An Angry Man in the Land of the Morning Calm

Koreans love drama.  It pervades everything, even comedies are filled with drama.  In drama, Korean drama, at least, everyone loses.  They don’t just lose love or whatever their situation is, they typically lose at life in general.  Korean movies, music videos, books, whatever, all ends in tragedy.  At the gym, pretty much any woman on the treadmill is watching the same drama, I’m not sure of the name.  Its basically a soup opera, down to the crappy camera quality, constant close-ups, and end scene zooms.  It makes me wonder, although I can’t understand it, the characters are always around eachother, but from the looks on their faces, are always baiting, attacking, and otherwise emotionally abusing eachother.  Why would you hang out with people like that?  No one in this show ever smiles, unless its some kind of evil grin.

Of course, its exactly the same as an American soup opera.  I recently saw a movie about a baseball player here.  From what little I understood, he played since he was a kid, and his mother never attended his games, of course, leading to serious issues.  In the movie, he’s at a big final game, and it’s all down to him.  Make the hit and win, miss and lose the game.  We’ve seen a million movies like it.  Of course, after literally 20 minutes of dramatic build-up, slow motion, and over the top music in the rain, he misses.  Still, nothing we haven’t seen in american sports films.

Turns out, his mother came to this game, and while that’s sort of a victory, the one game she attends, he fails.  I think some more traumatic stuff happened too, but I still understand barely any Korean, and this movie was in a different dialect than the one I’m learning anyway, so I was doubly confused most of the time.

Here’s a video example, though:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koZPdoTut_w

This is pretty normal for Korean art, really.