interesting article on north/south korean language barrier...

ah... it's damn grey here... well, at first i thought it was refreshing but began to get to me... eh...
i was browsing google news and ran into this article... think it's pretty intriguing and well written... but then i had to laugh because after living outside korea for such a long time, even i have hard time understanding these "new hybrid korean-english words"... oh, you just need to click on the title of this blog to see it...

LA story, the player, alfie (original one), l'eclisse and a tale of two sisters...

hmm...
since i was 12 i pretty much lived on my own... well, it sounds crazy but true... i left home to go to this art school since i was 12 and although i did stay under some sort of adult supervision(?) throughout but still i was pretty much free to do whatever i wanted to do... sometimes i wonder how come i never got off the "track" of being a decent student throughout... guess i have to thank my parents for giving me so much trust...
when i turned 15 or so i finally got my first vcr... and there was no adult around most of time... until then my grandma would come by and stay overnight but it got less frequent... so with free access to vcr, i started to rent movies... i think most of time i had no idea what was good and bad... just liked watching movies... sometimes i'd watch 4-5 movies a day or a night... sorry, mom...
anyway it was my second year in high school, i think... rented "LA story" just because... and i was so taken by its charm... seriously i don't think i understood all that much, especially when the translation must have been pretty off... but the way this movie described LA was just so sweet and charming... and steve martin was pretty damn funny... and c'mon, traffic sign telling your fortune...? that's pretty cute too... thought victoria tennant wasn't that attractive but what the hell, it was still a cute movie... and steve martin became one of those actors that only i knew along with robert downey jr... i still don't think he's all that big in korea... i ended up watching this movie over and over...
then the following year, after reading all these fancy movie magazines declaring how great director robert altman was, i went to see "the player" in a theater... also it was making some buzz for tim robbins' frontal nudity that had to be covered with one of those pixelated patch... anyway, i was so taken by the whole movie setting... the fact it was about hollywood and how these people were trying to get ahead of other people at any cost... and it probably was the first tim robbins movie i'd seen and i used to have a thing for really tall guys...
so with all that memory and a recently acquired interest in LA (heh heh heh), i decided to watch them again last weekend... and was happy to see that both of them aged really well... especially after having been to LA twice even for briefly, it helped me appreciate little things more... and of course my english is better than when i was 16... "the player" was so much more fun because also i was getting all the references to other movies along with more faces i recognized... and i thought in the scene where tim robbins' character commits murder, his intensity reminded me of orson welles'... although i am NOT putting them in the same level in any other category... to me, orson welles is one of the greatest, period... also i was proud (yes, i'm such a geek) to get the reference to "la dolce vita" in the opening of "LA story" and "touch of evil" long single tracking shot reference in "the player"...
then finally got to watch "alfie" after renting it previously how many times but never got to watch it for some reason... it was so sad...! i wasn't expecting it to be so sad... oh, my, god, michael caine is so good at playing this kind of character... a bit cynical, self-centered, dry humored yet charming... like him in "ipcress file" although he's not as selfish as in "alfie"... and he's damn good looking... think it did capture of the '60s very well though... when people were feeling more isolated by trying to figure out what it meant to be free... don't know if i want to watch the new version with jude law... although at the very end of "alfie", michael caine looked very much like jude law... ah, those good looking chaming brits...
then i thought i should follow up on antonioni since i got so intrigued by "la notte"... which left me with certain emotion that's really hard to describe but i knew that it touched me... and "l'eclisse" didn't let me down... it was toxicating from the very beginning until the end... especially the last 5 minutes of the movie really killed me... made my heart ache by its beauty... wow... and it's really incredible that he was able to pull out the emotions from the characters without any real dialogues... you could just feel from their gazes, hand gestures and camera angles... unbelievable... and monica vitti is so gorgeous... wow... she is one of those actors who knows how to act with their lips...
then on a completely different note i decided to watch "a tale of two sisters", a korean horror flick that i'd heard so much about from some friends... i rarely watch scary movies, seriously... when i went to see "the audition", i was literally under my seat for the last 20 minutes because i just couldn't bare... however this movie captured me from the beginning for it's visual presentation... it was constantly on the edge of being too stylish but somehow managed to stay just enough, if you know what i mean... and the usage of colors was really effective, i thought... still i got so scared after watching the first half, i scanned through the second half of the film, then went back to it and watched it... actually it was the moment i saw this sack soaked in blood, i freaked out because it reminded me of "the audition" too much... however when i finally got the plot, i was really impressed by how well the story was written... it's really clever, suspensful without being too over the top... meanwhile i think it's still interesting how "westernized" the house looked...
so... that was my weekend... now i have "whatever happened to baby jane" waiting to be watched... yikes...

what's my name...?

well, my name is spelled okkyung lee... it really should be spelled oak-kyoung lee or even oak-kyoung yi to be really authentic... in korean, last name lee is pronounced as yi but people use lee here just because it's the same chinese character... and as you know bruce lee being the most famous person with that last name...
ok, i'm going to admit something i rarely rarely bring up... well, if i do it first then maybe i'll feel less embarrassed...? hmm... then if i never bring it up then nobody will never know... what the hell...?
while preparing to move to boston to go to school, i enrolled at this ESL institute in seoul for about 6 months to work on conversational skills... the very first class i had was taught by this new canadian female teacher who literally had gotten to korea 2 weeks before the class began... so as the students started to introduce themselves to her, it was obvious that she was frustrated with korean names... they were just to foreign to her, i suppose... so after that she suggested that we all pick an english nickname... some picked silly ones like superman or mickey mouse or whatever, and some chose more normal(?) names like johnny or liz... i chose janice... the teacher even asked me weather "-s" or "-ce"... at the end and i chose "-ce"... don't know why but it could be that i had heard that name somewhere but still wasn't that common or at least i thought... so for the next 6 months i was using the name janice... finally after moving to boston with my name spelled as ok kyung lee on my passport, i ran into some problematic situations regarding my the pronunciation... how it was spelled was confusing people... some thought ok was my first name, kyung was my middle name... some didn't know how to say "ok" and said it closer to "ak" with open o sound... most of times "kyung" became "kyoong"... so you can imagine me getting a bit annoyed trying to teach how to say name correctly each time... then when in the very first class of my harmony II course at berklee, the teacher just gave up after not even trying one time to say my name, she declared "i just cannot say this right, do you have a nickname or something?"... so as being a good obliging (yes, there were times like that in my life...) student that time i told her that she could call me "janice"... and it seemed to have solved problems for many many many people for the time being... so it was stuck with it until i finished that damn school... guess at first it had some sort of liberating effect on me too... you know, felt like a different person... i think i was more open and sociable than in high school for example... however when i heard other korean students calling me with my nickname, i felt a bit weirded out... but still it was ok... thought it was better than all chewed up pronunciation of my name...
however when I started to go to new england conservatory for my masters, the situation changed 180 degrees... the teachers absolutely reused to use my nickname... i think from the get-go, they were pretty good at saying my name correctly... then when i even mentioned that they could use my nickname if it was too troublesome, they thought i was out of my mind... so I went back to being ok kyung... but i decided to get rid of that useless space between and made it into okkyung...
even now after living in new york city, the biggest melting pot of the world for 6 years, i still get all different variations of my name... but i guess it bothers me less, well, at least for the most of time, since i am probably not saying everybody else's name correctly... but now i have told you how to say my name... so if you run into me on the street, please don't be afraid to say it out loud... if it's really far off, i'll teach you how to say my name... then you can teach me how to say your name... just please don't make fun of my english nickname from the past...
if you want to know what my name means, that's a whole different story...

faust, les bonne femmes and days of being wild...

this wednesday at anthology, i got to see "faust" by f.w. murnau... my first murnau... and it was just pure cinematic beauty... just unbelievable how much he was able to do with limited technology... he was able to pull off such a imaginative and affective images by using mostly juxtaposing images... and all the characters were played out sincerely... couldn't believe it was made in 1926...
the following evening was "les bonnes femmes" by claude chabrol... had a very eerie and haunting ending... about 4 young girls living in paris in 1960 trying to figure out what they want in their lives including love... seems like things haven't changed all that much in year 2006... the ending reminded me of " le notti di cabiria" which came out 3 years earlier...
then last night was wong kar-wai's "days of being wild" with leslie cheung and maggie cheung... oh my, i loved it... so poignant and sad... think wong kar-wai must be a hopeless romantic... which i probably am... there were so many lines in the movie that went right to my soft spot and made me feel very melancholic... woo... why do we fall in with love someone who cannot give us (well, at least that's my tendency) what we want... then should we care so much about if we can get it, whatever that is, or not, then decide to be with that person or not...? meanwhile do we even know what we really want...? why can't we just reach out to each other and realize that life is short and we live only once... and you may never get another chance with this person... even though you might end up broken hearted... ah... that hurts too... yes, i probably have never made the "right" decision for me in terms of heart... ah yah... but, still, i believe in that thing called love... hey, wong kar-wai knows all too well about it... almost went to see "happy together" tonight then i couldn't bear the idea of watching yet another sad love story with leslie cheung... oh, the scene in "days of being wild" where leslie cheung dances by himself in front of the mirror is absolutely genius...
my heart aches thinking of that movie... eh...
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