First off, I wish to say that reports of the Party Pooper's demise have been greatly misexaggerated.
I've been quite busy with my usual nefarious scheming to undermine Korean society, just like all us other expats. Lately, those meddling kids at CALEE are making it harder and harder to operate. Not to worry though, we already have a very successful counterattack underway. Basically, just helping these kids get laid does wonders for getting them to spend less time obsessing over the sexual habits of foreigners.
Now just so no one gets the impression that the 16,000 members over at CALEE are simply racist and xenophobic, they do point out that they plan to "work on improving the bad images of foreigners, tarnished by a few illegal foreign nationals." Just visit their site and you can see all the various projects they have to do just that. I mean, I haven't actually found any, but I've only looked through 30 or so of their latest postings. I'm sure there were many before that.
Korea TV
I've posted on this topic before, but I have a few things to add. I often watch Korean TV in the morning while on the treadmill and catch Morning Wide (think Good Morning America, just with about 50% more fluff pieces). Every show I've seen has a segment on the Korean Wave and I guess this is just a regular segment right along with the daily traffic and weather reports (which do a very good job at keeping me posted on the daily temperatures of Dokdo, by the way). It's usually covering the latest Korean 'World Star' who makes a trip to Japan to promote a new CD or movie or simply go for some organized 'fan event.' They always start with the arrival in the airport, where literally dozens of Japanese fans are waiting to see them. The World Star is whisked away to the event where there are from 50 to several hundred homely Japanese women waiting to scream out 'oppa'.
Every time I see this, I always wonder why Koreans think this is so impressive. I've seen scholars that no one outside of their particular field has ever heard about visit Asian countries and get these kinds of draws (with better looking women on average at that). Is this really the best they can do? Donnie and Marie Osmond get better draws than that in Japan and I don't think you could find 200 people even in Utah who would take time out of their busy day to see them.
Seriously, I wouldn't be surprised at all if at least half of all the attendees in these publicity events are just Korean expats in Japan attending out of a sense of patriotic duty to the motherland.
World Star Rain
Of course, the World Star of all World Stars in Korea is Rain. With the release of Speed Racer, I went to the film reviews to get an indication of how well he came off in the movie. Most reviews do not even mention him, but I found one that did. I'll let you all go and find out for yourselves what the reviewer had to say (hint: to save time, go to the article and do a key word search on 'Rain' or the word 'catastrophic').
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3 comments:
The comment on Rain's performance is very brief and vague. How do you know the reviewer didn't mean 'catastrophic' in a good way?
??? doublethink on display.
In Shakespeare's day, "awful" used to mean "awe-full" as in "full of, or inspiring awe". as far as I know, catastrophic has ALWAYS meant disastrous (and that's the modern meaning of disastrous, not the archaic meaning, "able to convince onesself that something terrible is actually good")
Anonymous is right. The entire prepositional phrase dedicated to Rain's Hollywood debut is rather cryptic. I'm left wondering; is it catastrophic as in Oscar winning performance or catastrophic as in he'll never work in Hollywood again? Difficult writing indeed.
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