May 20, 2008
VAMPIRE/흡혈귀
i asked 경애 some months ago: what's the korean word for vampire?
(that'd be, "vampire 한국어로 뭐예요?")
and she told me there wasn't a korean word for "vampire".
i'll never forgive her. because there IS a korean word for vampire, and it's 흡혈귀. you see it above in the image, written out for me by artist sunkoo yuh, when i visited him in his studio in athens georgia for an article for KQ. i'll always keep this, because it's the only "original" sunkoo yuh i'm going to be able to afford for some years to come.
sunkoo does not particularly like vampires, and all the fangs in his work, he told me, are more guardian-oriented than vampire-oriented. korean culture is someone lacking in vampire lore. i reviewed a really bad k-drama called freeze (nicely transliterated hangul title: 프리즈) that went a long way to proving this. the only good thing about 프리즈 was its very, very handsome star. oh, i'm hardly the only one who thinks so... watch this korean tv clip about 프리즈 and you may soon be asking yourself, "'spontaneous orgasm by a television host' 한국어로 뭐예요?"
catching up on k-dramas
when the baby came, we really got caught in the undertow of k-dramas. i had about seventy bazillion hours of dramas to review for KQ, none of which were any good, all of which were keeping us from our daily faves -- 별난 여자 별난 남자, 미우나 고우나, and 아줌마가 간다 (bizarre bunch, likeable or not, and here comes ajumma).
watching any of these shows usually happened (and still often does) in three minute increments, as the baby or one of the dogs would need something else and we'd end up pausing the action for another four or five hours. literally.
for weeks, we were between 97% and 99% capacity on our DVR, always worrying that the next day's episodes would not have room to tape. we were always behind... 언제나 바빠요.
then slowly we started to catch up. i feed claudia on the couch and i don't think she has ever had a bottle without a k-drama playing in the background! hopefully she is soaking in a lot of korean.
i recently got through the end of 아줌마가 간다. the prolonged death of jaegwang left me irritated throughout the last episodes but i found actor 이 세창 (could have that spelling wrong) better than i had initially thought he was, throughout his "illness" and redemption. i really loved this drama, not only because it had one of THE BEST K-DRAMA THEMES OF ALL TIME, and i am dying to find an mp3 of it.
we are so behind on bizarre bunch that we are only up to kiwoong and haein's wedding, and the series showing ended last week. so we have a lot to watch. a new drama began to replace bizarre, now following likeable or not -- i believe it is called hearts of nineteen. i missed taping the first one but have the second, and ben and i will check it out.
i have decided that out of every actor on our three favorite dramas, my by-far favorite is 안 석환 (ahn seok hwan), as byungdoo on bizarre bunch.
second would be 김 지석 (kim ji seok) as baekho on likeable or not.
i consider these k-dramas an important part of my korean language learning. receptive language always precedes expressive language. i am always hearing things that i know, or can piece together, on these dramas, and i know it helps "tuck them into" my brain.
this is a good place to mention my k-drama subtitles set on flickr. those subtitles can be pretty funny sometimes, and i try to document it whenever we see a great one!
May 15, 2008
조용한 가족/the quiet family
this is one of the first korean films i ever saw. i was telling a friend today that i thought it would be an excellent introduction to korean film for her in particular because a) it's funny b) it's bloody c) it features actors who went on some films later to do amazing, amazing things -- and i'm going to take a phonetic stab at this, here, because that's what this blog is for -- 송 강호 (song kang-ho) and 최만식(choi min-sik). (i'll admit i froze up on "choi" and looked it up.)
this is perhaps the slimmest i've ever seen song kang-ho -- who is in many of my favorite korean films (memories of murder, sympathy for mr. vengeance.) and choi min-sik -- whom i always think of as "the korean gary oldman" -- is his regular chameleon self here, almost unrecognizable as the man who would play oh dae-su in oldboy.
even more exciting, ben and i realized in re-watching this film again last night, is the fact that the father in 조용한 가족 is "mr. hwangbo" from one of our favorite dramas -- 아줌마가 간다 (here comes ajumma).
