. Maybe in the morning.

Really Real Estate

August 3, 2013 / Mark / 0 Comments

Yay! It looks like I’ve found a place to live in Korea for the foreseeable future. And, somewhat bizarrely, it’s right in the middle of where I used to live. A huge, sprawling city of 10 million people, and I keep ending up in the same neighborhood.

Oh well, at least I have a decent view for once.

Useful Advice for Real Estate Agents

July 30, 2013 / Mark / 0 Comments

Dear Real Estate Agent:

If you are going to show me an apartment, please take a minute to make sure it has not been rented already. Especially if it is a really nice, affordable apartment that is going to make my wife all happy.

Sincerely,

– Mark

* * *

On a related note — wow, have rental prices ever climbed in Korea since I last lived here. If you wonder why the Korean real estate market seems so crazy, these two recent stories from the Korea JoongAng Daily may help clear things up:

– Deposits, monthly rental prices soaring

– Gov’t trims apartment supply to spur real estate market

Yes, these two articles appeared on the same day. Story A: The government should do something about rising housing prices. Story B: The government cuts supply to raise housing prices. I’m guessing that one policy or the other could work, but not both.

A few lines under deadline

July 22, 2013 / Mark / 0 Comments

Sorry for the lack of updates recently, but I’ve been rather under the gun of a rather large deadline. A deadline that I already missed rather egregiously. =_=

However, in between the writing and other tasks, I needed to make another exciting visa run to Fukuoka. Now, I’ve been making visa runs to Fukuoka since 1998, so I know the routine fairly well at this point (although this was my first since around 2005 or so). I quite like the city and always appreciate a chance to visit. This last trip, it was sunny and 34 degrees or so, while Seoul was getting soaked in a miserable, sticky rainstorm.

Fukuoka’s Naka River on a hot, hot day:

Plus, during my trip it was the lead up to the Yamakasa summer festival, so the city was full of those one-ton floats like this one:

Groups of men would load those floats onto their shoulders and run them around Fukuoka’s downtown, while people threw water on them. Very good fun (although incredibly hot, tiring work on a day like that).

Some old Japanese building porn (for Robert Koehler):

Fukuoka has some great ramen, too. Here’s a big building dedicated to ramen.

Inside, you are served in this tiny little stalls:

And here’s the ramen:

Meanwhile, when I got back to Seoul (last Friday), Seoul Station was full of budding photographers, all taking pictures of the sky. I’m sure my phone’s camera does not compare, but…:

Oh, some big news coming to the blog very soon (book news!), followed by some big changes to the blog itself.

Sometimes the Cheonggyecheon Really Is a River

July 4, 2013 / Mark / 2 Comments

This is my favorite time of year in Korea — I love it when the hot, summer rains pelt down — so after dinner this evening I took a little walk through the drenched streets of downtown Seoul. And, well, this is what I found:

Pretty cool, huh? The Cheonggyecheon was pretty swollen. Usually, the stream looks more like this:

This was the start of the Cheonggyecheon this evening, when the rains were really coming down:

As opposed to this:

Anyhow, one of my favorite parts of Seoul is just walking around, seeing what I might find on a random street on a random day. Like yesterday, I was walking near the Seoul History Museum, when I suddenly realized that I had never checked out Gyeonghuigung Palace before, and I really should. So I did:

Heunghwamun Gate was originally further east, then moved by the Japanese during the colonial era, and finally moved here in the 1980s.

Gyeonghuigung was apparently destroyed by the Japanese during the colonial era, so this is almost all a reconstruction … But it was quite a nice reconstruction.

The main entrance to the palace is under construction until August, so that was a bit of a bummer.

Unlike the other palaces in Seoul, this one was dead quiet. No tourists anywhere and just a few folks walking around.

Here’s a view of the palace from a hill behind it:

After checking out the palace, I stubbornly refused to retrace my steps and leave the same way I came in, so I started looking around for a back gate. But apparently there wasn’t one. Undeterred, I kept looking, eventually heading up into the forest hill behind the palace. There I found an old wall, with little steel doors in the side. It wasn’t locked, so I walked through and found myself on a little roadway.

I kept walking up until I got to the top of the hill, and what did I find? The old Seoul Weather Observatory, in operation since 1933, I do believe.

Around the observatory, there’s some rebuilt sections of the old Seoul wall (looking very unhistoric, by the way) and quite a nice path snaking its way around the hill. It led to this park: