Diddly Squat

Watching some Jeff Hawkins lecture, packing my stuff, and getting ready to move out of my apartment. I finalized all the stuff at YBM Guro, so I'll be living at the Guro Digital Complex as of November. Next week I'll be staying at a hotel in Gangnam and attending the YBM orientation all week, and then I'll be going to Japan for two days, and then I'll begin teaching again! A very short break, but it was good to get some time off.

I'm a little worried about moving all my stuff. I have quite a bit of things and I'm going to be taking everything up to my friend's house near Itaewon in a taxi. I'll probably have to make two trips. One when my friend gets off work and one after I get off work at 10:00pm.

As promised here is a picture from the zoo.

Weekend Update

Well, I am out of my contract with Kid's College and will be starting work at YBM pretty soon. I'm not yet sure which branch of YBM I'll be working at, but work will commence in either November or December. If it's December than I might take a vacation for a month. That would be nice.

I just finished watching Fierce Creatures, which I enjoyed a lot. I think it would make a nice companion piece with Peter Greenaway's A Zed & Two Noughts, both of which take place in zoo's.

Speaking of Zoo's I visited the Seoul Grand Park Zoo on Sunday. I had been to the botanical gardens on the zoo grounds before for a field trip with Kid's College, but this was my first time seeing all the animals. It was fun and it was a beautiful fall day so many of the animals were very active. I felt bad their cages were so small, but overall it was great. There is also a gondola there that takes you from one end of the zoo to another, it was great.

After the Zoo I ate some Donkasu with Doona and watched Mean Girls, which was an OK teen comedy with some funny moments. But I could have gone without seeing it.

Today or tomorrow I will upload some pictures from the zoo and from my last day at Kid's College.

Matt

70's Films

I like to make lists.

Lists of songs, lists of books, and, especially, lists of films. My 'favorite films of all time' list is constantly in flux and I'm constantly watching amazing movies. What I want to do now though is create an 'essential' films list. Movies that have contributed so significantly to the development of film that had they not existed film would be in a very different place today.

The choices for this list will be more 'obvious' than some other lists because the films that contributed the most to cinema are generally the more well known films. I will present here just an off the top of my head list, and then expand and develop it in the days and weeks to come.

Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein

For the Russian Formalist ideas about edited, of which Eisenstein created his five types of montage. In his later films he would move away from these intellectual formalized technique, but in his early work and most famously in this film, you have a very intellectualized editing and montage technique that was highly influential on filmmakers in the early 20th century, and continues to have an impact today.

Broken Blossoms by D.W. Griffith

Often credited with the first use of the closeup. More than other directors Griffith took advantage of the ability to show the viewer details through close up and with his use of motion to create excitement and climax.

Napoleon by Abel Gance

More so than Griffith, Gance pushes the envelope so hard as to be almost experimental to tell the epic story of the childhood and first campaign of Napoleon. One of the greatest films of all time.

Sunrise by F.W. Murnau

Murnau's amazing American film where he was given the full resources of Fox studios. Does for the tracking shot what Napoleon does for montage, pushes it to the limit in an extremely poetic way to tell the story of city vs. country, of good vs. evil, and above all about the greatness of humanity.

M by Fritz Lang

At the height of his powers and with the tremendous resources and the German Film Institute and the ominous rise to power of the Nazi's all around him, Lang's first sound film is a dark film about the police investigation into a serial killer who murders little girls. In it's pacing and presentation of information it is remarkably ahead of it's time, one of the first modern crime films. The culmination of Lang's earlier crime films 'Spies', and the 'Dr. Mabuse' movies.

...

some other films that definatley need inclusion:

Citizen Kane by Orson Welles
The Lady Eve by Preston Sturges
Red River by Howard Hawks

Song

Song

Affirmation

I'm reaffirming my goal of watching every Korean film released in 2007. So far I'm off to a bad start and am about 30 movies behind. But I can definatley do it and I'm pretty excited. 화이팅!

A New Hope

I think perhaps there is some point in blogging after all. This mostly has to do with what I perceive as the vast amount of idiot foreigners that are residing here in Seoul. While there are certainly some very cool, interesting people here, the majority are quite simply idiots. Which is a shame because their recycled opinions and negative attitudes are what shape outside perceptions of Korea.

I also recently watched two Korean romantic comedies, the first Korean films I've watched since the first few months I got here, and to me they are fascinated in the way they relate to Korean society and culture. I haven't formalized anything, but there is definitely a very different relationship between Koreans and Korean films than from American and American films. Because Korea is so small and insular it is much easier to see in the films a kind of national identification process. How the Koreans see themselves and how they would like to be perceived are both very evident in these movies.

Korean television (the variety shows that is, I don't watch any of the dramas as it's too hard to figure out what time they're on) are very 'safe'. The popular comedy shows humor is almost always focused on misunderstandings, wordplay, embarrassing people (breaking them), or bodily functions. As far as I can tell there is no social satire, sarcasm exists in a very infantile form, and public institutions and corporations are never questioned.

There is a sort of blind faith in the corporations and government here and the sense that everyone is working together. The corporations and the government are so intertwined that there is little distinction between them anyway. They are both equal authorities and neither is more important than the other. So, for example, when I tell someone I don't like Oprah they are very suprised. "Is it because she's black?". Or if I say that I hated the Transformers movie they look astonished, "But it was #1 at the box office".

...

Rant to continue later. So long for now.

Back in the Game

For some reason Blogger started displaying in English again instead of Korean. So I thought I'd write a post. My six months here is almost up. Latez.