ZEITGEIST

Now that nine out of every ten people keep a personal blog, it’s hard to keep up. Then there are all the company blogs (like this one!), the food review blogs, the metro blogs, and the if-you-can-spell-it-you-can-blog-about-it blogs. And that’s all on top of whatever regular news feeds you might try to keep up with.

Fortunately, there are some great tools out there to help weed through all that content. I figured I’d share a couple of my favorites, and my hope is that those of you with different favorites might share them in the comments section.

Google Reader

What did I ever do before Google Reader? I have no idea, but I imagine I did somewhat less online reading and my productivity level was also somewhat higher.

If you’ve ever used a stand-alone RSS reader application, that’s just what Reader is, except it’s online. As new stories get posted to the sites that you subscribe to, they’re highlighted as new, unread items. So, provided you keep your Reader page open throughout the day, as I do, you’ll see new stories populate as soon as they’re posted on CNN; or, better yet, new LOLcats the moment they’re published. And the fact that your settings are saved online means you can pick up where you left off from a different location, without having to go back through already-read postings, or surf to different sites.

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Review by Adam Hartzell

    D-War

I could talk about the long delay of D-War's eventual release, increasing its ledger to the point of becoming the most expensive South Korean film. I could focus on director Shim Hyung-rae's intent to conquer the U.S. market with a primarily English-language film with primarily U.S. actors and how he obtained the over 2,000 screens he desired to practically guarantee a significant box office take. But ever counter-narrative, I'll focus on how D-War supports Martin Kevorkian's thesis put forth in Color Monitors: The Black Face of Technology in America.

But first, the plot. "Imoogi" is not the Korean word for 'dragon' as the title might suggest, but refers to a mythical large snake. There are good and bad Imoogi. Apparently every 500 hundred years there's a woman, the most recent incarnation being LA resident Sarah (Amanda Brooks - Flightplan), who has a spirit (called Yuh Ui Joo) that helps an Imoogi become ‘celestial'. The bad Imoogi spends way more time hunting this woman than the good Imoogi and the woman has a companion, recent manifestation being Ethan (Jason Behr - TV show "Roswell"), who's supposed to protect her long enough to die instead for the good of the good Imoogi. If you don't get it, don't worry, early on it's explained to you twice and believability doesn't really matter because the film is really just a vehicle for computer animation prowess.

Some of the computer imagery is decent, such as the King Kong moment or the speedy, street-slithering. And such is partly responsible for the first weekend gross that put D-War at #5 in the U.S., staying in the top ten for one more week. But as for lasting impact, intriguing dialogue and well-orchestrated acting and editing would have helped, but like Sarah, such was sacrificed in order for the dragons to slide on screen. Those with whom I shared witness to the spectacle vocally cringed at much of the forced dialogue and plot propulsion. Poor pacing is the main problem. Many scenes are so quick they end up dampening the impact of the images. What should generate awe, say, when the Imoogi or the massive Atrox Army is introduced, end up uneventful. In a past life, Director Shim was a comedian, and although there are bits that could work, this same poor pacing, following a storyboard like it was a power point presentation, hinders the impact of much of the humor as well.

I'm left to look around for something in which to engage. What I found was further evidence for Kevorkian's argument about how black characters are being placed behind the computer screens of our movie screens and what this says about technology and race.

This cinematic practice has reached cliched proportions in Hollywood. It's one of those things you don't notice, but once someone like Kevorkian points it out to you, you no longer can not notice it, like the negative space generating an arrow in the FedEx logo. Die Hard, Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, Mission Impossible 2, Transformers etc., and now D-War, all cast black actors as computer operators. Although this partly represents a well-meaning effort to replace past stereotypical portrayals of blacks as ignorant with portrayals of them as highly intelligent, Kevorkian finds evidence that the black body is being placed in front of these machines to protect the white body from the contamination of technology, from the fears and anxieties spawned by technophobia.

In D-War we call him Bruce (Craig Robinson - Knocked Up). He searches for the information touching the data), while the processing of the information (exploiting the data) is Ethan's domain. Heightening Kevorkian's argument further, Bruce's other job is driving Ms. Yuh Yi Joo and Ethan around the streets of LA. And the only time that Bruce actually freely acts on technology outside of Ethan's instruction is when he gives Ethan a gun. This is contextualized within the film as a bad choice, implying that Bruce doesn't have the capacity to exploit technology like our hero Ethan. (This questioned gift is then dropped from the plot like it's hot.)

Let me state explicitly that I am not implying here that Shim's Bruce is a consciously racist portrayal. (At least Shim doesn't have Bruce die first like Michael Bay smashes the black voice in Transformers.) The placement of the black body as a technological interface seems to me more evidence of structurally racist industry practices, audience genre demands, and a problematic genre trope than conscious politics. However, now that Kevorkian has pointed out the invisible arrow resonating in the negative space, we can't ignore it. It's up to us to change direction.

In the end, D-War is more valuable as pedagogy for globalization than as entertainment, demonstrating how the new Hollywood stereotype of the black body in the black box has returned to LA in the form of a monster movie from South Korea. Globalization is a thing of the past that is here to stay. The considerable success of D-War in South Korea, where it reached the all-time top ten of ticket sales, and its reasonable success in the U.S should have us looking at what we want, and don't want, to keep traveling to and fro our respective lands.       (Adam Hartzell)

 

Review by Duncan Mitchel

    Chang

I have a confession to make: I don't much like Im Kwon-taek's films. Oh, I respect them: the old man learned his trade doing hackwork, and worked his way up to arthouse fare and international fame. He knows how to make a movie, and I'm never bored when I watch one. Between his expertise and that of his longtime cinematographer Jung Il-sung, Im delivers a product that panders both to my movie-fan's craving for visual impact (with gritty sex for seasoning), and to my pointy-headed intellectual's craving for pretension (with gritty sex to show his, um, artistic integrity).

But I feel a coldness in Im's work that puts me off in the end, and I also feel him trying to prove that he's an auteur of world-class cinema – like Ingmar Bergman at his worst, though on the whole I like Im better than Bergman. (No, I haven't seen all 100 of Im's movies – has anyone? – but I've seen enough of those that put him on the map to have formed a working opinion.) He takes an oddly detached view of Korean life, as if he were an anthropologist describing Han exotica to titillate outsiders – except that the outsiders are mostly Koreans themselves.

Chang (aka Downfall) isn't one of Im's best-known films, but it's a good example of his virtues and his limitations. It's the story of an orphan girl (Shin Eun-kyung, My Wife Is A Gangster) who's abducted into prostitution in the 1970s. Her career is a microcosm of life in South Korea's bars and brothels, as she goes from house to house and city to city. For a while she runs a place of her own before tumbling back down to the bottom; by that time she's given up hope of ever getting out of the Life. She meets a studly guy who gives her pleasure for the first time (in the film, anyway), but he turns out to be just another pimp, living off her earnings to make sure she never saves enough to buy herself out. She marries a rich older man, but he treats her as his own private whore for the use of guests and business associates, and when his college-age son discovers her background, she's back where she started. (She mentions that her husband even lent her to foreigners, which is a reminder that we see no foreigners onscreen. There's more to prostitution in Korea than the women who service American soldiers.)

Of course there's a shy, odd-looking country boy (Han Jong-hyeon) from Cholla Province, with lank shoulder-length hair, denim jacket, khaki pants, and clodhopper shoes. His name is Gil-yeong. He lets her sleep because she seems so tired, then looks at her body by matchlight; at dawn he slips out after the friend who brought him there. But later, when she's moved to a new house, she passes a machine shop where he's working, and they start seeing each other. "Are you okay?" she asks him, "Did you get a disease?" "It's almost cured now," he reassures her. They love each other, but they never seem to consider becoming a couple themselves. Gil-yeong always tracks her down, and keeps trying to find the town of Young-eun's early memories, a rural Eden that is gone forever because of the modernization and urbanization of Korea. (Gil-yeong is pulled over by the police three times in the movie for not wearing a helmet while riding his motorcycle; it's almost a running joke, maybe a tiny act of recurring resistance.)

There are other indications that Im intended Chang as an allegory of recent Korean history. Chae Young-eun's career spans two rather turbulent decades, and TVs are always on in the background. When President Park Chung-hee is assassinated, the women are blase. "Sure," comments one as Park's funeral plays on TV, "he made it easy for us to be whores." We're also told later in the film that it's hardly necessary to kidnap orphans into sex slavery anymore, with all sorts of women – even respectable middle-aged ajummas – voluntarily turning tricks for pin money and diversion from their boring middle-class lives.

Young-eun moves again, to a seaside town, and as Gil-yeong arrives on a rainy day, the accession of Chun Du-hwan to the Presidency is announced on TV. Young-eun is living with a taxi driver who's helping to pay off her debt. They plan to marry, and she invites Gil-yeong to come. He congratulates her; no jealousy. But her marriage fails, as does Gil-yeong's engagement to a yangban girl… And so it goes, through the opening of the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, with archival footage of President Roh Tae-woo kicking off the festivities. (Once again I was struck by Roh's resemblance to George W. Bush, only with Buddha earlobes.) I enjoyed the appearance of various Korean character actors and stars to be, especially Park Sang-myeon, who would appear again with Shin Eun-kyeong in My Wife Is A Gangster. Here he's a heavy who runs a bar where Young-eun works, without the charm and humor he'd later display.

Probably the most striking aspect of Chang is Im's use of a cutaway set for the brothel, allowing him to track from room to room and peek at one john after another, their quirks and weaknesses. (It's a common feature in films about prostitution, from Lizzie Borden's Working Girls to Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho, to show the humorous fetishes of the customers, so very unlike the wholesome voyeurism of the filmmaker and audience.)

Im's next film after Chang was his version of the Korean evergreen Chunhyang, which won lots of awards and established him definitively on the international scene. Chunhyang fits with and comments on its predecessor, contrasting the photogenic and refined kisaeng of the good old days with the degraded bar girls nowadays. But kisaeng were at the top of the sex trade in their day; there were also lower-class, cut-rate working women (and men) who weren't as glamorous. Chunhyang's Cinderella-style happy ending contrasts with the unhappy one of Young-eun, who if she's not Everywoman is much more typical of her trade.      (Duncan Mitchel)

[(Go to the site to watch the video)]

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
from A Summer Day, by Mary Oliver

Recently, we had the pleasure of working with Rob Carpenter from Intel’s IT group on two video white papers. I did not work with him directly but members of my team did – and they came back from the first shoot shaking their heads in admiration. Evidently, Rob came in, sat down with the cameras rolling and just started talking about this highly technical subject. No teleprompter, no stage fright, just an authentic passion for his topic and his work. They completed the video in one take.

All we knew about the man was that he was really smart, really calm, and fantastic to work with. The second of the white paper videos is here.

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If you missed this LunchBox you missed something really great. Eskimo Joe came, they rocked, and they had everyone wanting more. The band and their label were kind enough to bring the whole agency wonderful pizzas from Hot Lips and Roccos, 50 to be exact. The boys from down under then played [...]

These Aussie’s now how to put on a show and will be making the walls shake here at WK tomorrow.  They are also kind enough to feed the 350 hungry staffers of Wieden.  So bring your appetite and get ready to rock out with these award winning musicians! Also, don’t forget to check them out later [...]

Review by Darcy Paquet

    M

Midway through M, the novelist Min-woo types a repeated phrase on his computer, not unlike Jack Torrance in The Shining: "more specific, less poetic. more specific, less poetic..." I'm not sure what Min-woo thinks of this advice (he does subsequently press the delete button), but if the completed film is any indication, director Lee Myung-Se seems not to hold it in very high regard. M is a film filled with gorgeous imagery, flights of fancy, and bursts of color. However it makes very little effort to tie these images down into the world of people and things.

I wonder: are the "specific" and the "poetic" mutually exclusive? Many poets seem to go out of their way to immerse themselves in the specific and the concrete, and to my ears at least, it makes their work more poetic. Min-woo mentions James Joyce at one point in the film: perhaps the labyrinthine, complex architecture of a novel like Ulysses (or Finnegan's Wake) is what Lee Myung-Se is after. Still, M feels to me like a sad contradiction: the imagery beckons with sensual force, but the film throws up so many riddles and mind games that you're too preoccupied to feel its beauty.

There's none of Fritz Lang in M -- this is not an homage to the 1931 classic. Lee claims instead that the film's genesis came when Alfred Hitchcock visited him in a dream, presenting him with a book marked "M" on the cover. But I don't think even Hitchcock ever indulged himself so fabulously as Lee does here. M feels like the dream sequences that you sometimes see in other movies, except that it lasts for the entire film.

It's customary in a film review to introduce the plot, though even after watching M I'm still a bit in the dark. Let me offer up some observations instead: there is a novelist named Min-woo, who is feeling pressure to write his next book, though the words seem slow in coming. There is a young woman named Mimi, who may or may not exist, who pursues, and then is pursued by, Min-woo (is she his muse?). There is also a woman named Eun-hye who is engaged to Min-woo. They live together in a gorgeous apartment.

Gong Hyo-jin (Family Ties, Conduct Zero) plays the role of Min-woo's fiancee Eun-hye. Gong is a truly exciting actress -- her strength lies in the knife's edge to her voice, her "don't give me any bullshit" attitude, and the way that her characters always sound so grounded in reality. Yet in M her fiance, and indeed the film itself, seems to resent her for these qualities. If so, it's a particularly cruel bit of casting -- to choose an actress for her strengths, and then to make them seem like faults. Lee Yeon-hee's Mimi, by contrast, is the "poetic" to Gong's "specific". I'm a big fan of Lee as well -- her strength is her natural charm and screen presence, rather than her acting per se. Some actors just need to put themselves in front of the camera in order to make an impression. While watching this film, unable to make sense of what I was seeing, I spent most of the time simply waiting for Mimi to show up again in her purple dress.

But perhaps I'm being unfair to Gang Dong-won, who plays Min-woo. At the start of his career, I had a hard time understanding why many Koreans considered him so attractive (especially in his debut film, Too Beautiful To Lie). But he's looking pretty fabulous here, in his small, dark glasses and black jacket. It can't have been an easy role to play, either, with his character often flitting back and forth between dreamy romanticism and absurdist outbursts. Whatever you think of his performance here, Gang is establishing himself as a key actor of his generation.

With this film, I find myself on the unfamiliar side of a common debate. I'm generally not the kind of person who fixates on plot or tight narrative, in fact I often find it refreshing when filmmakers -- such as Lee Eung-su in Desire or Lee Myung-Se himself in First Love or Nowhere to Hide -- toss the plot aside for a while to focus on the image, all by itself. Still, despite the best efforts of its actors, much of M feels like an inside joke. In the films I mention above, the images pull emotions from the viewer, but here it's like I'm watching someone else's feelings on the screen.

M has not gone over particularly well in Korea. Walking out of the theater, I overheard a middle school student in front of me saying, "I tried to get some sleep, but the music kept waking me up." Viewers posting on the internet have called Lee a "swindler" for disguising a very personal, idiosyncratic film in such commercial trappings. That's perhaps unfair -- I think that Lee did genuinely hope to connect with his audience this time. But sadly, due to runaway ambition, miscalculation, or perhaps some other reason, M took a wrong turn and never made it home.      (Darcy Paquet)