Haylookitsa Godzilla!

Leaving soon. Feeling anxious. Going to watch a movie.

(Sorry to John and Lorin about my sophomoric analysis of these films. I'm marginally better at talking about films where I choose the music, the characters have serif, and they are printed on paper or e-reader.)

Some of the best films I have seen in the past half decade came from South Korea. Chaser, Tae-Guk-Gi, Joint-Security-Area, The man from Nowhere, Old Boy, and I saw the Devil -to name a few- are fantastic films who showcase a love of story, the craft of cinema, and craftsmanship that rivals the golden towers mortared by America's Bay, Spielberg, and Cameron.

These films explore themes of isolation, camaraderie, nationalism, identity, dualism, and crime with equal parts drama and an observational eye that seems to merely capture the characters on screen but has inadvertently brought along the pathos. Also, they have subtitles which makes it really hard to think they don't do all these cool things because subtitles make films seem smart because reading is for people like Terry Gross.

Kim Jong-Il was not like Mrs. Gross. Although they both have/had lesbian hair. Also I bet both dug some South Korean films in their day.

In 1978, legendary South Korean director Shin Sang-Ok was kidnapped by Kim Jong-Il because the dictator wanted to create a Godzilla rip off.

Best Korea does not have best film industry.

This is foolish for one reason: according to Statute AS 11.41.300 of the Alaska state felony law, kidnapping is an unclassified felony (not class A since Sang-Ok had to escape on his own agency). This means that if Kim Jong-Il ever were to try and visit America via Alaska (or Seattle where, according to RCW 9A.40.020, Kidnapping is a class A offense), he could be incarcerated for a life sentence or pay a fine upwards from 50,000 USD which can feed a North Korean family for a very long time. I'm not sure what statutes NK has for this kind of thing.

Legal protocol is an expression of culture. And there are different cultures.

Also, let's face it, who wouldn't want to come to America, especially if you're a Juche dictator who has a collection of multiple thousands of films, many of which are American? Also we have six flags, the Kims love Six Flags over Texas. Everyone loves six flags. If you don't like six flags you are a communist, or I guess not. I don't know.

This is an odd kind of globalization. A dictator of the most closed off nation in the world was a total film geek and exposed himself to all manner of media from all manner of international sources. While his nation prided itself on its isolation- the kind that breeds an exceptionalistic attitude that keeps a starving disease ridden people patriotic- its despot was watching movies made by folk from Hindustan, Jewishland, Black-place, and New Jersey. This strikes my Plebeian brain as odd. There is no economic trade here for the culture to piggy-back in on like Jordan Airs to Nigeria, nor is there a colonial push that causes mutual cultural infection like jolly old Curry and Chips from Bombay with love. Likewise, there was no mass influx of foreign people into an area like Nigerians to Colonial Virginia.

Of course Jong-Il's watching of films isn't just him investigating cultures, nor is cultural mixing a purely laissez-faire kind of affair. In many ways, it seems that the societal mixing isn't just a cause or disaffected relative of the international mixing of media, it is an essential part of this mixing. The two processes are symbiotic. Although films imported into a country hold their own themes, narratives, and actors, they are all inadvertently also about this importation itself.

A foreign film is honest in that we watch it as both a medium for consumption but also for its packaging. I think most foreign film watchers are more aware of the meta-narratives, the emotions, and indeed the content of the film itself when that film is from another culture. In our age of liberalism and (assumably)(somewhat) post-colonial attitudes We all become unwitting film critics when faced with the art of the other.

This is what makes the late Kim Jong Il's fascination with film confuses me. What kind of enlightenment can be gained from watching a movie in a palace built from the ignorance of an entire nation? Do imported films mean anything if there wasn't really any importation involved? Doesn't an album or film just become a plastic disk if whats on it cannot amplify in a cultural resonance chamber?

On the vice guide to NK, the Northern cultural ombudsmen (in a culture this repressed, aren't they all ombudsmen?) sing karaoke to a Sex Pistols song. Karaoke is to singing as a copy machine is to Faulkner and the idea of Kim Jong Il watching Amistad makes me chortle and churn.

(Quick aside: I think this also applies to language. A language is a mechanism of culture. Teaching it is not just a mapping of syntax over Brocas/Wernicke, but the confluence of cultures and people and business and ideas and sex and hate and war and Angelina Jolie: an opportunity to expand on the linguistic resources of a youth beset by a dynamic new globe fueled by an expansive viral information economy. Not to mention my own personal development . Cultural roots here go too deep for homogenization; this is an augmentation, an infection, an integrati- aaaaand blah blah blah more on this later.)

Of course we have completely forgotten to mention the source of SK films. South Korea. But pursuing a psudo-intellectual diatribe about a medium I know little about on a country I'm about to live in is silly. More on this later, from the otherside.

Heading out in a month. Contract in hand. Getting excited and nervous. Fuck yeah. Let's do this. Let's get our exportation on.