Y
and I went to a screening of Game of their Lives last night at UCI. A
British filmmaker managed to wangle enough permission slips from the
North Korean government to film a documentary about two barely
adolescent girls training for the North Korean mass games. Some quotes:
"When I dipped my toes into the waters of Mt. Paekdu, I promised to dedicate my life to the general."
"Bloody Americans!" A man in a North Korean family curses when the lights to his apartment go out during a planned outage.
The
best part was seeing the family sit down to the weekly Children's Film
on TV, a bunch of animated squirrels in military garb talking about
capturing and killing the enemy. Awwwww.
After the film there
were a few idiots acting outraged for outrage's sake, much in the veign
of Evergreen seminars. They attempted to accuse the film maker of being
the next Leni Reifenstahl, turning the place into the lefty college
seminar where nobody is willing to acknowledge that anyone else in the
room has any common sense. I mean, obviously if the guy has been
allowed into North Korea, he's not going to be running around filming
North Korean subjects raging against the machine.They raged at the
South Korean presenter, a woman who's been to North Korea several times
and is merely trying to get the word out about how freakishly awful the
place is, and who was trying to argue that the filmmaker is by no means
in league with Kim Jong Ill. Anyway, great film, and no matter how much
the kids in the film praise the dear leader, only an idiot would see
that film as pro-NK propaganda. If you want to see pro-NK propaganda
check out this Japanese site that gets NK TV news feeds. It's pretty
dull stuff, an announcer, a globe that stays on the screen for ten
minute spans, a few visits to some Kim Jong Ill museums. Yeeg! http://www.elufa.net
Anyway, I'm sick and need to get back to my word count. We went to the first Pho restaurant in Santa Ana today.
Saw War of the Worlds today and have come to the conclusion that critic
Stephanie Zacharek is an idiot. First she attacks Miyazaki, then Batman
begins, the only decent entry in the entire series, then she goes off
and says that Spielberg is playing on our fears of terrorism in War of
the Worlds. I think she's off her rocker.
If anything the film in showing an America under occupation does more
to show what we're doing in Iraq than our fears of terrorism. If
anything Spielberg sticks closer to the socialist intentions of Wells's
original text; showing the economic divide between Cruise and his
wife's new husband and the detachment of Americans with regard to what
is going on in the rest of the world: Cruise's newly yuppified children
order hummous from the health food store, but change the channel when
reports of an impending disaster begin to come in from the
Ukraine. Spielberg shows the channel change on this not once, but
twice. If anything it reflects our own dangerous disinterest in the
days before the 9/11 attacks, an apathy that unfortunately continues.
Furthermore, Spielberg uses our own helplessness in the face of a
technologically superior enemy to show just how ridiculous, horrifying,
and meaningless war is. Cruise's gun only gets him into more trouble,
Robbins's ranting patriotism "If the Japanese can beat them, so can we"
in the face of such utter horror, reflects the lunacy of both the right
wing American militia man and the terrorist insurgent at the same time.
There is only one thing that matters in such a situation: those that we
love.
I think that Spielberg faced an uneasy situation adapting Wells's book.
Either way, giant alien ships attacking earthlings is going to look
like conservative blockbuster fare, but people need to look at this a
little differently. One thing that I really appreciated him for was
talking back to the sanctimonious religious ending of the original film
adaptation, where the Martians have the hero and his love cornered in a
church and the aliens die just before the destroy it. Wells may have
said something about God's smallest creatures saving the world, but I
would say that that was more to do with his being a literary man of his
day, where a little obligatory piousness was needed for show,than as a
direct wave to the fundies. Wells was being philosophical and had a
broader view of God. But Spielberg takes the preachy George Pal B.S.
and gives it the finger. The first thing destroyed in the film is a
church. That couldn't have been an accident.
I'm getting annoyed by the CDs in Starbucks titled: "Elvis
Costello: Music that Matters to Him." Does anyone else get the urge to
throw the pompous little discs on the floor and do a java-induced tap
dance all over those weasely coke bottle lenses?
As B.R. Myers said recently: "Two aesthetics often exist in the same mind: a moviegoing aesthetic
that trusts primarily in personal taste and perception, and a reading
aesthetic that is more likely to defer to established opinion. Which
brings us back to the style that established opinion holds so dear."
But now this deferral to established opinion is trickling down into
areas of pop culture, which is really, if not at least
irritating, I'll go as far as to say spooky. When I see a CD in
Starbucks selling "music that matters to" Elvis Costello, I wonder how
far this idiocy will go? Why do I need Elvis Costello to recommend
music to me? I like the guy, but some of his stuff, like Lou Reed's Transformer, brings to mind only rapid dissapointment and disbelief.
Getting a mixed tape or CD from a friend, no matter how their taste may
or may not match our own, is something truly special, because no matter
how much our relationship with our friend may change, our relationship
to the music does not. If we part ways with that friend, the songs we
didn't like will be there to remind us of the things we didn't like,
but the songs we enjoyed will always remind us of the places where we
clicked with a particular person at a certain time in our lives. To
have a celebrity attempt to horn in on that, to shove his taste down
our throats frankly, feels like a violation.
sick
