Lost Memories

This past Friday night we went to see 2009: Lost Memories [N.B.: sound, flash], a high-budget Korean action film. In it, the Japanese and US were allies in WWII, and in their triumph Japan had colonized Korea entirely and Seoul became their capitol (the movie is almost entirely in Japanese). Ethnic Koreans were a minority, but a small, militant group called the KRA (yep, Korean Republican Army) was crashing parties and killing a bunch of people, without clear motive. Enter a couple of JBI (Japanese Bureau of Investigation) agents, one ethnically Japanese and one ethincally Korean, to figure out the KRA's motives. Hundreds of thousands of bullets later, things get crazy, issues of ethnicity, family, and identity are raised, lifetime friendships are betrayed, and--time travel! Unfortunately there are also more than a few cheesy scenes, and the ending is a tad confusing in that yeah-but-if-he-travels-through-time-then-X kind of way.

I liked it, though it was flawed. It seems like it might have been a great movie if it had been shot with a smaller budget, so that we might have been spared some of the embarrassing cheesed-out parts. A remarkable number of people get shot throughout its course. All in all, a worthwhile $7.50 for an interesting plot that makes for good after-movie conversation, some nice camerawork, and an example the Asian take on the big Hollywood action/sci-fi flick.

A few years ago I gave my original 233MHz Bondi blue iMac to my sister, since we'd gotten a flat panel iMac G4. I said if they ever didn't want it, I'd take it back, since I was kinda sentimental about it (my first real computer). Last year sometime they too upgraded to a flat panel iMac, so they shoved the 233 back in its box and put it in their basement. Last week, my mom was at my sister's to visit and no doubt instigated some massive basement-cleaning operation, and she uncovered the iMac and called to ask if I wanted it. I sorta waffled on the answer--I did want it, but JD didn't want anything extra cluttering up the house. I said I'd call her back in a day or two, and I figured in the meantime I'd try to convince the hubby that it wouldn't just sit in its box taking up space. I didn't call back, but when mom next called she said she'd gone ahead and sent it anyway. Now I'm in trouble, and I have to somehow get the iMac to earn its keep in our house--anyone know of a way to put an old machine like that to use? It's only got 4GB of HD space and 192MB of RAM. Our DSL comes with a static IP but we only get 128KB upload speeds, or I'd use it as a web server. I need to come up with something other than "you know, for guests to use", or I'm gonna be in the doghouse.

I don't know, I think it takes all the fun out of it. If I were an mp3 blogger*, I'd bristle at the notion that people just want to scrape the songs, and not read what I'm spending my time writing. Sometimes I'll even download something and not listen to it right away, and then wish I could remember where I got the song from so that I could read what they'd said to make me want to download it (often this happens when I listen and think "ick, where the hell did I get this?").

*So yeah, I don't think I'm going to jump on the mp3-blogging bandwagon, because really, the mp3-blogs-come-lately have sorta been subpar. I still enjoy the ones I read (StG, TtIKTDA, LHB, MoeRex, FluxBlog, lacunae, MFR), but some of the new ones just seem like mediocre attempts to be a scenester/net luminary. The best ones are still great though--StG has a really well-written paragraph today about a Weakerthans song, and he nails it, describing exactly what's great about that song in just a few sentences. Seems like it'd be a shame to just get the song and not read the eloquent description. And yeah I gotta be honest, it's not just taking the fun out of it, it's just taking it, and that's kinda shitty to the artist and blogger both.